New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft charged with soliciting prostitution

[No_Church_InThe_Wild]

Yea big fish in there nets alright.
It seams sureal . One moment he’s on top of the world.
And the next he’s become another “Florida Man” story

 

[ShyMan]

Come on folks. These sting operations to bust Johns and sex workers are extremely dangerous police operations. Johns' exploding when they come is highly dangerous requiring the LE's to don Hazardous Materials outfits and gears. It's not unlike a nuclear explosion site -- they must have sanitation stations to wash off men semen and female vaginal fluids from the uniforms of the LE's. Swat and explosion teams participated -- Floridians (and New Yorkers) should feel a million times safer because this sting operation substantially improved public safety. (Now what will those super wealthy geezers do to relieve themselves when they are playing golf in Florida.)

Let's forget about the bustling narcotic trade throughout Florida and New York and focus instead on these sting operations because we must protect the American public from the morally corrupting effects of prostitutions.

At least the LE's may recover enough (at least some) monies and assets (through forfeitures) to offset (partly or entirely) the huge costs of this operation. At least, the LE will charge a few low-level culprits that operated the rings.

 

[No_Church_InThe_Wild]

As to why mr Kraft made the decision to go to that shady parlor. Maybe it was because of the anonymity .
Maybe he forgot that it wasn’t Boston, where he surely must of felt untouchable as one of the hometown heroes.
We may never know exactly why , but one of the most successful NFL owners of all time instrumental in laying the foundation for the greatest dynasty of our times had he’s legacy destroyed because of this.
Whatever the reason he’s name is gonna get dragged through the mud and it’s game over for him in the NFL for sure.

Some folks think that he should have been arrested solely for stupidity alone . I mean I was shocked and amazed that a man with he’s resources whould ever consider being a patron at such a shady establishment.
I truly sympathize with him for what’s to come but I’d be really curious to know why? and whould have loved to ask him what was he’s reasoning for such a horrible lack of judgment . Maybe it’s age related and he just wasn’t thinking.

 

[hungry101]

The best time to hunt deer is when the bucks are in the rut. Boone and Crockett sized big bucks make stupid mistakes and try to fuck anything they can. This is when you want to be on the hunt.

 

[No_Church_InThe_Wild]

Hey Sam21 ,, yes of course we all make mistakes. I have made mine in the past and I reckon surely a few more to come in the future when the little guy takes over .
But I never needed to be as careful or had as much to lose as Mr Kraft.

 

[No_Church_InThe_Wild]

The best time to hunt deer is when the bucks are in the rut. Boone and Crockett sized big bucks make stupid mistakes to and try to fuck anything they can. This is when you want to be on the hunt.

Well put hungry101

 

[ShyMan]

This is when you want to be on the hunt.

Easier said than done

The male specie is not programed to be reasonable when the little guy hijacks the brain. (Hence, we find tough, heterosexual men in prisons turning weaker prisoners into their boy-toys.)

Patron, very thought provoking about the Asian SP's. I'd say fair wages for decent work. Sad to say but as one Merbit told me recently -- there are 1 Chinese person to every 5 person on Earth; there's also 1 East Indian person to every 5 person on Earth. The sheer number of women in China would continue to suppress the prices Asian SP's can charge, given the finite numbers of Johns who want to see Asian providers again and again (outside of Asia), IMHO.

 

[hungry101]

Easier said than done

The male specie is not programed to be reasonable when the little guy hijacks the brain. (Hence, we find tough, heterosexual men in prisons turning weaker prisoners into their boy-toys.)
.

No, I wasn't clear. I was using this analogy as a deer hunter which have been in the past. The big buck in the rut is the hobbyist. LE is the Deer Hunter.

 

[ShyMan]

No, I wasn't clear.

You were clear. :high5:It was a failed attempt at sarcasm on my part.

 

[CaptRenault]

Ever since I read that the cops had video evidence of the sex acts committed in one of the massage parlors, I have wondered how the hell they managed to get the video. Here's the answer:

Affidavit tells how video placed Robert Kraft in sex spa

The sex sting that authorities say snared Robert Kraft on surveillance video had its origin last summer on a tip to check out the Orchids of Asia day spa in Jupiter, Florida, for possible illicit sexual activity, a police probable cause affidavit reports. The Jupiter police investigation lasted six months, culminating in the raid on the spa Tuesday and the release Friday of the identities of Kraft, billionaire owner of the NFL New England Patriots, and 24 other male customers caught on tape. All were charged with soliciting sex acts for money during massage sessions that investigators said in the affidavit involved manual or oral stimulation. They said they did not observe sexual intercourse in any of the recorded video.

