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Black-shirted agents of the Orange County Sheriff's Fugitive Unit trooped into the Orlando Downtown Marriott on Friday, October 19, and arrested three Orlando Weekly employees at their Central Florida newspaper's Fall Job Fair.

While local TV news cameras recorded the event, classified advertising director Jarrell Brian Martin, line account rep Kate Miller, and display account director Matt Whiting were marched out of the hotel in handcuffs. The Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation (MBI) accused the trio of receiving financial support from prostitution, and of aiding and abetting the activities of prostitutes.

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heir alleged crime concerned the sale and publication of ads for escort and massage services in the alternative paper's classified section. As the three were spirited away, WFTV-Channel 9 reporter Robert Maxwell -- apparently hoping to make a trial process redundant -- badgered Martin with such questions as "Why are you selling ads for prostitution when you know it's illegal?"

On the same day, Orlando Weekly itself was charged under RICO (the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) with involvement in the sex-for-pay industry. A prosecutorial affidavit claims the newspaper's "Adult Services" classifieds produced more than $750,000 in ad revenue over the past five years, while "Certified Massage" ads pulled in an additional $1.25 million. (MBI Director William Lutz concedes that "not all" of the advertisers are running illegal businesses.)

RICO, a feature of the federal Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, was intended to aid prosecution of gangsters in the Al Capone mold. It has been used to put Mafia boss Frank "Funzi" Tieri, members of the Gambino crime family, and other organized crime figures behind bars. In effect, the law delegitimizes legal businesses used to support criminal activity. Typically, the aim is to steer such operations toward financial ruin.

In recent years, RICO has been used with increasing frequency as a tool to harass and destroy adult businesses, including escort services. Many of the targeted operations are run by private entrepreneurs with no crime-syndicate pedigree. One such entrepreneur is Jeane Palfrey, the RICO-indicted "D.C. Madam," who has fought back with politically explosive records of clients' phone calls. (An unintended upshot of the case was the resignation last April of Deputy Secretary of State Andrew Tobias, the Bush Administration's abstinence-pushing "AIDS czar," a Palfrey customer.) The MBI's move against Orlando Weekly may be the first application of RICO to a legitimate newspaper.

The Orlando Weekly arrests were products of "Operation Weekly Shame," a two-year MBI examination of the paper's advertising policies and procedures. A grand jury had reviewed evidence and handed down indictments in September, but the MBI waited several weeks to seize the three indicted staffers. Nabbing people at a public event in a busy hotel makes better television than walking into a newspaper office with warrants.

"The arrests," said publisher Rick Schreiber in a written statement, "are a blatant attempt to infringe upon the First Amendment rights of this newspaper and its advertisers. Essentially, the MBI intends to require Orlando Weekly to perform criminal background checks on customers who place advertisements in our newspaper. Orlando Weekly does not have the ability to take this action, nor would it choose to take it even if it did. No newspaper in the country performs criminal background checks on its advertisers."

The MBI is an Orlando-based task force encompassing 14 local, state, and federal agencies. These include the FBI, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Immigration and Customs, the Secret Service, the inspectional arm of the U.S. Postal Service, the Sheriff's Offices of Orange and Osceola Counties, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and several local police forces. This Hydra-headed entity was founded in 1978 by the State Attorney of the Ninth Judicial Circuit, the Orange County Sheriff's Office, and the Orlando Police Department. Orlando Weekly's October 25 coverage of events leading up to the Marriott debacle, headlined "Operation MBI Shame," describes the law-enforcement confederation as "an inept, inefficient police organization answerable to no one."

Despite the MBI's federal connections, Paul Zambouros, Commander of the MBI's Vice/Organized Crime Section, insists there was no federal involvement "whatsoever" in his organization's probe of Orlando Weekly's adult ads. Longtime tensions between the MBI and the alternative paper suggest, in fact, that MBI officials have been pursuing a parochial grudge match in response to the Weekly's muckraking efforts. Most of the MBI's funding comes directly from Orlando and Orange County; its splashy arrests aim to please and impress local funding sources.

Operation Weekly Shame had elements of a classic sting. In addition to issuing subpoenas for advertising records, Zambouros says the MBI sent two-female undercover officers posing as prostitutes to the paper to inquire about purchasing ad space. Returning on various occasions, the officers are said to have collected at least eight hours' worth of taped transactions proving that Orlando Weekly ad reps knew full well they were facilitating prostitution.

Whether the tapes really prove anything at all is not yet known. As The Guide goes to press, attorney Steven G. Mason, who represents the arrested ad personnel, says, "I'm still waiting for 'discovery' -- the investigative paperwork -- which has not been provided yet by the prosecution." Mason has declined to comment on the case or to permit his clients to do so until he has reviewed that material.

