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YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED”: THE WILD, DISTURBING SAGA OF ROBERT KRAFT’S VISIT TO A STRIP MALL SEX SPAAfter the Patriots owner made two trips to Orchids of Asia Day Spa, where a half-hour “massage” costs $59, he was charged with soliciting a prostitute. What happened next was not what anyone expected.
BY MAY JEONG
OCTOBER 4, 2019
Robert Kraft waving at 2019 super bowl
ILLEGAL CONTACT
Robert Kraft at this year’s Super Bowl in Atlanta. “You won’t believe what happened,” he told a friend after getting a massage at a strip mall.PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX.
I. THE RAID
On July 6, 2018, a health inspector named Karen Herzog visited a massage parlor in South Florida for a routine inspection. She noticed that the spa worker, a young Asian woman, was “dressed provocatively,” spoke “little English,” and appeared “nervous.” Herzog also noted suitcases, clothes, a fridge full of food, and condoms, all of which, according to the training she had received, could be signs of human trafficking. She reported her findings to the Martin County sheriff’s office.
Over the next eight months, Detective Mike Fenton launched an investigation into what he believed was a large-scale prostitution ring engaged in human trafficking. Because one of the massage parlors, Orchids of Asia Day Spa, fell on the other side of the county line, in Palm Beach County, Fenton’s office notified Detective Andrew Sharp of the Jupiter police, who began his own investigation in October 2018.
Orchids is located off U.S. 1, in a strip mall anchored by a Publix supermarket. Jupiter is a three-bar town that is home to what one local calls “old and quiet money.” Like most spas in the area, Orchids charged $59 for a half hour massage and $79 for a full hour. Like many spas in the United States, it’s staffed by women of Asian descent.
For seven days in early November 2018, Sharp and his team staked out the spa. Almost everyone they saw enter was a man. One day, a group of eight men who arrived in a golf cart made touchdown gestures before entering, their arms flung up to indicate that they were about to score. “At that point I understood this was not just a regular massage parlor but one that was an illicit massage business,” Sharp later testified.
Sharp asked Herzog if she could survey the parlor, and on November 14, she complied.
Herzog later testified that the spa workers appeared agitated by her visit and failed to make eye contact. “As the inspection progressed, I began to feel more and more uneasy,” she recalled. Herzog noted an “excessive amount of food in the refrigerator.” She also noted bedding, clothing, and a flatiron. Herzog’s report gave Sharp sufficient cause to search the spa’s trash, and on November 14 and 19, his team found semen among the refuse. Last January, he requested what is colloquially known as a sneak-and-peek search warrant.
The warrant is a holdover from 9/11. Issued under the Patriot Act, it was initially designed to temporarily expand surveillance and investigative powers of law enforcement agencies in domestic terrorism cases. Since then, however, both the act and the warrant have been routinely used in cases that stray far from their original intent.
Sharp received the warrant on January 15, and two days later his team returned to Orchids, where they evacuated the premises, telling workers that a bomb threat had been called in. While the women waited outside, officers placed hidden cameras in the ceilings of the massage rooms.
Over the next five days, Sharp and his team watched, via a live feed, as more than 20 men received manual sex, oral sex, and anal play. When the johns left the spa, an officer would follow them and initiate a traffic stop as a pretext for identifying the men.
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Among the patrons who turned up on the surveillance video at Orchids was Robert Kraft, the 78-year-old owner of the New England Patriots. Kraft, who visited the spa on the afternoon of January 19, spends part of the year in a double oceanfront apartment he owns on Breakers Row, among the most coveted addresses in Palm Beach. Earlier that day, according to a man I spoke with who asked to be identified only as Kraft’s “best guy friend,” Kraft had gone to the hotel spa for a massage. When he was unable to get an appointment, he conferred with his old friend Peter Bernon, the dairy and plastics tycoon who also lives in Palm Beach. Bernon offered to drive Kraft in his 2014 white Bentley to a place he knew in Jupiter, 20 miles up the Treasure Coast.
