Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready...Fifteen years ago, Oakland’s leaders launched an ambitious plan to combat prostitution and trafficking along “The Blade” — the infamous open-air sex market just east of Lake Merritt.
They sought to close two hotels infamous for playing host to a rotating cast of traffickers and people selling sex — including minors being sold for sex work. Rapes were commonplace in both, as were the discoveries of women who had been abducted from elsewhere in the Bay Area and the state by assailants seeking a place to stash them.
One property, after being shut down, became a home for modest commercial storefronts. Despite some residual safety concerns, it no longer appears to be a hotbed of human trafficking.
The other hotel, which reopened after a brief closure, now serves as a cautionary tale.
There, on the corner of East 12th Street and 1st Avenue, remains a hotel where women and teenagers are coerced or forced by pimps to demand money from undercover cops for sexual favors. One child — this time just 15 years old — arrived there in 2024 after being sold for three months on a notorious website at the rate of $120 per sex act. In another room, police found a pimp suspected of more than a dozen crimes, including the nearby shooting of a man in the neck during a rolling gun battle.
Legal observers and human-trafficking experts say the divergent paths taken by the two properties reveal a central weakness in Oakland’s whack-a-mole approach against sexual exploitation along The Blade: City leaders won a rare legal victory against both of them, but never built the sustained follow-through needed to keep one of the corridor’s most troubled hotels from slipping back into the same pattern.
The inn – owned by Rajeshkumar “Roger” Khatri – belongs to a family of hoteliers with several properties across the Bay Area, including another lodging in Redwood City that closed back in 1991 amid alleged violations of a law aimed at curtailing prostitution.
The city’s failures to stamp out crime at the hotel represent what some described as a blown opportunity to go beyond arrests of buyers, traffickers and people being sold for sex by taking on a persistent problem property.
“Somehow we get a little bit of amnesia about the things that we learn,” said Vanessa Russell, founder of the anti-trafficking nonprofit Love Never Fails.
‘A clear message’
More than a decade ago, the city’s efforts to close those two East Oakland hotels garnered media attention as an inventive strategy in battling crime along The Blade.
City leaders first declared the East 12th Street hotel a public nuisance in 2005, yet the problem continued “unabated” amid a string of rapes involving women and underage girls, some of whom had been taken there after being kidnapped from elsewhere in the region, according to a 2010 city court filing. At the other hotel, on the corner of International Boulevard and 17th Avenue, officers routinely arrested people for soliciting sex, other court filings show.
Exasperated, city officials took the unusual step of suing the properties’ owners in Alameda County Superior Court and asking a judge to shutter each business for a year — the maximum penalty allowed by state law at the time.
Within less than two years, an Alameda County judge approved the closure of each hotel, while hitting each of the five people overseeing the properties with $15,000 fines. In a press release at the time, new City Attorney Barbara Parker hailed the closures as sending “a clear message that we will not allow businesses in Oakland to make a living from abuse and exploitation of women and girls,” while predicting they would make “a tremendous difference” for the surrounding community.
The victory proved fleeting — particularly regarding the East 12th Street hotel.
Eight months later, the owners of the East 12th Street property successfully petitioned an Alameda County Superior Court judge to reopen the hotel, promising to set aside $800,000 to upgrade the property, while implementing a slew of reforms, including regular monitoring of 24-7 surveillance cameras and the employment of new security guards. It came after city attorneys objected to early re-opening proposals, including the hotel’s business plan, cash flow and whether enough security measures had been implemented to prevent prostitution in the future.
Problems resurface
Court records show the family’s promised reforms failed to stick, court records suggest.
In 2023, Oakland police found a 16-year-old girl at the hotel during a sting in which an undercover officer arranged to pay $300 for sex acts, the records show. It was part of a broader anti-trafficking operation at the hotel, during which a 20-year-old woman agreed to have sex with another officer for $200.
Over the next two years, police repeatedly found suspected pimps staying at the hotel, among them a Sacramento County man staying there with a woman and her 1-year-old child, who was mere feet away from a firearm. Months later, a man was pistol-whipped by two assailants while meeting up with a woman in a first-floor room, authorities said.
“They’d leave the hotel in their panties and bras and stilettos, and they would walk past the studio every day,” said Corey Action, who closed his studio next door to the hotel two years ago and moved to Portland.
“It’s almost like you can’t blame them,” added Action, of the hotels’ owners. “You can have a hotel packed every night if you just look the other way on some things.”
In a statement, the city attorney’s office said it was “disheartened and alarmed” at the prospect of sex trafficking once again taking place at the hotel, and its attorneys are “launching a new investigation” of the property.
Numerous attempts by this newspaper to reach the hotel’s longtime owner, Rajeshkumar “Roger” Khatri, through phone calls and listed attorneys were not successful.
It all represents a stark contrast from the evolution at the other property along International Boulevard and 17th Avenue.
That hotel, the National Lodge, faced foreclosure shortly after the judge’s 2012 shutdown order. Bought by a nearby businessman, the property has morphed into a crop of small but productive commercial storefronts. Its tenants include a tax preparer, two insurance agents and a medical transportation service.
The business owners there described the current complex as typical of the broader working-class neighborhood: Not without its safety concerns, but a far cry from its former distinction as a trafficking den.
