Dilaver took the women back to Velesta, the village where he was born, but Natalia soon realized she was pregnant — the result of hundreds of sexual encounters without condoms, which clients refused to wear. Leku was furious. “He took me to have an abortion,” Natalia said. “He paid the doctor 50 euros.” Then Dilaver sent her back to her former “owner.” “He got a refund,” Natalia said. “3,000 euros.”
Stories like Natalia’s are repeated by dozens of women who say they hope their testimony will one day put Dilaver behind bars. Sixteen-year-old Loredana left her native Bucharest in January, chasing a dream of working in Western Europe. But like thousands of naive Romanian girls, she ended up locked in a brothel in Macedonia. In Dilaver’s Expresso bar, “there was one client every hour, unless someone took me for the whole night,” Loredana said.
‘I AM A WONDERFUL BOSS’
Dilaver denies the claims. He offers phone numbers of Russian women who have worked in his club. “They will tell you I am a wonderful boss,” he said. Reached by phone in Russia, they spoke in glowing terms of Dilaver, though they admitted he had phoned them first.
Apparently preparing for his day in court, and irked by a reporter’s questions, Dilaver produced a dozen notarized statements from women — former “dancers” at his clubs — who blame their ill treatment on corrupt local police. In the documents, they say Dilaver rescued them. If there was prostitution, Dilaver says, it wasn’t his fault.
“These girls run away from their fathers and mothers. Then they run away from me. I offer for them to work as waitresses. But they want more money. And they want to sleep with men. It’s in their nature to prostitute themselves.” Dilaver says his dancers gave their statements willingly. However, one of the signatures is that of a 33-year-old Moldovan who told MSNBC.com in September 2001 that Dilaver held her as a sex slave and paid off police to issue false Macedonian work documents. “He told me to forget any thought I had of making money or returning home,” Luisa said. Dilaver now says he has quit the business of employing foreign women altogether, though he admits that “Moldovan and Ukrainian women bring in more clients.”
“I rented out my clubs for the last two years,” he said. “I’m not in the business anymore.”Loredana and Natalia say they were working for Dilaver in Velesta as recently as January and October, respectively. Loredana was wounded in a firefight that broke out during a police raid on Velesta. “I would love to seem him dead, but not because somebody shoots him,” she said by phone from a Bucharest shelter, where she is recovering from her wounds and resuming her studies. “I want personally to be the one who shoots him.”
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