Police have charged 12 women they say work at 11 area massage parlors with prostitution offenses, Acting Bergen County Prosecutor Gurbir S. Grewal said Friday in a release.
The arrests followed a week-long undercover investigation and were made at massage parlors in seven municipalities on three separate days, Grewal said. He said that each person arrested worked as a masseuse and is accused of engaging in sex with customers.
Nine of the women are from Queens, N.Y., one is from Maryland and two are from Little Ferry, the acting prosecutor said. The arrests were made at four massage parlors in Edgewater, two in Fairview and one apiece in Wyckoff, Tenafly, River Edge, Little Ferry and South Hackensack.
The two women who reside in Little Ferry are Shunyu Pio Piao, 48, who worked at a spa in Little Ferry, and Mihwa Jang, 41, who worked at one of the Edgewater massage parlors targeted in the investigation, Grewal said, and the Maryland woman, Yougin Cho, 36, was arrested at a spa in South Hackensack.
A former Westwood councilman pleaded guilty to federal charges on Wednesday, confessing that he sold phony massage therapy training certificates to women who worked as prostitutes at more than two dozen massage parlors in New Jersey.
Robert W. Miller, 67, of Westwood, who resigned from public office in 2015 after seven years of service, entered the plea in federal court in Newark to a single count of using facilities in interstate commerce to promote prostitution.
As a result of the plea, Miller could face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine when he is sentenced by U.S. District Judge Claire C. Cecchi on May 19.
The defendant, bald and dressed in a gray pin-stripped suit, calmly answered a series of questions posed by the judge and a prosecutor during the hearing.
Miller admitted that for a fee of $500 to $2,500 he offered to provide a massage therapy training certificate, as well as a transcript listing classes taken and grades received, to customers seeking to obtain a state massage license without actually receiving the required training.
Besides creating the fraudulent documents, Miller admitted he was willing to provide them to the New Jersey Board of Massage and Bodywork Therapy on behalf of his customers.
Miller acknowledged that between 1997 and 2013 he created at least 50 training certificates containing false information about the classes completed and grades earned by applicants for massage licenses, and provided them to about 25 different massage parlors in Passaic, Hudson, Union and Middlesex counties.
Under questioning by Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark J. McCarren, Miller admitted that he knew many of the massage parlors were fronts for prostitution and that the phony documents allowed the workers to engage in prostitution under the guise of providing legitimate massage services.
The charges specifically refer to fraudulent certificates and transcripts that he provided for five women working as prostitutes at a massage parlor in Middlesex County in June 2013. The documents falsely claimed the workers had completed 650 hours of training through Miller’s RWM Associates business in order to facilitate their real work as prostitutes, authorities said.
Miller, who also served as a councilman in Ridgewood from 1996 to 1998, also admitted that he operated a purported advertising agency in Westwood, known as A.R.M. Enterprises L.L.C., that could place ads in newspapers for massage parlors using discreet wording that signaled that the massage parlor was also a house of prostitution.
Miller placed ads in local newspapers for a number of massage parlors that operated as prostitution businesses and told many of the owners that he would give them advance notice of any law enforcement investigations into prostitution activities at their businesses, according to the charges.
Miller, who was released on a $50,000 bond, and his public defender, Linda Foster, declined to comment after the hearing.
