So Much For My Happy Ending

Law enforcement officials yesterday announced the arrest of 31 people who they said were involved in running an international prostitution ring that operated at least 19 brothels in the Northeast.
Officials said they also took 67 young Korean women into protective custody, all of whom they believe were brought to the United States illegally and forced to work as prostitutes, victims of human trafficking.
Many of the houses in what officials described as a “network of Korean-owned brothels stretching from Rhode Island to Washington, D.C.,” claimed to be legitimate businesses like massage parlors, health spas and acupuncture clinics.
Among those, they said, were the Crystal Spa on West Avenue in Norwalk, Conn., and Cleveland Park Holistic Health on Connecticut Avenue in Washington. In Manhattan, authorities said they found unnamed brothels on West 26th Street and 59th Street.
The brothels catered chiefly to Asian customers who learned about the illicit services through word of mouth, officials said. Some of the houses were making tens of thousands of dollars a month, officials said.
The ring’s recruiters in Korea sought women who wanted to come to the United States, officials said. The women were then helped to travel here with false documents or were helped to be smuggled across the Mexican or Canadian borders.
Drivers carried the women from a point of entry to a brothel, and sometimes moved them between brothels within the network, officials said. Once the women were delivered to a brothel, officials said, managers would typically take away their identification and travel documents and threaten to turn them in to the authorities or hurt their relatives in Korea if they tried to leave. The women were forced to work to pay off tens of thousands of dollars of debt they had accumulated in their travel from Korea, officials said.
Ten brothel owners or managers face broad conspiracy charges that could bring five years in prison, officials said. The transporter and middleman whose cellphone was monitored, identified as Tae Hoon Kim, 39, could face up to 15 years in prison if convicted of money laundering and transporting the women.
The women who worked in the various locations will be interviewed to determine whether they unknowingly entered into prostitution. Victims of human trafficking may be given short-term immigration relief and helped to pursue legal options for longer-term immigration status later, said Julie L. Myers, assistant secretary of homeland security for immigration and customs enforcement.
“These are women who have been mentally and physically broken down in every way possible in order to achieve a mental state in which they can no longer fight against their captors or try to escape,” she said. “They are scared of the traffickers — they are also scared of law enforcement. It can take weeks to build enough trust with these victims that they will speak to us.”