California
Founder of a porn empire sentenced to 27 years in federal prison
SAN DIEGO (AP) — The founder of a California-based porn empire that recruited women with false modeling offers was sentenced Monday to 27 years in federal prison.
Michael James Pratt pleaded guilty in June in federal court in San Diego. Federal prosecutors said Pratt and his co-defendants used force, fraud and coercion to recruit hundreds of women, many of whom were in their late teens, for their adult videos.
The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino sentenced Pratt on one charge of sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion and one count of conspiracy to commit the same crime.
Pratt was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list when he was arrested in Madrid in 2022, three years after he fled while facing sex trafficking charges.
A New Zealand native, he founded the now-defunct GirlsDoPorn website in San Diego. In 2019, he and others were charged in San Diego with sex crimes after being targeted in a civil lawsuit by 22 women who claimed they were victimized by fraud and breach of contract.
The women said they were plied with alcohol and marijuana before being rushed through signing a contract, which they were not allowed to read. Some said they were sexually assaulted and held in hotel rooms unwillingly until filming had ended.
A judge in 2020 found in favor of the women and handed down a $12.7 million judgment against Pratt, Matthew Isaac Wolfe and adult producer and performer Ruben Andre Garcia.
Wolfe, who handled day-to-day operations, finances, marketing and filming for the website, pleaded guilty in 2022 to a single federal count of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking. He was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison.
The other co-defendants also pleaded guilty. Garcia was sentenced to 20 years in prison and cameraman Theodore Gyi received a four-year sentence.
New York
Drug dealer whose sentence was commuted by Trump found guilty of violating terms of release
NEW YORK (AP) — A convicted New York drug dealer whose federal prison sentence was commuted by President Donald Trump has been found guilty of violating the terms of his release after being arrested and charged in connection with several recent crimes.
Jonathan Braun now faces up to five years in prison when he’s sentenced Oct. 9.
The Long Island resident had been accused of menacing a hospital nurse and a fellow synagogue member on two separate incidents, as well as of groping his family’s nanny and evading bridge tolls.
A federal judge ruled Friday that prosecutors proved the violations had occurred “by a preponderance of the evidence” during a series of hearings in Brooklyn federal court.
At the same time, Judge Kiyo Matsumoto acknowledged prosecutors had not met the legal burden for other charges related to a March 29 altercation at his home.
Prosecutors had said Braun punched a guest in the face, shoved him to the ground, then pushed his 3-year-old son to the ground, leaving a red mark on the child’s back.
Braun, who pleaded not guilty, has been in federal custody since he was ordered detained in April. His lawyers didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment Monday.
In 2019, Braun was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to drug-related charges. He served roughly a year behind bars before Trump commuted his sentence in the final days of his first term in January 2021.
Braun had been a high-ranking member of an international group that smuggled more than 100,000 kilograms (220,460 pounds) of marijuana from Canada into the United States, federal prosecutors said at the time.
In the most recent criminal cases, prosecutors said, Braun argued with a staffer at a hospital in January and swung an IV pole at her. In March, he threatened a man who asked him to be quiet during a synagogue service.
Last summer, police said, Braun evaded bridge tolls at least 40 times, accruing $160 in unpaid fees.
New York
Prosecutor warns of more raids after 57 detained making snack bars
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Fifty-seven people in the country illegally were detained after a raid on an upstate New York snack bar plant last week, according to federal prosecutor who warned Tuesday that employers can expect more large-scale workplace enforcement actions.
John Sarcone, acting U.S. Attorney for northern New York, said five of the people detained after the raid Thursday in rural Cato, New York were criminally charged for illegally re-entering the United States. The other 52 were detained pending deportation proceedings.
The advocacy group Rural and Migrant Ministry has said most of the people detained at the Nutrition Bar Confectioners plant were from Guatemala. It happened the same day immigration authorities detained 475 people at a manufacturing site in Georgia where Korean automaker Hyundai makes electric vehicles.
Sarcone told a news conference that the investigation in New York was continuing.
Factory owners said last week that their employees had legal documentation and that they did not know why they were raided.
Calls seeking comment were made to the factory Tuesday and an email seeking comment was sent to a co-owner.
Federal agents converged on the nutrition bar plant Thursday morning and took workers away in a Border Patrol van, according to photos and videos of the raid. One worker told The Associated Press that immigration agents ordered everyone to a lunch room, where they asked for proof they are in the country legally.