At Orchids, according to the Jupiter police, Kraft paid cash to the spa’s co-owner, Lei [censored], who goes by Lulu, and received a hand job from her and another worker, later identified as Shen Mingbi. After Kraft ejaculated, Mingbi wiped his penis with a white towel. Then she and Lulu helped him get dressed.
As Kraft left the spa in the white Bentley, Officer Scott Kimbark, nicknamed Bark, stopped the car for a minor traffic violation. Kraft asked the officer if he was a Miami Dolphins fan and showed him his Super Bowl ring, explaining that he was the owner of the Patriots. Kimbark, having accomplished his mission, let Kraft and Bernon go with a warning.
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Later that day, Kraft called his friend. “You won’t believe what happened to me,” his friend recalls him bragging. Kraft explained how he had gone for what he thought was a regular massage, but that the masseuse had given him a hand job instead.
The friend excoriated Kraft for getting a “rub and tug.” Kraft, seemingly hurt, insisted that it “wasn’t like that.” He said he had felt a real connection with Lulu and Mingbi.
Later that evening, Kraft received a call from Orchids, asking him to visit again. (At the time, Kraft’s number in Palm Beach was publicly listed.) Kraft, according to his friend, was thrilled. He did not seem to understand that the spa was merely soliciting repeat business.
The next day, Kraft returned to Orchids, this time with a driver in a 2015 blue Bentley. He arrived before 11 a.m., qualifying for the early bird special: $15 off. He received a hand job and a blow job from Lulu, and left after 14 minutes. That afternoon he flew to Kansas City, to watch his team play the Chiefs in the NFL playoffs. The Patriots won.
II. THE SEX RING
On February 19, after staging dramatic raids on nearly a dozen massage parlors in South Florida, Sheriff William Snyder held a press conference. Local officers, he announced, working alongside Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security, had busted a $20 million sex trafficking ring with tentacular reach to New York and China. Many of the women, he said, had been tricked into coming to the United States and had been working to pay off debts to traffickers before being rescued. “I don’t believe they were told they were going to work in massage parlors seven days a week, having unprotected sex with up to 1,000 men a year,” Snyder said.
Sex trafficking, under law, involves recruiting and transporting women by force or fraud, and coercing them to work as prostitutes. The traffickers, Snyder continued, had covered their tracks by moving the women every 10 to 20 days to different spas, where they were forced to sleep on massage tables and cook on hot plates. Some were unable to leave, the sheriff said, because the traffickers confiscated their money and passports.
Snyder announced that as many as 300 men who went to the spas for sex would be charged with soliciting prostitution. “Many of the men are married,” the sheriff said, adopting the moralizing tone common to faith-based groups that consider the sex industry an affront to Christian values. “Many of those men are in ongoing relationships.”
Three days later, on February 22, Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg announced that Kraft would be charged with two misdemeanor counts of soliciting prostitution. “Human trafficking is evil in our midst,” Aronberg told reporters. “Modern-day slavery” can “happen anywhere, including in the peaceful community of Jupiter, Florida.”
Owner and worker from Orchids of Asia Day Spa where Robert Kraft visited
STRIP-MALL SERVICE
After Florida police raided Orchids of Asia Day Spa (above), co-owner Hua Zhang (right) was charged with procuring prostitution. Zhang started as an esthetician in China (below). FROM TOP, BY BARRY CHIN/THE BOSTON GLOBE/GETTY IMAGES, FROM PBSO/MEGA, COURTESY OF ZHANG HUA.
III. THE ISLAND
When I arrived in Palm Beach last spring, the weather report was threatening rain. The sky hung low and the air was loamy. If you are the 1 percent, you can opt out of most things in this world, including the weather. Many of the island’s residents were packing up prior to hurricane season; covered trailers lined driveways, waiting to transport art back to Aspen or Connecticut or Long Island.
Hearings on the sex charges were ongoing; Kraft, who had pleaded not guilty, was vigorously fighting them in court. The question that the wealthy residents of Palm Beach were asking themselves was, plainly, why? Why would a man worth $6.6 billion risk getting a $59 hand job at a strip mall massage parlor?
