The woman didn’t have much time to talk.
Speaking in Mandarin, she told a police dispatcher she was being held against her will in a Sun Valley home. She pleaded for officers to arrive quickly. If her captors caught her using a phone, she said she’d be beaten.
The call for help in 2024 ended up pulling back the curtain on what a Los Angeles Police Department detective called a “spider web” of brothels that operated in plain sight throughout the San Fernando Valley. They were set up in nondescript suburban homes, often shielded by hedges or fences. Customers were told the operation prized discretion and safety.
In local government and law enforcement circles, the conversation around prostitution is often focused on infamous corridors such as Figueroa Street in South Los Angeles or Holt Boulevard in Pomona. Sex workers — some of them minors — walk the streets in revealing clothes and high heels. These “blades” are often violent. Women are forcibly trafficked and raped. Customers are robbed. Rivalries between pimps can spill into gunfights.
But the network uncovered in the San Fernando Valley suggests another kind of prostitution is thriving behind closed doors.
The brothels were linked by what police described as a “call center.” A client would send his age, nationality and location in a text message, and the call center operators would reply with an address, according to screenshots of the exchanges reviewed by The Times.
“We have many places to recommend you the best girls wherever you go, massage parlors, hotels, houses,” an operator wrote to an undercover officer.
The network included at least 10 residential brothels in the San Fernando Valley, but its organizers were also linked to sex operations in the San Gabriel Valley, Orange County and the Inland Empire, according to a search warrant affidavit.
Several women testified they were recruited through the Chinese social media app WeChat, where the ring’s shadowy organizers were known only by their usernames: “Cherri,” “Cherish” and “Perfect.”
It’s possible they were aliases of the same person. Whoever is overseeing the network has so far managed to elude arrest.
‘Very private and safe’
LAPD officers arrived within minutes of the 911 call. Inside the three-bedroom house on Van Noord Avenue, they found little furniture or personal effects — only lubricant, condoms and suitcases, Det. Martin Pinner wrote in a search warrant affidavit.
A woman had fled the house when police arrived. Speaking in Mandarin, she said she’d come to the United States three weeks earlier. She said she had been shuttled between four homes and forced to have sex with 10 men a day, Pinner wrote. Two other women at the home, who were from China and Romania, denied being trafficked.
The LAPD never found the woman who’d called 911, Pinner wrote in the affidavit.
Detectives seized the home’s surveillance system, which showed a man named Jiajia Fan assigning customers to the women, collecting payment and turning over the money to a courier, Pinner wrote.
Fan, 38, pleaded no contest in April to conspiring to commit pimping. He was put on probation for two years and ordered to undergo sex offender therapy, court records show. He could not be reached for comment.
Pinner searched the Van Noord Avenue address on Google and found a prostitution advertisement. An undercover officer dialed the associated phone number, and the person who answered said he could buy sex at four other homes in North Hollywood, Reseda and Encino.
Call centers are common in prostitution networks, Pinner wrote. Usually operated by women so “as not to make the customers nervous,” they answer texts and calls from a bank of cellphones, he wrote.
Another officer texted the hotline and received a detailed message. The network’s brothels were open 9 a.m. to midnight and operated out of homes, the message said, and they were “very private and safe.”
The network had a website with “menus” for each location, Pinner wrote. Options ranged from $140 for a 20-minute “basic service” to a $300, one-hour “deluxe VIP package.”
In June 2025, detectives had staked out an address listed on the website — a house on Saticoy Street shielded by tall hedges — when they saw a Toyota Sienna pull up, Pinner wrote. A man exited the home and handed the driver an envelope.
Detectives tailed the minivan to four other homes in North Hills, North Hollywood, San Gabriel and Rosemead. At each location, a man emerged and either handed the driver an envelope or spoke with him for a few seconds.
Detectives arrested the courier at a brothel on Riverside Drive, according to a police report. He was carrying nearly $10,000, some of it stuffed in envelopes marked with addresses of brothels. He has not been charged with a crime.
The Times interviewed the courier, who asked not to be named for his safety. The 63-year-old said he left Qingdao, China, in 2016 to reunite with his wife and daughter who had immigrated earlier to San Gabriel.
To help pay for his daughter’s college tuition, the courier said he took a job offered by a friend to pick up what he thought were the proceeds of massage businesses. Every morning for two months, he drove around the San Fernando Valley and collected envelopes. He was paid $3,000 a month, he said.
The courier said after making his rounds, he turned over the money to a heavyset woman who spoke with a northern Chinese accent. They never met in the same place twice — always outside a supermarket or business in Arcadia or Temple City, he said.
The courier told The Times he didn’t know the names of anyone involved in the operation. But according to a search warrant affidavit, he told the LAPD he was recruited by someone named Darren.
The name would surface again in an investigation 50 miles away.
‘He wanted sex’
In August 2025, LAPD Officer Matthew Crump texted the hotline and was given the option of a motel on Sepulveda Boulevard or a house on Haskell Avenue, he testified at a preliminary hearing.
The man who answered the door on Haskell Avenue asked for the last four digits of Crump’s phone number, then led the officer past a woman eating at a kitchen table who wore a black fishnet dress. Another woman in a white silk robe was smoking a cigarette.
The man — later identified as Jiwei Zhang — knocked on a closed door, and a woman wearing a short black dress opened it. After Crump negotiated a sex act, he alerted his partners. They raided the home and arrested Zhang.
