Category: Pennsylvania

Several locations in the Pittsburgh area were raided in an investigation of an alleged human trafficking ring that authorities say was being run through massage parlors in Florida, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Collins was convicted on four counts of trafficking individuals, three counts of involuntary servitude, one count of rape, one count of aggravated assault, and one count of strangulation. It’s the first-ever conviction involving trafficking of adults in the city.

The arrests were made as part of an undercover sting, the second this year in the Youngstown, PA. area. The investigation was by the Mahoning Valley Human Trafficking Task Force led to the arrests of 16 in all.

Eight alleged Reading, Pa. gang members were indicted on federal sex trafficking charges. Authorities said they conspired to recruit, entice, harbor, transport, provide, obtain, and maintain by any means females to engage in commercial sex acts. Some of the victims, they said, were under the age of 18.

Investigators say Xu, of Mt. Pleasant, owned four Tokyo massage parlors where the prostitution was happening and Chen, of Monroeville, would pick up young women at a bus stop and take them to the parlors.

A Lehigh County man accused of pimping out a half-dozen heroin-addicted women in York County and elsewhere has been sentenced to a decade in federal prison. Willie James Johnson appeared in Harrisburg’s federal court on Wednesday, Feb. 13, where he was sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered to pay a $5,000 special assessment fee under the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act, court records state.

In Greensburg, PA. a woman will serve up to 20 years in prison for selling sexual encounters with a 3-year-old girl. Rebecca Shadle was sentenced Thursday after she pleaded guilty in September to trafficking of a minor for sexual purposes, child endangerment, aggravated indecent assault and conspiracy.

A South Jersey man was convicted on charges that he ran a human-trafficking ring in which he profited as two women performed sex acts for money at Pennsylvania hotels.

There, the girls — ages now 16 and 13 — were assaulted multiple times in a bed by a man who knew their mother, they testified in Superior Court on Tuesday.

Police charged 12 sex workers and 27 of their patrons during a nationally coordinated sting operation meant to reduce sex trafficking, according to Pittsburgh police.

The teenager told investigators her friend handed her over to a 19-year-old for sex in the parking lot of a Rite Aid store in East McKeesport.