The third and final round of hearings for men accused of paying for sex in a brothel investigation was held Friday.
A third and final round of hearings was held Friday for the alleged buyers of a high-end brothel ring that operated out of Cambridge, Watertown and a Washington, D.C. suburb before being busted in November 2023.
Before Friday, 23 suspected clients had been identified, including Cambridge City Councilor Paul Toner.
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Another 10 men were identified in court Friday. They included:
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- Amrit Chaudhuri, of Brookline
- Mitchell Rubenstein, of Chestnut Hill
- Marshall Berenson, of Cambridge
- Harmanpreet Singh, of Woburn
- Kenneth Posco, of Fitchburg
- George Wu, of Needham
- Patrick Enright, of Wakefield
- Suren Chelian, of Lexington
- Sankara Asapu, of Malden
- John Cascarano, of Hingham
Federal investigators had described the suspected clients of the brothel as elected officials, doctors, military officers, government contractors and others in positions of influence and power, but they weren't publicly identified until the first in a series of hearings in magistrate court two weeks ago — something they'd fought in court.
In a battle that reached the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, attorneys for the alleged buyers fought to keep their clients' names out of the public eye for the show cause hearings, which are typically held behind closed doors and only become public if a clerk magistrate determines there is enough probable cause to move forward with criminal charges.
In this case, several media outlets, including NBC10 Boston, argued that the cases should be held in the open because of high public interest and to promote transparency in the process. The Cambridge clerk magistrate agreed in December 2023. However, she denied a request to make the court documents available prior to the proceedings.
But many of the alleged buyers took issue, eventually bringing the case up to the SJC, which ruled that the clerk's original decision should stand. In the opinion the court wrote that she "raised legitimate public concerns about potential favoritism and bias if such hearings were held behind closed doors, and that these concerns outweighed the interests in continued anonymity for the Does."
They further agreed that the clerk magistrate was within her discretion when denying access to the pending complaint applications, writing.
The three people charged with running the network - the alleged ringleader, Han Lee, and the man accused of booking appointments, Junmyung Lee, and James Lee, the man who provided the apartments they used in the ring, have pleaded guilty.
