task force working a sting spotted him outside a Super 8 motel in Sacramento, California, with the girl, who was “wearing a tight red shirt, very short miniskirt and 4-inch, high-heel shoes,” wrote Sacramento Police detective Jeff Morris, in a court affidavit. “The minor had acne which was consistent with a teenager’s acne.”

In chat logs later recover by police, Epps described the ease of using sites like myRedBook and Craigslist to broker women. “I don’t put girls on the blade,” he wrote an associate. “It’s Y2K pimpin’.”

“Get some professional, beautiful, elegant, glamor shots, put ‘em on these escort websites, and her phone gone slap,” Epps wrote.

The case is part of what law enforcement and child-protection officials have described as an alarming trend that sees pimps increasingly using social networking sites to recruit minors into prostitution, then renting them out through paid online sex ads. Washington, D.C., man Christopher Tyrone Young was sentenced last June to 17½ years for recruiting a 17-year-old Florida girl over MySpace and luring her to Las Vegas by promising to make her a “star.”

In Epps’ case, he met the girl — identified by the initials S.M. in court records — on MySpace in late September 2008, and immediately began trying to persuade her to travel to Sacramento, 50 miles from her home in Stockton, to work for him as a prostitute. Chat logs filed in the case indicate that S.M. had previously posted ads on adult websites, but prosecutors claim there’s no evidence that she’d gone out on a call before meeting Epps.

Within weeks of their MySpace meeting, the girl had relocated to Sacramento and moved into a cheap motel room with Epps, who used role play to teach her how to answer phone calls from prospective johns, and took her to a tattoo parlor to get his street name inked onto her arm. She began appearing on adult escort websites Oct. 7, 2008, with photos, measurements and a menu of sexual services.

She was soon booking three to five engagements a day, and she earned between $9,000 and $10,000 total for Epps, according to the government.

Epp’s sentence was handed down by U.S. District Judge Frank C. Damrell Jr. in Sacramento. Epps faced a statutory minimum of 10 years for the sex-trafficking charge. The government had sought at least 15 years, arguing that Epps deserved a higher sentence for taking a leadership role in a crime.

In a plea deal with Epps, prosecutors dropped a child-pornography charge stemming from a video seized at Epps’ arrest, in which S.M. is seen performing a sex act on him.

See Also:

• Alleged Pimp Charged With Recruiting Teen Runaway on MySpace
• Pimps Go Online to Lure Kids Into Prostitution

Authors: Kevin Poulsen

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