You'll have to flip a coin to figure out which is more incongruous.
Is it that a brothel operated in, of all places, Irvine?
Or is it the appearance of the person who allegedly ran it?
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Not that we're condoning illegal activities but for the sake of the clients one hopes the service providers at the brothel were not as bland, boring and indistinguishable as the City of Irvine.
In Irvine, there's vanilla sex and the late Maude Flaunders' favorite: unflavored.
Can you imagine the unexciting patter? Picture CPAs having sex. “Oh, consensual partner due to a prearranged business agreement, please give it to the above referenced customer forthwith.”
But the thing that really frosts our tips is the booking photo for the soul accused of running a brothel out of an Irvine apartment as well as an Extended (heh) Stay America in Torrance.
This is the American ideal of one who runs a brothel:
Or, from an even lesser-seen movie:
Or, if he must be a male like the suspect in Irvine, there's the Bunny Ranch dude:
With those in mind, check out the chap on the next page …
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Dude looks like a golfer on the Asian pro tour!?!
Gao Yang Zhou, 34, of Rowland Heights, was arraigned last Friday in Orange County Superior Court on 12 felony counts, including three felony counts each of pimping, pandering, money laundering, and one felony count each of conspiracy to commit pimping, conspiracy to commit general pandering, conspiracy to commit money laundering, with a sentencing enhancement for money laundering over $50,000.
He allegedly had a female partner, fugitive Yuzhen Xie, 32, also of Rowland Heights. If she's ever caught, Xie faces the same charges, enhancement and maximum sentence as Zhou: 11 years and eight months in state prison.
Zhou is accused of paying for website advertisements for prostitution between April 1 and Dec. 12, according to an Orange County District Attorney's office (OCDA) statement.
He is also alleged to have traveled to Irvine in search of an apartment, and Xie is accused on May 24 of signing a lease to an apartment on Alton Parkway, which Zhou is said to have turned into a residential brothel. They allegedly had three women working as prostitutes and maintained numerous bank accounts where they deposited brothel receipts. Zhou is also accused of paying for brothel expenses and ads through such accounts.
Xie is accused of signing a lease on a second Irvine apartment in October, with Zhou allegedly serving as the pimp who solicited the brothel clients. Though Torrance is in Los Angeles County, the case at the Harbor Justice Center in Newport Beach lumps in the allegations involving the Extended Stay America, where Zhou is accused of running a brothel from a room he rented and advertising its services in August.
The end came on Dec. 11, when undercover Irvine Police officers contacted the brothel and arrested Zhou the same day, according to the OCDA. The deputy district attorney assigned to the case, Daniel Varon, comes from his office's HEAT Unit, which targets human trafficking in the county.
Zhou, who is due back in court on Friday, was being held on $500,000 bail but before posting he had to prove the money came from a legal and legitimate source.
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
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.