Billionaire Robert Kraft’s lawyers claim police clearly violated the law when they secretly planted cameras inside a massage parlor. But it wasn’t the first time cops have used the controversial tactic.
In South Florida, the police have used court-approved warrants to spy on and record private rubdowns for prostitution stings. Officers in Boca Raton used secret cameras for similar massage-parlor crackdowns at least twice — in 2007 and 2014, charging dozens of johns and madams, records show.
State and federal laws prevent law enforcement agencies from using secret cameras for investigations that are specifically limited to prostitution. This has set the stage for Kraft’s lawyers, who’ve turned his criminal charges into a test case for whether cops can legally carry out such “sneak and peek” operations.
The stealthy surveillance has raised the issue of privacy against a national backdrop of people worrying about high-tech government snooping.
“It is relatively unusual to be physically intruding covertly into a home or a business to set up a camera,” said Jonathan Witmer-Rich, a law professor at Cleveland State University who has done extensive research on the warrants. “It certainly happens, it’s happened for a long time, but I think that’s fairly unusual.”
In the Boca Raton cases, no celebrities were involved and hardly anyone raised a fuss over the covert filming. And those are just the times when “sneak and peek warrants” were revealed through news accounts of massage parlor busts.
Yet now there’s a furor over the misdemeanor charges faced by Kraft, the 77-year-old New England Patriots owner over his visits in January to the Orchids of Asia Spa in Jupiter.
Battling secret cameras
Many of the legal questions surrounding the Kraft case remain unanswered: Did the Jupiter police go too far with their sneak-and-peek tactic to go after prostitution?
Or was their warrant legal because police also were investigating the possibility of human trafficking, with women brought to the U.S. from China and forced to perform sex acts?
A review by the South Florida Sun Sentinel reveals some key findings:
— The use of delayed-notice or sneak-and-peek warrants has increased over the past decade in South Florida, statistics show. But it’s still used in a small percentage for sex cases compared with drug busts, while numbers of massage parlor-specific warrants are unknown. Overall, requests for seek-and-peek warrants are not something judges see every day or even every week.
— The Boca Raton massage parlor cases with the sneak-and-peek warrants were typically resolved through agreements between prosecutors and those who were charged, records show. With some exceptions, prosecutors dropped solicitation counts after defendants completed minimal punishments such as community service and paid small fines.
— Only one person charged in the Boca cases went as far as to file a challenge over the sneak-and-peek warrant, raising objections similar to Kraft’s. Prosecutors dropped the charge before there ever was a hearing.
— None of the people charged in the Boca cases ever tried to ask the court to seal the videos, making the tapes available through public records requests. That’s completely different from the vigorous fight by Kraft’s legal team to prevent the videos from ever being obtained by the news media. Kraft’s lawyers labeled them “pornography.”
— Massage-parlor stings are set up every few years in South Florida, usually resulting in charges against people who work there or go there for sexual services. In Hallandale, Hollywood and other cities, cops even have gotten naked, worn wires, and used other undercover techniques to target criminal activity.
Stepping ‘over the line’?
It’s the use of secret cameras that raise the most red flags for criminal defense lawyers.
Several attorneys who defended men caught in the 2007 and 2014 Boca Raton massage parlor stings said they would have liked to challenge the warrants back then. But their clients advised the lawyers against it.
“I would love to litigate these things, because I think some of the things that law enforcement did in these cases step over the line,” said Michael Salnick, who got a prostitution misdemeanor dismissed against former Coconut Creek Police Officer James Yacobellis.
Charged in the 2014 case, Yacobellis avoided prosecution by quickly agreeing to community service and other minor requirements. But he also lost his job over the episode, with the video of his visit to O Asian Wellness Spa and Massage released to the public.