The white slave trade has reared its ugly head again in Britain. As police have raided 48 brothels in Peterborough in the past few months alone, there is clearly a serious problem. The stories that these raids reveal of East European women being trafficked into the country, abused and frightened into compliance, could scarcely be more sobering.

But this is hardly a new development for the “oldest profession”. Georgian and Victorian cities were saturated by a sex trade made up of imported as well as local labour. But while the scale of the new influx from Eastern Europe probably has no 20th-century comparison, the type of men who currently control it are all too familiar.

Between the 1930s and 1950s, prostitution in the West End of London was revolutionised by the Messina Brothers. Gino, Carmelo, Alfredo, Salvatore and Attilio were five Maltese-Sicilian siblings who took one look at London’s haphazard sex trade and concluded that it was ripe for a takeover.

From all over Europe and beyond, they tricked or forced young women to work for them. Passport problems were eased by forgery or the arrangement of marriages of convenience. Acquiescence was guaranteed with violence.

Clients used to a more carefree tradition discovered that the sex business was being industrialised. The Messinas’ girls were made to work shifts. Chambermaids were employed to knock on doors after ten minutes, with clients being physically ejected if they exceeded the time limit. Nobody messed with the Messinas.

As the Messinas benefited from the wartime surge in the sex economy, such was the scale of their profits that Gino bought, in cash, a four-storey house in Berkeley Square. He celebrated the end of a short prison sentence (for taking a razor to a rival pimp) by driving off in a black and cream Rolls-Royce. By the 1950s the brothers stood accused, by the Sunday People, of making London “the cesspit of Europe’s cast-off harlots”.

That paper’s exposé emboldened victims to come forward. Realising that their own time was up and an unwelcome knock on the door imminent, four of the brothers fled the country. A fifth went to prison.

Sadly, human nature abhors a vacuum. For the next two decades, their West End operations were taken over by “The Syndicate” of Bernie Silver and the former Maltese traffic policeman “Big Frank” Mifsud.

During that period, the diffidence – and in some cases corrupt connivance – of police officers allowed the trade to flourish. At least if the activity of Cambridgeshire police is any guide, today’s white slave masters will expect a more robust response.

Times Recommends

• Brown is in denial. Cuts are expected
• Fight our genetic urges? Slim chance
• Beware: dogs in mangers. Barking