MLB umpire Brian O'Nora arrested in sex sting operation

opes

Doctor Tongue
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Yea I think someone is now permanently unemployed by the MLB.

"Fourteen men were arrested during a single-day human trafficking operation that targeted individuals seeking to buy sex via the internet, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost and Liberty Township Police Chief Toby Meloro announced today. The operation, which took place on Sunday, was conducted by the Liberty Township Police Department in cooperation with the Mahoning Valley Human Trafficking Task Force, a task force under the attorney general’s Ohio Organized Crime Investigations Commission.” John stings deter those seeking to purchase sex – reducing the demand for human trafficking – and serve as a reminder that these crimes are more prevalent and closer to home than you may think,” Yost said. “Hats off to Chief Meloro and the Liberty Township Police Department on their successful operation.”

https://sports.yahoo.com/mlb-umpire-among-14-arrested-in-ohio-sex-sting-operation-010805758.html
 

luckiestman

Son of the Harpy
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Jul 15, 2005
32,619
If you had to guess, how many MLB umps do you think have gotten call girls during their career?

Human Trafficking Task Force is a nice touch from the cops.

"Hey Sully, are you busting murderers yet?"

"Negative, I made H double T F"

"Whoa, whats that?"

"Oh, I bust guys trying to pay to get their dick sucked, but from the internet, so I'm kind of a techie"

"I always knew you were going to do big things, bro You were always good at buying us weed from craigslist"

"Those were the days, those were the days"
 

Spud

New Member
Nov 15, 2006
99
If you had to guess, how many MLB umps do you think have gotten call girls during their career?

Human Trafficking Task Force is a nice touch from the cops.

"Hey Sully, are you busting murderers yet?"

"Negative, I made H double T F"

"Whoa, whats that?"

"Oh, I bust guys trying to pay to get their dick sucked, but from the internet, so I'm kind of a techie"

"I always knew you were going to do big things, bro You were always good at buying us weed from craigslist"

"Those were the days, those were the days"
This isn't about the guys getting their dicks sucked. It's about the kids being forced to do the sucking.

"The Mahoning Valley Human Trafficking Task Force along with the Mahoning Valley Law Enforcement Task Force assisted the Liberty Township Police Department in an operation Sunday which resulted in the arrests of 14 men who arrived at an area hotel to pay for sex.
The operation was in response to the increased amount of sex trafficking in the region and served as a warning to the men who are funding these criminal enterprises that prey on the trafficking victims, many of which are children."
https://www.facebook.com/MVHTTF/photos/pcb.1302933416738737/1302925000072912/?type=3&__tn__=HH-R&eid=ARCi9wLonkQE26qPFe2IpWtaHV6jUDZZkGGmqZpJPFChBVaNydJMuAlSF-_R0RGoFUnMg2R8cRlyuWEM&__xts__%5B0%5D=68.ARAmb8TZznMqhR4KELkupBPQBOeAS0v9OtuW7fWNVhJd4qaS25LP64ZpeSNXwUqiW8lO_WAHAQTIW9Vh2fuaTSMgSkprFQW-8Wk_DXUJWBKw6aHAuZNsClVJwWZSr_Q5xbkN09rE5W1u8lfLvWqVE00DEHvbJoFLj-r3xliDKOrl8Fh9wMIWfZuCi2iw0WcNZGVzf37VVnFga0Vd8apQZUAAqou4DP0iz_gh4ndtfMmAeWm-YA6aWHRS2OiWovA4zs3aYpkgr1XG6GfwelW1Q3Ho1jnS-SpF0CsuZudcDgi7xy6lGj2GG2w64fTUrzDqP2BhZSbklEC_fZEZ1lnOUDlDjw
 

luckiestman

Son of the Harpy
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Jul 15, 2005
32,619
This isn't about the guys getting their dicks sucked. It's about the kids being forced to do the sucking.
I went to the Yahoo link to see if this case was about child prostitution. It didn't say it was. Are you saying O'Nora was trying to have sex with a child?
 

Mooch

Member
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Jul 15, 2005
4,494
This isn't about the guys getting their dicks sucked. It's about the kids being forced to do the sucking.

