...when State Attorney Dave Aronberg conducted a news conference about the case, he downplayed Kraft and all the other men who’d been criminally charged, insisting this wasn’t about “lonely old men or victimless crimes.”
Instead, Aronberg said, it was about human trafficking, an “evil in our midst.”
"It's up to all of us to be the eyes and ears against human trafficking," Aronberg told the media. "If you see something, say something. That's the good that will come out of this.”
But for former police detective John Rode, founder of the nonprofit Global Children's Rescue, which helps save victims of human trafficking, there's something about the investigation that doesn't sit well. He questions why police officers, after installing cameras, watched the women committing dozens of sex acts over five days and did nothing to stop them. If these women were truly forced into sexual slavery, as police allegedly suspected, it would be tantamount to watching repeated rapes in order to bust the customers on misdemeanor charges.
"The number one concern should have been to rescue the victims," Rode says. "How could they look at this case as these women being victims and then watch the victims perform sex with the customers? It’s like letting a robbery occur and not doing anything."
No charges of human trafficking at the spa have resulted from the investigation. Veteran defense attorney Jamie Benjamin says if the real reason for the investigation was human trafficking, the placement of cameras in the massage rooms is suspect. He notes investigators had already established prostitution was happening inside the spa; witnessing the actual acts would not help build a trafficking case. For that, they should have placed the cameras in other areas of the spa to catch interaction between the women and alleged captors and bosses. It's another indication the Jupiter investigation might have really been about "lonely old men and victimless crimes" all along, Benjamin says.
"They are going to say that’s how you build a case," Benjamin says of the video recording. "But you’re utilizing investigative techniques and hiding the real reason you’re doing it. If you’re honest with the courts, those courts may not have given them the warrants to get their 'sneak-and-peeks.'"
Benjamin is referring to the sneak-and-peek warrant used in the Orchids of Asia case, which allowed investigators to install the cameras secretly in the first place (using a fabricated bomb scare at the business to get inside). Use of these warrants became widely available to law enforcement as a result of the Patriot Act (an irony perhaps not lost on Kraft); they were meant to be used in terrorism cases. They are extremely rare in Asian-spa investigations...
