The Polk County Sheriff’s Office in Florida announced 108 arrests Wednesday, with charges ranging from lewd battery and soliciting prostitution to the transmission of harmful material to a minor, among others.
Three Disney Parks employees, a FunSpot employee, and a retired judge were among those arrested after a six-day effort involving multiple law enforcement agencies, which police dubbed “Operation March Sadness II.” The operation began March 8.
“The arrests of a human trafficker and four child predators alone makes this whole operation worthwhile,” Sheriff Grady Judd said Wednesday. “The online prostitution industry enables traffickers and victimizes those who are being trafficked. Our goal is to identify victims, offer them help, and find and arrest those who are profiting from the exploitation of human beings.”
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“Where there is prostitution, there is exploitation, disease, dysfunction, and broken families,” he added.
Several of the suspects were from the #Orlando area @WFTV @WESH @news6wkmg
— Polk County Sheriff ? Grady Judd (@PolkCoSheriff) March 16, 2022
Of the confirmed Disney employees, one was 45-year-old Ralph Leese, who worked in IT, and another was 24-year-old restaurant worker Wilakson Fidele of Tomorrowland’s Cosmic Ray’s Starlight Cafe. The third, 27-year-old Xavier Jackson, has been accused of sending illicit pictures to a person who he thought was a 14-year-old girl.
“Did I mention that [Jackson] just happens to be a lifeguard at the Polynesian Resort for Disney?” Judd said during a press conference while holding up his mugshot. “You think there’s a few children around there? That’s right. I didn’t stutter. He was a lifeguard at the Polynesian Resort and was bragging about that.”
Disney confirmed to the Washington Examiner that Reese, Fidele, and Jackson are currently on unpaid leave.
Daniel Peters, a retired Cook County, Illinois, judge, was also charged with soliciting a prostitute. The 66-year-old is the oldest among those arrested. A 17-year-old charged with the same crime is the youngest.
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Police also arrested a 32-year-old woman, Tiffany Nash, for trafficking another woman. Nash has 61 previous criminal charges, according to police. At the time of her arrest, she also was in possession of multiple illicit substances.
“It’s not often we arrest traffickers at the undercover site, but we did,” Judd said. “Normally when we arrest traffickers at the undercover site, it’s a male.”
One of the anti-trafficking organizations involved in the operation provided assistance to Nash’s trafficked victim.
