"Dealing in Human Flesh"

In the wake of World War I, the League of Nations and numerous investigative journalists went undercover to infiltrate sex-trafficking rings, conduct clandestine interviews with men and women participating in the vice trade, and identify the weak links in their operations in order to destroy this "global menace." These covert researchers discovered that the sex-trafficking industry was dominated not by vast underworld syndicates but by petty hustlers operating tiny fly-by-night operations. In "Dealing in Human Flesh," Jeffrey S. Adler uses these unpublished field reports to map how small-time criminals conducted their sex-trafficking ventures. Adler shows that, despite policymakers' (and filmmakers') obsessions with the cartels and international crime rings of myth, it was in fact the business model of sex traffickers that narcotics and arms smugglers borrowed from to forge the surprisingly un-organized structure of early twenty-first-century human, cocaine, and weapons trafficking.  

Jeffrey S. Adler is Professor of History and Criminology and Distinguished Teaching Scholar at the University of Florida. He is author of Bluecoated Terror: Jim Crow New Orleans and the Roots of Modern Police Brutality.