BEYOND MASSAGES
PARLOURS COME UNDER MICROSCOPE
The sign on the wall reads “Massages: ½ hour $45, 1 hour $60, 1 hour $80.” That’s all. It doesn’t specify what an extra $20 per hour gets you.
The room with the sign is small. There’s space for a couch, tea and coffee-making tools, and a table with some magazines on it. The men’s magazine Maxim is a popular choice.
In one corner is a door, leading to a hallway with several other doors off it. The place is dimly lit and smells of incense.
The room described above doesn’t exist. Not exactly. It’s a composite of about 10 massage parlours in Calgary.
The Herald visited various parlours around the city to get an insight into the industry following the widely publicized closure of a parlour in southeast Calgary, allegedly serving as a front for prostitution.
Paradise Spa in Dover had been drawing complaints from neighbours for more than a decade. Its eventual closure came via a joint investigation between police and a provincial task force. The task force — Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods — ordered the property closed for 30 days. That rendered the lease with any business on site null and void. Paradise was out.
The move drew exultations from nearby residents, who were understood to be “ecstatic” to be rid of what they considered a den of depravity. Investigators spoke of a protracted closure process and a job well done. Police said the case was a warning to other parlours operating illegally.
Prostitution is legal in Canada but solicitation is not. As in many places, Calgary’s sex industry gets by on discretion and mutual understanding.
Except when it doesn’t. Police Staff Sgt. Robert Rutledge said Paradise Spa offered sex to undercover officers “on several occasions” during the investigation.
“They were offering sex for money instead of legitimate massages. It’s basically a common bawdy house.”
“Offering” is the key word. If consenting adults have sex, and money happens to change hands — no problem.
“There has to be an offer of sex,” Rutledge said. “(If not) then there’s no offence.”
And, so, you’re frequently presented with a small sign on the wall offering a massage and an hourly rate.
Those rates are surprisingly standardized, with $80 an hour the generally agreed maximum.
Parlour locales vary, though. Most common is the strip mall unit with tinted windows, but a converted house on a residential street will do. More discreet customers can
They were offering sex for money instead of legitimate massages. It’s basically a common bawdy house POLICE STAFF SGT. ROBERT RUTLEDGE
frequent second-storey suites in nondescript commercial buildings, entering, if they’re lucky, through a communal, unmarked side entrance.
Parlours were, perhaps unsur- prisingly, largely unwilling to talk to the Herald.
One massage parlour masseuse, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, was diplomatic about the business’s public face:
“When it comes to our advertising, the things we put out there are our hours of business, where we’re located, our phone number and our website.”
This process is easily circumvented, though. A quick Internet search unearths a website that lists more than 20 “erotic massage parlours” in the city with user reviews rating their services in explicit detail.
The SCAN team came across simi- lar information while working the Paradise case, and were stunned at how exposed the consumer side of the industry allowed itself to be.
“We were all just shaking our head thinking, ‘They actually talk about this stuff?’ ” investigator Glenn Stuart said.
“It is (brazen) and it’s because they really don’t have much fear.”
The masseuse dismisses any notion of a bold, criminal disregard in the industry — customer-driven Internet talk has nothing to do with them.
“The actual business isn’t putting that out there,” she said. “What other people put out there is totally out of our control.”
That could feed public misconceptions, she said, as could publicity around a case like Paradise Spa. Especially if it included comments from unhappy residents opposed to a parlour in their neighbourhood on principle.
“If it was just the unknown — ‘I just don’t like place’ — and they actually don’t know, then that’s not fair.
“Not everybody is the same. It’s like judging a book by its cover and that’s where it gets annoying in a way because every place is different.
“You’re targeted no matter what. You’re judged no matter what.”
Police contend they have good reason to arrive at such judgments.
“I get complaints from the public every week about somebody going in for a massage and they get propositioned for sexual services,” Rutledge said.
“There’s so many complaints I just don’t have the manpower to assign investigators to it.”
Lack of resources is one thing, but the Paradise closure came 12 years after it was first brought to police attention. How did it stay in business so long?
Quite easily, as it turns out. If the heat came on, all Paradise had to do was apply for a change of ownership. As long as the new owner passed police and fire checks and a health inspection, their licence to operate was approved. If employees faced charges, new ones were hired.
“They just keep changing the names, changing the owners, and city hall has to start all over,” Stuart said.
“They consider everybody legitimate until they’re proven not to be. There’s a flaw there. I don’t know if city hall can fix it.”
The presumed innocent approach leaves the city essentially hamstrung, even if they suspect misdoing.
“We can’t stop change of ownerships — if you want to sell your business, you sell your business,” Calgary’s chief licence inspector Kent Pallister says.
“The new operator, if … they’ve done nothing wrong we don’t hold up their licence.”
The city is not naive, though, he says, and does what it can when repeat offenders surface.
“If the place keeps flipping we can … meet with the new owner, see who they’re going to employ, ask ‘Do you realize you’re taking over a business the police just raided?’
“Sometimes (the new owner) will promise us the world.”
Paradise Spa was a textbook case, Pallister says, switching owners as soon as the city voiced any concerns. It even had a fresh ownership change application pending as it was forced to shut down.
The city is cracking down on the industry. In January, Calgary tightened its bylaw on what constitutes a massage therapy business.
Practitioners need a qualification with at least 2,000 hours training to be a licensed massage therapist.
The previous minimum was 250 hours. Anyone below the new level is now considered a “body rub” practitioner.
Those businesses cannot be within 300 metres of each other, cannot operate out of a home and must register all employees with the city.
No other business in Calgary has to meet such strict criteria.
“But, a gai n, criminal organizations are smart,” Pallister says.
“If we come up with a new bylaw, sometimes they will alter their activity to try to get around that, too.
“If you look at (Paradise Spa) as an example, we had to treat every new applicant fairly and we did, so they ended up getting a licence and
We just need to continue to work together to shut these places down faster POLICE STAFF SGT. ROBERT RUTLEDGE
over and over the licensees got in trouble.
“We tried to hold hearings, hold them accountable, do some bylaw charges. But if there’s a controlling mind behind the scenes trying to misuse things, it is very difficult.” Rutledge agrees. The three-way effort between SCAN, city licensing and police in the Paradise case is a template for future cases, he said, and could neutralize the ownership-change trick.
“We just need to continue to work together to shut these places down faster when we’re getting all the complaints. We probably just need to communicate better ... because people will call the city or they’ll call us or they’ll call SCAN.”
The untold story is the women who work in the parlours. One employee is facing charges in the Paradise case.
Stuart said an employee, he’s unsure if it’s the same one, arrived at work when SCAN was on site shutting Paradise Spa down last week.
She was “thrilled” her lease at the property was void.
“She said to me, ‘That means I don’t have to keep paying?’ She wanted to hug me because she was getting out of it.”
Human trafficking is not a widespread problem among sex workers in Calgary massage parlours, police say, but it is surfacing more often in the online industry and with escort agencies.
Julie Kaye, sociology professor at Ambrose University College and research adviser to ACT Alberta, says the exploitation issue has triggered a nationwide debate on the legal status of prostitution.
“The challenge is when we hear that human trafficking is a problem, the automatic thing we want to do is criminalize (the industry involved) but we’ve seen in a number of different trafficking response that that type of criminalization tends to affect the people who are most vulnerable.”
The R. vs. Bedford case challenging the country’s prostitution laws is currently before the Supreme Court of Canada. A decision is pending.
“(The) two sides of that debate have been so polarized in those views they’ve had trouble coming to the table,” Kaye said.
“We need to have a real conversation that looks at those rights.”