On a seedy stretch of highway in New Orleans East, business had slowed to a crawl on a recent weeknight at the ambiguously named Tokyo Modeling. Two middle-aged women clad in skimpy bustiers surveyed a pair of visitors through a bolted glass door before welcoming them into an outer room dotted with knickknacks and Asian decor, including a lucky cat statue with a swinging hand. Near the entrance stood an ATM machine, a reminder that all services here are purchased in cash.
No names and few words were exchanged before the would-be patrons β reporters for The New Orleans Advocate β were led separately to private, dimly lit rooms with low-slung beds. Massage parlors that offer services well beyond backrubs are not unique to New Orleans, a city steeped in the lore of Storyville that retains a reputation for sexual excess.
Though almost universally regarded by law enforcement as shady, the establishments have proved resistant to regulation, vetting their clientele to weed out undercover cops and hiring high-end defense attorneys to wage their legal battles.
Facing a well-publicized shortage of officers, the New Orleans Police Department has sharply curtailed vice investigations as officers grapple with huge backlogs of emergency calls that have lengthened response times. In interviews, several veteran law enforcement officials said they are confident that erotic massage parlors remain a barely veiled front for prostitution, based on a host of investigations years ago that combined federal and local resources.
But in a time of diminished manpower, certain nonviolent crimes have been relegated to the back burner. The New Orleans Advocate reviewed five-plus years of police activity at 10 erotic massage parlors around the city identified by law enforcement officials in years past or, more recently, in online forums, as houses of prostitution.
