A couple have been jailed for setting up a multi-million pound prostitution ring, which involved young women being trafficked from Northern Ireland.
We’re sorry. This video is unavailable from your location.
Irishman Thomas Carroll, 48, and his South African wife Shamiela Clark, 32, admitted running the complex and organised business in Ireland from their home, an old vicarage in Pembrokeshire.
The court heard Thomas Carroll and Clark moved their "headquarters" to Pembrokeshire, after the Garda uncovered the prostitution ring running in the Republic and Northern Ireland.
Carroll was jailed at Cardiff Crown Court for seven years while his wife got three-and-a-half years.
His daughter Toma Carroll, 26, was also jailed for two years for her part in laundering the profits, which in one year amounted to more than €1m.
Rituals
The ring was supplied with vulnerable young women and girls who were subjected to bizarre rituals to scare them by traffickers.
Some were shoved into coffins and witnessed chicken slaughter before they were sent from Nigeria and coerced into a large and lucrative prostitution ring run by the married couple.
Clark, a former prostitute who went by the name of Carmen, ran a "call centre" where she co-ordinated the brothels and took calls from clients, organised accommodation and placed adverts in newspapers, the court heard.
Robert Davies, prosecuting, said the business used foreign sex workers "so they would not have homes to go to at night".
Most of the young women and girls, one aged just 15, came from South America and Nigeria, with many not knowing they would have to work as prostitutes to pay off the huge debts they were told they owed their traffickers.
"They were cynically catapulted into a miserable existence and exploited," Mr Davies said.
Other prostitutes were willingly recruited to work both sides of the Irish border through advertisements on the internet and in newspapers.
There were around 35 brothels operating on both sides of the border.
Sentencing, Judge Bidder said the case was "exceptional in its scale".
On the trafficked women from Nigeria, he told the couple: "I'm not sentencing you for trafficking those women and accept you were unaware of the personal circumstance of the women who worked in your brothels and you were not responsible for any violence and threats of violence.
"But the Nigerian women who were threatened with dreadful coercion all ended up working for you.
"You did not ask and did not care what personal tragedies had befallen those women submitting for your profit. You were willing to exploit them."
© Press Association