An operator of brothels within the suburbs of Boston and Washington D.C. was sentenced to a yr in federal jail, which is 1 / 4 the sentence chief Han “Hanna” Lee received earlier this yr.
Junmyung Lee labored because the “booker” for shoppers and the intercourse employees of the operation. Particulars included in legislation enforcement affidavits additionally describe his work as sort of an errand boy for the Madame.
“Junmyung is also organized and dependable — he arranged logistics, instructed the men to be discrete to avoid the attention of neighbors, collected profits from the brothel locations regularly, and transported and assisted the women upon their arrivals to and departures from the Boston-area brothels,” prosecutor Lindsey Weinstein wrote in her sentencing memo.
He pleaded responsible to his function final October and on Friday U.S. District Decide Julia E. Kobick sentenced him to 12 months in jail to be adopted by a yr of supervised launch. His boss, Han Lee, was sentenced to 4 years in jail in March.
Han Lee’s brothel community took in at the very least $5.6 million from at the very least 9,450 business intercourse acts with the Korean intercourse employees, based on the sentencing memo.
Of the hundreds of males who frequented the Boston-area providers, the instances of greater than 30 of them had been heard in courtroom in Cambridge over the course of three hearings final month — although solely two of them confirmed up in individual. Every was discovered to have possible trigger for a felony criticism to be issued. Arraignments have but to be scheduled.
Junmyung Lee’s fluency in English — one thing Han Lee doesn’t possess — and different traits, Weinstein wrote, “made him a good employee for Han and allowed him to personally profit royally off of women selling their bodies for sex to complete strangers thousands of times.” She estimated his wage as $6,000 to $8,000 a month.
A 3rd operator, James Lee, pleaded responsible to his function in February. Prosecutors say that he cast identities to hire the flats the place the brothels operated, together with some in Cambridge and Watertown. He’s scheduled to be sentenced on April 29. Prosecutors say the three are usually not associated.
Han Lee maintained at her personal sentencing that she didn’t pressure the ladies to be prostitutes. She mentioned, by means of a Korean interpreter, that she had herself been a intercourse employee when she first got here to America and that she labored exhausting to make the lives of those ladies a lot better than is common for prostitutes.
It’s a rivalry Weinstein has vehemently disagreed with all through the case, and she or he reiterated the federal government’s stance in Junmyung Lee’s sentencing memo.
“While the government believes that the women engaged in sex acts under the legal standard of ‘voluntarily,’ they were vulnerable women who were exploited by the organization,” she wrote. “The Government also asserts that while the women were not ‘forced’ to engage in commercial sex, as defined by federal law, of course this was not their choice. To have a price set for one’s body and to engage in repetitive sex acts with strangers is a choice for those with limited or no other choices.”
