Escort Service Head, 11 Women Booked in Prostitution Inquiry

After a six-month prostitution investigation, police on Friday arrested the owner of the Miss Adventures Escort Service of Anaheim and 11 women working there.

The investigation began when the escort service was sold to its current owner, Leo Laptung Tam, 31, of Brea, police said.

The Orange County district attorney’s office already is prosecuting the former owner of the escort service, Clydell Inman, on 42 counts of pimping and pandering, Deputy Dist. Atty. Ken Prickett said.

Two of the women arrested Friday also were arrested when police raided the escort service in February, according to Anaheim Police Sgt. Steve Rodig of the vice detail.

Sold Service

After getting out of jail in February on $25,000 bail, Inman sold the service to Tam, who reopened it, according to police.

At that point, the police resumed their investigation of the business, Rodig said. In the first two weeks of June, Anaheim vice investigators, assisted by the Anaheim Crime Task Force and the Brea Police Department, executed eight search warrants in Santa Ana, Brea, Newport Beach, Lawndale and Los Angeles.

“We felt this was a large service,” Rodig said. “We estimated that approximately 20 prostitutes worked for this service.”

Tam was arrested on suspicion of 20 counts of pimping and pandering, Rodig said, and was released on $25,000 bail.

The women were arrested in Anaheim on suspicion of solicitation of prostitution, Rodig said. Some still were being held Friday afternoon on $2,500 bail each, while others had been released on bail or on their own recognizance.

After buying the escort service, Tam applied to become a client of a company in the Midwest that processed credit card purchases, police said, so that customers could pay with credit cards. But that company, police said, was being operated as an investigative tool by the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation.

The Iowa authorities provided Anaheim police with information that was used to obtain search warrants.

Iowa Operation Grew

Originally, the Iowa undercover operation was set up to determine the extent of prostitution in Iowa, according to Bill Brosnahan, special agent for the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, but it soon began receiving requests for its credit-processing services from all over.

“The word got out,” Brosnahan said, “that there was this company in Iowa that you could use credit cards with, and the thing got bigger and bigger.”

Brosnahan estimated that one-fourth of the business of seven escort services in Orange and Los Angeles counties that were clients of the Iowa sting operation was paid for with credit cards.

With the information from the Iowa operation, which went out of business Thursday, Santa Ana vice investigators were able to trace transactions from California to Iowa and back to escort service owners operating in Orange County, Rodig said. Iowa agents also provided taped meetings with some suspects in which they admitted prostitution activities, Brosnahan said.

Before making Friday’s arrests, Anaheim vice investigators took over the escort service’s communications center, a Santa Ana apartment from which escorts were dispatched, Rodig said. Investigators then sent escorts to locations where they were arrested by other agents, posing as customers.