But his business model was fatally flawed β as his trial for aiding and abetting trafficking revealed. Rudloff is now serving a five-year sentence for aiding and abetting trafficking.
Men wear bathrobes and shower shoes; women are naked aside from high heels. According to court documents, this became a problem for Paradise almost immediately. In , as Rudloff was growing his business, investigators in Augsburg, Bavaria β a hundred miles from Stuttgart β received a tip-off that gangs from the city were trafficking women from eastern Europe , and sending them to work in Paradise.
While prostitution is legal in Germany, pimping and sex trafficking are not. There was still no clear connection to Rudloff at this point. Then in , a trafficking investigation into a brothel in Augsburg uncovered further links with Paradise. The evidence was sufficient to convict several pimps who had trafficked women into Paradise.
Rudloff himself was finally arrested in September He would hit them on the head, rather than the body, he explained, so that no one would see the bruises. One woman who worked at Paradise told the court she had seen young women weeping after their first night working there.
Peter Holzwarth, the chief prosecutor at the trial, argued that the owner and management at the clubs were guilty of Organisationsdelikt β aiding and abetting an organisation involved in criminality. The court agreed.
