Man prostituting woman across America said he was trying to get home to NC, feds say
A man from North Carolina told police in Texas he was prostituting a woman to get back to his home state, according to a criminal complaint.
Now he’s going to prison, federal prosecutors said Tuesday.
Kortney Donnell Crews, 32, was sentenced to 10 years behind bars and five years of supervised release after he pleaded guilty to transporting women across state lines for prostitution in violation of the Mann Act, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina said in a news release.
“Crews’ actions, his abuse of these women, is a form of human trafficking. He used threats, intimidation, and physical abuse to force these women to humiliate and degrade themselves,” U.S. Attorney Robert J. Higdon Jr. said in the release. “The court’s sentence reflects the seriousness of this crime.”
Crews, who also went by “Homicide” or “P,” promised to pay the women “big money” but ultimately took most — if not all — of their earnings, prosecutors said. He also physically and emotionally abused one of the women.
According to a criminal complaint filed in April 2019, the women were prostituted using internet advertisements on Backpage.com from 2015 until September 2017.
He charged clients anywhere from $100 for 15 minutes to $200 an hour, an FBI agent said in the complaint.
One woman Crews is accused of prostituting until his arrest in 2017 was brought to locations all over the United States — including South Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Tennessee, Texas and Hawaii, the complaint states.
In 2016, the FBI agent said she was arrested in Hawaii. Roughly seven days later, police reportedly picked her up in Austin, Texas.
Officers had seen a man later identified as Crews drop her off at a hotel in Austin and then pull into a strip club parking lot to wait, according to the complaint. They arrested and searched him, finding the woman’s driver’s license, passport, social security card and credit cards in his possession.
Crews waived his right to remain silent and told police he had been prostituting the woman for several months “to earn enough money to travel home to North Carolina,” the FBI agent said in the complaint.
“He said he had earned about $2,000 from (the woman) and had kept all of it because, as a woman, (she) was not responsible enough to manage her own money,” the complaint states.
Other victims were prostituted throughout the Southeast for short bursts of time, according to the complaint. They left when Crews failed to pay them or they grew “tired of his poor treatment.”
He reportedly met some of the women on dating apps such as Plenty of Fish.
According to the complaint, Crews had a relationship with at least one of them before suggesting she work for him as a prostitute.
Court documents show he was arrested in Charlotte in September 2017 after officers arranged to meet with one of the women at a hotel. Police reportedly found $556 and the woman’s bank cards in his pocket at the time.
An analysis of Crews’ cell phone later revealed he directed the women through text messages and asked them to put ads up for each other online, the complaint states.
The investigation was completed by the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office in eastern North Carolina, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to Friday’s release.
This story was originally published March 10, 2020 at 6:26 PM with the headline "Man prostituting woman across America said he was trying to get home to NC, feds say."
