Epstein: When life imitates Lifetime

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VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
IDEAS
07.23.1912:54 PM

THE TWISTED FLIGHT PATHS OF 'GLOBAL GIRL' AND THE LOLITA EXPRESS

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THE GULFSTREAM GIRL can’t use that nickname anymore. In 2013, the model turned pilot—then 27, blond, often beaming in photos—was hit with a trademark infringement suit by Gulfstream Aerospace, which told her its brand name was off-limits.

That must have been a disappointment. As a commercial pilot, the former Gulfstream Girl, whose real name is Nadia Marcinko and before that Nadia Marcinkova, holds three rating certificates: for single-engine aircraft, multi-engine aircraft, and various Gulfstream business jets, which have their own rating certificates. Furthermore, she is the CEO of Aviloop, a supremely odd aviation branding business, whose website features flawless shots of her with Gulfstreams.



Marcinko was a good sport about losing her old handle. In the Miami Herald last year, Julie Brown reported that Marcinko was “brought” to the US from (the former) Yugoslavia to live with an abusive man more than 30 years her senior when she was 15. It’s not hard to imagine she’s adept at survival. Moreover, as an aerobatic pilot, she’s stylish and dashing; in a video from March 2018 (taken down just last week), she flips a Pitts S2B and then eats a doughnut, hanging from a ribbon, while upside down in the cockpit. In materials for Aviloop, she now calls herself Global Girl.

Marcinko’s shifting sobriquets bring to mind the opening to Vladimir Nabokov’s novel of child rape. “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning … She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”

Which makes sense, as the airplane that would later help shape Marcinko’s life in America—a large-cabin Boeing 727 now associated with both high glamour and incomprehensible suffering—was known as the Lolita Express. It belonged to Jeffrey Epstein.

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Unlike the hundreds of young girls who, according to testimony in court documents, were lured by Epstein and his surrogates to his mansions from Florida trailer parks, Manhattan high schools, and Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, Marcinko belonged to a smaller group who came to the Epstein syndicate—presumably by plane—from abroad. An attorney who represented Epstein's alleged victims described Nadia Marcinkova as “Epstein’s live-in sex slave” in a Florida court filing. Several girls told the Palm Beach police that, later in the aughts, Marcinko pressured them to have sex with both her and Epstein.

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Finally, among the alleged coconspirators, there’s another immigrant: Adriana Ross (aka Adriana or Adriana Mucinska), a former model from Poland whom Epstein supposedly hired in 2002 to set up what the court documents refer to as “sex sessions” in Florida. It’s not clear whether Epstein and his recruiters first encountered Ross in the US or Poland, but, according to flight logs, Ross is one of the people in Epstein’s circle who flew most frequently with Bill Clinton. She also appeared by Epstein’s side in Manhattan, at a magazine launch party in 2005. Ross refused to answer questions about Epstein in 2010.

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Her story also suggests a possible connection between the indentured girls who say they were brutalized by the Epstein syndicate and a part of the global transportation infrastructure of human trafficking. If Epstein’s arrest really does lead to a sustained effort to break the back of international sex-slave trade, governments should monitor more closely the use of Gulfstreams and Boeings to oligarchs and their cutouts. They are also going to have to crack down on planes full of human “cargo,” complicit private airports, and the extensive brutality, inhumanity, and complicity of some in this corporate jet set.

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I’m beginning to think Alex Jones might have been on to something.

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What did he say, brief me?

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syndicate and a part of the global transportation infrastructure of human trafficking

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The Girls Next Door
By PETER LANDESMANJAN. 25, 2004

