Written by
Rebecca Baker
Travel agent Douglas Allen, who for years has dodged charges that he runs sex tours in Southeast Asia, has scored another legal victory in Westchester County, where a judge dismissed an indictment accusing him of promoting prostitution.
“I’m laughin’ at ’em,” Allen said from his Poughkeepsie home on Tuesday. “They’ve been trying to put me in jail for about 10 years, and they’re no closer than when they started.”
In White Plains, Westchester County Judge Barbara Zambelli said Assistant District Attorney Michael Delohery improperly presented a case against Allen, who was arrested last year and indicted in May on a charge of third-degree promoting prostitution through his business, Big Apple Oriental Tours.
Zambelli said the prosecutor made a reference to human trafficking to the grand jury, even though Allen is not facing such a charge, and made a paperwork error that left the judge wondering if the grand jury heard part of a recorded conversation in which Allen defended himself to an undercover officer.
Delohery, the judge said, also presented “inadmissible hearsay testimony” that got an indictment against Allen and his former business partner thrown out in 2005. That testimony was a series of emails from a purported former customer and from an alleged guide in the Philippines.
“The court finds that the above incidents so impaired the integrity of the grand jury so that prejudice to the defendant may have resulted,” she wrote.
The District Attorney’s Office is considering several options, which include arguing before the judge again, appealing the decision and presenting the case to another grand jury.
Allen, 68, is due to return to court Tuesday. He still faces an arrest charge of third-degree promoting prostitution, punishable by up to seven years in state prison.
Allen claims Westchester has no jurisdiction in the case, even though a county investigator pursued a case against him, because his business is not based in Westchester. He also claims a 2007 revision of New York’s promoting-prostitution law that criminalizes the sale of travel-related services that patronize prostitution, despite the legality of prostitution at the desired locale, is unconstitutional.
Prostitution is a licensed activity in the Philippines, Allen said.
“Women are hired as entertainers and are allowed to go on dates,” he said.
He said Big Apple Oriental Tours “don’t make a penny” from prostitution in Southeast Asia.
Allen was arrested last December following a nearly four-month investigation by the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office, in which an investigator contacted Allen through his website,www.baotours.com, and said he wanted to go overseas to have sex for money.
The investigator met Allen several times to pay for the $2,500 trip, in which the customer would fly from New York to Hong Kong, then to Manila in the Philippines, where an escort would take him to Angeles City, an area known for strip clubs. Once there, prosecutors say, the escort would help the customer meet eligible women.
Allen is accused of telling the undercover officer that he would have to negotiate with the women about what sex acts they would perform before they left the bar. He is also accused of telling the officer that if he found a woman he liked, he could keep her for the rest of his stay in the Philippines.
The allegation mirrors ones filed in Dutchess County against Allen and his former business partner, Norman Barabash. The two were indicted in 2004 by a Dutchess County grand jury on felony and misdemeanor charges of promoting prostitution. At the time, Big Apple Oriental was run from Allen’s Poughkeepsie home and Barabash’s Queens home.
Dutchess County Judge Gerald Hayes dismissed the charges, finding prosecutors failed to provide sufficient evidence that a crime had been committed in the Philippines or in New York. The decision was upheld on appeal. Allen and Barabash were acquitted of running sex tours in a trial in Dutchess County Court in 2009.
According to the company’s website, Barabash retired and is no longer an owner. Allen is listed as sole owner.
The company’s website, which features a bikini-clad Asian woman on the main page, offers “unforgettable vacations for everyone in ‘paradise’ ” and welcomes wives and companions at discounted prices. The site also promotes a book called “So Many Girls! So Little Time!” described as a “step-by-step guide to love and romance in Thailand.”
Allen’s site boasts that journalists from “60 Minutes” investigated Big Apple Oriental Tours in 1996 and found no wrongdoing. It also lists in its frequently asked questions section, “Do you run sex tours?”
“The American Heritage dictionary defines sex tours as travel to locations where sexual services are available to tourists,” he wrote. “For example, prostitution under certain rules is legal in Israel and Italy. Therefore, if our tours are sex tours, so is every religious pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Vatican City.”
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