You want regular massage, OK! She kneaded his muscles for a few minutes, then peeled off her dress, removed her panties and pulled out a strip of condoms. Complaints filed with the city Buildings Department show allegations of prostitution at the address, including one in November. The Post obtained shared surveillance tapes showing dozens of men entering and leaving with women, including one clad only in panties and a shirt.
One tape features a man groping a young escort from behind as the two walk up the stairs together. A woman in a puffy white coat approached a second reporter outside 40th Road — the same location as the death leap in — Saturday.
A lady died from this and nothing has happened. We need constant enforcement, so that the cost of doing business becomes too great for that business to sustain itself. He said cops go after pimps, johns and landlords who rent out rooms to brothels — while trying to get help for victimized sex workers.
In the summer of , Song Yang began frequent WeChat dialogues with a Flushing lawyer, Chen Mingli, that at first focused on acquiring permanent residency — a process that he repeatedly told her could take months and months.
Still, she fretted that her arrest history would thwart her application for a green card. Gradually, though, their conversations came to reflect the darker realities of her 40th Road realm, with sobbing emoticons peppering her messages. Good morning, Lawyer Chen, she wrote in mid-October A police officer put a gun to my head today and forced me to perform oral sex. At the insistence of a friend, she had filed a complaint with the th Precinct.
Chen assured her that the matter would not affect the status of her immigration case, and implored her to cooperate with the police. But her intense desire to avoid attention, coupled with fear of retaliation from her attacker, overshadowed everything. The police circulated a wanted poster based on a hazy photograph of the man lifted from the surveillance video.
A retired United States Marshal, who surrendered after someone mentioned him as a possible suspect, participated in a lineup. But Song Yang identified another man, wrongly, as her attacker. The case was eventually closed. Several months later, in late September , she was arrested a third time on a prostitution charge. Handcuffed, led away from 40th Road, held overnight. She explained that she had been forced to make hard decisions and that it had been difficult to suppress her feelings while married to a much older man who seemed increasingly removed from her day-to-day life.
Chen was never formally hired by Song Yang, but now his central role seemed to be to buoy her spirits. Without purpose, without direction, what meaning is there to keep on living? I used to be a woman who was very strong in her life.
I strove for perfection in everything I did. I never thought that my life would turn out this way. At the end of October, Song Yang made one last visit to Mr.
She confided that another client had badly beaten her a couple of weeks earlier — an assault she had not reported to the police — and showed him photographs of her bruised and swollen face. The tip hardly came as a revelation, since shady activities at this address had generated scores of calls over the years. To some, the building even had the aura of being cursed, following a horrific crime in , in which a deranged stalker stabbed a woman in the second-floor hallway and removed her heart and lungs.
Forty-three arrests had taken place in the building over the last decade, more than a few sex-related, the most recent that of Song Yang. Her case, which had prompted those despairing messages to the lawyer Mr.
Chen, was one of 91 massage-parlor-related arrests in the th Precinct in , and one of six along 40th Road. According to court records, none of those arrests were for pimping, solicitation or operating an unlicensed massage parlor.
A few nights after the anonymous complaint, a sergeant and a detective ended a brief surveillance by venturing into the notorious building. The only thing they found suspicious was a handwritten sign in Chinese on the second floor, which they believed to say, in effect, There are no girls on this floor; please go to the third floor. An undercover officer then telephoned a woman associated with the building who was known as SiSi. They arranged an appointment for the next evening, Saturday, Nov. On the appointed day, members of the Queens North Vice Enforcement Squad met at their base in College Point to discuss the seven locations they planned to hit that night.
The closest target became the first: the bleak building at 40th Road. The vice officers went over their safety plan.
They chose their identifying color of the day. Now they were ready. The member team headed out into the evening, unseasonably mild for late November.
They parked along Prince Street, across from the White Bear dumpling place and just short of where the one-way street bends east to become 40th Road. The team leader and two arresting officers sat in the first car, with two more arresting officers in the second car. The third vehicle was for prisoner transport. The team tested its recording device, which used Bluetooth to transmit one-way audio. No problem. The green light was given: Go.
He wore an olive-green jacket, jeans and a cap. She wore a short winter coat, a red-and-black scarf, leggings and one of her signature headbands — with a small bow that resembled a butterfly. The officer could not have known that this woman had just attempted a video chat with her younger brother, who was still asleep in China. That she had plans to fly home in December.
That she had kept her court-mandated appointments with Restore NYC, a nonprofit organization that helps foreign-born victims of sex trafficking. That her fifth and last session with Restore was four days away. She led him up the worn stairs. She gave him a peck of a kiss in the hall, and opened her apartment door. Another woman, brand-new to Flushing and known as Momo, was already occupied with a man in the second bedroom. He consented to the arrangement and, heading to the bathroom, managed to utter the code word into his transmitter that a positive — that is, illegal — agreement had been reached.
He also hoped to signal to colleagues that it was time to move in, but a wary Song Yang prevented him from having privacy, telling him to keep the bathroom door open. Once in the bedroom, Song Yang became even more suspicious. Are you a cop? No , he answered. But he complained again about the service and grabbed his hat, prepared to leave. She pushed him out and closed the door. Four officers got out and hustled to the building. The other woman, Momo, emerged naked from her bedroom to investigate the noise, but hustled back to hide when she realized it was the police.
The balcony was not equipped with surveillance cameras, leaving what happened next to the imagination. It is possible that Song Yang was hoping to escape, perhaps by reaching for a wire that ran vertically past her balcony. It is possible that she was trying to land on the protruding metal sign of the restaurant below. It is also possible that she intended to kill herself. It is fact that she hit the pavement directly in front of the undercover officer she had pecked on the cheek just five minutes earlier.
His supervisors say that the officer remains shaken to this day. Later that night, while Song Yang was lying in a hospital bed with multiple fractures to her face, head and body, the police placed her under arrest. In the dark of an early December morning, two weary travelers shuffled through the multicultural scrum of Kennedy Airport. One was a tall, reedy man named Song Hai; the other, a slight, older woman named Shi Yumei, whose protracted weeping on the long flight from Beijing had concerned an attendant.
A telephone call from her husband several nights earlier had disrupted everything. Song Yang is dead , he had said. Police say she jumped from a building. Her distraught parents had telephoned their other child, Song Hai, to deliver words so heavy that he dropped his smartphone, cracking its glass.
Not accepting what he heard, he sent a WeChat message to his sister that depicted a pair of clinking coffee mugs, along with a gentle request to please call home. The mother and brother spent their first two weeks in Flushing tending to the affairs of death.
Then, on a dismal day of late December rain, they made their way to the Chun Fook funeral home, a few blocks from 40th Road. Though some had recommended a modest ceremony, the family had insisted on a more elaborate service, in a spacious room with a chandelier.
The dark wood coffin sat at the front before rows of chairs that would remain empty. No women from 40th Road. No Lao Li. One minister delivered prayers in English, while another repeated those prayers in Mandarin. The ceremony ended with the reading from the Book of Common Prayer that we are all from dust, and to dust we shall return.
Alleluia, the mourners mumbled. Suicide was not possible, he reasoned. Darker forces might be at play. He had already begun his own investigation. One snowy night soon after arriving from China, Mr. Their plan was to break into her apartment, collect her belongings — and, if possible, retrieve any surveillance video. Song, a learning specialist by trade, and Mr. Hayes, a computer consultant, crept up the 50 tiled steps to the fourth-floor door, which was secured with a locked chain.
Fearing the noise of the hammer and small acetylene torch they had planned to use, Mr. Hayes hustled to a Home Depot a mile away and returned with a hacksaw. After a few minutes of sawing, the chain gave way, and the two men pushed open the dull-gray door to enter the setting of a life interrupted.
The police had taken the surveillance equipment, but everything else made it seem as if Song Yang might return at any minute. In the two bedrooms, rumpled sheets. In the kitchen, a Pepsi and a half-empty bottle of Bacardi, sliced carrots and apples, and the black chair that Mr. Song recognized as the one his sister sat in while video-chatting with her family. In the living room, a raised table with a red curtained skirt, on which sat a CD player, a pair of sunglasses and a lucky cat figurine.
Placed neatly on the floor, a pair of pink shoes. On the snow-dusted front balcony, a broom, an upside-down bucket, a stool, a few plastic bags containing fruit and eggs. And, just beyond, the beckoning lights and shadows of the street below.
Song Hai returned often to 40th Road, a spectral presence in his dark hooded coat and black cap, a cigarette cupped in his hand. He saw himself as a lone-wolf investigator, working to prove that corrupt officers of this strange city had thrown Song Yang over the railing. That his sister had been sexually assaulted by a police officer. That she had filed a complaint. That the subsequent police lineup was fixed to protect the assailant. Then it was payback, which explained why, of all the women along 40th Road, only Song Yang was arrested in September, and was about to be arrested again in late November.
But Mr. Song was already beginning to believe that nearly every corner of the American criminal justice system — from the police to the medical examiner — was colluding to hide the truth. He patrolled downtown Flushing. He interrogated women and shopkeepers. When you saw the photo, SiSi Song Yang was no longer alive. Absolutely Confidential … Her brother Song Hai. The dozens of responses yielded little. And do you have information? His sleuthing occasionally paid off. One evening, amid the Main Street crush, Mr.
Excited, Mr. Song crossed the street and, right at the Roosevelt Avenue intersection, near the subway entrance, grabbed the man by the arm. Song recalled what happened next:. My name is not Li. Song waved down a passing police car, as a crowd gathered and the agitated man in his grip implored him not to involve the authorities. The two officers understood Mr. They separated the men, and Lao Li floated away in the rush-hour stream.
Later that evening, an angry Lao Li telephoned Mr. In the conversation that Mr. The request came as prosecutors across the country are rethinking their views of prostitution. It is no longer viewed entirely as a crime, but often as a consequence of sex trafficking.
On Tuesday, de Blasio urged state lawmakers to decriminalize sex work and he unveiled police reforms that would review procedures the New York City Police Department uses to identify and investigate human trafficking.
The city plans to focus on pre-arrest models, such as offering "community-centered services to sex workers without conducting arrest as a condition of receipt," as opposed to offering services after arrests, as is the current model.
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