Ir-Russi is an umbrella term that is false on two counts.
First, it is odious, especially for Russian women living legitimate lives away from home. Second, only a small portion of the women come from Russia. Most arrive from Ukraine, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania, Poland and Albania to spend three months in Malta walking the streets and earning money to send back home.
It all started with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Maltese pimps struck deals with the Ukrainian Mafia to start supplying them with East European prostitutes. Other pimps set up on their own, bringing women directly, acquiring visa permits for them and sub-leasing them to other pimps.
At the peak of this activity in the mid-1990s, there were some 12 pimps involved in East-European prostitution, each with three to eight women working for them at any one go. Then the police started closing in. The pimps who had good contacts survived. The rest went bust.
In tomorrow's edition of M magazine, a former pimp who was in prostitution for more than 30 years tells his story to The Times journalist Mark Micallef.
For the Memories section, M tracks down Mary Collinson who, back in October 1970, appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine with her twin sister Madeleine as the first ever identical twin Playmates. Now living in Milan, Mary recalls a Maltese population split in two: Half smuggled in the magazine or rushed to London to buy a copy, while the rest stayed on the island to protest that what the twins had done wasn't morally right.
M manages to get an exclusive interview with Prison Break star Dominic Purcell and also sits down with exorcist Fr Marcello Ghirlando to discuss the devil and possession.
As the countdown for the Champions League final in Moscow and the European Finals in Austria and Switzerland runs out of minutes, M warms up by focusing on a sport which men hail as the beautiful game and which women see as a 90-minute loss. M also flips through the photo album of Floriana's legendary football striker Louis Arpa. M magazine will be out tomorrow with The Times. It is published by Allied Newspapers Limited and produced by MediaMaker Limited. Its editor is Stanley Borg.