RED LIGHT, GREEN LIGHT
NYPD busts fail to stop Market of Sweethearts
The “Market of Sweethearts” is open for business.
On Jan. 26, the NYPD boasted it had in one week shuttered a dozen massage parlors that were allegedly housing backroom bordellos along Queens’ Roosevelt Avenue, a notorious red-light district exposed in a series of exclusive Post reports.
The next day, at least a dozen women stood outside different storefronts to lure clients, according to a 27-minute YouTube clip with the caption “Still Here!”
This week, The Post again toured Roosevelt Avenue, where one bold sex worker wearing a furry white jacket and pink dress whispered in a reporter’s ear: “F--k f--k, one hundred dollars.”
Later that evening, several of her X-rated co-workers were out in the 34-degree cold attempting to entice customers — even as cops manned a mobile command center 200 feet away.
“[Police] stop them on Monday, and then they start again on Wednesday,” one 45-year-old clothing store manager, who declined to give his name for fear of retaliation, said about his raunchy neighbors.
“The police officers here, they have to . . . keep constantly doing their job,” he said. “It cannot only be one time.”
Shut and open
Sarah Gil, 21, a server at nearby La Pequeña Colombia restaurant, fretted that the ongoing influx of migrants to the Big Apple is challenging to the city’s mission to clean up the strip in the neighborhood of Corona.
“I’m going to have faith [in the city’s efforts], but a lot of immigrants are coming here, especially from Venezuela,” Gil said, echoing Mayor Adams’ comments from November on the source of the area’s surge in sex work.
“There’s always gonna be prostitution on Roosevelt Avenue.”
Councilman Francisco Moya, whose district includes Jackson Heights and Corona, claimed that a long-term plan was underway to address the illicit sex trade.
“What we’re doing here is truly creating the beginning of a real crackdown on these establishments,” Moya said.
He insisted that police and the feds had “multiple ongoing investigations” into the thoroughfares’ brothels, but declined to provide further details.
“Those that operate these types of establishments, beware,” Moya warned. “We’re coming to close you down.”
The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment.