Here's an important tip to sleuths amateur and professional: If you are looking for a place that might be a brothel, start with the inn in town that has generated 365 police calls in the past year and a half.
Based on a tip from a john, and with a Los Angeles television news crew in town, cops busted up a den of prostitution at the California Lodge Suites Hotel, 2909 S. Bristol St., Santa Ana.
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It's an address Santa Ana Police know well, as it's generated the quantity of calls listed in the opener for complaints ranging from illegal druggin' to wife beatin.' “This property here has been a problem for quite some time,” Cpl. Michael Gonzalez reportedly told a KABC Eyewitness News crew that joined his Santa Ana cops on a recent prostitution sting there.
Busted were a 25-year-old woman who was allegedly having sex with a 41-year-old man and has been arrested four times before for prostitution. Her john is not only facing a solicitation for prostitution charge, he also allegedly had an outstanding drug-related arrest warrant.
What's amazing is the hotel (to use the term lightly) is not in a hidden area. It's not even the worst stretch of Bristol. The address is just south of Coastal Communities Hospital and a few blocks from Carl Thornton Park on West Segerstrom Avenue.
It's the joint's proximity to two nearby schools that bothers a KABC interviewee identified only as Jose. “I think our kids are in danger, because not only there's drugs but there's prostitution going on in there,” he reportedly said.
If things don't start improving at the hotel, the city will have to take more drastic steps against the owner, Gonzalez mentioned. If that person can even be found, something that has historically proven to be difficult for police and reporters alike.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.