A millionaire banker once hailed as a financial savior to Flushing’s Chinese immigrants owns half of the buildings housing alleged brothels on prostitution-plagued 40th Road.
“There is a nucleus and we happen to be at the center of it,” Eugene Morimoto Tsai told The New York Times about his father’s Asia Bank and their burgeoning Queens real-estate business in 2006.
Now the Tsais are at the nucleus of a hooker hotbed.
Four of the eight addresses identified as alleged houses of prostitution by business owners on the block between Prince and Main streets are owned by the 42-year-old and his father, Jentai Tsai, through their Asia Plaza Corp.
Although reps for the Tsais have claimed they did not know what their tenants were up to, large numbers of fines have piled up on their properties.
The bustling commercial district — a stone’s throw from Citi Field and an MTA/LIRR station — is overrun with Asian women propositioning men on the street in plain sight.
Councilman Peter Koo and local business owners have called for an NYPD crackdown.
The elder Tsai, Chinese but raised in Taiwan, founded Asia Bank in the 1980s and backed immigrant entrepreneurs who couldn’t secure loans from American banks. Asia Bank later sold for $126 million to Cathay Bank. His son spent part of his career at Goldman Sachs.
But while the pair accumulated rank and wealth, their buildings on 40th Road racked up seamy tenants and violations.
Also...and holy hand jobs, Batman!:
NY Post
Several women busted in the sweeping Florida massage-parlor sting that snagged Patriots owner Robert Kraft came from China to Flushing to get licensed and learn the illicit sex trade, cops say.
Florida police believe workers at the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter — where the 77-year-old billionaire allegedly paid for sexual services — and other parlors nailed in the probe are part of a bustling New York-to-South Florida pipeline.
Lan Yun Ma, who ran a parlor in Vero Beach, employed women from the Queens neighborhood and once lived a five-minute walk from its 40th Road red-light district, police said.
She has been charged with human trafficking in the Florida investigation.
Ma also faced trafficking counts in Oxford, Mass., in 2012, when “three Asian females were rescued from indentured sexual servitude,” according to a report.
She previously lived around the corner from the slim strip of 40th Road in Flushing where eight brothels operate and where Post reporters were openly solicited.
Lixia Zhu — who was hit with racketeering and money-laundering counts after a raid at the Therapy Spa in Stuart — got her massage license in Flushing, Lt. Mike Dougherty of the Martin County Sheriff’s office told The Post.
He said at least a half-dozen other women arrested there told cops that they had worked in Flushing.
“The one thing they have in common is home base is in Flushing, New York,” Dougherty said. “It’s the first point these women hit. That’s where they are getting documents.”
First Bezos, now this. Queens, it's where the action is!
