Ringleader of high-end US brothel network gets 4 years in prison

By Nate Raymond

BOSTON (Reuters) -The operator of a high-end brothel network in the greater Boston area and the suburbs of Washington, whose hundreds of customers included politicians, corporate executives, lawyers and military officers, was sentenced on Wednesday to four years in prison.

Han Lee, 42, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Julia Kobick in Boston after pleading guilty in September to conspiring to persuade, induce and entice primarily Asian women to travel to Massachusetts and Virginia to engage in prostitution.

"There were many vulnerable women who because of your actions spent their days selling their bodies to strangers, often many strangers each day," Kobick told Lee.

Prosecutors said that in the three years before her November 2023 arrest, Lee ran one of the most successful prostitution networks on the East Coast out of apartment complexes in Cambridge and Watertown, Massachusetts and Fairfax and Tysons, Virginia.

Prosecutors say clients paid $350 to $600 per hour for sexual encounters with women featured on two websites that advertised nude models for professional photography as a front for Han Lee's prostitution business, which operated since at least 2020.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Linsdey Weinstein said the enterprise Lee ran with the help of two co-defendants was highly profitable, generating at least $5.6 million in illicit funds that were laundered, which Lee must now forfeit.

Defense lawyer Scott Lauer stressed that Lee "tried to do her best for the women who worked for her," having been a sex worker herself. He said she never coerced them and shared as much as 70% of the business's revenues with the women.

"I tried my best to help other people," Lee, a South Korean immigrant, said through an interpreter.

Authorities say the network's hundreds of customers included elected officials, pharmaceutical and technology executives, doctors, military officers, professors, lawyers, business executives, scientists and accountants.

The identities of some of those clients began to emerge on Friday, as the first dozen of 28 alleged sex buyers who authorities had been seeking to pursue state-level misdemeanor charges against in Massachusetts were formally charged.

The 12 men so far include a pharmaceutical executive, a dentist, a software engineer and a radiology technologist at a Boston hospital.

While federal prosecutors also made referrals of alleged customers to authorities in Virginia, prosecutors there said they concluded they did not have sufficient evidence to make a case against any clients under the state's solicitation statute.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in BostonEditing by Bill Berkrot)