Yorkshire couple who ran brothel from flat and made £40,000 in six months jailed

Fabiana De Souza, 42, and her husband Gareth Derby, 53 were found guilty of “flying in” sex workers to the UK from Europe and South America.

The pair treated the women like “commodities” and were caught after a major police operation to protect sex workers, a court heard.

And police said sexual exploitation of seven vulnerable women amounted to modern day slavery.

De Souza, who provided dominatrix and discipline services to punters in the posh spa town of to Harrogate, North Yorks., was said to be the ringleader of the 'large-scale commercial operation'.

The court heard that she and Derby, who earned around £50,000 a year as an engineer and machine specialist, flew in prostitutes from Brazil and Portugal.

They paid for their flights and met them at airports, before whisking them off to sex dens where men paid for 'massages' and 'full services'.

The prostitutes were put at a 'significant financial disadvantage' and forced to lie to police to avoid detection, the court heard.

De Souza and Derby, who ran the mega-money business from their home in Norfolk, were arrested in August 2018 and charged with controlling prostitution for financial gain and human trafficking.

They each denied the charges, but a jury found them guilty on both counts following a two week trial in December.

They were jailed for five years each when they appeared at Leeds Crown Court for sentencing on Monday.

Prosecutor Nicholas Lumley QC said De Souza rented a two-bed flat in Harrogate so it could be used for sex, which would be advertised on the internet.

He said: “As soon as the (prostitutes) arrived here, they would be installed in the flat in Harrogate or elsewhere, always with the purpose of being available for sex.”

The couple even converted the garage at their then home in Springfield Road, Walpole St Andrew, into a prostitution den where a trafficked sex worker plied her trade.

Bundles of cash were found at this address, along with notebooks “setting out the trading which went on”.

Police also seized 10 mobile phones used by De Souza to take bookings, which showed the “extent of this operation”, the court was told.

De Souza and Derby would pay for sex adverts within hours of picking the women up from the airport and “setting them up” at the flat on Bower Road in Harrogate.

The adverts were placed on the classified escort websites Viva Street and Adult Work and included raunchy descriptions of the women.

They took the bookings and “made the arrangements (with the clients)” who would pay various amounts - from £80 for half an hour to over £1,000 for an overnight stay.

The money usually ended up in De Souza’s bank accounts, but on occasions cash was handed in by the sex workers, the court heard.

Between May 2017 and August 2018, £38,000 in cash was deposited into De Souza’s bank accounts at branches in Harrogate and Norfolk.

About £9,000 of bank transfers were then made to accounts in Brazil and Portugal using a money-services bureau.

Following her arrest, De Souza told police she had rented the flat in Harrogate for over £700 a month and let rooms people including “friends" from her homeland of Portugal.

Derby said only that he had an “inkling that Fabia worked at the Harrogate flat as a dominatrix”.

But in a text sent to a friend in January 2018, Derby boasted of being a “smuggler of women”, the court heard.

Police trawled through their bank accounts and found they'd spent “thousands on air fares” and over £2,000 on Viva Street adverts alone.

They tracked the couple’s movements and an undercover officer posed as a client to make appointments for the brothel in Harrogate.

De Souza would answer the calls in “broken English” and the officer was offered a “range of services”, the court was told.

He was met by a sex worker named ‘Lisa’ wearing a “revealing” short-length dressing gown who buzzed him into the flats above shops.

Defending De Souza, Michael Fullerton, said she had a very deprived background and had worked in the sex trade from a very young age.

She had worked in Brazil and then Portugal, at some point as a stripper, before arriving in the UK.

Judge Guy Kearl QC, the Recorder of Leeds, told the couple: “You were not only partners in marriage, but partners in business (as well).

"This was a properly organised, contrived, criminal business. This was a joint enterprise between the both of you (and) you are each equally culpable.

"You treated these women like commodities to increase your finances.”

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