Many year-round residents of Palm Beach attempted to distance themselves from the “nasty Krafty” scandal by dismissing the Patriots owner as nothing but a seasonal resident—one of the 20,000 or so who come to the island from Thanksgiving to Easter—and therefore not an actual member in good standing of the Palm Beach community. Others proffered the heat defense, typically reserved for explaining away acts of insanity, such as first-degree murder or third marriages. The reasoning is deterministic: the feeling that Florida itself—especially South Florida—propels men to strange deeds.
Florida has always played an outsize role in the national psyche, a shorthand for a specific aspect of the American dream. Florida is where you go when you don’t want to be found, or when you have something to hide, or to escape bad debt and scandal, as did Charles Ponzi, the original defrauder. Palm Beach is the place where William Kennedy Smith was acquitted, in 1991, of raping a woman he met at a bar alongside his uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy. Where financier Jeffrey Epstein was given a “sweetheart deal,” in 2008, for soliciting minors for prostitution. Where Bernie Madoff preyed on wealthy investors before pleading guilty, in 2009, to bilking his clients of nearly $65 billion.
South Florida as we know it began in 1886, when Standard Oil cofounder Henry Flagler started building railroads over recently drained swampland. It was Flagler who built the Breakers resort, to accommodate passengers on his railways, at a time when land was going for $1.25 per acre. (Now land goes by the square foot.) Flagler was also known for convincing the state legislature to allow him to divorce his second wife, whom he had committed to an insane asylum, so he could remarry.
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The island of Palm Beach, 16 miles long and less than a mile wide, remains among the most economically and socially segregated towns in America. Apart from the occasional titled European, many Palm Beach residents have been heirs to various fortunes: the Singer sewing machine, the Watson computer, Jell-O, Listerine. Ninety-seven percent of residents are white, and the median age is 67. Houses come with living rooms that can hold parties of 175, and two pools—one to catch the sun in the morning, the other to catch it in the late afternoon. Rembrandts hang in guest bathrooms.
Breakers Row—home to mostly Jewish residents, including Robert Kraft—is referred to by the island’s WASPs as the Gaza Strip. The clubs are so exclusive, local legend has it, that Burt Reynolds was once turned away at the door on account of his dark skin color. Even Joseph Kennedy Sr. was reportedly spurned on account of his Catholic faith. Besides, his money was deemed too new. “It’s new if it was made in the past century,” explained Debi Murray, chief curator of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County.
Some residents, when I asked them about Kraft, appeared puzzled that a man of such immense wealth would feel the need to leave his valeted residence for a massage, let alone sexual services. What horrified these residents most was that Kraft had gone “over the bridge.” Over the bridge is West Palm Beach, a service town on the mainland, where the support staffs live: maids, gardeners, doctors, judges—anyone who has to work for a living. It is where you go when you can’t send someone else, when you have to show up in person at the hospital, or the courthouse, or the charity photo opportunity. The Publix supermarket on Palm Beach island sells Marcona almonds; the Publix in West Palm Beach only stocks the standard California variety.
Men like Kraft, after all, can have the help come to them. J’Anine, who used to work on the island as a high-end escort, told me about the many famous johns she had worked for, a list that includes best-selling authors and rock stars and titans of industry. As a professional, J’Anine charged $1,000 an hour—about 13 times more than Orchids. But the high price did not always ensure discretion. There had been one incident, J’Anine shared, when she took too much cocaine on the job and ended up locking herself and her crack pipe in the bathroom. The client’s daughter, desperate to get rid of her, had called the police for help. Two officers managed to restrain J’Anine, but not before using a Taser and a choke hold.
Jeff Greene, a Palm Beach resident who ranks 232nd on the Forbes list of richest Americans, told me that he could not understand why any man would want to pay for sex, but that he did understand why Kraft had chosen to go across the bridge. Everyone in Palm Beach attends the same parties, Greene explained, and wakes up the next morning to read about the selfsame parties in the town newspaper, printed on glossy paper so as not to smudge the gloved hands of its readers. “Palm Beach is a small town,” Greene said. “I imagine if you want to do something you shouldn’t be doing, you go out of town.”