Democratic elected officials called it an example of heavy-handed immigration enforcement under the Trump administration. Gov. Kathy Hochul said detaining parents put “at least a dozen children at risk of returning from school to an empty house.”
Sarcone said social service agencies were involved and no children came home to an empty house.
Washington
Police arrest boy, 13, with 23 guns over school shooting threats
TACOMA, Wash. (AP) — A 13-year-old boy described by police as obsessed with school shooters was arrested on multiple firearms possession charges and causing a threat after they say they found social media posts about intentions to kill and seized 23 guns and ammunition from his home.
The boy pleaded not guilty to a total of five charges, four of them felonies, in juvenile court on Monday. He was arrested over the weekend in Washington’s Pierce County.
The boy’s name has not been released. It was not immediately known if he had a lawyer. Juvenile court records are generally confidential.
Firearms were mounted on walls and handguns were found unsecured throughout the home, sheriff’s Deputy Carly Cappetto said in a news release Monday.
“Several pieces of evidence from the suspect’s bedroom indicated he was obsessed with past school shooters and imitated similar behaviors with photos and inscriptions throughout his room,” she said. Loaded magazines with school shooter writings on them were removed.
“It appeared the suspect had everything ready to go to commit a mass shooting type of incident. It is unknown who or what the intended target was going to be, but it’s clear it was a matter of time before a tragic incident occurred.”
The boy’s parents said their son had no intention of harming anyone. His mother, who attended the court hearing, suggested in an interview afterward that the social media posts were an attempt to “be cool” among peers, KOMO-TV reported.
Cappetto said the boy was last enrolled in the Franklin Pierce School District in 2021. He was currently unenrolled and was not currently an active student in any school district.
Virginia
Appeals court hears from military contractor told to pay $42 million to former Abu Ghraib detainees
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Federal appellate judges on Tuesday heard arguments in case brought by a U.S. military contractor ordered by a lower court to pay $42 million for contributing to torture and mistreatment of three former detainees at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison more than two decades ago.
The three-judge panel in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments and questioned attorneys for nearly an hour in the appeal brought by Reston, Virginia-based CACI, which is challenging last year’s civil lawsuit that led to a finding against it. The judges did not immediately issue a ruling. It’s not clear when an opinion could come.
The appeal centers on CACI’s challenge to the lower court’s jurisdiction.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs, Suhail Al Shimari, Salah Al-Ejaili and Asa’ad Al-Zubae, argued the case was fairly litigated at the district court level.
The hearing delved deeply into legal details and didn’t get into the specifics that came up during last year’s trial, in which the plaintiffs testified they were subjected to beatings, sexual abuse, forced nudity and other cruel treatment at the prison during the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
A jury awarded each of them $3 million in compensatory damages and $11 million each in punitive damages.
The three did not allege that CACI’s interrogators explicitly inflicted the abuse themselves, but argued CACI was complicit because its interrogators conspired with military police to “soften up” detainees for questioning with harsh treatment.
CACI supplied the interrogators who worked at the prison. It has denied any wrongdoing and has emphasized throughout 17 years of litigation that its employees are not alleged to have inflicted any abuse on the plaintiffs in the case.
CACI had argued it wasn’t complicit in the detainees’ abuse and said its employees had minimal interaction with the three plaintiffs in the case.
Fundamentally, CACI argued that any liability for their mistreatment belonged to the government.
Photos of the abuse released in 2004 showed naked prisoners stacked into pyramids or dragged by leashes. Photos included a soldier smiling and giving a thumbs-up while posing next to a corpse, detainees being threatened with dogs, and a detainee hooded and attached to electrical wires.
Military police seen in the photos smiling and laughing as they directed the abuse were convicted in military courts-martial. But none of the civilian interrogators from CACI ever faced criminal charges, even though military investigations concluded that several CACI interrogators had engaged in wrongdoing.
Last year’s civil trial and subsequent retrial were the first time a U.S. jury heard claims brought by Abu Ghraib detainees in the 20 years since the photos shocked the world.
None of the three plaintiffs were in any of photos but they described treatment very similar to what was depicted.
The $42 million they were awarded fully matches the amount sought by the plaintiffs. It’s also more than the $31 million that the plaintiffs said CACI was paid to supply interrogators to Abu Ghraib.
