Peabody Award-winning Portuguese journalist Mariana van Zeller spends her new eight-part National Geographic documentary series,
Trafficked, infiltrating gangs of fentanyl peddlers, gunrunners, and tiger smugglers. But the hardest group to penetrate, she tells
Los Angeles, was the pimps of Los Angeles.
“We contacted over one hundred pimps, and less than a handful were willing to sit down with us and talk,” van Zeller says. “We had to postpone the shoot several times.”
On the series’ fifth episode (airing December 23), Van Zeller quickly discovers that L.A.’s pimps, although wary of journalists, are actually hiding in plain sight. On Instagram, she finds pimps luring women with photos of sports cars, diamonds, and stacks of cash, and using a system of coded hashtags, such as “304,” which spells “hoe” upside-down.