PALESTINE, Texas — When Kimberly Mao paid a local doctor last summer a little more than a million dollars for a sprawling ranch in horse country here, folks thought she was just another well-to-do city dweller seeking a rural retreat in the piney woods of East Texas.
But weeks after the 47-year-old Hacienda Heights woman purchased the property, bulldozers began cutting a winding course of bumps and berms into the soil, turning the tranquil farm into a raceway for the fast-growing sport of motocross.
Neighbors were outraged. "People move to the country for peace and quiet, not to live next to a motorcycle track," said resident and Dallas Police Det. Warren Martin. Local authorities, however, said there was nothing they could do.
Then things really got racy.
On April 18, Mao was arrested in Madisonville, Texas, for allegedly heading a multimillion-dollar prostitution and money laundering conspiracy. In a 40-count federal indictment, the government said she hid profits from her brothels in Inglewood, South Gate, Baldwin Park and Dallas in the East Texas property and four other tracks she owned in California, Texas and Florida, collectively named MX Oasis.
She has pleaded not guilty and is free on bail.
Federal prosecutors say Mao's case reveals the vast reach of global organized crime -- from prostitutes' home countries in Asia and Latin America to brothels in Southern California and finally to farm communities in rural Texas.
But Roger Jon Diamond, the Santa Monica lawyer representing Mao, said the government is trying to bootstrap a questionable low-level prostitution case into a major prosecution to feed "the Bush administration pandering to its right wing, fundamentalist, evangelical base."
"To use an old expression, they have made a federal case out of this," he said.
He also said Mao didn't know anything about any prostitution her tenants may have conducted.
Federal action against prostitution involving foreign women "trafficked" by brothel owners has indeed been a Bush administration priority. Justice Department officials say they have tripled the number of sex trafficking prosecutions since 2001.
In an operation in San Francisco and Los Angeles a year ago, hundreds of federal agents and local police swarmed massage parlors, chiropractic offices and apartments suspected of being brothels, arresting 45 people and detaining 150 suspected prostitutes.