The affidavit said Jupiter police, using the ruse of a bomb scare report, evacuated Orchids of Asia shortly before midnight on Jan. 17, then planted hidden cameras inside the spa. Five days of video evidence was collected. Names of the customers were connected with the video through spa records seized in the raid...



While a judge (who must have no respect for the Constitution) gave the cops permission to install the camera, doing that is neverthess a despicable tactic , something that only the worst totalitarian governments in the world would admire. It's another example of what happens when the mass hysteria about sex gets a whole country in its grip.

The cops, the judge and the prosecutor (an ambitious Democrat politician named David Aronberg) justify their actions by endlessly repeating bold faced lies about "sex trafficking" to a gullible press and public. And the press and public believe them.

Sex trafficking, the campus rape epidemic, the FOSTA/SESTA law, the prosecution of Backpage and the #Metoo movement are all nothing but brilliant propaganda campaigns that totalitarian governments would admire along with the practice of videotaping guys getting handjobs. The stupid cops and and the power hungry Aronberg have probably been jerking off while they watch the videos from the Jupiter parlor. I despise the people who did this to Kraft and the other men that have been arrested.

 

[hungry101]

Could you pass on to him that I think I have mesothelioma. Thanks.

Sambuca, I don't think he will have time for you or Kraft. It turns out he has something really big: Remember the Subway Foot-long law suit for subs that were only 11.5"? Well it seems that nobody thought about the 6" subs. They were only 5.75" long. He's gonna be busy for a long time on this one.

But seriously, this was a very good article and there are some better comments at the bottom of the article.

 

[sambuca]

Interestingly, some of us share the same sense of humor. The liberals here take themselves so seriously.

 

[jalimon]

Interestingly, some of us share the same sense of humor. The liberals here take themselves so seriously.

What? No one is as less serious as me here!

Cheers,

 

[sambuca]

Okay Jalimon,
You, hungry101 and I can all sit together at the same table in the lunchroom.

 

[CaptRenault]

Elizabeth Nolan Brown of Reason.com continues her excellent reporting of the truth about the massage parlor busts in Florida. As she points out, despite all the propaganda dutifully reported by most news sources, the case is a routine bust of girls giving hand jobs. It is not about sex trafficking.

Homeland Security and Florida Cops Spied on Chinese Massage Workers for Months but Still Couldn't Find Evidence of Human Trafficking

Nine women face felony prostitution charges and hundreds of their customers have been arrested. Florida says it's the real victim.
reason.com
Elizabeth Nolan Brown|Feb. 28, 2019

By now, the idea that Florida police busted up an international sex slavery ring operating through Chinese massage parlors has firmly taken hold in the national narrative, even though most of the charges, including those levied at Patriots owner Robert Kraft, were misdemeanors for soliciting prostitution. A closer look at the arrests in this operation reveals just how shoddy the reporting on the case has been—and just how little the police statements on TV resemble what they've put in their actual reports.

No one in this case was arrested on suspicion of sex trafficking, forced labor, compelling prostitution, or any other charge that implies force, fraud, or coercion in the arrangement.

Of the workers we know of from police documents (including those who were arrested and those who weren't), all have official massage therapy licenses in good standing. The Asian-owned massage and spa businesses raided across four counties were also licensed and in good standing with the state of Florida.

Police from Vero Beach said in a press release that one woman had been arrested for human trafficking, and Florida news outlets are still running with that story. But a simple check of county court records shows that this is not the case. Like her colleagues, the woman is charged with engaging in prostitution herself, "deriving support" from prostitution, and "racketeering," which sounds serious but just means working with others to accomplish something illegal.

Mutually Trafficking Each Other?

All of the women who were arrested in these stings are being charged with prostitution themselves. They're also facing felony charges for participating in and earning money from each other's sex work. In this way, police have found a sort of loophole that allows them to bring felony charges against sex workers simply for working together.

Some of the women arrested were managers or owners at one of the 10 spas targeted, but others simply worked there themselves, giving massages and sometimes something extra, and occasionally accompanied their managers on errands like going to the store or bank. (Police suggest these instances of them traveling together could mean workers were victims who couldn't be let out of eyesight, and yet they also charge the workers with felony crimes for going along on these tasks.)

Not counting clients like Kraft, nine women and one man are currently facing charges in conjunction with these stings, which come from two separate but similar operations carried out simultaneously on Florida's southeast coast. One involved the participation of Homeland Security Investigations, the Vero Beach Police Department, and the Indian River Beach County Sherriff's Office, while the other included authorities from nearby Martin and Palm Beach counties.

