Authorities crack down on Monterey massage parlors. - Monterey County Weekly

[massage]

At the corner of Casanova and Kolb avenues in Monterey stands a house with decaying beige paint, surrounded by a tall wooden fence. Inside, a business offers massages.

“It’s $80 per hour,” a woman says when she answers the phone at Cypress Studio. “But we can’t take you, because we only have one person on staff.”

Pots and pans clattering and running water can be heard in the background. The woman says she can’t check if there are appointments for the upcoming days because she “can’t leave the stove unattended.” Then she hangs up.

A neighbor says men wearing everything from suits and ties to casual attire often enter the residence through the back fence. “They think we don’t see them,” the neighbor says.

Monterey police recently took an interest in this parlor and on Nov. 19, they conducted an undercover operation to see if anything illegal was happening. Monterey Police Lt. Jeff Jackson says an undercover officer entered one of several closed-door rooms with Eun Ha Fuller for a massage. Fuller was wearing a “tight, short dress,” Jackson says, and during the massage suggested offering sexual services. Jackson declined to elaborate on what those services entailed, but says Fuller allegedly told the undercover cop those services would cost him more.

Fuller, whose residence is in Georgia, was arrested and cited. No charges have been filed yet, but she’s due to appear in court on the citation in mid-January.

Undercover operations at massage parlors are not frequent, but are done to ensure compliance with a new city ordinance that imposes stricter rules on parlors. Those rules restrict hours of operation and provide tougher permitting conditions, requiring people performing massages to be listed on the business permit and owners to be on site while a massage takes place. Violations of those rules put a business permit at stake.

Cypress Studio is in the process of renewing its business permit, but Jackson says it likely will not be renewed. For now, Cypress remains open for business.

Since the ordinance was enacted in June, four applications for massage businesses, all owned by different people, have been denied and the businesses closed down. The reason: sexually suggestive advertisements.

One of those four was Sea Story Spa, where police say genitals could be seen in online ads. A quick search shows women dressed in lingerie in an online ad listing business hours and location.

A police investigation several months ago found that 20 of the city’s 33 parlors were rated on sex websites.

In the case of Cypress Studio, where the woman was arrested on suspicion of prostitution, the business owner was not cited or arrested. The ordinance says the owner is “responsible for the actions of their employees” and he or she could face denial of their business application as sanctions.

Once an application is denied, owners are banned from opening a new business for five years.

Monterey Police Cmdr. Mike Bruno, who heads the Peninsula Regional Violence and Narcotics Team, suspects the illicit activity in these massage parlors is connected, and that there may be an element of human trafficking. But more manpower, he says, is needed to get to the root of the problem.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.