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Federal human trafficking bust implicates downtown establishment
Jennifer Park
Issue date: 10/5/06 Section: Metro
Correction appended.
Some Rhode Islanders might not be aware that downtown Providence, synonymous with the Providence Place Mall, premium cuisine and corporate offices, is also home to a more risqué form of commerce: the commercial sex industry.
Down Town Spa, an alleged undercover brothel located at 1 Custom House St. - less than a 10-minute walk from campus - was closed in August as part of a federal investigation into human trafficking.
More than 30 people were arrested and charged in an extensive human trafficking ring that stretched across the Northeast from Rhode Island to Washington, D.C., according to an Aug. 16 press release from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Kyong Polachek, manager of Down Town Spa, was one of those arrested. The federal investigation, which began in May 2005, uncovered a vast network of Korean-owned brothels posing as massage parlors, health spas and acupuncture clinics.
Another Rhode Island brothel posing as a spa - called Central - was uncovered in the investigation. The prostitutes there allegedly made between $18,000 and $20,000 a month, according to an Aug. 21 Providence Journal article.
Many of the women who were brought to the United States to work in such establishments came from Korea in the hopes of making money to support their families but were caught in the grasps of debt bondage and sold their bodies to pay off transportation costs, according to the Department of Justice press release. Brothel owners and managers often confiscated the women's identification and travel documents, and some of the women worked under threats of harm to their families back home.
Human trafficking - defined as the buying, selling and smuggling of people who are then forced into modern-day slavery - is the third-largest and fastest-growing criminal industry in the world, according to the Web site for the Polaris Project. The Polaris Project is a grassroots anti-trafficking organization founded by Katherine Chon '02 and Derek Ellerman '02 during their senior year at Brown.