Rebecca Bender turned lived experience into a cause to help other victims. Gerace stands charged with drug and sex trafficking.
BUFFALO, N.Y. — A national expert on sex trafficking took the stand at the Peter Gerace trial in a Buffalo federal courtroom on Tuesday.
Gerace, proprietor of Pharaoh’s Gentlemen’s Club in Cheektowaga, stands accused of drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and bribing a law enforcement officer.
Rebecca Bender was a victim of sex trafficking for 6 years before she says she was able to escape when her trafficker was was arrested by authorities on a RICO charge.
Bender formed the Rebecca Bender Initiative, a not for profit that assists survivors of sex trafficking. The author of three books on the topic, Bender says she has often been called to train police on dealing with sex trafficking victims.
Prosecutors accuse Gerace of grooming dancers at Pharaoh’s by plying them with drugs in order to get them addicted to the point where he could use their drug dependency to turn them into sex partners for himself, his friends, and high paying customers.
Bender testified that is one of several commonly seen methods used by sex traffickers to coerce women into prostitution.
From where he’s being held at the Chautauqua county jail, Gerace has sent 2 On Your Side several letters denying the allegations.
Bender testified as a so-called blind expert, as she neither interviewed any of Gerace’s alleged victims nor was she familiar with any of the charges in this specific case.
After a hearing outside the presence of jurors to determine is she could even testify as an expert witness, Judge Lawrence Vilardo ruled Bender could not discuss the details of her own experience of being sex trafficked. Judge Vilardo agreed with Gerace’s lawyers that allowing her to do so would be prejudicial to the defense.
Jurors also heard from a witness who testified at the separate trial of a co-defendant, former DEA agent Joseph Bongiovanni, who was earlier convicted of several counts of using his position to protect drug dealers, but acquitted of charges he accepted bribes from Gerace.
Retired FBI agent Tom Herbst, who also testified at Bongiovanni’s trial, told jurors Gerace fell onto his radar in 2009 when he was investigating cold case homicides believed by federal agents to be tied to the mafia in Buffalo.
Gerace’s grandfather, LaNova Pizzeria founder Joseph Todaro Sr., was reputed by the government to be the leader of Buffalo’s La Cosa Nostra and that suspicion was repeated in court again by Herbst during testimony on Tuesday.
Herbst had testified during the Bongiovanni trial that his hope was to build a drug case against Gerace in order to pressure him to provide information regarding Italian Organized Crime locally.
Herbst testified he was dissuaded by Bongiovanni from investigating Gerace and that the case eventually died.
Todaro Sr., who died in late 2012, was never charged with any crimes.
