Amid controversial police stings, Lewisville helped pass Texas law on illicit massage businesses - CBS News

[Kelsy Mittauer, Andrea Lucia]

While Lewisville police were engaged in controversial undercover operations at massage businesses in 2023, city leaders and lawmakers were sounding the alarm in Austin.

State Rep. Ben Bumgarner, who represents southern Denton County, had authored a bill to address the issue. At a hearing of the House Committee on Licensing and Administrative Procedures, he told his fellow lawmakers, "We have a serious human trafficking issue going on in the City of Lewisville."

"These investigations are very complex and require officers to work in an undercover capacity," then-Lewisville Police Chief Kevin Deaver testified. "I simply do not have the resources needed to conduct these investigations."

"This is Lewisville's most important issue this session," Lewisville Mayor TJ Gilmore said then.

Nearly two years later, it's a statement he stands by.

"It's a huge issue and not just for Lewisville, but I think all the cities - especially if you're on the I-35 corridor," Gilmore said.

Part of the problem, he and Deaver testified, was that it took too long to shut down illicit massage businesses.

"By the time somebody is found criminally liable, this place has changed hands three times," Gilmore said. "So we looked at that process and just said it was fundamentally broken."

How TX HB 3579 targets North Texas illicit massage businesses​

Under Bumgarner's House Bill 3579, which passed the Legislature and was signed into law in 2023, police can contact the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation about a suspected illicit massage business and the TDLR can issue an emergency order to shut it down.

The emergency order forces the business to temporarily close for six months to give the agency time to investigate potential trafficking and offer services to potential victims.

"It doesn't matter if it's prostitution or if it's human trafficking, it shouldn't be happening," said TDLR spokeswoman Tela Mange. "And we're going to assume that it's human trafficking."

After six months, TDLR can allow the business to reopen or revoke its license. Since the law took effect in September 2023, the agency has issued 16 emergency orders across the state, including at establishments in Burleson, Denton and Garland. TDLR has also worked on investigations with Arlington, Dallas and Fort Worth police.

However, Lewisville has not benefited from the provision it fought to get passed. It has yet to ask the TDLR to investigate any of its massage businesses.

Instead, leaders are using the other part of the law, which gives cities more power to close massage businesses where prostitution or trafficking arrests are made. In Lewisville, any massage business that wants to reopen in that location must apply for a special use permit, which can only be approved by the city council. If council members deny that request, the location must remain closed.

Women arrested in Lewisville PD prostitution stings​

Lewisville PD posts its annual crime reports online. In 2022, police arrested one man and 15 women for prostitution. In 2023, they arrested two men and seven women. The police department has not yet posted its 2024 annual report.

When the CBS News Texas I-Team asked Gilmore how arresting women for prostitution helps fight trafficking, he said he was unaware of police targeting the women involved.

"That's not been my experience of what's been going on," he said. "If you go back and look at our legislative arguments and the conversations that we had with our state legislators, which I think were really important, the one thing that they said is that we don't want to be arresting and punishing the victims of sex trafficking. And I believe that is the case for my police department as well."

In some of the cases the I-Team reviewed, records show police made traffic stops of men leaving the massage businesses and, rather than investigate them for taking part in prostitution, used the information they provided to help build cases against the women.

In 2024, the Denton County District Attorney's Office also took issue with how far Lewisville police were going to make their cases, rejecting 22 prostitution cases filed by the department citing "excessive contact" between officers and women at massage businesses.

An internal investigation into Lewisville PD's practices​

The police department opened an internal investigation; in interviews, officers said they could not find evidence of trafficking. Two mentioned luxury cars and homes that the women owned.

"We start looking at financial records and they're getting $10,000 a month," Capt. Casey Carter told Internal Affairs investigators. "They really were just entrepreneurial women that were making a lot of money doing illicit things."

"If they are being trafficked, it's a completely different way of being human trafficked," Sgt. Ezequiel Villalvazo said in his interview with investigators. "But that's not what we're seeing."

"It didn't take a genius to figure out that it's probably not human trafficking, right?" officer Wyatt Sparkman told investigators. "To this day sitting here, I don't believe it is human trafficking."

The internal investigation led to the termination of three officers and the suspension or demotion of eight others. The department had to drop 23 cases and returned nearly $250,000 cash seized from the businesses.

Chief Deaver retired in February 2024. The I-Team asked him and his replacement, Brook Rollins, why the department has not taken advantage of the TDLR's help. They both referred the I-Team to a spokesman for the City of Lewisville, who sent this statement:

"The law that was passed is a very valuable tool for cities. However, TDLR is asked to do a lot of different things and sometimes its enforcement resources get stretched so thin that it is not able to move as quickly on these cases and it - or we - would like. We found another tool through city ordinances that can move more quickly in some cases. Having both tools available means we can choose the more effective path each time we try to address this statewide issue of illicit massage establishments."

Another spokesperson for the city sent this statement:

"In 2021, after the City became aware through police officer and inspector observations that there appeared to be prostitution-related offenses at some of our massage establishments, we formed a citywide task force with representatives from multiple departments. They were tasked with researching best practices on how to approach enforcement.

We found that other cities were struggling with the same issue. Other than criminal enforcement, we did not find an existing administrative tool that would let us shut down those businesses, so we drafted and filed legislation in 2023 through Rep. Kronda Thimesch that would give cities the direct authority to close elicit establishments.

Our bill started strong, but then hit some opposition. When It became apparent that our bill was unlikely to pass, we resumed looking for other administrative options through city ordinances. This was simultaneous with the legislative effort. Ultimately, our bill failed, but our language was added to Rep. Ben Bumgarner's bill that focused on TDLR authority. That bill passed with both his original TDLR language and some of our municipal language. This creates two valuable, but different, tools.

Concurrent with that, we discovered that changing our zoning requirements for all licensed medical establishments would give us the authority to shut down non-complying message [sic] establishments. We changed our ordinance to do that and began enforcing the ordinance. We found that using the local route produced faster results than the TDLR had previously been able to provide with its limited enforcement resources.

By using the City ordinance option, we closed down six illicit establishments in about one year. It is generally a faster approach than the TDLR route.

The TDLR option is still open and is a valuable tool, but we've not yet encountered a case where we felt that was the preferred option. We've heard the TDLR option has been effective in other parts of the state and TDLR is being more proactive in its investigations.

The objective is to end criminal activity at massage establishments and to shut down establishments that persist with criminal activity. We are happy that we are able to choose from multiple tools to pursue that objective."

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