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The house at 12121/ 2 West Front Street in Plainfield, N.J., is a conventional midcentury home with slate-gray siding, white trim and Victorian lines. When I stood in front of it on a breezy day in October, I could hear the cries of children from the playground of an elementary school around the corner. American flags fluttered from porches and windows. The neighborhood is a leafy, middle-class Anytown. The house is set back off the street, near two convenience stores and a gift shop. On the door of Superior Supermarket was pasted a sign issued by the Plainfield police: ''Safe neighborhoods save lives.'' The store's manager, who refused to tell me his name, said he never noticed anything unusual about the house, and never heard anything. But David Miranda, the young man behind the counter of Westside Convenience, told me he saw girls from the house roughly once a week. ''They came in to buy candy and soda, then went back to the house,'' he said. The same girls rarely came twice, and they were all very young, Miranda said. They never asked for anything beyond what they were purchasing; they certainly never asked for help. Cars drove up to the house all day; nice cars, all kinds of cars. Dozens of men came and went. ''But no one here knew what was really going on,'' Miranda said. And no one ever asked.

On a tip, the Plainfield police raided the house in February 2002, expecting to find illegal aliens working an underground brothel. What the police found were four girls between the ages of 14 and 17. They were all Mexican nationals without documentation. But they weren't prostitutes; they were sex slaves. The distinction is important: these girls weren't working for profit or a paycheck. They were captives to the traffickers and keepers who controlled their every move. ''I consider myself hardened,'' Mark J. Kelly, now a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security), told me recently. ''I spent time in the Marine Corps. But seeing some of the stuff I saw, then heard about, from those girls was a difficult, eye-opening experience.''

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It turned out that 1212 1/2 West Front Street was one of what law-enforcement officials say are dozens of active stash houses and apartments in the New York metropolitan area -- mirroring hundreds more in other major cities like Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago -- where under-age girls and young women from dozens of countries are trafficked and held captive. Most of them -- whether they started out in Eastern Europe or Latin America -- are taken to the United States through Mexico. Some of them have been baited by promises of legitimate jobs and a better life in America; many have been abducted; others have been bought from or abandoned by their impoverished families.

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BREAKING THE GIRLS IN Once the Mexican traffickers abduct or seduce the women and young girls, it's not other men who first indoctrinate them into sexual slavery but other women. The victims and officials I spoke to all emphasized this fact as crucial to the trafficking rings' success. ''Women are the principals,'' Caballero, the Mexican federal preventive police officer, told me. ''The victims are put under the influence of the mothers, who handle them and beat them. Then they give the girls to the men to beat and rape into submission.''

Traffickers understand that because women can more easily gain the trust of young girls, they can more easily crush them. ''Men are the customers and controllers, but within most trafficking organizations themselves, women are the operators,'' Haugen says. ''Women are the ones who exert violent force and psychological torture.'' This mirrors the tactics of the Eastern European rings. ''Mexican pimps have learned a lot from European traffickers,'' said Claudia, a former prostitute and madam in her late 40's, whom I met in Tepito, Mexico City's vast and lethal ghetto. ''The Europeans not only gather girls but put older women in the same houses,'' she told me. ''They get younger and older women emotionally attached. They're transported together, survive together.'' The traffickers' harvest is innocence. Before young women and girls are taken to the United States, their captors want to obliterate their sexual inexperience while preserving its appearance. For the Eastern European girls, this ''preparation'' generally happens in Ensenada, a seaside tourist town in Baja California, a region in Mexico settled by Russian immigrants, or Tijuana, where Nicole, the Russian woman I met in Los Angeles, was taken along with four other girls when she arrived in Mexico. The young women are typically kept in locked-down, gated villas in groups of 16 to 20. The girls are provided with all-American clothing -- Levi's and baseball caps. They learn to say, ''U.S. citizen.'' They are also sexually brutalized. Nicole told me that the day she arrived in Tijuana, three of her traveling companions were ''tried out'' locally. The education lasts for days and sometimes weeks.

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She explained: ''They would call you out of the basement, and you'd get a bath and you'd get a dress, and if your dress was yellow you were probably going to Disneyland.'' She said they used color coding to make transactions safer for the traffickers and the clients. ''At Disneyland there would be people doing drop-offs and pickups for kids. It's a big open area full of kids, and nobody pays attention to nobody. They would kind of quietly say, 'Go over to that person,' and you would just slip your hand into theirs and say, 'I was looking for you, Daddy.' Then that person would move off with one or two or three of us.''

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