Milk, bread and happy endings: The illegal brothel hiding on your local shopping strip

ON A typical suburban shopping strip, a massage parlour is about to get a visit from a brothel buster. Warning: Explicit content.

Brothels posing as massage parlours are spreading “at an alarming rate”.

WARNING: Explicit content

ON A typical suburban shopping strip somewhere in southwest Sydney, a massage parlour is about to get a visit from a brothel buster.

In the window it advertises “beauty”, “reflexology” and “relaxation”, but inside, 50 metres from the local Coles, Woolies and BWS, punters are receiving the gamut of sexual services. Luckily for them, the business even offers health fund rebates.

It’s just one of countless illegal brothels masquerading as legitimate massage parlours that have become the bane of local councils throughout NSW, some of whom have spent tens of thousands of dollars on private investigators in a bid to shut down rogue operators.

“They might do something like touch your genitals and sort of coax you — you know, ‘Do you like that? Do you like that?’, that sort of thing,” said private investigator James*, speaking to news.com.au around the corner from the massage parlour.

“And they might say for example, ‘Another $50 I can sucky-suck.’ Sometimes you need to ask for it, and they will either say yes or no, and if they say no, sometimes they’re just feeling you out.

“If you’re not a regular there and they haven’t seen you before they might say no, but as soon as you start flashing some cash they might give in. I’ve had places where they absolutely refused and said no sex. So they’ve given masturbation — no blow job, just masturbation, happy ending, but no sex — even when I’ve thrown $400 cash to a girl, in closed doors, no one would have known.”

Earlier this year, the NSW government shot down a proposed new brothel licensing regime that local councils argued would have made it easier to combat the thriving illicit trade. A parliamentary committee recommendation to develop a special police unit which would ensure brothels are licensed, and don’t have foreign sex workers, was rejected by the Baird Government.

The inquiry heard evidence that illegal “massage parlours” offering sexual services were spreading through Sydney “at an alarming rate”, with criminal networks believed to be operating in the industry and workers being exploited.

An illegal brothel in Malvern.

In rejecting the proposal, Fair Trading Minister Victor Dominello said cracking down on the industry could risk recriminalising sex work. Sex workers had campaigned against the proposed changes.

Local Government Association NSW president Keith Rhoades said that meant the “ridiculous state of affairs in which councils are forced to waste ratepayers’ money hiring private investigators to go undercover and actually buy sex from prostitutes to obtain the necessary proof to launch a prosecution” would continue.

“In my experience, nearly every job I have done has involved Asian females,” James said. “I don’t know if it would be called sex trafficking — I don’t know the legalities behind it. In a lot of cases their English isn’t great, so it would appear to me they’re foreigners.”

A former NSW police officer who left in the mid-’90s in the wake of the Wood Royal Commission — the Commission “changed a lot of things in the police, so I felt it was time to get out”, he said — James divides his time between surveillance, undercover work, and the occasional brothel job.

His family knows his line of work, but “not all facets of what I do”. “But my family also know not to discuss my work,” he said. “How many [brothel jobs] I’ve done, that’s not something I need to disclose.

“How often do they come up? They’re quite regular for certain councils. It depends on the council and what their concerns are about a particular premises. Anything close to a school is going to be a concern — even if it’s legal they’re not going to want it there.

“We see a lot of it. I don’t know if it’s increasing or not. I do it but it’s not my main thing, but there are people that will only do [brothel work].”

James said the work was usually conducted on behalf of councils but sometimes on behalf of private owners to determine whether a premises is being illegally used.

“They engage us to go in there, try and seek a sexual service for payment, and if that’s the case then we put that into an affidavit or if required go to court, whatever the case may be,” he said.

Because the legal definition of “brothel” requires there to be more than one prostitute to be using the premises at any one time, sometimes private investigators will send in three people at once, or within minutes of each other.

A massage parlour in Queensland.

“If we’ve got three people there all obtaining a service at the same time, well then clearly there are more than two workers there,” he said.

James added that he wasn’t concerned about any potential organised crime elements. “That’s not something we get involved with. Police investigate crime, we don’t investigate crime. We deal with private inquiry, mostly involving common law or insurance type matters.

“I’m not shutting [anything] down. I’m only there getting information covertly. I don’t go in there with guns blazing saying, ‘Right, we’re shutting this place down.’ That’s not my job. I go in there looking just like an everyday person.”

Last year, news.com.au spoke to John*, another private investigator who exclusively does brothel work. He said in his experience, “if you looked hard enough, you might be able to find a massage parlour that doesn’t offer sexual services”, but James disagrees that illegal brothels are that prevalent.

“I’d say most of them are probably legit,” he said. “But it depends on the type of massage. Anybody that’s doing physio, they’re going to be pretty clean cut. But a lot of these type of places that we’re doing today, I’d hazard a guess and say they probably aren’t even trained in massage.”

James, however, is keen to emphasise the broad nature of private investigation. “Most people, if you tell them you’re a private investigator, they assume you’re hiding behind a tree, following somebody or watching out of the shadows,” he said.

“It’s a lot more than just surveillance. I do a lot of everything. The bread and butter work is insurance work, but I don’t get pigeonholed into a particular area. My favourite is actually a lot of undercover work, which is probably a little bit more specialised.

“Undercover can mean a lot of different things, but I do a lot of work where I’m required to go into places, businesses, and try to establish certain facts. A competitor of a business might want to know certain things — a lot of trademark-type inquiries involve undercover work.”

So it’s an interesting line of work, then. “It certainly is,” he said.

James heads into the massage shop, but emerges again shortly after. “Bit of bad luck, actually,” he said, coming out as a young Asian man entered the door behind him. “They’re booked out. Gotta make an appointment with these guys. Who knows? Maybe they’re legit.”

They weren’t — he ultimately got the service on a later visit.

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*Names have been changed