Well, I never!
18 Arrested in Lucrative Prostitution Ring Out of Staten Island
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
Eighteen men and women were arrested yesterday on charges that they helped run a sophisticated prostitution ring that masked its operation behind a series of corporate fronts and escort services with names like Gentlemen's Delight, Day Dreams and Personal Touch, officials said.
Records that were seized in a search at the home of one of the ring leaders indicated that the operation brought in $1.6 million in nine months, a law enforcement official said.
Prosecutors from the State Organized Crime Task Force, working with the New York Police Department and the F.B.I., charged 16 people with enterprise corruption and two others with falsifying business records and promoting prostitution and money laundering.
About eight midlevel managers ran the ring, which operated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, using about 15 to 20 drivers to dispatch 30 to 40 prostitutes each day, officials said. In most instances, customers paid $250 for sex, sometimes using credit cards. The transactions, officials said, were processed through merchant accounts held by escort services or limousine companies, and in one instance a company that hired musical bands for weddings.
"This was a sophisticated and lucrative operation with a multitiered management structure," the state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, who oversees the task force, said in a statement. "It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring, and now its owners and operators will be held accountable."