"The Mahoning Valley Human Trafficking Task Force along with the Mahoning Valley Law Enforcement Task Force assisted the Liberty Township Police Department in an operation Sunday which resulted in the arrests of 14 men who arrived at an area hotel to pay for sex.
The operation was in response to the increased amount of sex trafficking in the region and served as a warning to the men who are funding these criminal enterprises that prey on the trafficking victims, many of which are children."
View: https://www.facebook.com/MVHTTF/photos/pcb.1302933416738737/1302925000072912/?type=3&__tn__=HH-R&eid=ARCi9wLonkQE26qPFe2IpWtaHV6jUDZZkGGmqZpJPFChBVaNydJMuAlSF-_R0RGoFUnMg2R8cRlyuWEM&__xts__%5B0%5D=68.ARAmb8TZznMqhR4KELkupBPQBOeAS0v9OtuW7fWNVhJd4qaS25LP64ZpeSNXwUqiW8lO_WAHAQTIW9Vh2fuaTSMgSkprFQW-8Wk_DXUJWBKw6aHAuZNsClVJwWZSr_Q5xbkN09rE5W1u8lfLvWqVE00DEHvbJoFLj-r3xliDKOrl8Fh9wMIWfZuCi2iw0WcNZGVzf37VVnFga0Vd8apQZUAAqou4DP0iz_gh4ndtfMmAeWm-YA6aWHRS2OiWovA4zs3aYpkgr1XG6GfwelW1Q3Ho1jnS-SpF0CsuZudcDgi7xy6lGj2GG2w64fTUrzDqP2BhZSbklEC_fZEZ1lnOUDlDjw
The sting included children?

This seems like a boilerplate comment trying to draw a straight line connection from "people who pay for sex" to "sex trafficking" to "sex trafficking of children" rather than any real evidence that it's actually taken place here.
 

Spud

New Member
Nov 15, 2006
99
I went to the Yahoo link to see if this case was about child prostitution. It didn't say it was. Are you saying O'Nora was trying to have sex with a child?
No, I'm only saying that the goal of H double T F is to cut down on the trafficking of children. I have no idea who O'Nora was trying to have sex with.
 

Spud

New Member
Nov 15, 2006
99
The sting included children?

This seems like a boilerplate comment trying to draw a straight line connection from "people who pay for sex" to "sex trafficking" to "sex trafficking of children" rather than any real evidence that it's actually taken place here.
My best guess is that a Human Trafficking Task Force is setup to try to make a dent in human trafficking. I suppose it could be a fancy name for what used to be the vice squad, but I think human trafficking is a much bigger problem than what many of us realize. Again, I have no reason to believe that children were involved in any of this. I guess poking fun at the H double T F rubbed me the wrong way. I work with people who represent trafficking victims in New Jersey. It's a huge problem there. I don't know how big a problem it is in Youngstown, Ohio.
 

Phil Plantier

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Mar 7, 2002
3,419
@luckiestman can speak for himself, but I think his point is that, having gone through this with Robert Kraft, many of us are aware that police are very good at implying that a transaction between two consenting adults is actually trafficking. And they're very good at neither confirming nor denying that children were involved or requested.
 

Pedros Midget

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The perp photos in that link look like a photo booth from a SoSh gathering.

I would not try to get into the mind of one of these perps, but in this day and age why would anyone even begin to try to do this kind of thing on line?
 

opes

Doctor Tongue
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I went to the Yahoo link to see if this case was about child prostitution. It didn't say it was. Are you saying O'Nora was trying to have sex with a child?
I think the whole point is to stop anyone from paying for sex regarding human trafficking. Kids get caught up in trafficking too. Maybe they wanted to hook up with dudes, elderly, teens or college coeds. The point is someone else is forcing them to do it for money.
No one technically had sex with anyone, but it was the intent. I knew a guy back in highschool tried this 20 years ago, and he got busted for attempting to hookup with an underage girl. He went to prison. I didnt know him well, but he was generally known as a piece of shit. No idea what happened to him.
 

Spud

New Member
Nov 15, 2006
99
@luckiestman can speak for himself, but I think his point is that, having gone through this with Robert Kraft, many of us are aware that police are very good at implying that a transaction between two consenting adults is actually trafficking. And they're very good at neither confirming nor denying that children were involved or requested.
Got it and agree. I just didn't want the seriousness of child trafficking to get overlooked in that branch of the discussion.