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Luxury items—champagne, caviar, truffles—have no inherent value. They are made desirable through scarcity. But for the tiny stratum of society for whom nothing is unattainable, the commonplace, paradoxically, can attain a luster of its own. If calling up an escort like J’Anine is akin to ordering Wagyu beef from room service, then visiting Orchids is like swinging by the McDonald’s drive-through.
Sometimes you just want a burger.
IV. THE MEN
Whenever I encountered men of Palm Beach in their natural habitat, in hotel lobbies, inlet tiki bars, and private clubs, they were exceedingly eager to share stories of their visits to spas like Orchids.
In midtown Manhattan, at a smoke-filled club frequented by seasonal residents like Rudy Giuliani, I fell into conversation about Kraft with a man at its mahogany bar. I explained that after many months of working on this story for VANITY FAIR, I still could not figure out why Kraft had acted with such abandon. The man, who identified himself as the son of a famous politician, explained that men go to massage parlors for many reasons. In fact, he told me, he was heading to one himself in a few days. If I liked, I would be welcome to accompany him as his guest. (The trip did not take place.)
At a bar in Jupiter, a Patriots fan named Billy told me that he is a regular at Orchids, and had visited the spa only two weeks before the raid. His father and uncle had served in World War II, he explained, at a time when the U.S. military tacitly endorsed prostitution as good for morale. Over the years, many soldiers returned from Japan and Korea and Vietnam with a highly sexualized view of the women they met.
“Marry an Asian woman,” Billy recalled being told. “You’ll be happy for the rest of your life. Asian women know how to take care of a man. You come home and she cooks dinner, takes your shoes off, never complains.”
Billy was 42 when he was first taken to a “jack shack” on his way to a Patriots game in New England. After moving to South Florida, friends he made at a local bar told him about Orchids.
“A lot of my friends think Asian women are very attractive,” Billy said. “That’s what I think myself. The girls are beautiful. They are thin, in shape. That’s why American guys like that.”
Indeed, on one of my first nights on the island, I was sitting at a hotel bar, working up the courage to crash a reception for alumni of the Harvard Business School, Kraft’s alma mater, that had already begun out on the deck. An older gentleman approached me and asked where the function was. I pointed to the deck. He told me he couldn’t hear what I was saying. I suggested he try the deck. He became upset and walked away.
Later, the man approached me again, this time to apologize for having behaved rudely. By way of explanation, he told me that he had thought I was a member of the hotel’s service staff. I introduced myself as a reporter in town on a story, and we began chatting about Kraft and Jupiter. Suddenly, he leaned toward me—this older man who only moments earlier had treated me with disdain—and began making sexually explicit comments. “I had all these fantasies about you,” he confessed.
On the island, there were only two preordained roles for a young woman of Asian descent. Being a reporter was not one of them.
V. THE MADAM
Lulu, the co-owner of Orchids who allegedly attended to Kraft, lives a world away from her clients. From Palm Beach, you drive through West Palm Beach, past the South Dixie Highway, past laundromats advertising weekday deals and pawn shops after your gold. If you hang a right and drive north until the turnpike narrows, past billboards advertising plastic surgery and personal injury lawyers, past state prisoners performing hot, humid labor, you enter Martin and Port St. Lucie and Indian River counties, where the rest of Florida lives.
There, upstream from the source, the story of Kraft and the massage parlor raids has grown muddied. Flora Vera and Sean Williams, who live next door to Lulu, told me they had heard the sex workers had been kept naked so they wouldn’t run away. Another neighbor chimed in, telling me it was all part of a complex global conspiracy involving President Trump, full of byzantine connections that I found impossible to follow.
Flora laughed. “Next thing you know, we are saying I saw a UFO,” she said.
“Well, I did see a UFO,” her husband said.
He told me that it had appeared above a Kmart parking lot at dusk, “hovering above the pines,” on his way to church. He had been 12 years old. Later, Flora told me that she has precognitive dreams.
