Alleged madam called racketeer

The owner of a massage business is awaiting trial in state court in the first racketeering case brought by Honolulu Prosecutor Keith Kaneshiro to combat alleged prostitution.

An Oahu grand jury returned a secret indictment in June charging Biyu Situ with owning or operating an illegal business. Her trial is scheduled for March.

Racketeering is a Class B felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Situ, 47, is free after posting $100,000 bail.

Authorities have been unable to locate or arrest a second person named in the indictment, Kam Fai Chow.

The racketeering charge represents a third novel approach that Hawaii authorities have taken to address alleged prostitution over the last year. The first two failed.

In May, Honolulu police arrested and charged 16 women from several massage businesses in the Ala Moana area with sexual assault rather than prostitution. Sexual assault carries more serious penalties and requires those found guilty to register as convicted sex offenders.

Critics of the arrests said prostitutes are victims of human trafficking and that charging them with serious crimes further victimizes them. Also, defense lawyers questioned how undercover police officers could be victims of sexual assault when they presented themselves as willing participants.

Honolulu police said the arrests were the result of undercover operations conducted with the FBI and Homeland Security in response to numerous complaints about prostitution and unlicensed cosmetology and massage businesses. But when police forwarded the sexual assault cases for prosecution, Kaneshiro dismissed them, citing the inability to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt — the standard necessary for conviction.

Also last spring, state lawmakers approved legislation that renamed the offense of first-degree promotion of prostitution as sex trafficking, and adding the term “sex trafficking” to other statutes.

The Honolulu Police Department, state attorney general, Maui and Hawaii County prosecutors, and Kaneshiro opposed the changes, which they said would have made prosecuting some offenders more difficult. Kaneshiro also said sex trafficking is already covered by existing laws, and urged Gov. David Ige to veto the bill, which he did.

Defense lawyer Myles Breiner, who represents some of the women arrested in late April and early May, says the racketeering approach makes more sense than arresting women for sexual assault and is more consistent with the law. But he questioned the timing of the new tactic.

The racketeering statute has been on Hawaii’s law books since 1972.

“Why didn’t (Kaneshiro) use the law before, when he was prosecutor (a previous time), when prostitution was run by the yakuza?” Breiner asked.

State business records list Situ as running Mayflower LLC, a massage business that operated in two adjacent apartments on the 27th floor of Century Center. The apartment owners association owns the two units and leases them to a woman who lists Situ as her registered tenant. The association says Mayflower is in the business of prostitution and is trying to evict Situ, the lessee and two women who were arrested there for alleged prostitution in January 2015.

It is not Situ’s first brush with the law.

Police arrested and charged her in 2012 with prostitution and performing massages without a massage therapy license. The court dismissed the charges in 2013 because of a defect in the charging documents.

The state refiled the charges but dismissed them in 2014 after failing to take Situ to trial within the required 180 days.