Read Online The Ophelia Cut by John Lescroart - Free Book Online Page A

paying even the insanely low rent. In theory, Lo could evict these families, but it took forever, was vastly expensive, and sometimes San Francisco judges refused to orderevictions. When Lo did get an eviction order, he had to convince the sheriff to enforce it, and that was a whole other cycle of obstacles. In the meantime, he was paying off his father’s refinancing, and the monthly rents weren’t covering his nut.
    There had to be a better way.
    Liam Goodman, his lawyer, had come up with the answer. Goodman had explained—though in truth, Jon Lo was more than passing familiar with the practice—that the apartment units should be converted from residential properties to massage parlors. The massage parlors would, in turn, be staffed by recent female immigrants from Korea who had been lured to the United States by promises of big money and clean, steady work as waitresses or models or hostesses; in fact, these young women often arrived owing thousands of dollars to the brokers who had arranged for their travel, documents, and relocation to America.
    To pay off this debt, their brokers—or owners in all but name—forced them to work in the massage parlors as sex slaves. They usually worked six days a week, entertaining as many as a dozen men every day, earning for their landlord fifty dollars per trick plus half of their tips (one to four hundred, depending on the services performed), with the remainder going for their freedom, a freedom that could and often did prove elusive.
    Bad as it was for the girls, the business was terrific for Jon Lo, and it solved all of his monetary problems. In the city’s super-permissive atmosphere, sexual behavior flew under the radar. Officials tended not to care about these so-called victimless crimes. Beyond that, in 2004, jurisdiction for the massage parlors moved from the police department to the city’s Department of Public Health, whose mandate to check on general cleanliness in these places of business did not necessarily include reporting signs of suspected or probable prostitution to the police. A used condom might be a health violation, but it was nothing to call the Vice Squad about. Besides, sex in a massage parlor, unless police saw money change hands, went ignored.
    In short, it was a good time to be the owner of several massage parlors in San Francisco, and Jon Lo, grateful to Liam Goodman for the legal and zoning assistance in turning his financial life around, had no problem with donating to Goodman’s campaign for city supervisor or with urging his fellow businessmen in the Tenderloin and in Chinatown to support that campaign as well.
    T HE PROXIMATE CAUSE of the city’s sting this week against bar owners and underage drinking had been the third trickledown effect that had begun two months before with an unexpected federal sweep of the city’s massage parlors. The sweep resulted in the arrests of one hundred masseuses, most of them Korean. In response, the mightily embarrassed mayor, Leland Crawford—who was shocked, shocked, to discover that there was a lot of sex at these locations—called for the formation of a task force of health and police inspectors to step up their surveillance and enforcement of the city’s antiprostitution laws.
    In the much publicized second event from only a month before, Crawford, accompanied by members of his new task force and a brace of reporters, had waited in the cut, or narrow unnamed alley, abutting the Golden Dream massage parlor, owned by Jon Lo and licensed by the Department of Public Health, while a plainclothes Asian policeman rang the doorbell. When the metal security door opened, the decoy officer duct-taped the lock so the mayor’s party could get in, just in time to discover a man in the middle of a sex act in the building’s lobby.
    Not too surprisingly, this had caused a stir, and in its aftermath, Crawford had all but declared war on sex trafficking in the city. Unfortunately, all the immediate hue and cry came