In 2007, the Amsterdam city council decided that enough was enough and voted to clean up the Red Light District. Legalising the sex trade ‘hasn’t worked’, said the city’s mayor at the time, the left-wing stalwart Job Cohen. ‘We’ve realised this is no longer about small-scale entrepreneurs, but that big crime organisations are involved here in trafficking women, drugs, killings and other criminal activities,’ he said. Armed with strict new zoning rules and powers to revoke brothel licences, authorities began buying up brothels and converting them to other uses. Within a year, roughly a third of
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