Lulu, who had been arrested at home and released after posting a cash bail of $75,000, declined my request for an interview. She has pleaded not guilty to all charges, including soliciting others to commit prostitution. But her business partner, Hua Zhang, who owns the other half of Orchids, agreed to speak to me.
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Zhang was born into a “not rich but respected” family in Guangzhou, China, in 1960. After marrying and giving birth to a son, Zhang applied for a U.S. visa in 2001. Five years later, the visa came through. Zhang hesitated. She was making a good living in China as an esthetician. She knew every bend of every road in Guangzhou. The new country would be full of unfamiliar roads, and strangers who wouldn’t know how to pronounce her name.
But Zhang was a mother before she was anything else, and she decided to emigrate for her son. After the family moved to Los Angeles, Zhang learned there weren’t many opportunities for a middle-aged woman with no professional expertise. A friend Zhang made from her English as a second language class suggested she go to work at a massage school run by Jet Li’s personal masseuse.
ONE NEIGHBOR SAID THE RAIDS WERE PART OF A COMPLEX GLOBAL CONSPIRACY INVOLVING TRUMP, THE DETAILS OF WHICH WERE IMPOSSIBLE TO FOLLOW.
At the school, Zhang made another friend who later moved to Florida to work at a massage parlor there. The friend soon began calling Zhang, pleading with her to join her. Zhang was reluctant, but by that time her son was grown, and she and her husband were filing for divorce. Florida is the land of second acts, and in 2010, Zhang moved to Jupiter to begin her life anew as Mandy.
Mandy packed light; she knew everything would be provided. Businesses owned by Chinese Americans—laundromats, restaurants, massage parlors—frequently provide room, board, and transportation for newly arrived workers, who often lack the means and connections to buy or rent a place on their own.
After a few years of hard work, Mandy raised enough money to buy Orchids in 2013. She hired workers from Chinese immigrant communities across the country, placing ads in Chinese-language newspapers. Mandy also provided day care for children while their mothers were at work. By then, her son had moved to Florida, and word got out that a Chinese woman and her English-speaking son would take in your kids for a reasonable fee. Soon, Mandy was looking after as many as 11 children.
In 2017, Mandy signed over half of the spa to Lulu, one of her steadiest workers. She began devoting most of her time to her grandson, Michael—named after local resident Michael Jordan, who owns a 28,000-square-foot mansion on three acres in Jupiter.
On the morning of February 19, Mandy was making coffee at a condominium near the spa that she had rented to house her workers. Suddenly, there was banging at the door. Six police officers swarmed in, handcuffed Mandy, and booked her into the Palm Beach jail.
“At the time I thought: They must have made a mistake,” she says. “It’s so funny—they treat me as a treacherous criminal. I can’t believe what kind of system it is. Why do you make such a big move against a family woman?”
As the co-owner of Orchids, Mandy was charged with a second-degree misdemeanor for “maintaining a house of prostitution.” She was also charged with 26 counts of soliciting others to commit prostitution, as well as a second-degree felony for deriving support from prostitution, a crime punishable by up to 15 years in prison. She has pleaded not guilty to the charges. A police affidavit lists the “victim” of her crime as the state of Florida. “Because it’s our society as a whole that has been victimized by this prurient behavior,” explains Robert Norvell, a West Palm Beach attorney who represents one of the defendants in the case. “I [censored] you not.”
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After a few weeks, Mandy was released on bail. Unable to return to the condo, where two of her employees were being detained, she was placed under house arrest in a home that a cousin of hers had put on the market. The house, on a quiet street in a gated subdivision, had not been lived in for some time, and was infested with vermin. Mandy spent six weeks scrubbing its floors. Her ankle monitor prevented her from taking out the trash or picking the ripe mangoes in the backyard, so she stared at the falling fruit from the window.
VI. THE MOGUL
The men who were arrested for availing themselves of Mandy’s services faced no such restrictions. After his arrest, Kraft was free to live his best life. He reportedly donated $100,000 at a charity dinner at the Breakers in Palm Beach, attended the annual pre-Oscar brunch at the Beverly Hills home of Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, and watched Rafael Nadal defeat Dominic Thiem in Paris to win the French Open.
