NORTHAMPTON — Once again, the 10 women were on the road. This time, on a bus bound for Flushing, New York — away from the alleged sex trafficking operations from which investigators say they were rescued.
On the same day, Dec. 14, 2016, Shuzi Li, who prosecutors say is a ringleader, stood silently with her head bowed before a judge during her arraignment on sex trafficking and money laundering charges in Northampton District Court.
In the courtroom, a prosecutor spoke of a covert business arrangement in which Li shuttled these women from Flushing to her massage businesses in western Massachusetts. It was there where these women earned subpar wages and performed sex acts on male clients for cash tips — virtually all of which was pocketed by Li, Assistant Attorney General Elizabeth Vasiliades told the judge.
Not much is known about the women who were allegedly lured into these criminal enterprises. They all came from Flushing and spoke little to no English. Authorities have not said whether they are all native to the Flushing area. However, throughout the investigation, which is ongoing, Mandarin translators aided several of the women during interviews with authorities and during arraignments for the defendants.
The alleged victims range in age from their mid-20s to mid-50s, said Northampton Police Lt. Alan Borowski, who oversees the group of detectives who spearheaded the case’s investigative efforts for more than half a year.
“We made every effort possible to ensure the safety and comfort of these women,” Borowski said in an interview. “(We) provided them with hotels in western Massachusetts, and then we provided them with transportation to get back to New York.”
Borowski said the attorney general’s office funded the purchase of bus tickets for the women while the police department oversaw logistics. The day they were identified, the lieutenant said, they were interviewed by authorities, offered counseling from victim advocate services and put up in local hotels.
“They were definitely not left in the cold,” Borowski said.
A day before the women returned to New York, local and state authorities commenced a takedown of two alleged sex trafficking operations, one of which was in Florence. The operations, while similar in scope and organization, are not connected, according to investigators. In Li’s case, the women worked, and sometimes slept, in massage parlors all while she allegedly solicited sexual services on websites like rubmaps.com.
The enforcement actions ultimately yielded four arrests and identified 10 women who were trafficked for sex inside massage parlors in Northampton, Hadley, Framingham, East Longmeadow and Agawam, according to the Massachusetts attorney general’s office.
The businesses in question were Hadley Massage Therapy in Hadley, Feng Health Center in East Longmeadow, Massage Body Work in Framingham, Pine Spa in Northampton, and Agawam Massage Therapy in Agawam.
In addition to Li, Feng Ling Liu, 50, her husband Jian Song, 48, both of Sunderland, and Liu’s daughter, Ting Ting Yin, 26, of New Hyde Park, New York, were arrested at the same time. They were charged in connection with trafficking women between New York and operations in Hadley, East Longmeadow and Framingham, according to the AG’s office.
In light of the takedown and the women returning to Flushing — a storied neighborhood in Queens where other human trafficking operations have been known to exist — the question arises: How do these women become part of trafficking operations, and what are they promised in return?
For the past 11 years, Cherie Jimenez has operated EVA, a Boston-based service center for women victimized by commercial sexual exploitation, which most often takes the form of prostitution or trafficking.
Trafficking typically involves force and coercion, whereas prostitution generally is voluntary, according to experts interviewed.
Jimenez has helped girls and women who escaped abusive households and who turned to the streets in order to escape financial distress. She was not familiar with the local case but framed her remarks about sex trafficking in general.
One of the biggest misconceptions about the big picture of sex trafficking, Jimenez said, is that people tend to think these women only come from abroad, particularly eastern Asian countries.
“Most of the women are women from our communities,” she said. “Almost 50 percent have reported to have aged out of systems … (such as) group homes (or) foster care.”
So many of these women, she added, arrived at this point because of limited exposure to educational or professional opportunities.
“There’s so many barriers that … render women vulnerable to this,” Jimenez said.
No matter where the women come from, Jimenez said, their circumstances are almost always parallel.
“It’s not like people are doing this because of access to opportunity,” she said. “It’s mostly out of economic necessity when you don’t have viable opportunities.”
While Jimenez is unfamiliar with the specifics of the investigation involving the Flushing women allegedly being shuttled to massage parlors in western Massachusetts, she has worked with women who have emerged from the same area and become entangled in similar alleged operations.
“Coming into Flushing, into New York, the allure … I’m sure (is) they were told you can make money, like everyone else (that I’ve worked with),” she said. “We all have very different stories, but there is this common vulnerability.”
Like Jimenez, Donna Sabella, who is an associate professor of nursing and social justice at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has spent her career trying to better understand the complicated workings of human trafficking and how people tend to become involved.
There are three criteria, Sabella explained, that are considered when determining whether commercial sex work could be deemed trafficking: force, fraud and coercion.
While force is arguably the most straightforward of the criteria, fraud and coercion may not be so obvious.
Sabella said she has seen “bait-and-switch” type cases in which folks are led to believe they are participating in another line of work, until the aggressor pushes them into sex work. Sabella gave as an example a woman who’s told she’s hired as a dancer at a strip club and is later pressured into performing sex acts for customers for money.
When it comes to coercion, Sabella talked about cases in which the person or people overseeing the operation will get these women addicted to powerful drugs so that the workers become dependent on the leader(s) to continue to provide.
There are even cases where there will be an uptick in commercial sex in the aftermath of a natural disaster where people have lost everything.
In the event a city or geographic area is brought to the ground and as chaos ensues, “it ruins the whole infrastructure,” Sabella said. “Sex always sells anywhere under any circumstances.”
But one of the most difficult elements trafficking victims, domestic or foreign, have to overcome, Sabella said, is the stigma associated with their experiences.
“In some cultures, you can never go home with that over your head,” she said.
Michael Majchrowicz can be reached at mmajchrowicz@gazettenet.com.