Thanks.
 

luckiestman

Son of the Harpy
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Jul 15, 2005
32,619
I think the whole point is to stop anyone from paying for sex regarding human trafficking.
I don't believe the cops just because they say the words "human trafficking." I'm cynical and assume that is marketing by the cops for resources.

This seems more like "stopping anyone from paying for sex" and selling that policy as stopping human trafficking. Happy to be wrong, but that is how the story reads. Light on details and heavy on emotional buzz words.
 

Spud

New Member
Nov 15, 2006
99
I don't believe the cops just because they say the words "human trafficking." I'm cynical and assume that is marketing by the cops for resources.

This seems more like "stopping anyone from paying for sex" and selling that policy as stopping human trafficking. Happy to be wrong, but that is how the story reads. Light on details and heavy on emotional buzz words.
I wish you were wrong, but chances are good that you're not. We are living in a cynic's paradise.
 

nvalvo

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Jul 16, 2005
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A few things about this:

The first is that I'm not really thrilled to see the Daily Mail exporting their gutter journalism to US stories about US nationals. So much of the UK media is such trash.

The second (with the caveat: I am not a lawyer; I just read a ton of journalism) is that police departments overhype sex trafficking wildly, goosing the numbers with misleading statistics that combine widely disparate activities and insinuations about pedophilia, and contribute to unhinged moral panics like QAnon and Pizzagate without doing much to actually solve the much smaller, but very real problems we have with child sex trafficking. Those cases are much more complicated, and tend to involve multiple jurisdictions and tons of resources, so instead of tackling those issues, the police and DAs just define up more routine cases.

Law enforcement know that the popular moral intuitions here are that the women are victims (especially if they are young) and the men are criminals, so they present these stings as humanitarian rescues of vulnerable women. I heard on a podcast that one common arrangement, sex workers living together as housemates — because they benefit from each others' sex work — means that each can be charged as each others' "trafficker," even in the absence of what you might think of as a conventional pimp or madam. So a DA can take an apartment with four women turning tricks over the internet and pooling their electricity and gas bills, and spin something like 12 counts of "human trafficking" out of it. I don't think that's exactly what most people have in mind when they hear about charges for "human trafficking," which I think for most people would imply a more obviously coercive situation. Another common situation, especially for young sex workers, is what is sometimes called "survival sex." This is much closer to our conception, but again, it's hard to see how criminalization is the state action that most helps these vulnerable young people. It seems more like a product of the ongoing erosion of the welfare state.

The outcomes of these stings don't match their purported goals. Notably, the charges tend not to stick, so we see a ton of arrests and very few convictions, which of course will not be noted in the story. This means the salacious humiliation provided by media effectively takes the place of a jury trial, which is pretty terrible on innocent-until-proven-guilty grounds. (Crickets from the "cancel culture" crusaders, though.) Meanwhile, the women (typically) at the center of the sting do tend to face criminal charges and are more frequently convicted, as solicitation is easier to prove. The men get shamed and the women get jailed, and get their cars, etc. seized through civil asset forfeiture.

Look at Kraft's case, which was pretty typical in a lot of ways. Charges were dropped, but he had his name dragged through the mud first. Meanwhile, the woman he paid for sex — whom the police depicted in their press releases in humanitarian terms as a victim of human trafficking — faces huge fines and a period of probation. So who exactly is victimizing her? A University of Chicago study a decade or so ago found that a sample of Chicago sex workers they followed for a few years were four times as likely to be raped by a police officer as arrested by one.

I'm pretty far from a libertarian, but this might be a time of day where that stopped clock is right. Prostitution has long been legal in places like Germany and the Netherlands, and the social fabric seems to be holding up okay. They face challenges with coercive trafficking, but they seem to be trying to address those issues in more robust ways than we are.
 

LoweTek

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I agree with you 100% nvalvo. I found the the Kraft situation to be an embarrassment to law enforcement. With the caveat and assumption this latest case is in no way involving underage victims, which anyone should regard as abhorrent, show me the trafficking... In the Kraft case police in South Florida stood before cameras multiple times touting "trafficking, trafficking, trafficking." It took mere days for the news outlets to determine there was no such "trafficking" happening and the women involved were acting of their own free will and getting quite well compensated for it. Consenting, sober adults making choices on both sides of the transaction. Where is the problem? It was a huge waste of expensive state resources, especially when the lawyers got involved.

