The club has long been rumored to have cartel ties: During the height of the pandemic, it was one of the few locales to continue operating. VIP customers are picked up at the nearby U.S.-Mexico border in limousines. The club, one of Mexico’s most famous, attracts clientele from around the world: Russians, Chinese, Mexicans-and especially Americans. Female strippers penetrate each other with dildos to the delight of clients. Topless dancers twerk on a table covered in soap and bubbles as men slap dollar bills on their butts and finger them for extra money. Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the three-story club employs hundreds of strippers designed to meet any man’s fantasy: skinny women, thick women, women in their thirties, and 18-year-olds with braces. The Hong Kong Gentlemen's Club was the killer’s hunting ground. Months later, Mexican authorities declared the murders to be the work of a serial killer. Three weeks after his girlfriend’s body was discovered in a hotel bathroom, another sex worker was brutally murdered in Tijuana. But there is another story: About how a lackluster investigation, slow-moving justice system, and a time-consuming extradition process allowed a serial killer to continue preying on sex workers. and Mexican authorities hailed the alleged murderer’s eventual arrest as an example of the countries’ close cooperation. Instead, three weeks after his girlfriend’s body was discovered in a hotel bathroom, another sex worker was brutally murdered in Tijuana. “If the FBI had actively contacted the Mexican authorities and said ‘we have information related to a murder in your city,’ things would have gone very differently,” said Toby, who asked to withhold his last name because of the enormous media attention around the case. He pleaded again when Acosta’s Apple Pay was used in the days after her murder-at a Dunkin Donuts and a Vietnamese restaurant. He pleaded with them to do something, anything. Less than 36 hours after Acosta’s body was found, he shared the information about her cell phone turning up in Southern California with an FBI task force officer, while Acosta’s mom told Mexican investigators. He was convinced that his girlfriend’s murderer lived in one of the low-rise, green stucco apartments. To his shock, the phone appeared on a residential street in Downey, 130 miles north of Tijuana. In the early morning hours after her death-before her body was found and when she was still feared missing-he had tracked her phone to try to glean information about her whereabouts. The murder of his girlfriend, Angela Acosta, offered plenty of leads: There was a crime scene, a body, video footage, and cell phone evidence. Only a handful of suspects were ever apprehended. Famously, the mangled bodies of hundreds of murdered women turned up in the desert around Ciudad Juarez on the Rio Grande River in the 1990s and early 2000s. Those investigations that do happen are often sloppy and half-hearted, and lack even the most basic forensic work. Instead of being treated as victims, the women themselves are often blamed-because they were out alone at night, or had drunk too much, or even worse, were selling their bodies for sex. The disappearance and killing of women in Mexico is a decades-old problem. Crimes were rarely solved even less so when the victims, like Toby’s Mexican girlfriend, were sex workers. It was just another death in a city that regularly ranks among the world’s most dangerous. Her murder, in Tijuana’s red light district a year and a half earlier in January 2022, had hardly made the news at the time. Toby is a project manager, six feet tall with wavy, salt and pepper hair, tanned skin, an athletic build and a gee-whiz feel about him that matches his Subaru Outback.
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