Investigator paid for sex acts with potential trafficking victims at SC spas on your dime

Almost every Wednesday morning for more than two months in 2019, Ken Robison Sr. drove from Columbia to Horry County to visit multiple massage parlors, solicit sex acts in exchange for money, rent a hotel room for the night and then wake up and do the same thing on Thursday.

He documented these visits in excruciating detail — the exact time he arrived, what the women looked like, where he touched them, where he allowed them to touch him and how much he tipped them for these services — and compiled his notes into a lengthy report on behalf of four local law enforcement agencies.

His information was used by Horry County police and the solicitors’ office to shut down more than 20 of the businesses, relying on nuisance laws.

But law enforcement experts and advocates are balking at the taxpayer-funded investigation, saying that the hiring of a private investigator to have sex with the women was grossly inappropriate and unnecessary to shut down the businesses.

These actions are particularly troubling, they say, because law enforcement across the country are increasingly identifying women working in these illicit massage businesses as sex trafficking victims.

Signs of human trafficking were present throughout the investigator’s report, but no criminal charges were pursued. And while the businesses closed, experts say that the women were likely just moved elsewhere and continue to be exploited.

The Sun News and The State Media Co. published a series of stories in 2019, detailing how human trafficking victims may be working in many S.C. massage parlors that operate with minimal scrutiny from law enforcement, except when they conduct prostitution stings.

A 2018 report from Polaris, a global anti-human trafficking organization, compiles information based on extensive research and interviews with survivors who were trafficked within massage parlors. It explains how traffickers pose as legitimate employers, helping Asian immigrants hoping to escape poverty or abusive relationships obtain visas and travel to the businesses, and then force them to repay their debt, taking advantage of a culture that emphasizes shame and reciprocity.

While Polaris and other advocacy organizations are making headway encouraging law enforcement to take a different approach in handling illicit massage businesses, many police remain skeptical and, as a result, potential victims continue to suffer.

Local law enforcement and the solicitor interviewed by the paper defended the investigation, deeming it a success in its goal of protecting the community.

Private investigator hired

Unbeknownst to reporters, just days after The Sun News investigation published, Robison Investigations Agency was contracted to investigate massage parlors in Horry County, according to records obtained via an open records request from the 15th Circuit Solicitor’s Office, which ultimately filed the nuisance orders.

The contract was between the Irmo-based agency and Conway-based Battle Law Firm, which served as special prosecutor for the investigation. It permitted Robison Investigations “to do all things necessary, appropriate, or advisable in performing said services for and in the best interests of” Battle Law Firm.

Solicitor Jimmy Richardson said he wasn’t aware when the investigation began, but his understanding is that it was first sought by Horry County and Horry County Police. Police departments in Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach and Surfside Beach were later brought in to help fund the effort, based on which agency had jurisdiction over the businesses being investigated.

James Battle, the lead prosecutor on the nuisance cases, declined to comment, but invoices obtained through the records request appear to support Richardson’s explanation.

Battle Law Firm agreed to pay Robison Investigations $75 per hour, 50 cents per mile driven, $50 per diem for food per day and all reasonable expenses incurred during the investigation. Battle later hired a separate investigative agency to search through online reviews of these businesses, and the total cost of both agencies exceeded $65,000, according to the invoices.

According to records obtained from each jurisdiction, Surfside Beach and Myrtle Beach paid Battle Law Firm $6,523 and $14,104, respectively, for the massage investigation. North Myrtle Beach has paid the firm $55,795 since March 2019, but city spokesman Pat Dowling noted that those payments are for services covering a wide variety of issues, not just the massage investigation.

Horry County, which had jurisdiction over the the majority of illicit massage businesses, has not fulfilled a records request as of Tuesday for payments to Battle Law Firm.

‘Improper’ investigation

The investigation, paid for by taxpayers, is described in a 126-page report submitted by Ken Robison Sr., director of the agency and sole undercover investigator for the majority of the investigation.

Using a list of businesses provided by Battle that grew throughout the monthslong process, Robison briefly surveilled each massage venue before entering and posing as a customer.

At 20 of these businesses, he successfully solicited sexual services, typically in exchange for a cash tip that exceeded the cost of the actual massage. Each time, he stopped the women before completion, but the actions he describes — naked touching, probing and oral sex — still constitute sexual conduct under S.C. law, according to experts.

Numerous investigators, advocates and former prosecutors who have conducted or helped train law enforcement specifically on illicit massage business investigations reviewed portions of Robison’s report at a reporter’s request, and all agreed that the investigator went too far.

Detective Joseph Scaramucci, a human trafficking investigator with the McLennan County Sheriff’s Office in Waco, Texas, said his department would likely arrest this investigator if he handed in this report.

