According to the nonprofit anti-trafficking organization Polaris Project, there were more than 9, illicit massage parlors in the United States in , mostly staffed by Chinese women, aged , with at least one child in China. Their struggle is often one for family and dignity. The building that houses Queens Criminal Court, like the city of New York itself, is usually filled with a mixture of men and women of all ages and races. But when I went downstairs to courtroom AP-8 one morning last April, I found myself facing a group of 25 women, mostly Chinese. The Chinese women looked plain. They had no makeup.

Amy points to the sign scrawled in black magic marker, Scotch-taped below an anatomical drawing of the human form. We're in a small, dark room on the second floor of a brick building on Roosevelt Avenue in Flushing, Queens, the heart of the Asian massage industry in America. Amy, a year-old massage worker—her name, like that of others from the industry who appear in this story, has been changed to protect her identity—is clad in a not particularly seductive outfit: a canary yellow t-shirt and black leggings, a royal blue visor atop her head, black hair pulled back in a ponytail. I'd read on RubMaps, the so-called Yelp of massage parlors —a subscription website where people provide detailed reviews of their sexual experiences at "rub and tugs"—that happy-ending massages occur here. I'm wondering if Amy provides them, but the sign isn't promising. In fact, Amy is insistent that she doesn't offer massage either, but "body work," a distinction that may be unimportant to customers, but is essential to her. Many massage workers don't have licenses, and so refer to massage offerings by euphemism because operating a massage parlor in New York without a license is a class E felony that can result in up to four years behind bars.

Skip to content. Editor's note: This story has been updated with a Feb. Prosecutors painted a squalid picture of what went on inside the little house on busy Russell Street: The Asian women were kept there night and day, providing sexual services for a fee, sleeping where they worked and rarely venturing outside except to take out the trash. The customers themselves led law enforcement to the address in , by writing detailed reviews of the services they received at Hadley Massage Therapy — services that went far beyond massage.

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