COBB COUNTY, Ga. — Several massage businesses were shut down in unincorporated Cobb County in the past year.
A team of men and women have worked tirelessly behind the scenes to tackle the problems spoke exclusively with Channel 2 Cobb County Bureau Chief Michele Newell.
It was a little more than a year ago when the Cobb County Police Department Detective Bruce Witt and Sgt. Dan Formato began noticing problems at some health spas. The Cobb County Business License Division began getting noticing similar problems.
Complaints about some health spas began coming in. Some customers claimed they were inappropriately touched during massages. Unlicensed massage therapists were found working at some of the businesses.
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The problems led to an action plan that involved visiting all 88 health spas in unincorporated cobb county within a one-year period, with some businesses receiving multiple visits. Police and the manager of the Cobb County business license division said they noticed problems at 20 to 25 businesses out of the 88 they visited.
Their efforts led to nearly 20 businesses shutting down and multiple people have been arrested, mostly business owners who are accused of allowing unlicensed massage therapists to conduct massages.
Officials say these illicit or illegitimate businesses are often hiding in plain sight, with many storefronts in shopping plazas.
“Some of the things we saw was women wearing see through shirts with just their bras,” Witt told Channel 2 Action News.
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“They don’t leave, they are open seven days a week,” Formato said.
According to the Business License Division, problems start after a license for the business is issued.
“No massage therapist on site, customers only there for 17 to 23 minutes, parking a distance from the front door,” said Ellisia Webb, Cobb County Business License Division Manager. “It’s after the license is issued and we conduct a business inspection or compliance check that we start running into these issues.”
A closer look behind closed doors showed part of a nationwide problem.
“Once we started going to more businesses, we started to see more problems,” Witt told Channel 2 Action News.
An example of what police said they’ve found can be seen in pictures that show red lights in massage rooms, lingerie, an abundance of feminine hygiene products, beds in the back of some businesses, suitcases that appear to be lived out of, refrigerators completely filled with food.
“(It) looked like people were living there, which are indicators of somebody possibly being human trafficked, so that was alarming,” Witt said.
Video obtained through an open records request from the Cobb County Police Department reveal police and county business license division officials find employees inside a business that weren’t licensed massage therapists.
“You were performing a massage and you don’t have a license to perform a massage,” Witt tells someone on the video.
Officials also re-wrote the county ordinance for health spas, after that they used a 6-month moratorium suspending new health spa business applications to focus on strengthening the ordinance that helps regulates these kinds of businesses.
“We are here to support the legitimate businesses, that’s why we are doing such proactive enforcement to get rid of the bad ones,” Formato said.
The Georgia Attorney Generals office said it has joined in on visits with police and county officials.
“Cherokee, Cobb County, we’ve been down to Henry County and we’ve been as far out as Athens-Clarke County,” said Hannah Palmquist, chief of the human trafficking prosecution unit for the Georgia Attorney General’s Office.
Palmquist said they wanted to unify the state’s efforts, joining forces alongside local departments already making strides, and see what could be done.
“We’re also meeting with landlords and working with them to notify them of the illicit activity and to empower them to do something about it, so they are not hosting illicit activity,” she said. “The days in Georgia where people felt comfortable buying vulnerable people for sex and exploiting them, those days are over.”
Palmquist told Newell her team has successfully shutdown 31 illicit massage businesses statewide.
“We have over a 60% percent closure rate already in just a little over a year of launching our project,” Palmquist said. “What we decided to do is a more targeted approach. We knew we could be more effective if we methodically moved from county to county and built those partnerships.”
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