have been bar codes. the youngest victim i ve seen was 13. tattoo artist chris baker of ink 180, a nonprofit dedicated to erasing tattoos, explains. they look just like a bar code on a product that you buy in a store, a upc bar code, but they ll have both numbers and letters usually below the tattoo, sometimes above and below. if a pimp sees a girl they don t know with a bar code they ll look up that reference number on an underground website and track her back to whoever owns her and contact that pimp and ask what they want to do. usually it s, she ran away. we ll send somebody, or make her disappear. ink 180, which originally served former gang members, has removed tattoos from over 100 trafficking victims. what we see are gang symbols, because on a local level a lot of trafficking is run by the gangs. we also see pimps names. they want that symbol out there.
that is funny, isn t it? she s 19 years old, so, of course, you know, you know everything. there s no problems in her life. everything is great. kind of like the honeymoon stage. she s fooling herself. bottom line is she s prostituting herself. she s out there. i guess until these women hit rock bottom or something catastrophic happens in their life, they ll continue to do what they re going to do. we re done with her. i ll sign her in. nicole tinan knows all too well the cold reality of cook county s jail cell and being controlled and sold by a pimp. you stand on the right side of your pimp, and you don t tell anybody that you have a pimp. he said, when you re done, you bring me all your money, and if you steal any money, if i catch you cuffing any money, you could die. he hit her with a bat, he hit her with a hammer. i was so scared, i said, he s
this is her. hello. when anastasia quickly calls back to discuss price, anton suspects his date may be under the thumb of a pimp. she had to call me back to ask the price which kind of leads me to believe someone might have told her, you know, you didn t discuss price, so call him back. a pimp on the scene means potential violence for the undercover. about a month ago, one of my guys answered an ad, went into the room and two men attempted to rob him. ended up breaking his hand. we took the two individuals into custody. had we not been there, they would have robbed him and probably would have left him there beat up. it s very dangerous. the team heads out to a suburban hotel 15 miles northwest of chicago. we re going to have to be aware of who s watching that room. a lot of times the pimp will stay out in parking lot and be watching the room. if they sense anything, they ll drive away and leave the girl there. anastasia s area code leads
if anybody has any doubt as to why we have to go after human trafficking and sexual exploitation, hammer and tong, these tattoos leave no reasonable doubt. it s one thing to have tattoos that you chose to put there. it s another to have another human being impose their will on you and to make you acknowledge it in the form of a tattoo that covers your entire back. director morton says the public needs to understand that the branding of women by pimps has reached a new level of criminality. it is a particular depravity to tattoo somebody, to mark them as your property. and that is what is going on. case in point, the new trend by traffickers of bar coding women. probably about 70% of the trafficking tattoos i ve seen
they ll do anything for their pimps. she got very, very irate when i told her i was taking the male s stuff so he can come and get it. come on. let s go. if we would have found a weapon in there, anything like that, she would have took the hit for him because, again, their ultimate goal is to protect their man. walking out. anastasia s pit bull defense of her so-called boyfriend continues outside the hotel as she is taken to the cook county lockup for processing. she s prostituting herself. there s a guy in the picture. she s protecting him. it leads me to believe there s a pimp involved. we take her out of the situation. the goal is to get her out of the entire prostitution life. the guy you were with, that s who i m interested in because, you know what, he s not here. you re here. i don t have a pimp. okay. you have a boyfriend, right? no, i don t have a boyfriend. i don t have any of those things. you re well trained. i m well trained? you are well trained. tha