So many dubious massage shops keep popping up in Tri-Cities. What’s being done about it - Tri-City Herald

[massage]

Even as Linhui Yan was being investigated for human trafficking in Louisiana, he held a massage therapy license in Washington. That license was used to open and operate 12 massage businesses across the state, including four in Kennewick. At least one of those involved a woman who offered to sell sexual services to an undercover officer. The state Department of Health recently suspended Yan’s license after he was charged criminally in Chelan County with leading an organized crime organization, promoting prostitution and money laundering. The Kennewick raid on West Clearwater Avenue in March highlighted a problem hiding in plain sight.

It ended up being the first of three raids over a few months that led to 11 Tri-Cities massage parlors closing. Six were directly tied to sex trafficking allegations and two because of licensing problems. Three others closed for unknown reasons but were tied to one of the owners. It’s a problem that’s been an open secret in the community for while, said Tricia MacFarlan, who runs the faith-based Mirror Ministries working to help survivors of human trafficking. The shops often don’t stand out.

They’re not flashy and are often found in shopping centers, providing them with an air of legitimacy, said Chris Muller-Tabenera, the chief strategy officer with The Network, an intelligence-driven counter human trafficking organization. A combination of a lack of resources and a lack of will to find the businesses has created an open market where women are usually brought in from East Asian countries and required to sell sex, he said. The number of illicit massage parlors across the U.S. has grown 10% a year since 2019, Muller-Tabenera said.

“What’s really driving the increasing market is the level of impunity and invincibility that operators feel in running an illicit massage parlor,” he said.

Most of the eight shops searched this year in Richland and Kennewick opened within the last year. Sgt. Chris Littrell said the booming population in the Tri-Cities is also a factor. “As we grow, things tend to quietly settle in,” he said. “Sometimes it’s good things. Sometimes it’s unlawful things. We have to decide as a Tri-City community what we’re going to tolerate. If we approach it as a community, it’s going to increase the ability to solve it.” Kennewick and Richland city councils are taking steps to address the issue. Each adopted new rules this year in an attempt to curtail what has been a growing issue not only in the Tri-Cities, but nationwide.

City officials hope the changes will be the first steps to making it more difficult for illicit massage parlors to open and stay operating in the Tri-Cities. Pasco doesn’t have current plans to change its ordinances, said officials.

Illicit massage parlors Kennewick’s efforts to find illicit shops this year started with people calling police about their unusual experiences at the storefronts, said Littrell. Then in March, Kennewick police were contacted by the Wenatchee-based Columbia River Drug Task Force. The task force was in the middle of a 7-month investigation into Linhui Yan and Yan Yang. Yan already had been tied to a Louisiana massage parlor in 2019 that was accused of engaging in human trafficking, according to a story from WAFB-TV.