US Attorney's Office has potential conflict of interest in brothel case
WORCESTER - At the end of a Monday hearing for the two Massachusetts defendants facing charges for allegedly operating a high-end brothel, the judge mentioned an ex parte, or a one-side only, meeting with the prosecution about how there is a potential conflict of interest in the case. When WBZ asked Acting U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy about the conflict, he said "no comment."
But any speculation about the conflict including connection to the brothel in question is likely unfounded, according to legal analyst Jennifer Roman. "It most often is that the judge has some sort of personal relationship with one of the attorneys, and just says, 'I need to maintain my impartiality, and I don't want anything to taint or have the perception that I may not be impartial,'" she explained. "Usually that stems from having some sort of a personal relationship with one of the attorneys."
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"Clearly in a case like this, where they're saying it touches everybody in all professions, our brains go to the darkest place, which is that somebody in the U.S. Attorney's Office is implicated in this scheme in some manner, but more often than not, more likely in this case is that it's just. It's some sort of personal connection between the judge and one of the attorneys," she said.
The woman accused of operating the ring, Han Lee, as well as the man who allegedly worked for her, Junmyung Lee, were both in court on Monday. They walked into the courtroom in jumpsuits and handcuffed.
Both waived their right to a preliminary hearing, where typically some evidence would be presented. "It was a smart move, really, because it sounds like there were hundreds of people involved on many levels with this scheme or this alleged scheme, and so playing it close to the vest, both from a prosecution standpoint and from the defense side, is actually quite smart," Roman said.
Last week, prosecutors announced that they uncovered a massive high end brothel where hundreds of johns allegedly paid for sex with young Asian women in luxury apartments in Greater Boston. Since the announcement, no new information has come out about the people who were allegedly clients of the scheme, who prosecutors claim includes politicians, doctors, attorneys, and more.
This is an investigative technique, Jennifer Roman said. "I think the prosecution's putting some pressure on those people" to become confidential informants, she explained. "But somebody who doesn't come forward now and tries to hedge their bets that maybe they're not going to be implicated, or maybe they're not gonna be involved in some way – that information of who they are that probably will become public down the road, and that's a gamble for anybody who's involved in this."
Both defendants also postponed their detention hearings scheduled for Monday to Wednesday, November 22 at 2 p.m. instead.
