A conspiracy to enslave and sell women for sex began at a tavern in Circleville, Ohio, the Columbus Dispatch reports. Army Specialist Craig Allen Corey, on leave, talked to a pair of childhood buddies about his plan to pad his soldier’s wages. Corey had been a customer of illicit massage services advertised on the Internet, and he proposed to do the same out of his apartment more than 300 miles away in Millersville, Md., near his post as a supply specialist at Fort Meade. With some risque photos of the offerings and some explicit listings on craigslist, Corey calculated he could pocket $150,000 a year on top of his drug-dealing income.
Human trafficking, mostly associated with big cities, had come to small-city Appalachia. Corey and his gang would travel regularly from Maryland to Chillicothe to obtain and sell drugs and “recruit some bitches.” Corey used MySpace, YouTube and Web ads to recruit a few women from Virginia, and he imported a woman from Watertown, N.Y., where he once was stationed at Fort Drum. “I don’t think any area is immune,” said William Winter, agent in charge of the Baltimore office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which built a case against the men that sent them to prison for a combined 57 years. “A lot of the women had not traveled much and were low on the socio-economic scale. They were ripe to be exploited by someone with strong personalities like these guys. “They would recruit these women by saying … ‘Come to the big city of Baltimore and bring your friends. Come party with us,’ basically. ‘We have a lot of money.’