“This would be an extremely improper law enforcement investigation, and we do not advocate for anything like this,” said Scaramucci, who has conducted numerous investigations into massage businesses and never arrested women for prostitution.

Jane Anderson, a former prosecutor in Miami and current attorney advisor for AEquitas, a nonprofit aimed at improving prosecution practices related to human trafficking, said she’s never seen anything like this investigation — noting law enforcement essentially hired someone to commit a crime.

“There’s sort of an upside, which is that he is at least documenting it because I think we hear from survivors that this level (of sex acts) happens more often than we know about,” she said, “... but it was very obvious that this was unnecessary and totally gratuitous.”

Rochelle Keyhan, a former prosecutor in Philadelphia and CEO of Collective Liberty, a nonprofit working to end human trafficking, said she was alarmed by the sex acts described in the investigator’s report, but noted that it’s not uncommon for law enforcement to perform sex acts with women during criminal investigations.

State officials in Hawaii passed a law in 2014, banning police from having sex with prostitutes, after several reports of alleged abuse by undercover officers. And the prosecution of several individuals allegedly involved in sex trafficking in Arizona massage parlors during 2018 fell apart after it was discovered that federal Homeland Security agents engaged in sex acts with the alleged victims during their investigation.

Keyhan said part of the issue is that many prosecutors use the lack of an overt sex act as an excuse to dismiss the case.

“It could be honestly that the prosecutor won’t bring the case unless it’s so air tight and every argument is refuted, which is I think the main problem across the country,” she said.

Were the sex acts necessary?

Richardson, Horry County’s solicitor, said he didn’t lead this investigation or oversee Robison’s actions, but he’s fine with everything that happened, pointing out that they were transparent with the judge and defense attorneys involved in the nuisance cases.

“God and everybody heard it all, and it couldn’t have been that outlandish if we’re going to go out and tell the entire story in front of a courtroom full of people,” he said. “... I don’t think we’ve done anything wrong. I think we did the very best we could, and I think it was successful.”

Richardson didn’t explicitly say a police officer would be allowed to perform the same sex acts during an investigation, but added that agencies “can’t employ deacons and preachers” as undercover officers.

Surfside Beach Police Chief Kenneth Hofmann said he didn’t have an opinion on Robison’s actions, noting a lot of time had passed since he read the investigative report, but he wouldn’t permit his officers to engage in sex acts as part of an undercover operation.

North Myrtle Beach police declined, via a city spokesman, an interview about the investigation. Spokespeople for Horry County and Myrtle Beach police both referred questions to the Solicitor’s Office and then didn’t respond after being told a reporter had already spoken with Richardson.

Robison could not be contacted because he died in December, according to his obituary, and the phone number listed for his investigations agency is out of service.

Scaramucci said that in the rare instances an undercover operation is necessary, he’d advise an investigator that a crime has been proven once an employee offers a sex act for money. Then, the investigator should find an excuse, such as he forgot to bring cash, to not engage further.

Richardson acknowledged that such an exchange would have been enough to prove the nuisance, but with just a single investigator, he had to be convincing as a customer, and the women might have caught on if he kept stopping them before anything happened. He added that Robison was a perfect choice because he had two prosthetic legs and didn’t look like a cop.

“They could’ve probably gotten a (second investigator), but you can’t just go in on one act and shut everything down,” he said.

Robison visited each massage business he was told to investigate at least twice — receiving sex acts on 49 occasions for more than $5,500 in tips, according to his report. While emphasizing that he didn’t direct the decision to visit each business multiple times, Richardson said he did believe it was necessary to prove the business was a nuisance.

“(Otherwise) that could’ve been just a girl going rogue at some point,” he said.

S.C. laws define a building as a nuisance if it: is constantly used for the buying, selling or use of drugs; offers the sale of lewd and lascivious conduct, assignation or prostitution; or is established as a “continuous breach of the peace.” Richardson noted these businesses fit the second definition.

He filed nuisance orders against 22 massage businesses in late 2019 and early 2020. All are currently closed; most did so voluntarily immediately after the orders were served. The majority of those cases have been resolved either by default because the defendants could not be located or through consent order, with the business owner agreeing to vacate the property for at least a year.

Scaramucci, Keyhan and Anderson all agreed that nuisance orders leading to civil abatement can be an effective strategy in combating illicit massage businesses, but should be coupled with fines, asset seizures and, ideally, criminal charges against those profiting off the illegal activities — none of which were pursued in Horry County.

They also reiterated that engaging in sex acts was completely unnecessary, particularly for a civil case, where the standard of proof is just a preponderance of evidence as opposed to beyond a reasonable doubt for a criminal case.

