Three Berkeley massage parlors may be closed for good after city officials ruled that explicit online reviews support allegations of prostitution.
Crystal Massage on Shattuck Avenue, as well as Acupressure Health Center and Berkeley Alouette — both located on University Avenue — were served with cease and desist notices in April, and use permits for all three were revoked during a Zoning Adjustments Board hearing. Crystal Massage later signed a consent form and voluntarily gave up its permit with 120 days to vacate.
Berkeley City Council will review the board’s recommendation sometime in July.
According to city spokesperson Mary Kay Clunies-Ross, the remaining two parlors have not yet signed consent forms but may have vacated their spaces anyway. However, in a telephone call to Crystal Massage on Friday, an employee who answered the phone said they were still open.
Clunies-Ross also said the owners of the commercial properties may face legal penalties for their tenants’ actions.
At the zoning board’s April 26 meeting, Berkeley Code Enforcement Supervisor Gregory Daniel and Deputy City Attorney Laura McKinney presented numerous reviews from Rubmaps and myRedBook, online guides to adult services. Rubmaps reviews feature anonymous users recounting sexual experiences and provide intimate details about the women’s bodies.
“When you are referring to their body part of ‘kitty’ as ‘natural,’ as ‘trimmed,’ as ‘partially shaved,’ what else is that?” said board member Deborah Matthews.
According to McKinney, the online reviews, which span several years, provide enough evidence to prove that the three massage parlors were engaging in prostitution.
Attorneys representing the three massage parlors attended the hearing and condemned the findings as hearsay and said there was insufficient evidence.
Henry Hu, representative for Acupressure Health Center, called the online reviews “unfounded” and “malicious,” arguing that they could have been created by competing establishments.
But McKinney pointed out that there were reviews for other Berkeley parlors as well.
“If a legitimate business was concerned about it being painted in a negative light or in a light that was engaging in illegal conduct, they would have taken some action to eliminate themselves from these websites,” she said at the hearing.
Both Berkeley Alouette and Accupressure Health Center advertise on myRedBook. Berkeley Alouette’s advertisement reads, in part: “We want to get our hands on RB gentlemen.” Although Crystal Massage does not have a similar listing on the site, its ads have appeared in the back pages of East Bay Express, next to advertisements for escort services.
Joseph Morehead, the attorney representing Crystal Massage, said at the hearing that the revocation of the use permits will result in unfair consequences for his clients.
“They will lose their jobs,” Morehead said. “They will lose their occupations without any type of due process.”
Daniel said the investigation began after two other Berkeley massage parlors, South Sea Studio and Healing Hands Massage, were shuttered in 2011.
“After we did shut those two down, we noticed there was a sudden rise in the number of massage parlor applications being submitted,” Daniel said. “In most instances the same person would come back with a different woman.”
According to Daniel, the three establishments were also in violation of a city code which requires all masseuses to be licensed. He also discovered women working at the parlors who were not listed on the city establishment permits.
Although Rubmaps lists a total of 16 massage parlors in the city, Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Sgt. Mary Kusmiss said law enforcement does not always have the resources to investigate. Of the massage parlors closed down within the last few years, many were handled by city government instead of undercover officers.
“We often will enlist the city to approach the massage parlor with the zoning or business license angle because it’s more successful,” Kusmiss said.
Following the closure of the three parlors, nervous chatter appeared on the Bay Area message board on myRedBook, as users expressed outrage and warned each other to be careful.
Although City Council has yet to review the recommendation, board members like Michael Alvarez Cohen believe the zoning violations alone are damning enough.
“We can quibble about these staff reports and the accuracy,” Cohen said. “There’s a lot of evidence that these people have not met the requirements of their permit. Just on that alone, we can move forward.”
A May 29 amendment to the chapter of the municipal code concerning massage establishment permits will make it a challenge for the parlors to re-apply for permits if theirs have ever been revoked, and requests could even be denied outright.
View the zoning board agenda involving the hearing here:
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Where’s Tony M and libsareclowns supposed to spend their EBT credits now?
What would you do without me to stalk online, you silly little child?
So long as there’s no sex trafficking going on and these are voluntary prostitutes, who cares. Berkeley has a lot of other things it needs to fix before bothering with crap like this.
they’re “asian massage parlors”. I would guarantee that the female employees were trafficked into the US and are being forced to work as prostitutes. If you think otherwise you are just sticking your head in the sand.
While I don’t condone “human trafficking”, most investigations have indicated that it’s more of women being voluntarily smuggled (or overstaying tourist visas) to make money to bring back home. Not that such behavior should be condoned, but there’s a bit of a “moral panic” by the way this is presented by many militant feminist activist groups. We need to be honest about this issue, which is simply that people who break the law and come to this country illegally to make money.
Wrong, they are “voluntarily” smuggled only because they were told that they would be worked as a waitress in America.
