Eric Claiborne had dreams of playing college football, but instead became a pimp. Now he’ll spend nearly six years in a federal prison.
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When the FBI arrested Claiborne after he was identified from a lineup in May 2009, the 23-year-old told authorities he was in Virginia on a football scholarship. That statement was, his attorney wrote in court documents, an indication of how far Claiborne’s self-respect had fallen.
“When things didn’t go well for Eric in [community] college football, which was his passion, this seems to have been the time when his focus on life changed,” Claiborne’s grandmother, Wilma Nichols, wrote in a letter to U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee. Last week, Lee sentenced Claiborne to five years and eight months in prison.
“Feeling down about himself and his football career prospects [or lack thereof] … and looking for a way to make money, Mr. Claiborne was ripe for the picking when he was brought to a strip club and introduced to the world of ‘pimping,’ ” his attorney Lana Manitta wrote in court documents, asking for leniency.
According to Manitta’s argument, Claiborne was just getting started in the business when police arrested a 17-year-old girl at the JW Marriott hotel in Washington on May 20, 2009. The teen told police, who had arranged for the tryst using Craigslist, that she was working for a pimp named “California E.”
Authorities went to the Suburban Extended Stay Hotel in Sterling, where the girl had been living, and found an adult prostitute referred to as “Toni W.” in court documents. She told authorities she had met the teen on the D.C. prostitution track at 14th and K streets months earlier and later introduced her to Claiborne.
Manitta said Claiborne didn’t seek women out. Instead, he answered prostitutes’ Craigslist advertisements and offered to be their pimp.
“He met up with one girl at a McDonald’s — hardly a sophisticated enterprise,” Manitta wrote. “He paid for hotel rooms, but had no real idea how much money the girls were making, as they made their own dates.”
The teen was six months shy of her 18th birthday, documents said. At times, Claiborne drove her the 30 miles from Sterling to sex-for-cash meetings in Washington.
