By SCOTT GOLDSTEIN
Published 07 February 2011 11:05 PM
A felon from Austin forced a teenage girl and her adult sister to come work as prostitutes in Dallas because “there was big money to be made during Super Bowl,” according to police documents.
But Dallas police say they busted Anthony Ladell Winn, 35, before the sisters, ages 14 and 20, arranged any weekend dates.
“We’re very proud of the work on this one,” said Sgt. Byron Fassett of the Dallas police Child Exploitation Squad. “Any time that we can identify a child victim on the street involved in this, it is exceptional work, quite frankly. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack.”
Winn was arrested early Sunday on felony charges of attempting to compel prostitution by force and trafficking of persons. He was being held Monday night at the Dallas County Jail in lieu of $100,000 bail.
Area authorities had been bracing for a possible influx of prostitutes and human trafficking victims in the run-up to Super Bowl XLV. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and the FBI pledged additional resources devoted to combating human trafficking last week.
Authorities say it can be extremely difficult to accurately measure whether such crimes spike and why. However, early indications in Dallas are that there was not an obvious increase in reported prostitution cases, perhaps due in part to the icy and cold conditions, police said.
Dallas police reported 23 adult prostitution arrests from Wednesday through Sunday, though they noted they do not know how many were related to the festivities or people surrounding the Super Bowl.
“We didn’t see that as being a drastic increase in our normal enforcement numbers,” said Assistant Chief Tom Lawrence. “We were trying to focus much more heavily on the locations where we thought there’d be a high level of parties, activities related to the Super Bowl.”
Arlington and Fort Worth police said their prostitution arrest numbers were not available Monday.
For Fassett, whose squad handles sex crimes involving juveniles, the Winn case was the only arrest of its kind thought to be related to the Super Bowl.
“I don’t know that I saw on the street level any more activity than any other normal night that we would have run an operation,” said Fassett. He acknowledged that “there’s no real statistical data to prove it one way or the other.”
Investigators believe Winn met the sisters in Austin, had been prostituting the older sister for about a year and the younger sister for about a month, police documents said. A few days ago, Winn and the older sister got into an argument because the woman did not want Winn prostituting her younger sister anymore, the documents said.
Winn punched the 20-year-old woman in the face and bit her twice on the arm, police said. He then told the women “they were going to Dallas to prostitute for him” during the Super Bowl and that “there were men that would spend a lot,” the documents said.
Winn drove the women to the city Saturday morning, rented a northwest Dallas hotel room and sent them out to engage in prostitution. He told them all the money they made would go to him, the documents said.
Dallas patrol officers came in contact with the sisters Saturday and investigators ran a sting operation on Winn, police said. He was arrested near Northwest Highway and Interstate 35E.
Winn’s Texas criminal record includes convictions out of Austin for assault, drug dealing and violation of a protective order.
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