Restaurant closed after being linked to illegal activities reopens with new owners
A Southlake restaurant which closed last month after it was financially linked to the alleged illegal activities at a Dallas massage business reopened this week under new management.
The Dragon House reopened its doors Wednesday in the 2600 block of E. Southlake Blvd in Southlake.
Manager Michael Teng said Friday that he along with two partners will now operate the popular Chinese restaurant, noting the same chef, waiters, cooks and other employees will return.
“It’s going to be an employee-owned restaurant,” Teng said in a telephone interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram on Friday.
The restaurant serves authentic traditional Chinese dishes, dim sum and hand-pulled noodles. Dragon House also features the latest Instagram food trend soup dumplings, or xiao long bao.
Authorities raided the restaurant on Oct. 30 and they arrested the Dragon House owner, 51-year-old Yong Bei-Wang Murphy, who was linked to an alleged prostitution ring run out of Jade Spa, a Dallas massage parlor.
She was one of six people arrested last month with connections to the Jade Spa.
A search warrant was executed on Oct. 30 at the Dragon House, which Dallas police has said was financially linked to owners and management of Jade Spa.
Several officials at Jade Spa are accused of prostitution and engaging in organized criminal activity. Authorities also believe officials at Jade Spa were involved in sex trafficking.
Dallas police Major Max Geron said operations like the one in Dallas are difficult to uncover because they don’t stand out.
“It may look like an abandoned building,” Geron said in a news conference in Dallas. “But these operators keep it to themselves. Customers keep it quiet. It’s not like a violent crime.”
No prostitution was alleged to have taken place at Dragon House, but “the restaurant paid bills to accounts on behalf of the spa,” Geron said.
Dallas police and other area officers also executed search warrants last month in Grapevine, Carrollton, Dallas, Arlington and Irving.
Geron said some of the locations were homes.
Warrants were executed at several North Texas banks, and about $370,000 related to the operation was seized and/or frozen. Five vehicles were confiscated along with several weapons at various North Texas locations, authorities said.
Authorities also executed arrest warrants for people involved in the financing and operation of Jade Spa in Dallas. The people arrested were Unlu Gurpinar, 64; Chung Shendelman, 62; Yong Suk Brown, 61; Jae Jasmin Lee, 48; and Sangchan Byun, 41.
At least six people were detained by police at the search warrant locations, and authorities were working to identify them and offer support to those found to be victims of trafficking. Of the six, most were Asian women, Dallas police said.
Dallas city attorneys have obtained a temporary restraining order to keep Jade Spa from reopening as the Dallas city officials have revoked the business’s certificate of occupancy.
The search and arrest warrants stemmed from a Dallas police investigation of the Jade Spa, 2006 Market Center in Dallas, in February. Detectives determined prostitution was taking place inside of the business and surveillance indicated the possibility of sex trafficking.
For the next several months, detectives expanded their investigation to identify the investors, owners and operators of the Dallas business.
Earlier this month in another human trafficking investigation, local, state and federal authorities executed search warrants in Colleyville. No details were released on the investigation.
“Such investigations and any associated prosecutions that may be forthcoming can take months or even years to complete,” said Carl Rusnok, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Central Region, in an email.
Colleyville police along with agents with Homeland Security Investigations, officials with the U.S Secret Service, and officials with the Texas Department of Public Safety executed the warrants in Colleyville on Nov. 6.
This report contains information from Star-Telegram archives.
