Couple Jailed For Selling Nigerian Girls

A couple were jailed Thursday after running a prostitution ring from an old vicarage in Wales using girls trafficked from Nigeria.

Thomas Carroll, 48, an Irishman, and Shamiela Clark, 32, his South African wife, controlled their multimillion-pound business from a mobile phone “call centre” in Castlemartin, Pembrokeshire.

Among the prostitutes were six trafficked girls and young women, aged from 15 to 21, some of whom had been terrified into working for fear of breaking a “juju” oath they were forced to take during voodoo ceremonies in Nigeria.

Carroll was jailed for seven years, and Clark, a former prostitute, for three and a half years, at Cardiff crown court, after both admitted conspiracy to control prostitution for gain and conspiracy to money-launder.

Carroll’s daughter, Toma, 26, was imprisoned for two years after admitting laundering the profits which, in one year alone, totalled more than £800,000.

After the case, investigators said the evidence suggested that at the time of their arrest, the couple were in the process of setting up a similar operation in South Africa to coincide with the World Cup.

The couple ran more than 35 brothels, mainly in the Irish Republic, from the rented Welsh farmhouse to which they fled after coming to the attention of the gardaí.

The Nigerian women and girls, who were not trafficked by the defendants, were among prostitutes supplied to the ring. One girl rescued by police was just 14 when trafficked out of Nigeria, and 15 when placed in one of the Carroll brothels.

All came from poor family backgrounds, having lost one or both parents, and were promised a better life away from their remote, rural villages. One was told she could be a hairdresser, another that she would be put into further education.“Instead, they find themselves being issued with forged passports in different names and being taken to Dublin via various routes and find themselves in the hands of the Carroll family,” Mark Phillips, deputy director of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), which was involved in the operation, said after the case.

“The first time these girls know they are going into a life of prostitution is when they are bought items of clothing, dropped off at a flat, and get a phone call to say ‘expect a male customer and do what you are told.”

They worked 12 to 15 hours a day, were regularly moved from brothel to brothel, and supplied with “necessities” – condoms, creams and lingerie. Food was brought to them. The going rate was €160 (£140) for half an hour, but they had to pay their money into Toma Carroll’s bank account.

Of the 15 prostitutes caught in the police raids on Carroll’s brothels, some were from South America and Europe and willingly worked for him.But many of the trafficked women and girls lived in fear of juju oaths, made during “terrifying and humiliating” rituals they were forced into by traffickers.

One was forced to sleep in a coffin to “put the fear of death” in her. Menstrual blood was drawn into a padlock, locked, and thrown in the river to signify their lives were in the hands of the river goddess, said investigators.

Live chickens were killed and the victims made to eat the raw hearts. Fingernail clippings and pubic hair cuttings were taken, and retained, to “instill the fear of God in them” and show they could be “metaphysically” reached wherever they were. Often the girls were naked, and one was cut all over her body with blades, said investigators.

An important part of the oath was each was told they had to pay back, on average, £65,000 to their traffickers.

If they breached the oath, they would die, or their families back in Nigeria would die.

Investigations continue to track down those responsible for trafficking them out of Nigeria and those passing them through Europe to Ireland.

The defendants are said to have properties in South Africa, Bulgaria and Mozambique thought to be worth “millions”.