D.C. Sex Trafficker Of 17-Year-Old Sentenced To Prison

GREENBELT, MD — A 38-year-old Washington, D.C. man has been sentenced to 14 years in prison and will be deported back to Liberia following his prison term for conspiracy to engage in trafficking of a minor, prosecutors announced. Charleston Harris, also known as "Giovanni" and "Leon Baye" pleaded guilty to running a large-scale prostitution business throughout Maryland and elsewhere, beginning around April 2012 and continuing to about June 2015.

Harris, along with his co-conspirator Phoebe Omwega, managed as many as 18 prostitutes at a time and directed services throughout Maryland, Virginia, Georgia and Florida, prosecutors said. Harris and Omwega often recruited women to work for them by falsely claiming they managed a modeling business in Atlanta, Ga.

In 2012, Harris recruited a 17-year-old female to engage in prostitution. The underage victim engaged in commercial sex acts in Maryland, Florida and elsewhere and was advertised on the social networking website "backpage.com," according to court documents.

The women who worked for Harris typically charged between $100 and $200 for sexual services. Harris collected the proceeds, managed day-to-day activities, organized meetings with "clients" and made hotel arrangements in various cities for the women.

He did not allow the women to retain any of the proceeds, prosecutors said. The women were allowed to purchase food, clothing and make other similar purchases using their proceeds, and sometimes had to track their spending and report it to Omwega. Harris would confiscate the women’s clothes, cellphones, devices, keys to their vehicles, and identification documents, and would arrange for the women who worked for him to obtain false identification documents, prosecutors said. The women were not allowed to speak to family members or law enforcement.

The women were required to make a minimum of $1,000 a day, and Harris forced the women to continue to work if they failed to meet this quota. He enforced these rules by threatening physical violence, and occasionally physically assaulting the women who worked for him, prosecutors said.

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