A Massachusetts man who recruited troubled young women from Maine to pimp them in Boston in 2013 was sentenced Thursday in U.S. District Court in Portland to 46 months in federal prison.
Fritz Blanchard, 29, of the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, was found guilty by a federal jury last Aug. 28 after a four-day trial on a charge of aiding and abetting interstate transportation of women for prostitution.
Blanchard was also sentenced by Judge Nancy Torresen to serve three years of supervised release after completing his prison term.
Blanchard is the second pimp to be sentenced in the case. His childhood friend, Samuel Gravely, who moved to Maine years ago after prison terms in Massachusetts on illegal gun and drug charges, pleaded guilty to an identical interstate prostitution charge in 2013. Gravely was sentenced last Sept. 23 to serve four years in prison.
At Blanchard’s trial, Gravely, 28, told jurors that Blanchard had been his criminal mentor after they reconnected in 2012, and that he had told him that the illegal sex trade was “the new way” to make money.
Gravely described to the jury how Blanchard encouraged him to advertise his girlfriend from Presque Isle on a prostitution website, and accompanied Gravely and the girlfriend when they pimped her twice in Bangor in March 2013.
“He knew a new way to make money besides just selling drugs,” Gravely testified at trial, recalling his conversations with Blanchard in 2012 and 2013. “He told me that prostitution was the new way, that there was money to be made in it.”
Blanchard and Gravely then brought the woman to Portland on March 27, 2013, and recruited another young woman with dirty clothes and a black eye off the street the same day, Gravely’s girlfriend testified.
After pimping the two women for one night in Portland through ads posted on backpage.com, the men picked up a juvenile girl on the street the next day, convincing her to join them for a road trip to Boston and possibly beyond, Gravely and his girlfriend testified.
In Boston, the men checked the women into a hotel on Huntington Avenue. Gravely’s girlfriend testified that Blanchard told her when they got to the hotel not to tell the juvenile girl they were prostitutes. But she said that Gravely, whom she knew by the nickname “Bigs,” told her to explain to the girl what was happening.
The Press Herald is not identifying the women or the juvenile because they are considered victims and have not been charged with any crimes.
Gravely’s girlfriend testified that the girl was suffering from symptoms of opiate withdrawal on the drive to Boston and began crying when the men would not get her drugs.
The girl did not know she was expected to be a prostitute when she first got in the car, then feigned illness and managed to slip away from the Boston hotel to call police, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Scott Dolan can be reached at 791-6304 or at:
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