LAPD Busts Brothel Network Run From Homes Across Southern California; Three Managers Plead, Alleged Boss Still at Large
LOS ANGELES — After an investigation spanning roughly two years, the Los Angeles Police Department has dismantled a network of brothels operated out of suburban homes across Southern California, according to an Oct. 8 report by the Los Angeles Times. A search warrant affidavit says the network ran at least 10 houses converted into brothels in the San Fernando Valley alone, and that its organizers were linked to sex-trade sites in the San Gabriel Valley, Orange County and the Inland Empire. Three house "managers" have pleaded no contest and received probation, but the person police identify as the boss behind the network has not been arrested and faces no criminal charges.
The investigation began with a 2024 call for help. Speaking in Mandarin, a woman dialed 911 and told a dispatcher she was being held against her will in a home in Sun Valley, pleading for officers to arrive quickly — if her captors caught her using a phone, she said, she would be beaten. In a search warrant affidavit, Detective Martin Pinner wrote that the three-bedroom house on Van Noord Avenue held almost no furniture or personal belongings — only lubricant, condoms and suitcases. A woman who fled the house told officers in Mandarin that she had arrived in the United States three weeks earlier, had been moved among four houses and was forced to have sex with 10 men a day; two other women inside, from China and Romania, denied they had been trafficked. The LAPD never located the woman who made the 911 call.
Investigators say the network was tied together by a call center: clients texted their age, nationality and location, and an operator texted back an address. The brothels, all in residences, operated from 9 a.m. to midnight daily and were pitched as "very private and safe." The network also maintained a website listing a price "menu" for each location, from $140 for a 20-minute "basic service" to a $300 one-hour "deluxe VIP package." Several women testified that they were recruited through WeChat, and that within the network the organizers were known only by the usernames "Cherri," "Cherish" and "Perfect."
In June 2025, detectives followed a Toyota Sienna used to collect cash, linking four more houses in North Hills, North Hollywood, San Gabriel and Rosemead. Detectives later arrested the courier at a brothel on Riverside Drive carrying nearly $10,000 in cash, some of it in envelopes labeled with brothel addresses; he has not been charged. The courier told the Times he is 63, left Qingdao, China, in 2016 to join his wife and daughter in San Gabriel, and took the $3,000-a-month pickup job to help pay his daughter's college tuition, saying he believed he was collecting massage-parlor receipts.
Three house managers have been convicted. Surveillance video showed Jiajia Fan, 38, assigning clients to women, collecting payments and passing cash to the courier; court records show that in April of this year he pleaded no contest to conspiracy to commit pandering, was sentenced to two years of probation and was ordered to undergo sex-offender treatment. In August 2025, an undercover officer was led into a house on Haskell Avenue and detectives arrested its manager, Jiwei Zhang; after Zhang was released on bail, police learned he had booked a flight out of the country and stopped him for questioning at Los Angeles International Airport, where he admitted managing the brothel and said the organizers paid his family in China about $75 a day via WeChat. He also pleaded no contest to conspiracy to commit pandering and received two years of probation. Months later, police raided a linked house on Shirley Avenue in Reseda, whose manager, Ali Alobadi, likewise pleaded no contest and received probation.
As for the boss, testimony points to a woman known only as "Perfect." "She's the boss," one woman testified. "We only know her as Perfect." In a September 2025 search warrant, Detective Pinner wrote that one suspected organizer had been identified through an investigation in Irvine: in 2024, police raided a brothel in a home on Skinner Street in Irvine, and seized phone records showed that a woman named Candy Ding was the person behind the username "Cherish" and managed the Van Noord Avenue house first discovered by police; "Darren," the name given by the man who recruited the courier, is the nickname of Ding's husband, Hongshan Wang. Court records show the couple's Van Nuys massage parlor was investigated by the LAPD in 2019, and the then-city attorney accused them in a civil lawsuit of running a "highly organized prostitution ring" through two massage businesses; a judge ordered the couple to pay the city $163,000, and their attorney denied the allegations at the time. In the current brothel case, Ding and Wang have not been criminally charged, and their attorney did not respond to the Times' request for comment. The deputy district attorney prosecuting the managers' cases also did not respond to a request for comment. (GSM, based on reporting by the Los Angeles Times)
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：洛杉矶市警察局总部大楼（市中心西一街100号）。本案由洛杉矶市警局历时约两年侦办。图片来源：Eden, Janine and Jim 摄，经 Wikimedia Commons，CC BY 2.0。Photo: Los Angeles Police Department headquarters at 100 W. 1st St. in downtown Los Angeles. Credit: Eden, Janine and Jim via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
