Woman indicted after police say she tried to sell undercover cops 20 girls for sex
The mother in a mom/son run “prostitution operation” was indicted on Wednesday following a sting at a Dallas hotel in early November.
Helen Kim, who officials say was coordinating the sale of women for sex, was indicted by a federal grand jury on racketeering charges.
In early November, more than 50 officers were part of an undercover operation where they posed as out-of-town businessmen in hotel bars and rooms, according to police. The officers would discuss buying girls for commercial sex from Daniel Mendoza Jr. and his mother, Helen Kim.
“It takes a lot of coordination to ensure an operation like this goes without a hitch. I’m proud of the way law enforcement came together to fight for these young women,” said U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Nealy Cox in a press release. “The defendant’s willingness to demean women for financial gain is sickening. We cannot and will not allow this type of behavior to go unchecked in North Texas.”
According to a complaint filed Oct. 30, an undercover informant met with Mendoza on Sept. 14 at Drafthouse, 1850 Market Place Blvd. in Irving, to discuss purchasing about 18 to 20 girls for a night.
The document doesn’t give approximate ages for the girls and only refers to them as “girls.”
During that first meeting, the informant and Mendoza talked about possible price ranges and the number of girls that the informant wanted to order, the document says. They met again on Sept. 20 to finalize plans: The informant would get 20 girls for about four hours for multiple men.
During a meeting at a Starbucks, Kim accepted an upfront payment of $5,000, according to a press release from the Department of Justice. Kim insisted the men should not talk publicly about the affair.
“The way this is set up,” Kim’s son told the undercover officer, “it could be considered human trafficking.”
After police arrested Kim and Mendoza, several of the women were taken to Mosaic House, a local shelter for women fleeing human trafficking. Many had been living at Kim’s purported “spas,” Pink One and Illusion, according to the Department of Justice press release.
Both Mendoza and Kim were arrested and charged with using a facility for interstate commerce to promote a business enterprise for prostitution.
During their first court appearances on Nov. 2, Mendoza was given a court-appointed attorney. Kim said she would hire her own.
This story was originally published November 21, 2018 at 2:22 PM.