“If it’s just for nuisance, I just don’t know why they’re going to such in-depth steps,” Keyhan said. “... Even for the criminal statute, it’s not necessary, but then for (civil), it’s even less necessary.”

Signs of sex trafficking

While the outside experts and Richardson were at odds over the investigator’s methods, they all agreed that signs of human trafficking were present in the targeted massage parlors.

Robison detailed numerous pieces of evidence suggesting the employees were sleeping at the businesses, including seeing rooms set up as bedrooms, the businesses opening without anyone seen entering during early morning surveillance and one woman even telling him she lived there.

Traffickers often require the women to live at the massage businesses to keep them isolated and be available to customers at all times, according to the Polaris report.

Keyhan noticed that the women performing the sex acts often communicated with the older business manager, typically known as the Mamasan, before proceeding, seemingly seeking permission. And the investigator wrote on a couple occasions the women quickly handed over their tip money to the manager.

Some women described being coached by their boss’ attorney on how to offer sex acts while avoiding prostitution charges.

“I said how much and she replied ‘We not supposed to say,’” Robison wrote in his report. “I asked her who said so and she stated ‘Boss and boss lawyer say no say how much for extra, customer say and call it tip.’”

One particularly telling exchange happened when Robison started chatting with an employee post-sex act.

“She advised me that her name was ‘Lisa’ and that she just got here from Duluth Georgia this morning,” he wrote. “... I stated I had come by yesterday and they were closed. She then said that was due to the owners didn’t have any girls; one was arrested and in jail; one had gotten into trouble and left town and one had ‘run away’ even though she still owed them work.

“She said they brought her in to re-open until they can get new girls,” he continued. “She stated the girl who got into trouble was ‘moved’ to Duluth. At this time the older woman yelled something in Chinese and she said, ‘She doesn’t like us talking.’”

One of the guiding principles for social interactions in China, according to Polaris, is known as renqing, which emphasizes reciprocity or repayment.

“If a trafficker is able to convince a victim that he or she has done her an extreme favor by employing her,” the Polaris report states, “then anything the trafficker asks of the victim should be done because she owes the trafficker so much.”

Richardson said after reading Robison’s reports, he suspected human trafficking may be occurring and wanted to make sure federal agents were aware. Battle told him he was keeping Homeland Security Investigations in the loop, he said.

Richardson said a human trafficking investigation must be led by a federal agency because, by definition, trafficking involves crimes committed across county, state and even national lines, and federal agents are the only ones with the ability to investigate across jurisdictional lines.

“We still have whatever we collected during that (investigation),” he said. “If feds didn’t know one thing about any massage parlors around Myrtle Beach, through The Sun News, I’m telling them, come get it. You can have all of it; you can have the names; you can have the receipts; you can have everything you want and go do a human trafficking case. There’s no statute of limitations on it.”

Keyhan agreed that human trafficking investigations are resource-intensive and that federal agents are helpful. Too often, these types of small, organized crimes are not prosecuted, she said, because they’re too difficult for a local police agency with limited resources to handle and not significant enough to warrant a federal investigation.

Scaramucci was more critical of that mindset, noting he’s never needed federal assistance to go after those profiting off illicit massage businesses.

“You can bet ... if this was a 16-year-old Caucasian girl who was kidnapped in New York and trafficked in Myrtle Beach, all of a sudden they would be all about it,” he said.

Businesses closed or just moved?

Scaramucci previously compared Horry County law enforcement’s approach of prostitution stings at the businesses to “playing whack-a-mole,” since the women would just get out of jail and be put back to work. He likened this latest effort to “kicking the can down the road.”

“You shut it down in Myrtle Beach, but it just reopened in (another city),” he said. “That’s not ending trafficking; it’s just moving it.”

The Sun News has already identified two massage parlor owners whose Myrtle Beach businesses were shut down as part of the investigation opening a new parlor elsewhere.

Xuemei Zhang, the former owner of Yuki Spa Massage in North Myrtle Beach — one of the businesses named a nuisance — is now the owner of Mei Spa in Myrtle Beach, according to its city business license.

Law enforcement officials are clearly aware of this development, as two private investigators were sent multiple times to the business — after Robison’s cover was apparently blown — attempting to solicit sex acts without much success as recently as last September, according to documents from the solicitor’s office.

AA Massage, which opened up in Florence County since the mass closures, is owned by Sam Owenby, according to the property owner. Owenby was the owner of three of the spas, including one by the same name in the North Myrtle Beach area.

Owenby, speaking with a reporter at length for the first time since the nuisance orders were filed, said he no longer runs any massage businesses and claimed he just signed the lease for the Florence business, but another woman operates it. He was also the lease holder for Yuki Spa Massage.