Kraft was born in 1941, in the affluent Boston suburb of Brookline. In 1963, he married Myra Hiatt, an heiress to a paper box fortune whom he met at a Boston deli. They had four children. In 1994, he purchased the New England Patriots, growing the team into one of the most valuable franchises in the National Football League.
In 2010, Myra, referred to by some as the “smartest Kraft,” fell ill with ovarian cancer. During the NFL lockout in 2011, Kraft spent his days negotiating with union representatives, then came home each evening to rub Myra’s feet. She died later that year, and Kraft’s life became a boat you forgot to tie up.
The following year, at a party in Los Angeles at the home of New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch, Kraft met Ricki Noel Lander, an aspiring actress 38 years his junior. The two began seeing each other: on, then off, then on again.
Kraft reveled in his newfound status as a single rich guy. Owning a winning football team in America gave him access to a world that money alone can’t buy. He was seen at the Met Gala and the Grammys and the VANITY FAIR Oscar party, and sometimes appeared at events alongside young women who remained uncredited in photos.
Kraft hadn’t gone to Orchids on that January day because the Florida heat had driven him mad, or because he was in search of anonymity, or because he had served his country in the Far East. Born the year of Pearl Harbor, he was 13 when the Vietnam War began. He went to Orchids, in his relatively new status as a single rich guy, to get a massage. And it was in his part as a single rich guy that he came to believe he had done nothing wrong. According to his best friend, he thought there had been something between him and Lulu. He thought she liked him. He thought that what had transpired between them had no business being discussed in a courtroom.
“If you are affluent, rules loosely apply to you,” says Norvell, the lawyer representing one of the defendants. “You wear it like a loose garment.”
As the owner of a six-time Super Bowl championship team, Kraft understood that sometimes the best defense is a good offense. To represent him in court, he hired William Burck, who withheld sensitive documents from Congress during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing; Alex Spiro, who defended former Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez after he was charged with murder; and Jack Goldberger, the Palm Beach attorney who helped broker a plea deal for Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein himself, in his twisted worldview, saw Kraft as a kindred spirit. A few months after Kraft was charged, a Fox Business reporter asked Palm Beach’s most notorious sex offender if he knew that the girls he had lured to his mansion for massages and sex were underage. Epstein insisted that his own crimes weren’t “that much different than what happened to Bob Kraft. Only he went somewhere, and they came to me.”
Kraft’s legal team bombarded the court with motions, pushing to bar the public release of the surveillance video from Orchids as an invasion of their client’s privacy. “It’s basically pornography,” Burck told the court.
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On March 28, the state attorney’s office in Palm Beach offered Kraft a plea bargain. If he admitted his guilt, the charges would be dropped and his record expunged. Prosecutors extended the same offer to the other defendants in Palm Beach, a county that, despite being the home of Mar-a-Lago, votes blue. Next door, in the Trump-supporting Martin County, no plea deals were forthcoming.
Kraft rejected the plea deal.
America’s criminal justice system relies on defendants taking plea deals: More than 90 percent do so. The system was not built to indict rich men, and so it was not prepared for a rich man to reject an offer of leniency. The case would have gone away quickly had Kraft not decided to devote his tremendous resources to destroying the state’s case.
Palm beach resort and Kraft meeting with Trump
COUNTRY-CLUB LIFE
The Breakers (above), the Palm Beach resort where Kraft has an apartment. In 2017, Kraft joined President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Mar-a-Lago (below). TOP, THE PALM BEACH POST/ZUMAPRESS.COM; BOTTOM, BY AL DRAGO/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX.
VII. THE RESCUE INDUSTRY
Florida, perhaps more than any other state, has been a leader of the Christian right’s campaign to “rescue” those they consider victims of a globally syndicated criminal human trafficking ring. The first comprehensive human trafficking act passed in 2000, but it wasn’t until three years later, when President George W. Bush pledged $50 million to support anti-trafficking organizations, that the campaign became a full-fledged industry.