Founder of a porn empire sentenced to 27 years in federal prison
SAN DIEGO (AP) — The founder of a California-based porn empire that recruited women with false modeling offers was sentenced Monday to 27 years in federal prison.
Michael James Pratt pleaded guilty in June in federal court in San Diego. Federal prosecutors said Pratt and his co-defendants used force, fraud and coercion to recruit hundreds of women, many of whom were in their late teens, for their adult videos.
The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino sentenced Pratt on one charge of sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion and one count of conspiracy to commit the same crime.
Pratt was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list when he was arrested in Madrid in 2022, three years after he fled while facing sex trafficking charges.
A New Zealand native, he founded the now-defunct GirlsDoPorn website in San Diego. In 2019, he and others were charged in San Diego with sex crimes after being targeted in a civil lawsuit by 22 women who claimed they were victimized by fraud and breach of contract.
The women said they were plied with alcohol and marijuana before being rushed through signing a contract, which they were not allowed to read. Some said they were sexually assaulted and held in hotel rooms unwillingly until filming had ended.
A judge in 2020 found in favor of the women and handed down a $12.7 million judgment against Pratt, Matthew Isaac Wolfe and adult producer and performer Ruben Andre Garcia.
Wolfe, who handled day-to-day operations, finances, marketing and filming for the website, pleaded guilty in 2022 to a single federal count of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking. He was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison.
The other co-defendants also pleaded guilty. Garcia was sentenced to 20 years in prison and cameraman Theodore Gyi received a four-year sentence.
New York
Drug dealer whose sentence was commuted by Trump found guilty of violating terms of release
NEW YORK (AP) — A convicted New York drug dealer whose federal prison sentence was commuted by President Donald Trump has been found guilty of violating the terms of his release after being arrested and charged in connection with several recent crimes.
Jonathan Braun now faces up to five years in prison when he’s sentenced Oct. 9.
The Long Island resident had been accused of menacing a hospital nurse and a fellow synagogue member on two separate incidents, as well as of groping his family’s nanny and evading bridge tolls.
A federal judge ruled Friday that prosecutors proved the violations had occurred “by a preponderance of the evidence” during a series of hearings in Brooklyn federal court.
At the same time, Judge Kiyo Matsumoto acknowledged prosecutors had not met the legal burden for other charges related to a March 29 altercation at his home.
Prosecutors had said Braun punched a guest in the face, shoved him to the ground, then pushed his 3-year-old son to the ground, leaving a red mark on the child’s back.
Braun, who pleaded not guilty, has been in federal custody since he was ordered detained in April. His lawyers didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment Monday.
In 2019, Braun was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to drug-related charges. He served roughly a year behind bars before Trump commuted his sentence in the final days of his first term in January 2021.
Braun had been a high-ranking member of an international group that smuggled more than 100,000 kilograms (220,460 pounds) of marijuana from Canada into the United States, federal prosecutors said at the time.
In the most recent criminal cases, prosecutors said, Braun argued with a staffer at a hospital in January and swung an IV pole at her. In March, he threatened a man who asked him to be quiet during a synagogue service.
Last summer, police said, Braun evaded bridge tolls at least 40 times, accruing $160 in unpaid fees.
New York
Prosecutor warns of more raids after 57 detained making snack bars
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — Fifty-seven people in the country illegally were detained after a raid on an upstate New York snack bar plant last week, according to federal prosecutor who warned Tuesday that employers can expect more large-scale workplace enforcement actions.
John Sarcone, acting U.S. Attorney for northern New York, said five of the people detained after the raid Thursday in rural Cato, New York were criminally charged for illegally re-entering the United States. The other 52 were detained pending deportation proceedings.
The advocacy group Rural and Migrant Ministry has said most of the people detained at the Nutrition Bar Confectioners plant were from Guatemala. It happened the same day immigration authorities detained 475 people at a manufacturing site in Georgia where Korean automaker Hyundai makes electric vehicles.
Sarcone told a news conference that the investigation in New York was continuing.
Factory owners said last week that their employees had legal documentation and that they did not know why they were raided.
Calls seeking comment were made to the factory Tuesday and an email seeking comment was sent to a co-owner.
Federal agents converged on the nutrition bar plant Thursday morning and took workers away in a Border Patrol van, according to photos and videos of the raid. One worker told The Associated Press that immigration agents ordered everyone to a lunch room, where they asked for proof they are in the country legally.
