LUAN PLAKICI, an Albanian trafficker now serving 23 years, shows the extent of the evil surrounding people-smuggling.

Based in London, he ran a £1 million sex slave empire, dressed expensively and drove a Ferrari. Behind the wealth lay a vice empire that was based on fear and beatings.

After arriving in Britain, Plakici, 26, got a British passport from the Home Office and began trawling Eastern Europe for poor and gullible girls.

He was convicted last year on counts of kidnapping, procuring a teenager to have unlawful sex, incitement to rape, living off prostitution and people-smuggling.

In April his 10-year sentence was increased to 23 years by the Court of Appeal.

He trafficked more than 60 women to Britain from Eastern Europe while working as an interpreter for law firms specialising in immigration.

He brought in young women from Moldova and Romania, forcing them to work as prostitutes and demanding that they repay an £8,000 “travel bill”.

As soon as they had cleared immigration with fake passports, Plakici took them to his flat in North London before finding a brothel, where they were forced to entertain up to 20 men a day, seven days a week. The slightest dissent was met with violence, rape and warnings that their families back home would be attacked.

Plakici was granted political asylum and then British nationality after claiming that he was a Kosovan. His victims were from rural parts of Romania and Moldova and had been only too happy to come to “the bright lights of London”. He married one girl and she spent her wedding night selling her body to other men. In the months that followed Plakici ordered her to have two abortions and made her return to work hours after each one.

He was making so much money — his wife alone earned him £144,000 in less than two years — that he began building luxury homes for himself across Europe. One, in Albania, was described as a mini-palace.

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