Hate to burst your bubble, but I have some familiarity with the Korean community, and in fact have made several trips to Korea over the years, the first one most likely before most of those commenting here were even born (having a Korean-born girlfriend at one point in my adult life was also an education in itself). The vast majority of the girls coming here from Korea do so on their own free will, and know damn well what’s expected of them when they come here, as a considerable number of them were sex workers back in Korea. That’s not to say that they aren’t mistreated by mamas, smugglers, taxicab drivers, apartment massage owners and the like, as well as those advancing them the cash to come here, because that IS a serious problem, but the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of Korean women come over here on their free will. The racket is that if they admit to coming here voluntarily, they will be deported, but in the event of a raid or bust, if they claim to be “trafficked” they can have a hold placed on their own deportation. Not to say it doesn’t happen, but the prevalence of human trafficking in the East Asian community is rather overstated for a number of reasons: http://www.springerlink.com/content/r9p5kjxu3ke8cy3v/. In the case of women who ARE being forced/deceived into this line of work, you won’t find them in a massage therapy establishment serving the general public, but in a far more controlled setting within their racial/ethnic group, because the smugglers know that the average American male tends to have a “white knight” attitude towards women and will probably make trouble for an establishment if he thinks women are being forced into the trade. The worlds of illegal immigration, “human trafficking” and sex work involve a number of different groups with different agendas, so it never hurts to have a good dose of healthy skepticism when one hears such claims…
Then it would be pretty easy to shut down these businesses by just going in and verifying immigration status.
Immigration checks are illegal in obama’s America, comrade.
And isn’t that the best, most ironic part? Oooh, amnesty from deportation, it’s for the children! Um, no, it’s so rich people can keep exploiting non-citizens like slaves and profiting from it.
In addition, sex is probably the one industry where a guest worker program is warranted based on the teatard talking point of “jobs Americans just won’t do no more” because this culture turns most “American” women into unsighltly Nancy Grace helmethair land whales. Thus, the libertarians and the progressives should find common ground and turn Berkeley into Amsterdam, since they aren’t going to create jobs any other way.
Once again we have something that neither side of the political spectrum wants to address. For the left to get Latino and illegal votes, they will accept slavery. They will talk about helping people to pursue the American dream, but they are just promoting the exploitation of the weak. For the right to get inexpensive labor, they will accept slavery. They will talk about being tough on illegal immigration, but they stay quiet so business can enjoy the lower costs of slave labor. And citizens don’t really care, because they want inexpensive produce, clothes, and prostitutes.
The only thing that is more depressing is that Mexico and various Asian countries must be real sewers for people to trade exploitation for what they had in those countries.
Uninformed people commenting=never not funny. No immigration checks have occured since Obama was elected? Immigration is an issue revolving solely around sex trafficking in shady massage parlors? Oh dear lord, spare me.
What’s uninformed? Berkeley liberals would rather let these women suffer in sexual slavery than carry out simple immigration checks that could put the massage parlors out of business.
Better to let others suffer than for the libs to do something that Joe Arpaio might endorse. Ideological purity trumps human outcomes.
Bummer…swap them out with some good ol’ US of A born and raised hookers, problem solved.
While that may be true in some cases, it is not necessarily true. Unless you know each and every girl at all ‘asian massage parlors’, you cannot guarantee that. I can, however, guarantee it is not true in some cases.
ALL of them are trafficked!! you idiot! why do you think they don’t speak English? if they wanted to be prostitutes they could of just done that in their own country!!! its so fucking obvious that they are trafficked.
lol, were are all the liberals who scream “American taliban” when conservatives base laws on morality? conspicuously silent in this thread.
I assume this story won’t have a happy ending…
Now that’s funny! Thanks, Tony–I needed a laugh today…
Acknowledging that the massage parlors are probably guilty of the allegations given the preponderance of evidence, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s hearsay. Accepting online reviews, given while not under oath and in a completely uncontrolled format, as truth is dangerous. Taking on a case like this in a bureaucratic committee instead of a court is a travesty of due process.
If they’re as guilty as they seem, take them to court and do this properly.
Swim fondly remembers an experience — a first experience, in fact — 40 years ago in one of Berkeley’s finest; if that helps. Swim further recalls that this Freshman experience was delivered by a graduate student working her way through a psychology doctorate.
In this time of rising tuition, it seems like we should be *en*couraging this entrepreneurial spirit, not discouraging it.
the only “entrepreneurs” are the pimps who lie to girls in Korea about waitress jobs in America, then confiscate their passports and force them into prostitution.
such scum should be terminated.
Who needs hookers in the age of widely accessible birth control?
Guaranteed that most of those reviews were jokes in poor taste. This is just sad.
Oh, come on. All three of the pictured establishments are pretty clearly houses of prostitution pretending (and not very convincingly) to be something else. Or maybe you’ve never lived near one of them and seen young women bundled in and out of them by their suitcase pimps.
If they were legitimate therapeutic establishments, why would their front offices need to have the blinds drawn 24-7? Why would they advertise that they employ women of certain ethnic backgrounds?
Illegal entrants into the US are often snookered into working in these places and threatened with exposure to the authorities if they refuse to do what the clients demand. If we want to allow prostitution, this is not the way to do it.
guaranteed that they were not.