For the second time since 2018, federal authorities busted an Asian-run prostitution ring in Massachusetts. Five years ago, it was a bunch of Koreans who operated brothels in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Atlanta, Georgia, and eastern Virginia [Virginia Man Sentenced for Operating Interstate Prostitution Ring, Justice.gov, June 26, 2020]. This time, three Chinamen were operating brothels in the same area and in eastern Virginia. But it was the same modus operandi: advertise on websites to bring men into the sex parlors.
High-end brothels catered to politicians, military officials: feds https://t.co/KfLGV2ABif pic.twitter.com/UyOS493NUX
— New York Post (@nypost) November 9, 2023
The suspects, Han Lee, James Lee, and Junmyung Lee, began operating in 2020, the criminal affidavit says. The money quote, though, explains just who was paying for the sex:
[Johns paid] $350 to upwards of $600 per hour depending on the different services, [which] suggests that customers are paying a premium price compared to standard rates for commercial sex being offered in the area. Throughout the course of our investigation, and as detailed below, agents have identified several customers through surveillance, phone records, customer interviews, and other investigative methods. These customers spanned a wide array of different professional disciplines. Some of these professional disciplines included, but are not limited to, politicians, pharmaceutical executives, doctors, military officers, government contractors that possess security clearances, professors, lawyers, business executives, technology company executives, scientists, accountants, retail employees, and students.
Read that again: “Military officers” and “government contractors that possess security clearances” were patronizing brothels operated by three Chinamen. Some of us want to know the names of those military officers and government contractors.
Like the Koreans before them, federal prosecutors charged the suspects in this case with inducing and/or coercing the women to travel for prostitution, which carries as much as 20 years in prison. Nothing much happened to the Koreans.
Federal prosecutors typically disclose whether suspects are foreign nationals, so in both cases, we can assume they were born there. Still, immigrants and their kids seem to have a thing for selling sex.
Asian massage parlors are big business in California, and elsewhere in the country, illegal aliens are forcing women into prostitution. Nothing has changed since I last reported on the crime eight years ago. Five of six men on the Most Wanted list of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are Mexicans. Three of the men named in my previous post are still at large.
Not that this is anything new. Sicilian immigrant Lucky Luciano, who founded what became the Genovese crime family, controlled prostitution in New York. Like the Chicago Outfit’s Al Capone, who was convicted of income-tax evasion, Luciano was never nailed for murder and racketeering. Selling sex did him in:
Investigators conducted simultaneous raids on some 40 brothels and eventually built a case against him using about three-dozen witnesses, including a slew of prostitutes and madams. The key witness was a prostitute named Florence “Cokey Flo” Brown, a hard-bitten heroin addict who testified that Luciano told her he wanted to run his string of bordellos like a chain-store operation.
Amazingly, Luciano took the witness stand, confident he could charm the jury. It didn’t work; he was convicted on 60 counts of compulsory prostitution and sentenced to 30 to 50 years in prison.
Prostitution in New York-Part 2, From Lucky Luciano to the Bad Old Days of Times Square, by Stuart Marques, NYC Department of Records and Information Services, September 6, 2019
Luciano landed on Ellis Island in 1906. [Gateway to America: The Celebrities of Ellis Island, Yesterday’s America]. Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky followed him six years later [Notable Immigrants of Ellis Island, National Park Service].
Upshot: Mass immigration means more prostitution.