The Palm Beach County and Martin County Stings

​

The Palm Beach/Martin operation has been getting the most attention, since it's the one that snagged Kraft. Some have extrapolated from his arrest to assume that all the customers at these massage parlors were rich, white men, and to insinuate that this is isolating them from more severe charges. But by all evidence, soliciting prostitution was the extent of their criminal conduct. And according to the arrest records, at least half of those arrested were men of color. Their listed occupations include an array of manual labor jobs, including "dog grooming," "mover," "roofer," and "painter."

All of the businesses targeted in Palm Beach and Martin counties were legally registered and licensed in the state of Florida; one had opened in 2012, the others in 2016–2018. Orchids of Asia and Sequoia Apple Day Spa both list Hua Zhang as their owner; the other three (Florida Therapy Spa, Cove Day Spa, and Bridge Spa) were owned or run by Ruimei Li.

After at least six months of surveillance and undercover operations at these businesses, police wound up arresting Zhang, Li, and two other women on prostitution and prostitution-related charges. All of the women arrested were Chinese nationals in their late-thirties through fifties, and all of them came to the U.S. legally.

The Indian River Beach County and Orange County Stings

The stings in Indian River Beach and Orange counties netted more than 100 solicitation arrests for customers plus the arrest of six people (five women, one man) associated with the massage businesses. The man is accused of serving as a driver for women who worked temporarily at the spas while visiting from out of town; he has been charged with racketeering. The women are charged with prostitution, racketeering, and deriving support from the proceeds of prostitution. One is also charged with "unlawful transport for the purpose of prostitution."

There is no evidence in initial complaints, the arrest affidavits, the arrest warrants, or subsequent court documents that any of those arrested were using force or deception at the massage businesses. On the warrants, the victim is listed as the State of Florida.

The police documents detail the lengths local cops and federal agents went to in order to show that some men were getting jerked off after their massages. In Orange and Indian River Beach, the investigation dates back to at least August 2018 and involved East Sea Spa, AA Massage, A+ Massage, and East Spa.

First, an undercover Homeland Security agent received massages and asked about add-on sexual services. A police report said that the agent kissed and had his penis touched by the worker but left before anything else could happen.

Then they staked out the businesses, went through their trash and tested it for semen, interviewed men who exited, and followed around the women who managed and worked at the spas. (One very detailed section of arrest affidavits describes two of the arrested women buying condoms.)

Then they got warrants to install hidden cameras in massage rooms and captured weeks' worth of video evidence from within.

If abusive antics were an issue at these places, weeks of hidden camera footage should at least have hinted at it. Instead, nothing on the extensive surveillance footage yielded charges for sex trafficking or other abusive behavior. What it did catch was a bunch of regular massages being given and sometimes additional sexual activity—mostly hand jobs.

Cops Can't Do Math (or Truth)

Police have suggested that "victims" at these businesses were sexually serving 1,500 men per year. But according to arrest documents, their cameras caught an average of about one sexual customer per employee every three days.

Those that were arrested stand accused of engaging in between 3 and 16 paid sex acts apiece throughout the 40-day surveillance period.

Police originally relied on two details to spin the trafficking narrative in the press: Some of the women were living at the massage parlors, and they "weren't allowed to leave." But Martin County Sheriff William Snyder later admitted that the part about not being allowed to leave was false.

Included as evidence that they lived there was the presence of "food and condiments" in a kitchen fridge—pretty standard for workplace kitchens, no? In addition, one of the places had two extra rooms, in which police found beds made with sheets and pillows and dressers holding personal belongings. Police later told reporters these women were sleeping on "cots" and in "squalor," but that's not what their official report says. (It's also worth noting that the one woman police say for sure was briefly staying at one of the spas is also facing the most prostitution charges, so in practice police don't really seem to think sleeping there equates to victimhood.)
In any event, the fact that some women may have temporarily lived in the spare bedrooms needn't speak to anything untoward. Police suggest that some of the workers came in for a short time from other U.S. cities; these rooms could have been temporary crash pads while they were there.

Because these are Asian immigrant women, many people are quick to see visiting from other cities as something salacious and horror-filled. But sex workers (including those unquestionably on the high end of the empowerment and independence spectrum) often "tour" when work is slow in their cities, or to exploit the novelty factor to make money in a concentrated time period elsewhere. The fact that Chinese-American masseuses and sex workers may work together and have informal community ties doesn't make them a vicious sex-slaving conspiracy.

Prices at the different spas varied—they were owned and staffed by different people—but they do not suggest overall that these women were operating at the most desperate level. At the Indian River Beach spas, a regular massage cost $50 and a "happy ending" (manual stimulation of the genitals) was $60 on top of that. Oral sex was an additional $100, and full sex $160. At others spas, women offered different arrangements and prices, which suggests they were setting their own terms.

