Trial for Suspected Pimp Continues Without Him

If a car hadn’t driven past the pineapple field one night in March 2009, a young woman says she's certain her pimp would have killed her.

Joseph Vaimili was to have been tried in what prosecutors called one of Honolulu's higher-profile human trafficking cases. But on the day of opening arguments last month, Vaimili didn't show up. While the manhunt for him continues, so too can his trial.

A key witness is the 24-year-old¹, who states in police records she knew Vaimili as “Joe Blo,” but didn’t know he was a pimp when she began talking to him at Waikiki’s Zanzabar Night Club in February 2009. Shortly after their first conversation, she says Vaimili forced her to work “the track,” a prostitution route down Kuhio Avenue, and give him everything she earned.

Over the next month, Vaimili beat her unconscious and dragged her down a Waikiki alleyway, choked her, left deep bruises and welts across her body from whipping her with his Gucci belt. He broke a hotel-room lamp — under which he instructed her to leave the money she earned — by smashing it against her skull.

On that late March night, after Vaimili forced her to the ground in the field, she says she tried to beg him for her life with the barrel of his silver automatic handgun in her mouth. He told her repeatedly how easy it would be for him to kill her and how easily he could bury her body beneath the rows of pineapples stretching out beside them.

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