If all of these massage parlors are participating in "human trafficking" aren't the patrons participants as well? We have a slew of cases coming from the Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio tri-state area that prosecutors are alleging to be a part of an interstate network that spans three states and shuffles the women from one parlor to another every few months. The businesses are owned by Korean-American women and the cases are being prosecuted by the feds. The parlor owners are being prosecuted, but the customers, and in most cases, the workers, are not.
One might realize that the interconnection could be something as simple as the women wanting to work in different areas to develop new clients or the parlor owners wanting to have new workers for clients that frequent the business over an extended period of time. It is a fact that men that patronize adult businesses do not want to see the same lady all the time. According to an article written by Jim Hannah for NYK.com, Florence, Kentucky massage parlor operator Yong Hui Cho stated to an informant that her employees could make $9K a month. The women working for Ms. Cho were 36-, 37-, and 48-year-old Korean-American women. Thus far the massage parlor investigations have netted at least eight convictions and hundreds of thousands of dollars in forfeited money and property.
It sounds to me like these Korean-American women did quite well for themselves and the case has nothing whatsoever to do with human trafficking. If these women were legal residents in the US, then the "trafficking" label must be tossed – each could work wherever she so desired and was not smuggled into the country via Mexico or in a boat. It must be noted that there are grants and funding available for law enforcement agencies to train officers to spot human trafficking situations and victims, and perhaps too many officers depart these seminars and classes with the belief that any woman of foreign origin working in adult business has been trafficked and forced into this type of work. Most likely, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the women prefer plenty of money over having a minimum wage job.
Cho (age 51) was the feds latest arrest – May 7, 2009, in this tri-state area, but there are other cases in progress. The news around the internet reveals that Cho had a male partner, Tae Sun Kim from Flushing, New York, and he put the business entirely in Cho's name. There is no record of Kim being charged in state or federal court in connection to this case, so I know that if I were Ms. Cho, I would demand a clear understanding of who my money man really is and why he has not been charged in connection to this case. It is possible that Cho was a worker in a massage parlor that was put in business by Kim, backed by the feds. I smell a rat, or several, depending on your viewpoint.
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