The woman whom Crump solicited later testified she was living in Orlando, Fla., supporting herself by driving for Uber, when a friend mentioned she could make some money in Los Angeles. The woman, who was identified only as Sandy, said her friend told her to contact someone named Cherish through WeChat.
Cherish sent Sandy the Haskell Avenue address, Sandy testified at a preliminary hearing. When Sandy arrived, Zhang greeted her and showed her to a room. Not long after, she heard a knock at the door and opened it to find a strange man.
“He wanted sex,” she recalled. Sandy testified she thought she’d be working as a masseuse. “I don’t do sex,” she said.
“But here, that’s what you do,” the man replied.
Sandy testified Zhang took half of the $200 the man paid her for sex. Cherish added her to a WeChat group, Sandy said, where she was required to report information about customers, including how much they paid and the amount of time they spent at the brothel.
Sandy estimated she had sex with 10 men a day. She testified she wasn’t forced to have sex, but only did it because she was “afraid.” She had nowhere to go if she tried to leave, she said.
“I don’t know anybody here,” she testified.
The woman Crump saw eating in the kitchen testified she was also told she could make money giving massages in Los Angeles. The woman, identified only as Barbara, said she was born in Cuba and was working as a dancer at a members-only adult club in Austin, Texas, when a friend introduced her over WeChat to someone called Cherri.
After requesting Barbara’s full name, photograph and “references,” Cherri bought her a plane ticket to Los Angeles, Barbara testified.
Barbara said she and the other women referred to Zhang, then 37, as “the butler.” Along with surrendering a large cut of her earnings, she was required to pay Zhang $5 per client and $80 a day for room and board, she testified.
Customers paid with cash, Zelle, PayPal or Venmo, Barbara testified. The Zelle account was linked to a limited liability company controlled by Cherri, Barbara said.
“I only saw her once,” she testified, recalling the time Cherri came to collect money from Zhang. “She is an older woman. And other girls had told me that she was the boss.”
Zhang was released on bond. When police learned he’d booked a flight out of the country, they stopped Zhang at LAX and interviewed him, LAPD Officer Louis Jimenez testified.
Zhang admitted managing the brothel, Jimenez testified. He said his family in China was paid by the network’s operators, who sent them the equivalent of around $75 a day through WeChat.
Zhang pleaded no contest to conspiring to commit pimping and was sentenced to two years’ probation. He had told police he was recruited over WeChat by someone called Perfect, Jimenez said. A defense attorney asked the officer, “Did you follow up as to who Perfect is?”
No, Jimenez replied.
‘She’s the main boss’
The arrests didn’t take down the network.
Three months later, the LAPD raided an “associated” brothel on Shirley Avenue in Reseda, a prosecutor said in court. One of the women arrested there — identified only as Miriam — testified she willingly had sex for money.
But for a few “minor incidents,” the network didn’t employ violence or coercion, Pinner testified. In one instance, a potential patron who left without purchasing sex told the LAPD he was later blackmailed for money, the detective wrote in his affidavit.
The “house manager” of the Shirley Avenue brothel, Ali Alobadi, pleaded no contest to conspiring to commit pimping. Like all of the convicted managers, Alobadi was spared prison and granted probation. The deputy district attorney who prosecuted the cases didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Miriam testified there was someone higher up than Alobadi — someone whose nickname was familiar to authorities.
“She’s the main boss,” Miriam said. She never learned the woman’s name. “We just knew that person as Perfect,” she said.
There is no public record of anyone higher up than a “house manager” being prosecuted — although it’s clear authorities have an idea of who was in charge. In a warrant filed in September 2025, Pinner said one of the alleged organizers was identified through an investigation in Irvine.
In 2024, police searched a brothel operating out of a home on Skinner Street. After the raid, officers were watching the house when they saw a man enter and leave with some paperwork, Pinner wrote. They questioned the man, who said someone named Darren had asked him to lock it up.
Darren was the same name the money courier gave to the LAPD.
The man said he also collected some papers belonging to his girlfriend, whose name was Candy Ding, Pinner wrote in the affidavit. Officers seized the man’s phones and shared the data, including several WeChat groups, with the LAPD.
The phone records indicated Ding was the person who went by “Cherish,” Pinner wrote. Based on the WeChat messages, the detective concluded Ding oversaw the brothel on Van Noord Avenue first discovered by police, Pinner wrote in the affidavit.
It’s unclear if the LAPD has identified the person known as “Perfect.” Pinner didn’t return a request for comment.
The detective identified Darren as the nickname of Ding’s husband, Hongshan Wang. According to his affidavit, the couple owned a Van Nuys massage parlor that the LAPD investigated in 2019.
In a civil complaint, then-Los Angeles City Atty. Michael Feuer alleged Ding and Wang ran a “sophisticated prostitution ring” out of two massage parlors. Ding and Wang’s lawyers disputed the allegations and said they sold the parlors, but a judge ordered the couple to pay the city a $163,000 judgment. Their attorneys did not return requests for comment.
Ding and Wang have not been charged in the brothel investigation. On a recent morning, a woman pulled a Tesla SUV into the driveway of a Temple City home linked in public records to Ding. The woman, who wore large gold-rimmed sunglasses and a bright-colored dress, denied she was Ding.
She asked why a Times reporter wanted to speak with Ding. Told the LAPD had named Ding as being involved in a prior prostitution network, the woman said, “They need to do a better investigation.”
The post The LAPD busted a secret network of brothels — but hasn’t arrested the owner appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
