Snyder announced that as many as 300 men who went to the spas for sex would be charged with soliciting prostitution. Some were unable to leave, the sheriff said, because the traffickers confiscated their money and passports. 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. Sex trafficking, under law, involves recruiting and transporting women by force or fraud, and coercing them to work as prostitutes. “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. 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. 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. O n February 19, after staging dramatic raids on nearly a dozen massage parlors in South Florida, Sheriff William Snyder held a press conference. Kimbark, having accomplished his mission, let Kraft and Bernon go with a warning. 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. Then she and Lulu helped him get dressed.Īs Kraft left the spa in the white Bentley, Officer Scott Kimbark, nicknamed Bark, stopped the car for a minor traffic violation. After Kraft ejaculated, Mingbi wiped his penis with a white towel. Bernon offered to drive Kraft in his 2014 white Bentley to a place he knew in Jupiter, 20 miles up the Treasure Coast.Īt Orchids, according to the Jupiter police, Kraft paid cash to the spa’s co-owner, Lei Wang, who goes by Lulu, and received a hand job from her and another worker, later identified as Shen Mingbi. 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. 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. 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. Last January, he requested what is colloquially known as a sneak-and-peek search warrant.Īmong the patrons who turned up on the surveillance video at Orchids was Robert Kraft, the 78-year-old owner of the New England Patriots.
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. Herzog noted an “excessive amount of food in the refrigerator.” She also noted bedding, clothing, and a flatiron. “As the inspection progressed, I began to feel more and more uneasy,” she recalled. Herzog later testified that the spa workers appeared agitated by her visit and failed to make eye contact. Sharp asked Herzog if she could survey the parlor, and on November 14, she complied. “At that point I understood this was not just a regular massage parlor but one that was an illicit massage business,” Sharp later testified. 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. Almost everyone they saw enter was a man. For seven days in early November 2018, Sharp and his team staked out the spa.