the Department of Homeland Security,
had busted a $20 million sex tracking
ring with tentacular reach to New York
and China. Many of the women, he said,
had been tricked into coming to the Unit-
ed States and had been working to pay o
debts to trackers before being rescued.
“I don’t believe they were told they were
going to work in massage parlors seven
days a week, having unprotected sex with
up to 1,000 men a year,” Snyder said.
Sex traficking, under law, involves
recruiting and transporting women by
force or fraud, and coercing them to
work as prostitutes. The trackers, Sny-
der continued, had covered their tracks
by moving the women every 10 to 20 days
to dierent spas, where they were forced
to sleep on massage tables and cook on
hot plates. Some were unable to leave,
the sheri said, because the trackers
conscated their money and passports.
Snyder announced that as many as
300 men who went to the spas for sex
would be charged with soliciting prosti-
tution. “Many of the men are married,”
the sheri said, adopting the moralizing
tone common to faith-based groups that
consider the sex industry an aront to
Christian values. “Many of those men
are in ongoing relationships.”
Three days later, on February 22, Palm
Beach County State Attorney Dave Aron-
berg announced that Kraft would be
charged with two misdemeanor counts
of soliciting prostitution. “Human traf-
cking is evil in our midst,” Aronberg
told reporters. “Modern-day slavery”
can “happen anywhere, including in the
peaceful community of Jupiter, Florida.”
III. THE ISLAND
W
hen I arrived in Palm Beach
last spring, the weather
report was threatening
rain. The sky hung low
and the air was loamy. If
you are the 1 percent, you can opt out of
most things in this world, including the
weather. Many of the island’s residents
were packing up prior to hurricane sea-
son; covered trailers lined driveways,
waiting to transport art back to Aspen or
Connecticut or Long Island.
Hearings on the sex charges were
ongoing; Kraft, who had pleaded not
guilty, was vigorously ghting them in
court. The question that the wealthy
residents of Palm Beach were asking
themselves was, plainly, why? Why would
a man worth $6.6 billion risk getting a $59
hand job at a strip mall massage parlor?
Many year-round residents of Palm
Beach attempted to distance themselves
from the “nasty Krafty” scandal by dis-
missing the Patriots owner as nothing but
a seasonal resident—one of the 20,000 or
so who come to the island from Thanks-
giving to Easter—and therefore not an
actual member in good standing of the
Palm Beach community. Others prof-
fered the heat defense, typically reserved
for explaining away acts of insanity, such
as rst-degree murder or third marriages.
The reasoning is deterministic: the feel-
ing that Florida itself—especially South
Florida—propels men to strange deeds.
Florida has always played an outsize
role in the national psyche, a shorthand
for a speciic aspect of the American
dream. Florida is where you go when
you don’t want to be found, or when you
have something to hide, or to escape bad
debt and scandal, as did Charles Ponzi,
the original defrauder. Palm Beach is
the place where William Kennedy Smith
was acquitted, in 1991, of raping a wom-
an he met at a bar alongside his uncle,
Senator Ted Kennedy. Where nancier
Jerey Epstein was given a “sweetheart
deal,” in 2008, for soliciting minors
for prostitution. Where Bernie Mado
preyed on wealthy investors before plead-
ing guilty, in 2009, to bilking his clients
of nearly $65 billion.
South Florida as we know it began
in 1886, when Standard Oil cofounder
Henry Flagler started building railroads
over recently drained swampland. It was
Flagler who built the Breakers resort, to
accommodate passengers on his rail-
ways, at a time when land was going for
$1.25 per acre. (Now land goes by the
square foot.) Flagler was also known for
convincing the state legislature to allow
him to divorce his second wife, whom
he had committed to an insane asylum,
so he could remarry.
The island of Palm Beach, 16 miles
long and less than a mile wide, remains
among the most economically and
socially segregated towns in America.
Apart from the occasional titled Euro-
pean, many Palm Beach residents have
been heirs to various fortunes: the Singer
sewing machine, the Watson computer,
Jell-O, Listerine. Ninety-seven percent of
residents are white, and the median age
is 67. Houses come with living rooms thatcan hold parties of 175, and two pools—
one to catch the sun in the morning, the
other to catch it in the late afternoon.
Rembrandts hang in guest bathrooms.
Breakers Row—home to mostly Jew-
ish residents, including Robert Kraft—is
referred to by the island’s WASPs as the
Gaza Strip. The clubs are so exclusive,
local legend has it, that Burt Reynolds was
once turned away at the door on account
of his dark skin color. Even Joseph Kenne-
dy Sr. was reportedly spurned on account
of his Catholic faith. Besides, his money
was deemed too new. “It’s new if it was
made in the past century,” explained
Debi Murray, chief curator of the Histori-
cal Society of Palm Beach County.
Some residents, when I asked them
about Kraft, appeared puzzled that a man
of such immense wealth would feel the
need to leave his valeted residence for a
massage, let alone sexual services. What
horried these residents most was that
Kraft had gone “over the bridge.” Over
the bridge is West Palm Beach, a service
town on the mainland, where the support
stas live: maids, gardeners, doctors,
judges—anyone who has to work for a
living. It is where you go when you can’t
send someone else, when you have to
show up in person at the hospital, or the
courthouse, or the charity photo oppor-
tunity. The Publix supermarket on Palm
Beach island sells Marcona almonds; the
Publix in West Palm Beach only stocks
the standard California variety.
Men like Kraft, after all, can have the
help come to them. J’Anine, who used to
work on the island as a high-end escort,
told me about the many famous johns she
had worked for, a list that includes best-
selling authors and rock stars and titans
of industry. As a professional, J’Anine
charged $1,000 an hour—about 13 times
more than Orchids. But the high price did
not always ensure discretion. There had
been one incident, J’Anine shared, when
she took too much cocaine on the job and
ended up locking herself and her crack
pipe in the bathroom. The client’s daugh-
ter, desperate to get rid of her, had called
the police for help. Two ocers managed
to restrain J’Anine, but not before using a
Taser and a choke hold.
Jeff Greene, a Palm Beach resident
who ranks 232nd on the Forbes list of rich-
est Americans, told me that he could not
understand why any man would want to
pay for sex, but that he did understand
why Kraft had chosen to go across theNOVEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR 109