Louisiana Voice

There was a recent story in the Baton Rouge Advocate that caught my attention and at the same time elicited my skepticism and more than a little amusement at the thought of my local Denham Springs Police Department conducting an undercover investigation of human trafficking and prostitution.

The story related how a local citizen, thinking he would receive “legitimate treatment from a licensed masseuse,” was instead greeted by a “scantily-clad woman,” prompting his suspicion that he had stumbled onto prostitution operating in plain sight in once sleepy Denham Springs.

When I moved out here in 1981, Denham, as the locals refer to it, was indeed sleepy. You could practically fire a cannon down Range Avenue, the main north-south drag, and not hit anything.

Not today. The Baton Rouge bedroom community, along with the entirety of Livingston Parish, has exploded in population over the past three decades and along with that growth came the usual problems of traffic congestion and crime.

And apparently prostitution. Undercover investigators began surveillance of three local massage parlors. They were the Green Land Spa on South Range Avenue, Apple Spa on Florida Boulevard (U.S. 190, erstwhile the main east-west artery before Interstate 12 was built, and Massage Life on Hummel Street.

Given the methods once employed by cops in Hawaii, Arkansas, and Michigan (where they actually engaged in sex in order to make a bust), I was given to wonder just what the so-called “undercover” operation entailed in investigating these massage parlors. (When the Hawaii legislator was considering abolishing the practice, police officers testified that the actual engagement of sex was a valuable “tool” for law enforcement. Most of my redneck wag friends would snicker at the use of that particular word.)

“There’s no secret that there’s sex trafficking going on in this country,” said Denham Mayor Gerald Landry, belaboring the obvious. “And there’s no secret that massage parlors are ways for these young ladies to be abused. There are not enough local ordinances for us to properly manage those kinds of facilities.”

That’s certainly more incisive than what I heard from a Denham cop a few days before Christmas in my carport several years back.

We were keeping our twin grandchildren while their parents, my eldest daughter and her husband, were out of town. We let them sleep in our bed and I was assigned to the guest bedroom and my wife opted for the sofa in the living room.

The layout of the living room is unique in that it has windows in the back of the room that look out into our carport which at the time did not have an enclosure (that was remedied after the flood of 2016). The carport has a motion-activate light and at 4 a.m. my wife came into the guest bedroom to wake me with the news that someone was in our carport.

I got up and looked out the window and saw someone going through my wife’s vehicle, apparently looking for anything of value he could steal and sell – most probably to purchase drugs. When I opened the door leading into the carport, he bolted, and disappeared down our driveway.

The Denham police were summoned in the vain hope that they might apprehend the would-be thief. How foolish of me to make such an assumption.

The officer who responded stood at least six feet from my wife’s vehicle and proclaimed, apparently seriously, “I don’t see any fingerprints.”

I was incredulous, but said nothing until we started down the drive, tracing the thief’s steps, and I spotted an object that he attempted to take but dropped on his way out. I forget now what it was but the officer picked it up and somberly said, “I don’t see any fingerprints on this, either.”

At that point, I blurted, “Well, I bet my fingerprints are all over it and the car, too. You can’t just stand next to something and see fingerprints.”

Given all that, I have to wonder if undercover officers found any fingerprints at those massage parlors.