413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

promising sign that law enforcement efforts are weakening the structure and operations of AMPs
engaging in sex trafficking and prostitution.
Tracing and seizing assets derived from prostitution and/or sex trafficking at AMPs has also been difficult
due to the difficulty in uncovering the criminal network and the strictly cash-based nature of many of the
massage parlors. While it is unclear exactly how much money AMPs are earning within the DC area, one
law enforcement official’s description of money uncovered on a raid provides a window into the large
amount of money being generated:
We did happen to come across an Asian massage parlor … I guess we were just lucky that
day because they had $70,000 at that location. It was not like it was truly hidden, it was
stashed inside a lotion bottle with a false bottom but it was out of plain site and our
hound dog over here found it. (DC Law Enforcement Official)
While AMP profits are unclear, the demand for services and client base is much easier to uncover.
According to prosecutors, investigators, and service providers, massage parlor clients communicate
openly with each other through online forums where they provide tips and rate the sexual services of the
women inside the massage parlors. A service provider described these public, online forums in detail:
Brothels
Three main ones are eroticmp.com, spahunters.com, and rubmaps.com and of the three
of them, I think EroticMP is the most up-to-date information, the best, and the highest
level of confidence that [if] the parlor is being listed there, you have commercial sex
occurring. (DC Service Provider)
Latino brothels operate out of residences throughout the DC area, largely in neighborhoods with higher
concentrations of Latinos. Latino brothels have been the most difficult of the three main forms of UCSE
for officials to investigate due to the largely diffuse, mobile, and ethnically- closed nature of the brothel
operations:
All of the sort of things that have worked against Asian massage parlors, Latino brothels
have figured out a much better way to do it. From the get go, they limited their consumer
base and they’re in residential areas as opposed to northwest business areas, so we have a
very difficult time finding these places, investigating these kinds of cases, and prosecuting
them. This a huge challenge because we have no idea what the economy of Latino
brothels looks like, but we know it’s big and that there are a lot of them and that they’re
constantly moving and that there are a lot of people moving within them. You’ll have, let’s
say, in Columbia Heights or somewhere northwest/northeast DC where there’s a large
Hispanic population. You’ll open up one of these places. The women sort of come from all
over DC, Virginia, New York and will basically go to one of these places. Obviously many
men coming in and out, but the men are always solicited far away from the residence: bus
stops, places where vans pick up migrant workers or construction workers rather. I’ve
heard of instances even where the men were hooded before going to where the residence
was. Things I’ve heard—again really I’ve only had a few of these where I’ve talked to the
women—they only allow Salvadorians in so we’re not even talking about how many
Puerto Ricans have we tried to send into one of these places and they’ve laughed at us.
[To them] Puerto Rican means police. These guys have always understood that you’ve got
to keep this discreet. They have look outs: young children with cell phones, older women
on lawn chair texting over there. They’re just really hard to infiltrate, but DC has a big
problem with them. (DC Prosecutor)
Despite these difficulties, DC law enforcement has conducted some investigations of Latino brothels.
Similar to what happened with AMPs, this caused the brothels to morph from residentially-based
operations to more mobile escort service operations:
Sometimes Latino brothels turn mobile, like the Asian escort services that we talked
about where their natural setting is the massage parlor, but their kind of “Plan B” setting
is to go mobile. I think the same thing happens with Latino brothels where their natural
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