Human trafficking is a serious problem: The Department of Health and Human Services calls it the world’s “fastest-growing criminal industry.” But some anti-trafficking groups, in search of funding, routinely overstate the scale of the commercial sex trade. They frequently claim that 300,000 minors are “at risk” for being sold into sexual slavery in America each year—a number that has been debunked by researchers as wildly overinflated. (The Washington Post dismisses it as a “nonsense statistic.”) In 2018, the FBI confirmed a total of 649 trafficking cases in America, adults included.
Even more alarming, the exaggerated numbers about sex trafficking have come to inform public policy. On May 3, driven in part by spurious statistics, the Florida legislature passed a sweeping new law to combat prostitution. The measure creates a statewide “anti-prostitution registry” that is intended to list men like Robert Kraft, should he be convicted, as a john. But critics worry that the registry, which is vaguely defined, will also wind up including sex workers like Lulu and Shen Mingbi. In doing so, the anti-prostitution law could effectively end up functioning as an anti-immigration law, targeting poor women of color, many of them from Asia.
Florida’s new sex registry is the latest in a long line of similar laws. One of America’s first laws against prostitution, in fact, was the 1870 Act to Prevent the Kidnapping and Importing of Mongolian, Chinese, and Japanese Females for Criminal or Demoralizing Purposes, intended to protect the public from “scandal and injury.” The law was a precursor to the Page Act of 1875, which aimed to “end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women,” which in turn was a precursor to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882—the first law to bar all members of a specific ethnicity or nationality from immigrating.
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The raids on Orchids and other massage parlors in South Florida were conducted in the name of rescuing women from sex trafficking. But the only people put in jail were the women themselves. A few, like Lulu and Mandy, managed to post bail and were placed under house arrest. But others were transferred to the custody of ICE. Women who migrated to America in search of work—who chose the least bad option available to them—were being punished for what one of their lawyers calls “the crime of poverty.”
The New York Times and other news outlets, quoting investigators, initially presented the raids as a clear-cut case of sex trafficking. Women at the spas, the media reported, were working “14 hour days” and “sleeping on massage tables.” After “surrendering” their passports to spa owners, they were not allowed to leave the premises without an escort. The “wretched” women in “strip-mall brothels” were not sex workers, but rather “trafficking victims trapped among South Florida’s rich and famous.”
But as police subjected the women to hours-long interrogations, those claims began to unravel. The only woman alleged to have been locked up and forced to live on the premises was Yong [censored], who went by the spa name Nancy. In fact, like many other employees, Nancy had been hired from out of state, so her boss drove her back and forth from the job. When the owner fell ill, Nancy was asked if she wouldn’t mind sleeping at the spa.
The one woman whose passport had allegedly been taken away was Lixia Zhu, or Yoyo. During questioning, the police repeatedly grilled Yoyo, looking for evidence of human trafficking. Did anyone else set up her bank account for her? Did anyone else have access to her account? “Did you feel like you had a choice to come down and work, or did you feel like you were forced to?”
“No one forced me,” Yoyo insisted. It was the terrible winter of 2018 back in Pennsylvania, where she was living at the time, that inspired her to move to Florida.
The interrogator pressed harder. “Did you feel like you had to do this?”
Yoyo shook her head.
“Then why did you do it?”
The inquiry continued along these lines for several more hours. It was somehow easier for law enforcement officers in South Florida to believe that the women had been sold into sex slavery by a global crime syndicate than to acknowledge that immigrant women of precarious status, hemmed in by circumstance, might choose sex work.
In the end, Yoyo told police that her boyfriend had confiscated her passport, locked it in a safe, and threatened her with a gun. He was the one, she intimated, who had forced her into sexual slavery.
Later, during a hearing conducted after she had managed to retain a lawyer, Yoyo recanted the story about her boyfriend. She told the court that she had said what she felt the police wanted to hear, in the hopes of getting a lighter sentence.
