The leader have lee will be sentenced in court

The network operated from high -end apartments in Cambridge, Watertown and the Washington suburbs, transferring women between cities and brothels. They sold sex with women for hundreds of dollars per hour while requested verification procedures developed from buyers. It is a case, the defenders of the trafficked women say that that highlights exploiting nature of the illicit industry and the imbalances of power among men who buy sex and the women who sell it.

For the first time, prosecutors recently described the brothel income in judicial documents: more than $ 5.6 million, derived from approximately 9,450 “dates.” That income, prosecutors wrote, made this “one of the most successful prostitution networks on the east coast of the United States.”

Lee and their associates recruited women, many of whom were Asian immigrants, moving them between apartments and cities on the east coast, prosecutors said. They kept the isolated women while led the brothel ring, and announced the online women’s services, saying that they would perform a variety of sexual acts for customers. Han Lee started the network in July 2020, no later than the prosecutors in a recent presentation said they believe the ring probably began before.

New judicial presentations of the Government and the defense lawyers of Lee during last week shine in light on the background of the leader. His lawyer wrote that he was born poor in South Korea of ​​an abusive and heavy father and a mother suffered from depression.

She came to the United States about 10 years ago. In California, after meeting sex workers who earn enough money to stay, he started selling sex.

“The work was easily available in brothels throughout the country,” Scott Lauer, his designated lawyer, wrote. California recovered to Las Vegas, New York and, ultimately, landed in Massachusetts.

Here, after a federal investigation closed another important brothel operator in the area, Lee saw the opportunity to manage his own network.

The defense argues that Lee struggled to create a brothel to protect and benefit women who sold sex. He continued selling sex, argues Lauer, including advertising with the women he had brought.

“There is a world of difference between Mrs. Lee, a sex worker, and a pimp (or lady) who enriches the expense of those who do the work,” Lauer wrote, and said that women were free to deny to provide services. “Commercial sex workers in this case were well treated and well compensated.”

Lauer wrote that women who made sex generally maintained more than half of the money. He asked him to be sentenced to 30 months in prison.

But by counting the assistant of US lawyers in the case, they have read was the kingdom of an expanding criminal company based on exploitation.

“They have immensely benefited from women who sold their bodies by sex and hid multimillions of illicit income dollars obtained from their business,” wrote the assistant prosecutor of the US Lindsey Weinstein. “They have attracted and recruited women to travel to Massachusetts or Virginia of other states, and in thousands of occasions, ordered women to have sex with strangers for money.”

Prosecutors acknowledged that there is no evidence that Lee used physical abuse. But rather, Weinstein wrote, he took advantage of vulnerable women who had no choice but to continue their requests.

Most were illegally in the United States, Weinstein wrote. Some were recruited in their countries of origin and brought to the United States, and, he wrote, some said they did not know that they came here to do sex work.

“His commercial decisions were calculated, they were largely motivated by greed, and not the circumstances of life,” Weinstein wrote. “He saw how lucrative and profitable was commercial sex work and wanted to make sure Boston markets and east of Virginia for it.”

Prosecutors asked the judge to sentence her to six years in prison.

In 2023, after federal authorities dismantled the ring, prosecutors said that the extensive documentation that reads and their associates required men allowed the authorities to locate those who had been paying for sex. The authorities presented positions in the State Court in December 2023 against 28 men who said they were among the most frequent customers, which generally means that they had exchanged more than 400 text messages with the cell phone of the direct line of the brothel. A series of appeals delayed the launch of these names, but the initial public audiences started last FridayAnd those who were identified include a software engineer, a dentist and a man who runs a charity fund. More names will be released on Friday when the audiences continue.

You can contact Sean Cotter at [email protected]. Follow it @cotterreporter.