Manassas Journal Messenger | Police seek ties to other brothel

The business end of a brothel raided May 12 on Grant Avenue is very similar to one broken up in February on Lomond Drive, but police have yet to find any solid evidence connecting the two, Manassas City police said.

The Grant Avenue house also may be linked to other prostitution houses operating in the Manassas area, said Lt. Robert Bagshaw, head of the Manassas city police department’s vice narcotics division.

“Both of these houses had similar business operations, such as how they collected money and managed the house,” Bagshaw said. “We have no concrete evidence to support that the same employees were working at each place, but there were definitely similarities.”

A vice/narcotics task force made up of officers from the Manassas, Manassas Park and Prince William County police departments, arrested three women and two men at a home at 9633 Grant Ave., near the Georgetown South development.

In February, Prince William County police arrested three prostitutes, including a juvenile and the home’s owner, at a house on Lomond Drive, less than two miles from Stonewall Middle School. At the corner of the home’s yard was a school bus stop.

In both houses, the owners brought girls from the New York City area.

An affidavit for a search warrant at the Lomond Drive address said a man named “Flaco” brought girls from New Jersey every Monday.

In the recent raid, one of the women was from Brooklyn and another was from Gaithersburg, Md. The third woman, who gave police false information, is also believed to be from the New York area, police said.

“These places can be hard to track down,” Bagshaw said. “Sometimes we just stumble into them.”

Bagshaw said that a few years ago city police raided a brothel and ended up finding two others which were handling the overflow of customers.

Bagshaw said that these houses, including the one on Grant Avenue, only serve Hispanic males and that if someone of another race comes to the door, they will be turned away.

“Most of these young men are here working and have trouble meeting women,” Bagshaw said. “Most of the women who are here are already married, so these men resort to other means.”

In an affidavit for a search warrant filed May 12 in Prince William County Circuit Court, a detective with the Manassas Park police department wrote that he and other officers saw several men going into and out of the house April 11.

The men would go to a rear door of the house and enter the home. Roughly 30 minutes later they would leave. The house is believed to have done business Wednesday through Sunday night.

All of this was news to neighbor Carlos Quintana, who lives two houses away.

“I never saw anything until the cops showed up,” Quintana said. “I had no idea that it was going on.”