Massage Parlors
Joe the Cop walked into the Tech Room and, grumpy as usual said, “We’ve got two massage parlors to start the day.”
That brought groans and curses from the rest of the team. We felt inspecting massage parlors, aka brothels, was a boring and pointless job. The Mayor’s Office of Midtown Enforcement was tasked with responding to sensitive complaints in Manhattan from Fourteenth to Sixtieth Street, East River to the Hudson. Part of a team which included a Police Officer (Joe the Cop), a Fire Inspector and a Health Inspector, I was the Construction Inspector, handling building code and zoning issues. Each of us inspected what our respective agencies were responsible for. Joe, there for protection, also dealt with anyone who considered offering any of us a bribe.
In the 1990s, the Giuliani administration’s catch phrase was “quality of life,” so local elected officials, Community Boards, and neighborhood associations came to us when they felt theirs was being affected. There were lots of complaints related to hazardous construction, blocked fire exits, and contaminated food and we knew we were accomplishing something dealing with those. Many others were less safety related. There might be a new store opening on Fifth or Madison Avenue with tacky signage which didn’t fit with the upscale style of the district and more importantly didn’t comply with the local signage regulations. Maybe a restaurant extended its outdoor tables into a public plaza, illegally excluding the public unless they were paying customers. These were typical, but even more common were the so-called massage parlors. During that period and throughout the Midtown area, they were an embarrassment to the administration.
Two competing gangs ran the massage parlors of Giuliani era. They would open in residential and commercial buildings. The Police couldn’t do much about them because the “massage” front worked. If an undercover went in as a customer, he was naked when and if a the masseuse made a solicitation. Not a good time to make an arrest and he could only arrest the woman making the solicitation and not her colleagues and managers. Our city’s Law Department came up with a process that would work. I’d issue various Building Code violations for illegal occupancy and work without proper permits for partitions and plumbing. The clincher was a zoning violation for unlicensed massage. They didn’t really do massage, but they said they did, and that was enough for a violation. Under the nuisance abatement law and using my documentation as evidence, City attorneys would bring a civil suit, and a judge would issue a closing order – end of story. Well, not really. They would re-open again at a new location within a few weeks. Since there were two gangs running them, many of the tips came from one about the other. It kept us busy. Although part of the job, these places seemed so innocuous we felt our time would be better spent rectifying dangerous conditions.
This went on for most of the five years I worked at Midtown Enforcement. We did our inspections early in the day so there were rarely any customers. The women were usually dressed in casual street clothes, and we got to know most of them by name. Our female health inspector would speak to them about health related issues and services they might avail themselves to. They knew they wouldn’t be arrested so our official visits became a cordial hour or so. Although run by Chinese gangs, the workers were often Korean. There was usually a mama-san who looked after them, doing laundry and cooking. In addition to issuing violations, I made a rough floor plan of the establishment so when the police and lawyers went in to execute the closing order, they would have some familiarity with the lay-out.
Our method was considered so successful we were sometimes asked to do inspections outside of the Midtown area, most frequently in Chinatown. The first time we did this was at a location on the Bowery near Delancy Street at the request of the Fifth Precinct’s CO. Aside from having massage cubicles, it was a gang headquarters with a section of the location devoted to gambling. The police went in with a warrant and secured the premises before we entered. They had interrupted a high-stakes mahjong game. And I had always associated mahjong with elderly women.
As I walked in the ground floor entrance, two attractively dressed Asian woman hurried passed me, followed by a Chinese undercover cop. I watched as they ran across the Bowery and Delancy Street and almost into a traffic cop. He let the women go but grabbed the undercover who was chasing them and cuffed him. His calculated scruffy appearance worked well enough to convince the traffic cop he was a bad guy. Despite this glitch, the police considered the operation a success. It ended with me going to the precinct with a Fujianese interpreter to serve papers on the club’s owner.
A guard noticed me staring at all the black smudges on the cell walls. “We don’t give perps paper towels after we take their prints. They only flush ‘em and clog the toilets.” The black ink abstract patterns hand rubbed on an institutional-green background made an interesting décor.
When we were next called to Chinatown it was supposed to be a much simpler operation: the usual brothel operating as a massage parlor. We went with just our team and no additional police like the first time. We entered and found, besides twelve women, five men who didn’t appear to be customers. Since this was Chinatown and not Midtown, we figured they were security.
We began our inspection and as I drew a floor plan in one of the cubicles, a young woman approached me and said, in heavily accented English, something like, “I want to go out with you.”
It wasn’t uncommon for the ‘masseuses’ to sometimes act flirty and tease us. It made our shy fire inspector uncomfortable but didn’t really bother me. This time it was different. She wasn’t smiling and seemed nervous. I asked some questions and eventually understood that she and the other women in this brothel were being held there against their will.
Joe came looking for me because I had been gone for so long. “Did I interrupt you and your girlfriend?”
“Joe, we’ve got a problem here.”
I explained, he grasped the situation quickly and was concerned.
“I’m outgunned,” he said, referring to the five man security team.
He radioed the local precinct and within minutes a lieutenant, ten uniforms and an interpreter from the DAs office arrived. There was nothing left for us to do but leave and prepare our statements.
My affidavit was enough to keep me from having to testify in court. Our office attorney filled me in on what came out at the hearing. The twelve women were from Thailand and were offered passage to America by an organization they thought legitimate. At a cost of $6000 each they made whatever size deposit they could and were told they would be able to work off the rest in the organization’s New York garment factory. Their ages ranged from fourteen to twenty-two and were working at the brothel for three weeks when we arrived to do our inspection. The gang’s defense attorney claimed they were well fed, given any medical attention they required and every Sunday chaperones took them sightseeing. They’d seen the Statue of Liberty from the Staten Island Ferry and some of them went to Rockefeller Center. Nevertheless, the DA came down heavy on the gang with a long list of justifiable charges and won his case.
This episode showed us the dark side of the business. Unsuspecting women were duped then held against their will and forced into prostitution. If prostitution was decriminalized and regulated perhaps the situation, we came upon wouldn’t have happened. If sex workers could freely choose that line of work and own and operate their brothels without being under the control of pimps, maybe things would be different. Whether this is true or not, we were glad we arrived when we did and could help them. Our team never learned exactly what happened to these victims of sex trafficking. A non-profit took charge of them and helped to either return them home or, if they chose to, stay in America. I wondered if any would have decided to stay after the experience they had here.