Man enslaved young girls in Maryland hotels, sold them for sex, police say
By: Freeman Klopott
Examiner Staff Writer
October 29, 2009
A New York man enslaved young girls in Maryland hotel rooms and sold their bodies for sex on a prostitution track in Northeast Washington, prosecutors said in court documents.
"While slavery was abolished in the United States in 1863, [Jermaine Moore] has continued to fuel the modern day version of slavery in the form of human trafficking of minors for commercial sexual exploitation," Assistant U.S. Attorney Karla-Dee Clark wrote in court documents. Moore "treated these victims as property, a mere commodity, to which he gave no respect," she wrote.
Moore, 37, faces up to life in prison when he's sentenced Thursday, although prosecutors have asked that he receive 17 years. Moore pleaded guilty to trafficking the girls in May.
The oldest of the three girls Moore trapped in his prostitution ring was 17, and the youngest was 15 when she first met him in New York City, authorities said. He brought the 15-year-old to the Washington area in December 2007, and he set up shop, according to authorities.
The pimp, known as "Nut" and "King Bam Bam," was arrested in September 2008. By then he had also ensnared a 17-year-old known as "A.S." in court documents after meeting her at a party in Maryland, authorities say. At first the teen told him she was 18, but Moore later learned she was 17 after seeing reports in the media about the search for the missing minor, according to documents.
Moore required the girls to earn $500 a night, court documents said. If they failed to do so, documents said, he would beat them. If they tried to leave one of the various hotel rooms where he kept them, he would beat them, authorities said. The third girl, a 16-year-old, was badly beaten in the back of a taxicab when she didn't turn enough tricks during a night of selling herself on Rhode Island Avenue in Northeast, documents said.
"The victims suffered from broken noses, badly bruised faces, and burns," Clark wrote. "[Moore] provided them with the food he wanted them to eat. If they did not like what he provided, they simply did not eat. The only possessions the girls owned were the clothes they wore when they met [Moore]." The pimp also "regularly had sex with the victims and provided them with marijuana and [E]cstasy."
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