“Oakland is Oakland — you’ve got to know where you’re going around here,” said Eid Abdelwahhab, who owns a barber shop called Town Cuts at the complex. “But we’re neighbors with the other businesses, and it’s all one community, so for sure we all look out for one another.”
On a recent afternoon, a first-grader scurried through the building’s open-air hallways where pimps once staked out rooms to stash the teens they trafficked. Nearby, Brenda Grisham looked on, having just styled the child’s hair at the salon she owns at the property.
Even owners of a cafe at the complex — which became the target of several shootings in 2024 — reach out regularly for help and advice, said Grisham, an early candidate for mayor of Oakland who has routinely advocated for public safety reforms.
“We still have some people coming in here asking about a hotel,” said Grisham, who also leases space at the building for a tax firm and her anti-violence nonprofit. “But it’s been really good; it’s been real quiet over here.”
The property’s owner, Bruce Vuong, said he has tried to keep rents on the property low for years to help small business owners, but is losing patience with a property that doesn’t return a profit. He listed it for sale two years ago, but few have expressed interest in buying it.
He and a business partner were among seven entities who tried to buy the property in 2013, and were the lone bidders who didn’t want to keep it a motel. As a result, he won the support of city attorneys, given how “a sale for a motel use without significant restrictions risks return of the nuisance and eventually undermines the purpose of this Red Light Abatement Act action and the Court’s closure order,” according to a joint court filing by the city and a receiver for the property.
The city’s concerns back then highlight a problem with many hotels in the region, East Bay human trafficking experts say, claiming such activities are common at numerous hotels along International and MacArthur boulevards.
Other hotels have been sued by Oakland for prostitution-related concerns, with varying degrees of success. In 2015, for example, Oakland officials filed a similar lawsuit against owners of the Mills Motel off MacArthur Boulevard in East Oakland. Now called the Laurel Inn, and under different ownership, the property has continued to be the subject of sex trafficking investigations in recent years.
Traffickers rely on these businesses for a reason.
“They’re kind of invisible, and that’s how trafficking moves,” said Sa’rai T Smith-Mazariegos, director of the group S.H.A.D.E. “Trafficking likes to be invisible – it does not want the spotlight, because if there is a spotlight, it doesn’t work.”
“You see?”
Back at the still-open East 12th Street hotel, the bookings continue. When approached by a reporter, a receptionist said its owners had recently rebranded the property under the Econo Lodge name and may seek to pursue money from the city of Oakland to house homeless individuals. (Jean Walsh, a city spokesperson, said the city has no plans to convert the hotel into a transition housing site.)
“We got strict with our policies for our visitors,” he said, showing off a piece of paper that cash-paying visitors must sign. On it, signees promise “no smoking in rooms,” “no visitors/unreported guest allowed,” “no break/damage to property,” and “no provocative dressing strictly.”
The receptionist, who refused to give his name, recalled phoning Oakland police at least 10 times in the last six months to report prostitution and trafficking among hotel guests, and said other staff have called dozens of additional times. Sometimes officers respond — days earlier, he said, police “rescued” a 20-year-old woman whom the receptionist reported as trying to rent a room. More often, however, “the city has too many cases to take care of,” he said.
“We can deny one person, we can deny two people — people find a way” to get around the hotel’s rules, he added.
As he spoke, a woman walked by the front desk in a skin-tight shirt and high-cut leather skirt, before turning the corner toward The Blade. She had checked into the hotel four hours earlier.
“You see?” the receptionist said.
‘It should not be anything new’
Recent trafficking and prostitution tied to the East 12th Street property raises fresh questions about how the property has not been similarly rehabilitated.
Legal observers pointed to a warning sign in the hotel’s reinvention, when the Khatri family won approval to reopen by promising to franchise the inn to an outside management company, operating as America’s Best Value Inn, which was touted as potentially professionalizing the brand by overseeing daily operations. It remained under that brand until recently.
On paper, such arrangements may appear favorable to judges, who often weigh alternatives to forcibly shuttering a hotel over concerns that suddenly vacating a property could worsen blight and invite more crime. Legal observers, however, say such arrangements can allow owners to simply rebrand, while the owners remain profitably on the property deed.
John Russo, the city’s former lead attorney, lamented that an idealistic effort that he began with a cadre of newly-hired attorneys appears to have fizzled out. He retired in 2011 — halfway through the city’s legal battle against each hotel’s owners.
“Closing a business entirely takes an untold amount of work,” said Russo, of the city’s efforts. “The people who operate sleazy businesses are able to utilize their corporate structures to avoid responsibility.”
Anti-trafficking advocates lauded an ordinance passed in February by the Oakland City Council that significantly increased fines for people caught buying sex, working as pimps or owning properties that fail to address repeated trafficking issues.
City Council newcomer Charlene Wang, who helped author the legislation, called the lapse in nuisance law enforcement at the Econo Lodge — which sits squarely in her district south and east of Lake Merritt — “bluntly frustrating.”
She broadly expressed sympathy for low-earning hotel owners who may feel pressured to accept as many clients as possible, amid a long-term regional decline in tourism revenue. Yet, she added, the property could be much better served as temporary housing for Oakland’s homeless residents.
Her immediate preference may ring familiar to those who first filed lawsuits against the East Oakland hotels some 15 years ago.
“We absolutely need to shut these businesses down,” Wang said, “and we need the resources to go after them.”