The cameras were secretly recording New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft both times the billionaire showed up at a day spa to solicit sex, police say.
Investigators said they surreptitiously watched Kraft and others last month, thanks to the handful of cameras they hid inside the Orchids of Asia Day Spa, a massage parlor in Jupiter.
After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. expanded the use of secret surveillance in the war on terror. But the tactic has spilled over to infiltrating other crimes, most recently the alleged sex acts at the Jupiter business.
In such cases, so-called sneak-and-peek warrants let authorities access private property so the government can secretly do a search without notifying people under investigation.
But legal experts say the police likely have taken an unprecedented step by hiding cameras on private property for an investigation into prostitution and human trafficking. Celeste Higgins, a University of Miami law professor, said she never saw a sneak-and-peek warrant during her 25 years as a federal public defender. “It’s a very rare thing to have,” she said.
And when these types of searches “get used for a common crime — quite frankly, as insignificant as basic prostitution — it’s very, very troubling,” she said. “That means there is no limit when they could use” it.
“Putting devices into locations is really the ultimate invasion,” she said. “How is this a terrorism case?”
Police justify their use of the cameras because they sought to crack down not only on prostitution, but the egregious crime of human trafficking. And they said the cameras helped them ensnare two dozen men on charges of soliciting sex. Perhaps the highest-profile of those charged is Kraft, 77, who this week pleaded not guilty to soliciting prostitution.
Jonathan Witmer-Rich, a former federal public defender, said there’s a privacy concern if authorities didn’t have a valid reason for a covert search.
But if it’s being done to stop human trafficking, as police say, a prosecutor could argue it’s legally justified, said Witmer-Rich, who is now a professor at Cleveland State University’s Cleveland-Marshall College of Law.
A human-trafficking case is “much more serious, obviously,” Witmer-Rich said. And “from that perspective, it does seem like an important enough investigation to use this tool.”
Approved for surveillance
Although the sneak-and-peek warrants have been previously used, particularly for drug stings and fraud cases, they became more common with the blessing of the Patriot Act after the 9/11 terror attacks, said Professor Mark Dobson, of Nova Southeastern University’s College of Law.
Although the intent of the Patriot Act was to combat national threats of terrorism, “it’s quite natural that anytime law enforcement is given a tool, they are going to look at what they’re given and ask, ‘What can we use this for?’” he said.
Jupiter police decided on using this type of warrant to solidify their investigation, one of the last steps in their monthslong investigation that included searching dumpsters for evidence.
Officers first were tipped off to allegations of illegal activity at the Orchids of Asia Day Spa by detectives at the Martin County Sheriff’s Office, who had their own investigations into “prostitution and possible human trafficking” at spas in their area, according to a police report.
Jupiter police began keeping a close watch of Orchids of Asia in November. Detectives monitored who went in and out of the business, and how long they stayed. They noticed how the customers were only men, even though the spa offered services for women.
Then they sent in a state Department of Health inspector, who found evidence suggesting the Asian women who worked there also were living there, because they had beds, medicine and clothing there.
“Obviously our concern in this investigation centers around victims of human trafficking,” Jupiter Police Chief Daniel Kerr said at a Jan. 22 news conference.
Cops went dumpster-diving in the trash bins outside, finding ripped papers that they pieced back together to figure out clients’ names, as well as the services and methods of payment. They also found napkins wet with bodily fluids, they said.
On Jan. 10, cops began pulling over men on traffic violations as they were leaving the business, who then admitted the services they received. On Jan. 15, Jupiter police next obtained a judge’s approval for their warrant, the details of which are unknown because it remains sealed.
Relying on the warrant, police hid cameras within the spa-treatment rooms and began noting what was caught on cameras two, three, four and five, according to the report. For five days in January, the police used the cameras to watch dozens of men take off their clothes and participate in sexual activity at the massage parlor, according to the report.
Investigators noted every detail: the timestamp when men took off their clothes, and everything illicit that happened afterward, according to records.
Kraft, who lives in Massachusetts and has a home in Palm Beach, denies the allegations against him and wasn’t arrested. He received a copy of a court summons through his attorney, according to a prosecutor.
Michael Edmondson, executive assistant to Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg, said the men arrested were charged with solicitation.
Sex trafficking-related charges for others could come later, he said. Accused of owning or managing the Jupiter massage parlor were two women, Hua Zhang, 59, of Winter Garden, and Lei Wang, 40, for whom no address was given.
Prosecutors have “not filed formal charges in regards to madams or individuals who were arrested for the business that was being run,” Edmondson said. That’s still under investigation, he said.
Challenging the police
The crackdown extends beyond the Jupiter spa, which was shut down. Multiple agencies also closed nine other spas from Martin County to Orlando, leading to charges against hundreds of men.
Some of the men’s attorneys will dispute the legality of the warrants.
The act of recording inside these spas “is a shocking affront to the personal privacy of the plaintiffs, is an insult to the decency of our society and is an unprecedented abuse of police powers,” Richard Kibbey, the Stuart-based lawyer representing some of the defendants, wrote in a recent court filing to stop the public release of the videos.
Defense attorney Marc Shiner, whose partner is representing one of the spa business owners in Martin County, argued secretly recorded videos violate the privacy of both the defendants and the alleged victims.
The police, he argued, “were watching it live as it was occurring.”