Pimp jailed 23 months, fined $160,000
For nearly five years, the owner of a digital media company ran a prostitution ring involving 16 local women that grossed an estimated $600,000.
Danny Ang, 37, known as Charlie or Leslie to the women, also operated a model agency and used its website to sell sexual services before he was caught.
Ang was jailed for 23 months and fined $160,000, after admitting to 10 charges of living off the earnings of prostitutes, and six counts of procuring women for prostitution over 57 months until September 2015.
District Judge Mathew Joseph said, in decision grounds issued last week, that "the model agency was really an online vice syndicate".
During Ang's "lucrative vice career", he earned revenues of $618,724 from pimping the women.
He created and managed a website which advertised the services of the sex workers as those of social escorts.
Criminal Investigation Department (CID) officers nabbed Ang and co-accused Lee Shiun Jean, 52, in a two-hour raid across three locations on Oct 13, 2015, during which several women were also detained. Lee is being dealt with separately.
Eight women, aged 22 to 29, provided witness evidence.
Over half a year, Ang secured 15 clients for one of them, known as Jacintha, 25.
Her booking rate was $2,000 an hour, and she handed about $15,000 of her total earnings to Ang, who used it for his daily expenses.
Deputy Public Prosecutor N.K. Anitha showed the sums paid by 14 women who, between December 2010 and September 2015, serviced about 500 clients.
Ang took a cut from each booking.
A woman named Fion, 22, paid him $111,250 for 89 bookings serviced.
Ang's lawyer, Mr Anand Nalachandran, urged the court to mitigate the jail term and fine as Ang had pleaded guilty and suffered various medical ailments.
But the judge said a deterrent sentence was warranted due to "the scale of his business, the profits earned from the sexual services of the women, the sheer number of women involved".
"These are offences that clearly cause feelings of outrage and revulsion to the community, and the sentence must adequately reflect that feeling."
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