All of the charges were misdemeanors, and the…
By Chris Fuchs
Three women from Flushing and another from New Jersey were arrested March 26 in Huntington Station, L.I., accused of working at or running a house of prostitution, the Suffolk County district attorney said.
All of the charges were misdemeanors, and the women were released without bail, a spokesman for the DA said Monday. The women were identified in the criminal complaints as Yon Kim, 50, of Flushing; Incha Kim, 48, of Flushing; Lian Li, 38, of Flushing; and Sok Lee, 43, of Jersey City, N.J. Their next court date is Sept. 25.
The defendants could not be reached for comment.
The women were arrested inside a Huntington Station house at 121 East Jericho Turnpike, the complaint said. Two undercover police officers entered around 10:10 p.m. last week, offering to pay two of the women $60 for a massage, the complaint said. During the massage, though, the women told the officers that they would perform a sexual act as well, the complaint said.
The four women were then arrested by police. Lee and Li were charged with prostitution, and Yon Kim with two counts of promoting prostitution in the fourth degree, according to the complaints. Incha Kim was charged with criminal nuisance.
Yon Kim, the complaint said, allegedly accepted the $60 fee that the officers were charged for the massage. Incha Kim maintained the massage parlor by cooking for the employees and tending to the laundry, the complaint said, cleaning and changing the linens on the massage table.
Since 1991 the district attorney’s office and the police have shut down more than 600 houses of prostitution in Queens, with 262 of them closed within the last two years, said Betsy Herzog, a spokeswoman for the office.
“They’ve used different tools to shut them and keep them shut,” Herzog said, referring to both the Civil Enforcement Unit of the New York Police Department and the Special Prosecution Division of the Queens district attorney’s office.
Herzog added that many of the shuttered houses were in Flushing.
“I can say they appear to be persistent in the so-called Roosevelt Avenue corridor,” she said, “and it goes across several little communities.”
Reach reporter Chris Fuchs by e-mail at Timesledgr@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 156.