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Within weeks of the raids, the state’s case had evaporated. There was no $20 million trafficking ring, no women tricked into sex slavery. The things the state had mistaken as markers for human trafficking—long working hours, shared eating and living arrangements, suspicion of outside authorities, ties to New York and China—were, in fact, common organizing principles of many Chinese immigrant communities. As an assistant state attorney in Palm Beach told the court on April 12: “There is no human trafficking that arises out of this investigation.”
VIII. THE MIX-UP
Democrats have tried, so far without success, to tie the Orchids scandal to Donald Trump. Kraft, after all, was a close friend of the president. He had attended Trump’s wedding to Melania in 2005, and gave $1 million to his inaugural fund. (Trump once reportedly tried to set up Ivanka with Tom Brady, hoping to make the Patriots quarterback his son-in-law.) Li “Cindy” Yang, the former owner of the Orchids spa, also donated to Trump’s campaign, and ran a consulting firm that promised Chinese business executives access to Trump and Mar-a-Lago.
On March 15, congressional Democrats on the intelligence and judiciary committees asked the FBI, the director of national intelligence, and the Secret Service to open an investigation into Yang and her alleged ties to Trump. I emailed Nancy Pelosi’s office to ask why she wanted Yang to be investigated by a top intelligence agency. The speaker’s press officer, Ashley Etienne, pointed me to news reports about Yang “bypassing security” at Mar-a-Lago. “This was before it broke that she’s a likely spy,” Etienne added.
Etienne appeared to have misidentified Yang. I asked her if she was referring to a separate probe involving a Chinese woman named Yujing Zhang, who had allegedly breached Mar-a-Lago security. “I am not sure what you mean,” Etienne wrote back, referring me to the FBI for “more details.”
I also emailed Senator Dianne Feinstein, who had signed the letter requesting an investigation. Her press person also responded by citing the case against Zhang.
“This is political prosecution with no evidence,” Cliff Yi, executive director of the National Committee of Asian American Republicans, told me. “It reminds us of our experience in China. It reminds us of how we were scared, how we were oppressed.”
On September 11, Zhang was convicted of trespassing and lying to federal agents. The FBI has also opened a public corruption investigation into Yang, focusing on whether she illegally funneled money from China into Trump’s reelection campaign. Federal prosecutors sent subpoenas to Mar-a-Lago, demanding that it turn over all records relating to Yang.
IX. THE DOUBLE STANDARD
Kraft, aided by the best defense team money can buy, seems likely to beat the charges against him. Last May, a judge threw out the video evidence that had been gathered at Orchids, ruling that the warrant had been “seriously flawed.” The judge also threw out evidence from Kraft’s traffic stop, calling it “the fruit of an unlawful search.” The state is appealing the ruling.
Even if he is found guilty, however, Kraft has little to fear in the way of punishment. In Florida, as in most other states, the purchasing of sex is a misdemeanor. The few first-time johns who wind up being convicted typically pay a fine and perform no more than 100 hours of community service. The selling of sex, however, is policed far more severely. Sex workers are more likely than johns to face repeated arrest, increasing the odds that they will be charged with a felony and sentenced to prison, and have fewer resources to defend themselves in court. And “madams” who profit from the prostitution of others—the charge leveled against Mandy and Lulu—can be convicted of money laundering if the proceeds are deposited in a bank, or used to pay rent, or buy milk.
While Kraft’s legal team fights to have the charges against him dismissed, one of the alleged sex workers arrested in the raids, Lei Chen, remains in ICE custody. Under civil forfeiture proceedings, the state seized her J.P. Morgan Chase account, which held $2,900. Until August 21, when she was transferred to another immigration facility, Chen was held at the detention center in West Palm Beach, a half mile from a strip club where Stormy Daniels performed, and across from the Trump International Golf Club.
Another alleged sex worker, Yaping Ren, was also held for five months, waiting to be handed over to ICE, before being released in July. Her status remains uncertain: Her attorney told me that he has been unable to determine whether she is going to be deported. The county has only two court-certified Mandarin interpreters, who charge $400 an hour—a prohibitively high fee for his clients.
Under Florida law, it would appear, happy endings are the exclusive property of men.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10/the-disturbing-saga-of-robert-kraft
