ithin hours of a police raid of Miami Beach massage parlors in 2017, Chief Daniel Oates stood before TV cameras praising his agency’s eight-month effort to crack down on
prostitution and human trafficking.
Officers had detained 10 Asian women and, through interpreters, tried to determine which of them were victims and which were perpetrators. The city, he said, had shut down four
brothels posing as spas.
“Obviously, the message to these kinds of operations is that they won’t be tolerated in our town,” Oates said.
Even before the news conference started, however, the case had begun to fall apart. Some sex workers – potential witnesses against the organizers – were gone.
One of the spas would avoid being shut down altogether. The one person charged with trafficking in the case later was allowed to plead guilty to profiting from prostitution, a lesser charge.