413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

for cleaning supplies and food and thus help to support the operation. Stakeholder estimated there are
generally anywhere between two and four women working in a massage parlor or spa and employees often
work from ten in the morning to midnight, seven days a week. They average between five to ten clients in
a day.
One major difference between street/online sex work and massage parlors sex work is the gender makeup
of the facilitator. Pimps tend to be male, whereas massage parlor and spa operators are
overwhelmingly female:
Most of all the owners and managers are all women. In this area, we found a lot of the
human traffickers that have been arrested have been women. … I think again, if you're
looking at you traditional white girl, black girl on the street or moving into a hotel room, I
think yeah, your pimps are gonna be men. Even though a lot of them have the bottom girl
as well. But within our realm, a lot of these massage parlors are being ran, the managers
are almost always women. Again, with my experience … It’s a little bit different maybe in
the Chinese side. A lot of the owners are maybe women, and they’re the ones that are kind
of cracking down. And then when we look at, we had a woman indicted and arrested in
almost all of our trafficking cases in the past few years. Pretty much all involved a woman,
if not the woman being the ringleader. (Federal Law Enforcement Official)
Massage parlors and spa operators will often own several similar businesses in the same area and in cities
outside of Washington. They rotate women around to various storefronts in order to keep clients
interested and decrease the likelihood of law enforcement detection. These operators often know one
another. Law enforcement has tracked the migration movements of these women by where they get
arrested. According to one federal officer, “Seventy-five to eighty percent of the Vietnamese-based ones
have at least one prostitution arrest … they will pay the fine and just don’t go back to that city, if they even
pay.” However, law enforcement does not consider this to be organized crime:
It’s a community that knows each other and we found that in the interstate cases. And
those had to be Vietnamese, for the most part, the suspects were Vietnamese, and they
knew who to call—it was a network of people. You could call it organized crime, but you
really don’t have anybody sitting at the head of the table, so to speak, in those cases. You
have your mama-san who gets it going, she’s got the horsepower to open a storefront. And
what we’ve heard over the last three to four years is that Seattle’s the place where you’ll
make more money than you will anywhere else. That’s what they tell me, because they
keep coming out of California all the time. “Why do you come up here” “We make more
money up here than we do in California.” Well, I think they have a saturation problem in
California, to be honest with you. (Seattle Law Enforcement Official)
Despite the mass migration from California to Seattle to work in massage parlors and spas, a lot of
women, particularly Chinese nationals, start out at an agency in Los Angeles or the Bay Area and are then
referred out to businesses across the country. If they want to move to another massage parlor or spa, they
will often contact the agency in California, who will then connect them to another place in another city.
Law enforcement has been unable to identify where these agencies are located and their owners.
Some women who work in massage parlors and spas are here legally and some are not. For those who are
not here on legal visas, the price for fraudulent documents can run upwards of $10,000. Some women are
smuggled through Mexico and brought up to Seattle through California; however, the majority are
smuggled through Canada, which borders Washington state. They will also pay to have fake massage
licenses created that state that they are licensed in China, as one local law enforcement official explained:
It would be something like, “We, the state, will accept certifications from China that you
attended massage school in China. So you just bring your certificate to us, and we’ll give
you a massage license in Washington state.” That kind of document fraud maybe Which,
by the way, now the state is backing up on at 180 miles an hour, screaming, “We need to
fix this!” Oh really Because the documents that say, “I attended school in China,” are
kind of on the fraudulent side because either they swam across the Pacific or they could
have run into Canada, on foot, got on a plane, flown over, run back across foot, and we
want to maybe track their travel through Customs. Or it’s kind of hard when you’re
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