Odenton Men Plead Guilty to Sex Trafficking

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Two Odenton men have pleaded guilty to using social media and online sites to promote a prostitution business, according to federal authorities.

Prosecutors say Robert Downing, also known as “Luck,” and “Shamrock,” 46, and Michael Wesley Lee, also known as “King,” or “King P,” 31, both of Odenton, pleaded guilty Feb. 13 to use of an interstate facility to promote a prostitution business. Lee also pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit sex trafficking by force and fraud.

The guilty pleas were announced by United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein in a news release.

According to their plea agreements, from at least 2012 to his arrest in August 2013, Lee was a pimp who used social media websites to entice females to prostitute for him. Downing worked for Lee. The men used the Internet to recruit women to work as prostitutes, and to advertise sex services. The defendants rented hotel rooms to house the women and to serve as a place to prostitute, which they paid for with prepaid gift and debit cards.

In one case, prosecutors say Lee took a woman from New York to the Maryland Live Casino in Hanover in an unsuccessful effort to solicit prostitution customers in February of 2013. Once they were in the parking garage, Lee struck the woman repeatedly with a closed fist. Police arrested Lee; Downing then took the woman back to his home. Later that month, Downing drove the woman to a local hotel so she could earn money by prostituting to help pay Lee’s bail.

In August 2013, Lee used a social media website to lure a woman from St. Louis to Baltimore to work as a prostitute. He took the woman to a hotel in Linthicum Heights and demanded her identification card. Lee told her that she needed to reimburse him for the bus ticket to Maryland, and that she had to pay a $1,000 initiation fee. Prosecutors say that after two weeks of working for Lee as a prostitute, the victim called an ambulance and reported her situation to the EMTs, which led to Lee’s arrest.

Court documents recount other cases, including an attempt by Lee to persuade an exotic dancer in Baltimore to prostitute for him and then plan to send her to Florida for sex work.

As part of his plea to sex trafficking by force, Lee must register as a sex offender where he lives and where he works.

The plea agreement calls for Lee to be sentenced to 13 years in prison, followed by five years of supervised release, and Downing will be sentenced to 46 months in prison. Sentencing is set for March 30.

The case was investigated by the FBI-led Maryland Child Exploitation Task Force, created in 2010 to combat child prostitution, with members from 10 state and federal law enforcement agencies. The task force partners with the Maryland Human Trafficking Task Force, formed in 2007 to discover and rescue victims of human trafficking while identifying and prosecuting offenders.

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