The MBI told Orlando Weekly to clean up its ads once before. In 1996, some time before the trio under indictment joined the newspaper, the MBI launched "Operation Do the Right Thing," warning the Weekly and other local publications, including the BellSouth yellow pages and the Orlando Sentinel, that running escort ads amounted to fostering and promoting illegal activity. The publications responded with some degree of cooperation.

"They scaled back in the language of the ads," Zambouros recalls, "and they weren't putting in the verbiage like they have now, like the provocative sayings and so forth." He claims prostitution in the area was significantly reduced as a result.

Orlando Weekly may have temporarily toned down some of its advertising, but the paper has never toned down its negative coverage of the MBI. The 22-year-old newspaper, whose press run of 47,000 is distributed free throughout Greater Orlando, began running articles critical of the multi-agency law-and-order machine in the late 1980s.

The newsweekly's exposés have included stories about the MBI's botched efforts to take down a football gambling ring via illegal wiretap, its cover-up of crimes committed by some of its drug informants, its mishandling and occasional destruction of evidence, its infiltration of a nuclear protest group led by teachers and clergymen, and its repeatedly failed attempts to shut down escort services and strip clubs by constitutionally dubious means.

One of the MBI's stranger exploits was its 1988 investigation of gay prostitution, in which hustlers were forced to entrap johns not merely by accepting money from them, but by having sex with them on camera. According to Orlando Weekly, MBI Director Bill Lutz later stated that prosecutors dropped the case because the videotape "had no jury appeal and was traumatic for agents to sit through."

The MBI also applied its media skills to a subsequent campaign against three Rachel's Gentleman's Club strip bars. In the line of duty, MBI agents paid two Rachel's strippers $7,000 each to penetrate each other with a strap-on dildo in the back of a limo while the episode was filmed. Indicted on charges similar to those brought against the Weekly Three, club owner Jim Veigle was exonerated. One of the Rachel's strip-club investigators, Paul Winsett, an MBI agent with a history of improprieties, was disciplined last February for taking pictures of his penis with an MBI cell phone and sending them to women.

In 2004, Orlando Weekly chronicled the MBI's expensive ($27,562), ethically unsavory bid to shut down Cleo's strip club through a carnival of undercover work in which agents got drunk, bought drugs, blew on strippers' vaginas, grabbed dancers, and tripped dancers so that they fell off stage and into their laps. The sting resulted in 52 arrests but few convictions. MBI destroyed records of the investigation and refused to turn over unedited tapes to the club's legal counsel. Cleo's remains open for business.

Columnist Scott Maxwell at the Orlando Sentinel, the local mainstream daily, calls Bill Lutz's denial that MBI was vengefully targeting the paper "a crock."

"If you look at the back of any alternative weekly anywhere in the country," notes Ronnie Radner, editor of the Florida GLBT biweekly Watermark, "there are always those ads. It does seem that Orlando Weekly was singled out." Watermark also carries escort and massage ads among its "Personal Services" classifieds, though Radner says her publication is "ridiculously careful" about content.

Nevertheless, in "Operation MBI Shame," Orlando Weekly quotes such recent Watermark ads as "Hot Stud 2 Help You Release," and cites similar classifieds from other local publications, including the Orlando Sentinel and the BellSouth business directory. Curiously, while Orlando Weekly's owner and publisher received warning letters about ad content last March, it appears the only other business to have received a similar warning from MBI in 2007 was not a Central Florida print publication, but the San Francisco-based web giant Craigslist.com.

Lutz claims that the MBI is only trying to keep Orlando, home of Disney World, family-friendly. But alongside a cluster of theme parks including the Disney/Epcot complex, Universal Studios Escape, Sea World, and other attractions, there are scores of thriving adult businesses, some of them gay, all over the Orlando area. According to the city's website, Orlando is the second busiest convention venue in the United States, surpassed only by Las Vegas. Conventions and tradeshows keep replenishing swarms of at least momentarily single people who are, in many cases, eager consumers of whatever the local sex industry has to offer.

Community Marketing's statistics rate Orlando as the tenth most popular destination for GLBT travelers in the U.S. The majority of gay travelers to Orlando don't go there to share milkshakes with Mickey Mouse, not even during the annual Gay Days celebration's ritual visit to Disney World. Gay amenities in the area range from Parliament House, one of the largest and wildest gay facilities in the state of Florida, to the newer, more exclusive Freedom Resort and Spa.

Gay visitors to Orlando can glean information about the area from this magazine, from Watermark, or from gay-friendly Orlando Weekly. For now, however, Orlando Weekly's classifieds have been somewhat abridged. Massage and phone-sex ads continue to run, but escort ads have been suspended pending the outcome of the MBI-initiated prosecution.