Orlando, Fla. ? For years, the back pages of the Orlando Weekly were filled with ads for naughty nurses, sultry coeds and girls with come-hither names like “Rush” and “Roxie.”

But the saucy escort-service advertising came to a halt last month.

Vice squad officers arrested three of the paper’s advertising sales reps in a sting operation and secured an extraordinary racketeering indictment against the Weekly, accusing it of knowingly profiting from prostitution.

The free alternative paper is calling the arrests an assault on the First Amendment – an argument that might not fly in court, given that investigators say they videotaped Weekly employees selling ad space to undercover officers who openly claimed to be prostitutes.

“We couldn’t believe how easy it was to say, ‘We’re a prostitute. I want to put out an ad,”‘ said Paul Zambouros, commander of the vice and organized crime section at the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation, a task force made up of Orlando-area police and sheriff’s departments. “That has to stop.”

Escort-service ads are common in the nation’s alternative newspapers But Richard Karpel, executive director of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, said he has heard of only one other similar case, and it involved one employee and no charges against the paper.

“There’s hundreds of ads every week, and it’s not a place of newspapers to vet all their ads,” Karpel said. “I think the responsibility of the newspaper is to make sure that they’re not advertising anything that’s explicitly illegal.”

The Weekly has decried the arrests as retaliation for running stories critical of the MBI. The paper has extensively chronicled allegations that during investigations of strip-club prostitution and drug sales, MBI officers groped dancers, mishandled evidence and spent a lot of time in nightspots with little results.

The MBI denied the bust had anything to do with the Weekly’s stories. Zambouros said the agency couldn’t ignore the newspaper because MBI officers kept arresting prostitutes who advertised there.