The final of the three indicted operators of a brothel community catering to rich shoppers within the suburbs of Boston and Washington D.C. has been sentenced to greater than 2 years in jail.
U.S. District Decide Julia E. Kobick on Wednesday ordered James Lee, 70, of Torrance, Calif., to 27 months in jail to be adopted by three years of supervised launch. The defendant should additionally pay $548,490 in restitution to the Small Business Administration and $20,833 to Harvard Small Business Finance, LLC.
The ruling is just not as extreme as his boss Han Lee’s four-year jail sentence, however it’s longer than the “booker” Junmyung Lee’s sentence of a 12 months.
All three operators, arrested in November 2023, had pleaded responsible to their roles within the brothel community, which took in at the least $5.6 million from at the least 9,450 business intercourse acts with Korean intercourse employees, based on court docket paperwork. Prosecutors have stated the three usually are not associated.
James Lee’s involvement within the case was centered on renting the high-end residences the place the unlawful intercourse came about. Prosecutors had stated that he was the “sole and legal tenant of at least six locations used by this prostitution network,” together with these in Cambridge and Watertown.
James Lee used each his title and a collection of pretend and stolen identities, which he backed up with a number of fraudulent driver’s licenses. Along with leasing the residences, he labored as a liaison between the intercourse employees and property managers. For this work, prosecutors say, he was paid a $1,000 per 30 days fee per energetic lease.
In line with a sentencing memo from Assistant United States Legal professional Lindsey Weinstein, James Lee accepted fee from Han Lee on “at least 63 occasions” for renting the six residences used within the community.
Weinstein additionally acknowledged that James Lee took in at the least $580,000 in federal COVID-19 aid funds that he fraudulently obtained via using his title, solid identities, shell corporations, and financial institution accounts.
The prosecution requested a sentence of 33 months and three years of supervised launch.
“The defendant played an integral role in a sprawling criminal organization that operated a multi-state prostitution network and money laundering operation,” Weinstein wrote within the sentencing memo, filed on Monday. “He protected the prostitution and money laundering organization in multiple ways, and it would not have been successful without his active participation.”
James Lee pleaded responsible in February to conspiracy to coerce ladies to journey interstate to interact in prostitution, cash laundering conspiracy and wire fraud.
Of the 1000’s of males who frequented the Boston-area providers, the instances of greater than 30 of them have been heard in court docket in Cambridge in March. Every was discovered to have possible trigger for a felony grievance to be issued.
James Lee, via his legal professional, Keith Halpern, requested a sentence of time served, nearly 19 months of incarceration. Halpern wrote in a memo that there’s “no sentence that could have a greater deterrent effect than the shame he lives with.”
Halpern highlighted how Lee emigrated to the USA within the Nineteen Eighties at age 26, along with his dad and mom and siblings, and have become a naturalized citizen “about 10 years later.” After working a clothes manufacturing enterprise for 20 years, the enterprise went bankrupt and closed in 2010, inflicting monetary pressures for Lee.
“Mr. Lee became part of the brothel enterprise and generated the fraudulent loan applications in his mid-60s, a very late age to start criminal involvement,” Halpern wrote. “It was not because of any desire to turn to a life of crime. He did not go looking for these opportunities. But when they were proposed, he found them difficult to resist.”
“The shame that Mr. Lee felt after the failure of his business, was nothing compared to the shame that he feels now,” Halpern added.