Most of the women arrested are still being held in county jail. Their bonds have been set in the $200,000 to $800,000 range, and any money they earned working at the massage parlors (as far we know, their only source of income) cannot be used to pay this balance. So far, at least three have entered pleas of not guilty and are asking for jury trials.

The more that comes out about this case, the more it looks like police are just using human trafficking fears to justify their months of undercover massages and their big press announcement about arresting Kraft.

The authorities may eventually find illegal dealings beyond consensual commercial sex, but they certainly haven't yet. Apparently, they chose to go on a national media offensive with the sex-trafficking story before even having a shred of evidence to that effect.

But now that Kraft has made headlines and the national media have milked the story, how many people will care if cops quietly drop the bit about the transnational sex cabal? Will anyone even notice what ultimately happens to these women that police stalked, made secret porn films of, and then locked in cages?

 

[hungry101]

Well the people of Florida can sleep well now that this criminal organization was thwarted by the heroes in blue.

What a fucking waste of time and money.

The trafficking reminds me of the Global Warming conspiracy. One climate scientist says that the climate has been warming but that it has warmed about 9/10 of a degree over the past 50-60 years and only about half of that can be attributed to carbon emissions. There are 31 models that exist today and all are government models. All but one (the Russian model) have proven to be exaggerated by about 7x. Why do they do this? To scare the day lights out of the non-scientific community. The 7 climate scientists that came out and told the truth were ostracized by their money-grubbing, power-wielding colleagues. This is no different than the human trafficking scare. The people in government are more crooked than a barrel of snakes.

The author of Freakonomics spoke at a luncheon I was able to attend. NGO's are in the business of scaring the public to make money. The more they can scare by misrepresenting or exaggerating the data the more money they can extort. This is no different. Think of the Dihydrogen Monooxide scare. The stuff can kill you!!!!
https://www.google.com/search?q=Dih...KHTtIDYIQ9QEwAHoECAYQBg#imgrc=Xmt24vFe5G48uM:

THERE IS NOTHING AND I MEAN NOTHING WORSE THAN A DO-GOODER.

 

[sambuca]

There are 31 models that exist today and all are government models. All but one (the Russian model) have proven to be exaggerated by about 7x.

I knew there was a reason I liked Russian models.

 

[hungry101]

The lawyer interviewed had a lot of interesting things to say.

When the police allege that vulnerable women are effectively being held as sex slaves, I would ask why the police didn’t move faster to get these women out of danger?

Instead the police took several months doing surveillance...The investigators seemed more concerned about obtaining highly embarrassing video footage to shame the customers, rather than acting faster to stop an illegal operation keeping vulnerable women in ‘sexual servitude.’

...the video was probably not legally obtained, the police seemed to ignore the necessity requirement for such an intrusive measure like planting a camera in the premises.”

I am hoping that this blows up in the face of these publicity seeking scumbag cops. I know how Florida could save a lot of money from the budget.

 

[Valcazar]

Presumably if the Asian massage industry were to be eliminated, the ladies would not come to the U.S. Would they have better lives back in Asia, likely doing sex work.

I'm not sure why you would think that? The implication in the story is that they didn't come to do sex work in the first place. They came to do other work. In fact, that is a big deal with trafficking. Most trafficking isn't specifically sex work trafficking. It is general "exploitation of labor" trafficking. That's one of the problems with all these reports about huge sex trafficking rings - you can't really separate the one from the other, so it is easy to report all trafficking as sex trafficking to raise the scary numbers. And that's not getting into how blurry the lines often are between various forms of undocumented immigration, smuggling, and trafficking as raw exploitation. (You should read people like Laura Agustin.)

 

[CaptRenault]

...they didn't come to do sex work in the first place. They came to do other work....

That's the biggest myth about the women who work in Asian massage parlors. If you can get gullible reporters and members of the public to believe that myth (not that hard to do), then they will believe all the other lies told about Asian sex workers and "sex trafficking."


http://reason.com/archives/2016/09/09/the-truth-about-us-sex-trafficking

http://reason.com/blog/2019/02/28/homeland-security-spied-on-chinese-women

http://reason.com/blog/2019/02/25/florida-massage-parlor-sex-stings

http://reason.com/blog/2019/02/22/robert-krafts-prostitution-arrest-is-par

http://reason.com/blog/2017/09/25/human-trafficking

http://reason.com/blog/2017/12/31/best-sex-work-writing-of-2017

http://reason.com/blog/2017/02/17/she-gave-a-cop-a-handjob-now-she-faces-d