413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

Pimps have always been mobile, moving from city to city looking for ways to increase their profit margins.
Because of Kansas City’s central location and the pair of major highways passing through (I-70 and I-35),
it is often a stop on the Midwest pimp circuit. According to law enforcement, the cities that make up this
circuit include: Minneapolis, St. Louis, Las Vegas, Houston, Indianapolis, San Diego, and Des Moines.
With the advent of the Internet, pimps are able to take the “temperature” of a city before traveling there—
by posting online ads prior to arrival—in order to determine the level of demand.
Despite pimps’ ability to recruit women and girls and find new ways to increase their profits, stakeholders
did not find pimps in Kansas City to be highly organized. Their businesses lacked structure and tended to
be small operations. As one prosecutor stated, “Any hoodlum can get some girls, sell some girls, sell some
drugs; when you’re looking at international trafficking, it necessitates more organization.” She went on to
say, “For the most part, international cases are organized crime (with ethnic connections or family
connections), domestic cases are just organized thugs (with networks that came from drug and gun
trafficking).”
Erotic Massage Parlors
Unlike most of the other study sites, law enforcement reported that there was very little massage parlor
activity in Kansas City. Figure 4.6 illustrates this point and even shows a decrease in the number of
parlors from 2011 to 2013. As one law enforcement officer stated,
We don’t have any [massage parlors], when I first started here, we had a couple of those
here, but we got rid of them, they moved across state lines which we’re not too upset
about … we don’t have any massage parlors that are in Kansas City, that we’re aware of
right now. (Kansas City Law Enforcement Official)
Previously, highly organized erotic massage parlors—typically run by Chinese nationals—did exist within
city limits. As a law enforcement officer explained, those who ended up working in an erotic massage
parlor would begin their journey in China. They would employ the assistance of a “snakehead,” who would
smuggle Chinese nationals out of China to one of several countries, specifically Panama, Guatemala, and
Mexico. The smuggled individuals would move from one country to another until they arrived in the
United States. By the time they reached the United States, several months passed in which they would
have accrued a debt of approximately $50,000 per person. Since an individual’s family often times would
have only raised about $5,000 to fund the trip, the individual would be in debt to the snakehead for
$45,000. At this point, the snakehead would sell the individual to a “business owner” for $45,000. The
individual might be directed into prostitution or a sweatshop and might also be sent to other parts of the
country, including Kansas City. For those smuggled through a snakehead, the snakehead knows their
family. If the smuggled individual testified against the snakehead, their whole family would be blacklisted
and no snakehead would ever help their family come to the United States again.
Several years ago, a massage parlor case was prosecuted in Kansas City that took two years to investigate
and one year to prosecute. Authorities seized $80,000 in the case; however, stated that the “big money”
disappeared, as the massage parlor owners sent the money back to China using Western Union. But as
one law enforcement officer noted, “One could calculate the money generated through condom counts.”
When discussing the challenges to investigating massage parlors, the same law enforcement officer went
on to say, “Often you’ll bust a girl in a massage parlor for prostitution and the manager will say “she
wasn’t supposed to do that ”and instead of a massage parlor case, you now have just a single girl in a
prostitution case.”
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