Man arrested for running prostitution ring in Wauwatosa

A 25-year-old Milwaukee man was arrested yesterday for soliciting prostitutes and putting them up at Super 8, 115 N. Mayfair Road.

According to Wauwatosa Police reports:

Officers received a call from a woman saying her 22-year-old sister from Green Bay had dropped off her kids Feb. 23 saying she was going out with friends. It was not until March 6 that the sister called crying and saying she was being held against her will.

Officers found the Green Bay woman and a 20-year-old Milwaukee woman in a hotel room. The Green Bay woman said she and a friend had hung out with an acquaintance in Green Bay who had asked her to go on a trip to Florida with her. But on March 1, they arrived in Wauwatosa and picked up the Milwaukee woman and had been staying in the hotel since.

The Green Bay woman told officers she started getting scared because the man kept talking to her about prostituting herself, and the Milwaukee woman, who is familiar to Wauwatosa police due to a past shoplifting incident, coached her on getting guys drunk, avoiding cops and stealing customers' credit cards. During the next week, they took her to clubs around Milwaukee and Chicago to practice and gave her a cell phone to use if she had any interest from potential customers. The man started getting angry because she was not soliciting jobs.

The woman said she had enough when the man found another girl at a shelter and brought her back to the hotel to work as a prostitute.

When officers arrested the man, he had about $1,800 in his pockets, five cell phones, as well as a laptop computer with information on how to operate a prostitution ring.

A background check showed he had a history of prostitution and drug trafficking. The 20-year-old Milwaukee woman, who has several aliases, had prostitution arrests in Illinois, Nevada, Washington D.C. and Hawaii.