Carlisle massage parlor padlocked, three charged with prostitution offenses - PennLive

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CARLISLE - The signs in Li’s Asian Massage in Carlisle said “no erotic services.” But according to customer accounts and online reviews, the regulars knew that if you were willing to pay a little extra, the signs didn’t apply.

That’s what Cumberland County detectives are alleging in a new prostitution and human trafficking case filed this week.

Li’s Asian Massage, at 300 E. High St., remained closed and padlocked Friday when a PennLive reporter drove by. Small strips of police evidence tape were affixed across the front double doors.

The owner, Chuanxia Wang, 65, is charged with felony counts of promoting prostitution, human trafficking and dealing in proceeds of unlawful activities. Two female employees are also facing misdemeanor prostitution counts.

Preliminary hearings for all three women are scheduled for next week.

Cumberland County District Attorney Sean McCormack on Friday said this week’s arrests are part of an ongoing effort by his detectives and local police to try to make Cumberland County known by human traffickers as a place to avoid.

Police said the investigation at Li’s is actually an off-shoot of a probe begun at another massage parlor in Cumberland County.

In that case, a tipster expressed concerns to police about what appeared to be a rotating cast of Asian women working and living at the massage parlor off West Trindle Road in South Middleton Township for weeks at a time, and then being replaced with others.

Police raided that parlor, GL Massage, last month, and one of the employees there disclosed she had previously worked at Li’s in Carlisle.

There, that employee said, Chuanxia Wang, whom she described as the owner of Li’s, directed her and other employees to engage in sexual acts with customers for payment.

Police then started to investigate Li’s, including interviews with customers who had been recorded coming and going from the business in recent weeks and were identified through state motor vehicle registrations.

Investigators also dove into online sites that feature customer reviews of massage parlors, and found at least two posts regarding Li’s in which customers described, getting “hand jobs” from female workers there after paying a tip beyond the “house fees” for a massage.

“Overall the massage wasn’t great, but the twofer was lots of fun,” one client wrote in July, after describing two separate instances of masturbation during a one-hour visit, followed by a hot towel clean-up.

Several of the customers tracked down by police, who were not named in the charging documents, also admitted they had paid for sexual services at the business, and after being shown pictures, identified Wang, of Newport, Perry County, and two other women, Dong Mei Liu and Yue Jun Zhao, both of Flushing, N.Y., as having provided those services.

Flushing, a part of Queens, is one of the epicenters of New York City’s largest-in-the-nation Chinese American community.

Equipped with this information, police raided Li’s on Nov. 19 and found Liu, 55, and Zhoa, 62, working there. Wang, 65, arrived on the scene during the search.

Liu and Zhao were arraigned later that day on single misdemeanor counts of prostitution.

Wang, whom state records showed had incorporated Li’s Asian Massage in February 2018, is charged with felony counts of running a corrupt organization, human trafficking and promoting prostitution.

Case filings show that Wang and her husband, identified as Ronald Wilson, are listed on the building’s lease as the renters of the property. Wilson, police said an affidavit of probable cause, denied anything illegal was occurring at Li’s, though he volunteered that he had heard GL Massage “had an issue.”

Wang is not an owner of GL Massage, though Wilson confirmed to police that Wang’s massage license was posted there, and he said she used to go there to help out when business was slow at Li’s.

Police also noted that several potential customers came into Li’s during their raid, and two agreed to be interviewed. Both admitted having received “hand jobs” at the business for an additional payment, even though signs posted at the business stated it did not provide “erotic services.”

One of those men also identified Wang, Liu and Zhou as having performed sexual acts on him for money.

Asked about the investigation associated with GL Massage, McCormack said Friday that case is continuing and “there’s potentially more charges down the road...

“I think Cumberland County is ripe for this type of crime because we have the highway system,” McCormack said, referring to the fact that three interstates pass through Cumberland, and Interstate 81 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike intersect here.

“The message that I’m trying to get out is that we’re not going to tolerate human trafficking in Cumberland County and we’re going to do what we can to root it out.”

In an unrelated case, in August 2023 county detectives raided five massage parlors operating in several West Shore communities and charged their operator, Min Dong, 55, of Camp Hill, with running a corrupt organization and other counts.

The charges against Dong are still pending.

McCormack noted that the county has also been running periodic stings to identify and arrest individuals who patronize labor/sex trafficked individuals.