A North Myrtle Beach retiree, Owenby said he got into the massage business about five years ago, purchasing Oasis Spa in Little River after frequenting the business as a customer to help with his chronic back problems.

He explained that initially his girlfriend, who worked at one of his massage businesses, helped recruit employees by posting on Chinese message boards, but eventually he developed a reputation within the community as a good boss — treating employees kindly, taking them shopping and letting them sleep at his house — and he started getting employee referrals.

He noted the women often couldn’t speak much English and didn’t tend to stay in any one place for very long, typically going back to New York or Los Angeles, two primary hubs for Asian immigrant populations, needing a break after working 12- or 13-hour days, seven days per week.

Owenby said he did not approve of any prostitution occurring within his businesses, wasn’t aware it was happening and didn’t believe that what the private investigator wrote in his reports was true.

The Sun News previously detailed how Owenby posted bailed for two Asian women who were arrested at Oasis Spa during a police prostitution sting in January 2019 and then one of those same women again a few weeks later after a separate police prostitution sting at the business.

Owenby said he let that woman, 49, return as an employee because she was his girlfriend’s aunt and she promised not to do it again. But he then bought her a ticket back to China after the second arrest.

He said he didn’t know how she came to America, but was told she had previously been mistreated, abused and even jailed in China due to her religious beliefs.

“That is bad, but to me, for her to want to ruin my business — not that I think she wanted to ruin my business, I think she just wanted all the money she could get — I had no pity for her to send her back,” Owenby said.

Traffickers often target such women from rural China, who are grappling with abuse and poverty, and are promised a better life in America, including financial support for children they leave behind, say advocates.

“Most of them are immigrants, chasing a dream of financial stability in a faraway land, seeking not a prince but a steady job with decent wages,” the Polaris report states.

Owenby dismissed the notion of massage businesses being major harbingers of human trafficking, stating that he has contacts within the industry in many parts of the country, and none of them are participating in trafficking.

Promoting victim-centered investigations

Advocates including Keyhan and Anderson say that the key to obtaining better outcomes is providing more education to help shift law enforcement toward a more victim-centered approach.

ERASE Child Trafficking, a Tennessee-based nonprofit that travels around the country training law enforcement agencies in how to proactively identity and investigate human trafficking, was brought to Horry County to offer police training shortly before this investigation began. One of the listed topics was illicit massage businesses.

Sandy Sparks, the organization’s executive director, expressed severe disappointment after reading the private investigator’s report.

“The individuals encountered during this undercover investigation of multiple massage parlors highlight some of the many tragedies of human trafficking here in the U.S.; exploitation, victimization, traumatization, misidentification of victims of human trafficking, and perpetrators not being held accountable for their crimes,” she said in a statement.

“... We may never know if the (women) performing the sexual services received by the investigator were victims or potential victims of human trafficking. This investigation possibly created countless missed opportunities of help for the women performing the massages and sex acts.”

Keyhan noted that misguided investigations such as this empower traffickers, reducing the likelihood of victims reaching out for help.

“It really does also fuel not only the trauma, but the victim’s understanding of the U.S. criminal justice system and what is available to them in terms of support and help,” she said.

South Carolina has made some strides in recent years addressing human trafficking, strengthening laws and creating a statewide Human Trafficking Task Force, which actively promotes that victim-centered approach.

Kathryn Moorehead, director of the task force within the S.C. Attorney General’s Office, agreed to read a portion of the private investigator’s reports from Horry County’s investigation, but Robert Kittle, a spokesman AG’s office, later told The Sun News they were declining to comment because they weren’t involved in the investigation.

Asked why the public should believe law enforcement takes a victim-centered approach given what occurred during this investigation, Richardson responded: “I think the public understands that 20 massage parlors got closed down, so if there was human trafficking going on in Myrtle Beach (by) way of a massage parlor, it’s not anymore. Maybe more could’ve been done, but our purpose was nuisance and we got through that, we did the nuisance and now they’re in New York or Grand Rapids or some other jurisdiction (...) I hate it for them, but they only elected me to take care of Horry County and Georgetown County.”

Signs of human trafficking

Red flags that someone is a victim of human trafficking include:

• Poor living and working conditions: Unable to come and go as they wish; unpaid or paid very little; owes a large debt they’re unable to pay off.

• Poor mental health: Fearful, anxious, depressed; avoids eye contact; anxious around law enforcement.

• Poor physical health: Appears malnourished; signs of physical or sexual abuse.

• Lack of control: Few personal possessions; no bank account; unable to speak for themselves.

If you see any of these red flags, call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888.

Source: Polaris