V. THE MADAM
L
ulu, the co-owner of
Orchids who allegedly
attended to Kraft, lives a
world away from her cli-
ents. From Palm Beach,
you drive through West Palm Beach, past
the South Dixie Highway, past laundro-
mats advertising weekday deals and
pawn shops after your gold. If you hang a
right and drive north until the turnpike
narrows, past billboards advertising plas-
tic surgery and personal injury lawyers,
past state prisoners performing hot,
humid labor, you enter Martin and Port
St. Lucie and Indian River counties,
where the rest of Florida lives.
There, upstream from the source, the
story of Kraft and the massage parlor raids
has grown muddied. Flora Vera and Sean
Williams, who live next door to Lulu, told
me they had heard the sex workers had
been kept naked so they wouldn’t run
away. Another neighbor chimed in, tell-
ing me it was all part of a complex global
conspiracy involving President Trump,
full of byzantine connections that I found
impossible to follow.
Flora laughed. “Next thing you know,
we are saying I saw a UFO,” she said.
“Well, I did see a UFO,” her husband
said.
He told me that it had appeared above
a Kmart parking lot at dusk, “hovering
above the pines,” on his way to church.
He had been 12 years old. Later, Flora told
me that she has precognitive dreams.
Lulu, who had been arrested at home
and released after posting a cash bail
of $75,000, declined my request for an
interview. She has pleaded not guilty to
all charges, including soliciting others to
commit prostitution. But her business
partner, Hua Zhang, who owns the other
half of Orchids, agreed to speak to me.
Zhang was born into a “not rich but
respected” family in Guangzhou, China,
in 1960. After marrying and giving birth to
a son, Zhang applied for a U.S. visa in 2001.
Five years later, the visa came through.
Zhang hesitated. She was making a good
living in China as an esthetician. She knew
every bend of every road in Guangzhou.
The new country would be full of unfa-
miliar roads, and strangers who wouldn’t
know how to pronounce her name.
But Zhang was a mother before she
was anything else, and she decided to
emigrate for her son. After the family
moved to Los Angeles, Zhang learned
there weren’t many opportunities for a
middle-aged woman with no profession-
al expertise. A friend Zhang made from
her English as a second language class
suggested she go to work at a massage
school run by Jet Li’s personal masseuse.
At the school, Zhang made another
friend who later moved to Florida to work
at a massage parlor there. The friend soon
began calling Zhang, pleading with her to
join her. Zhang was reluctant, but by that
time her son was grown, and she and her
husband were ling for divorce. Florida
is the land of second acts, and in 2010,
Zhang moved to Jupiter to begin her life
anew as Mandy.
Mandy packed light; she knew
everything would be provided. Busi-
nesses owned by Chinese Americans—
laundromats,One neighbor
said the raids
were part of
acomplex global
conspiracy
involving Trump,
the details of
which were
impossible to
follow.
CONTINUED ON PAGE COUNTRY-CLUB LIFE
The Breakers (above), the Palm
Beach resort where Kraft
has an apartment. In 2017, Kraft
joined President Trump and
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe at Mar-a-Lago (below).NOVEMBER 2019