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"Real-Life Detectives Tell How They'd Crack Those Unsolved Mysteries"
A 23-year old female journalism student meets a handsome cargo-boat skipper, who proposes that she travel with him to Haiti and write a story contrasting the poverty there with life in America. The student agrees, and over the objections of her parents and boyfriend, sets off. Weeks pass. The family hears nothing. Finally, they make inquiries and learn the boat was last seen in the Caribbean. Since then, neither the boat, the woman nor the skipper has been seen again.
A drug shoot-out? A storm at sea? Neither, says maverick private eye Logan Clarke, a former soldier of fortune. "It's the white slave trade. There is a tremendous white-slavery market that goes on all over Cuba, Haiti, that area. More than a hundred girls go missing each year. It's easy to ship them out from there to Colombia or the Middle east, where the suppliers-- or wranglers, as they're called-- can get $10,000 to $20,000 per girl, or even up to $100,000 for the right one."
The journalism student, Clarke says, fit the slavers' bill perfectly: "They look for someone who has a zest for life or a mission, because it's easier to get that kind of person to go with them." The skipper was just the kind of man who makes an ideal procurer. "He's young, handsome, dangerous, and speaks several languages. He can easily get the attention of a girl. And he offered her something she wanted: a trip to Haiti."
For Clarke, what really matters is how to bring her back. "It's useless to go around with a photo, saying 'Have you seen this girl?'," he says, pointing out a major mistake the boyfriend made. "You have to set up the reverse sting: put someone through the same trail, or create a job the skipper wants and let him hear about it." It won't be easy, and it will be expensive ("in the neighborhood of $100,000," says Clarke), but it may not even be worth doing. "If you found her," says Clarke sadly, "after all the drugs and brainwashing, she'd be a vegetable-- take [abducted heiress] Patty Hearst and multiply that by a thousand, and that's what you've got."