Democratic elected officials called it an example of heavy-handed immigration enforcement under the Trump administration. Gov. Kathy Hochul said detaining parents put “at least a dozen children at risk of returning from school to an empty house.”
Sarcone said social service agencies were involved and no children came home to an empty house.
Washington
Police arrest boy, 13, with 23 guns over school shooting threats
TACOMA, Wash. (AP) — A 13-year-old boy described by police as obsessed with school shooters was arrested on multiple firearms possession charges and causing a threat after they say they found social media posts about intentions to kill and seized 23 guns and ammunition from his home.
The boy pleaded not guilty to a total of five charges, four of them felonies, in juvenile court on Monday. He was arrested over the weekend in Washington’s Pierce County.
The boy’s name has not been released. It was not immediately known if he had a lawyer. Juvenile court records are generally confidential.
Firearms were mounted on walls and handguns were found unsecured throughout the home, sheriff’s Deputy Carly Cappetto said in a news release Monday.
“Several pieces of evidence from the suspect’s bedroom indicated he was obsessed with past school shooters and imitated similar behaviors with photos and inscriptions throughout his room,” she said. Loaded magazines with school shooter writings on them were removed.
“It appeared the suspect had everything ready to go to commit a mass shooting type of incident. It is unknown who or what the intended target was going to be, but it’s clear it was a matter of time before a tragic incident occurred.”
The boy’s parents said their son had no intention of harming anyone. His mother, who attended the court hearing, suggested in an interview afterward that the social media posts were an attempt to “be cool” among peers, KOMO-TV reported.
Cappetto said the boy was last enrolled in the Franklin Pierce School District in 2021. He was currently unenrolled and was not currently an active student in any school district.
Virginia
Appeals court hears from military contractor told to pay $42 million to former Abu Ghraib detainees
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Federal appellate judges on Tuesday heard arguments in case brought by a U.S. military contractor ordered by a lower court to pay $42 million for contributing to torture and mistreatment of three former detainees at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison more than two decades ago.
The three-judge panel in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments and questioned attorneys for nearly an hour in the appeal brought by Reston, Virginia-based CACI, which is challenging last year’s civil lawsuit that led to a finding against it. The judges did not immediately issue a ruling. It’s not clear when an opinion could come.
The appeal centers on CACI’s challenge to the lower court’s jurisdiction.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs, Suhail Al Shimari, Salah Al-Ejaili and Asa’ad Al-Zubae, argued the case was fairly litigated at the district court level.
The hearing delved deeply into legal details and didn’t get into the specifics that came up during last year’s trial, in which the plaintiffs testified they were subjected to beatings, sexual abuse, forced nudity and other cruel treatment at the prison during the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
A jury awarded each of them $3 million in compensatory damages and $11 million each in punitive damages.
The three did not allege that CACI’s interrogators explicitly inflicted the abuse themselves, but argued CACI was complicit because its interrogators conspired with military police to “soften up” detainees for questioning with harsh treatment.
CACI supplied the interrogators who worked at the prison. It has denied any wrongdoing and has emphasized throughout 17 years of litigation that its employees are not alleged to have inflicted any abuse on the plaintiffs in the case.
CACI had argued it wasn’t complicit in the detainees’ abuse and said its employees had minimal interaction with the three plaintiffs in the case.
Fundamentally, CACI argued that any liability for their mistreatment belonged to the government.
Photos of the abuse released in 2004 showed naked prisoners stacked into pyramids or dragged by leashes. Photos included a soldier smiling and giving a thumbs-up while posing next to a corpse, detainees being threatened with dogs, and a detainee hooded and attached to electrical wires.
Military police seen in the photos smiling and laughing as they directed the abuse were convicted in military courts-martial. But none of the civilian interrogators from CACI ever faced criminal charges, even though military investigations concluded that several CACI interrogators had engaged in wrongdoing.
Last year’s civil trial and subsequent retrial were the first time a U.S. jury heard claims brought by Abu Ghraib detainees in the 20 years since the photos shocked the world.
None of the three plaintiffs were in any of photos but they described treatment very similar to what was depicted.
The $42 million they were awarded fully matches the amount sought by the plaintiffs. It’s also more than the $31 million that the plaintiffs said CACI was paid to supply interrogators to Abu Ghraib.