Police like to have dog and pony shows with morality twists. The mistake they made with Kraft was he had the resources to stand up to them. Hopefully, if this case is of similar ilk, someone will stand up to them here as well.

For the life of me I have no idea why anyone would care about consenting adults involved in this activity. Assuming the providers are consenting adults (and I do realize there is a drug habit funding element of the trade - which should be addressed albeit not criminally) who cares? I couldn't care less if an MLB umpire, player or anyone else is making an arrangement with another willing participant who is of age. It happens everyday in ways both subtle and indirect as well as those where the transaction is a bit more at the forefront. There really is no victim.

You have college women financing their education entirely through this activity except they're called "Sugar Babies." There is no practical difference. When is the last time you heard about a "Sugar Baby bust?" Or, "Sugar Baby Trafficking?"

I compare it to crumbling marijuana laws. We're finally figuring out the error of our ways on that subject. Maybe one day we'll get there too with this particular waste of law enforcement resources.
 

opes

Doctor Tongue
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Off topic slightly. For you that have daughters, would you be acceptable for them being in a situation like this? Because honestly imo, I would not and be more vocal negatively regarding this subject. It seems there is a significant portion of this thread thinking its totally cool.
 

Pandemonium67

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I have daughters and I would hate to see them in prostitution. Likewise, I would hate to see them espouse white supremacist ideologies, or vote Republican.

But whether or not those things should be illegal is an entirely different animal.
 

luckiestman

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Jul 15, 2005
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But my point stands. If they think its morally not cool, their opinion would very likely be the opposite.
Who is they?

No, I wouldn’t want my son or daughter to be an exotic dancer, porn actor, or a prostitute. Nor would I like them to take Oxy, meth or heroin.. But what I want isn’t really relevant to the state imposing its will on individuals of sound mind.
 

nvalvo

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Off topic slightly. For you that have daughters, would you be acceptable for them being in a situation like this? Because honestly imo, I would not and be more vocal negatively regarding this subject. It seems there is a significant portion of this thread thinking its totally cool.
That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm not saying that coerced prostitution is in any way okay. I'm saying that criminalization isn't helping, and might be hurting.
 

richgedman'sghost

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I have daughters and I would hate to see them in prostitution. Likewise, I would hate to see them espouse white supremacist ideologies, or vote Republican.

But whether or not those things should be illegal is an entirely different animal.
Voting Republican Should be illegal in this day and age.
 

djbayko

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I don't believe the cops just because they say the words "human trafficking." I'm cynical and assume that is marketing by the cops for resources.

This seems more like "stopping anyone from paying for sex" and selling that policy as stopping human trafficking. Happy to be wrong, but that is how the story reads. Light on details and heavy on emotional buzz words.
Yup. "Human trafficking" is one of the biggest law and order political buzzwords of the past couple decades. They don't mind that what pops into your head is 12 year olds packed into shipping containers at Port Newark when really it's mostly nothing of the sort. If you want to go after trafficking, fine...go after the fucking trafficking. But busting people for consensual sex is a lot easier, it makes good headlines, attract police funding, and gets officials re-elected.
 

Cousin Walter

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Jun 26, 2006
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It's like Carlin said: Selling's legal. Fucking's legal. Why can't selling fucking be legal?

It's no one's business how two or more consenting adults choose to live their lives and criminalizing such activity only drives it underground; it doesn't eliminate it.
 

Marciano490

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Nov 4, 2007
62,312
I’m always torn on this stuff. I’m all for legalized prostitution. But it doesn’t seem like there’s always space between that and trafficking/coercion/rape. The ecosystems overlap. Maybe the answer is just legalization and then cracking down harder on the actual trafficking and underage stuff.
 

mauf

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Could these prostitution rings survive in an environment where the sex trade was legalized and regulated, even loosely? If not, I think the “trafficking” label fits.

My instincts in this area are generally libertarian, and I definitely don’t think it’s relevant whether I’d want one of my loved ones to make a living in this fashion, but the more I’ve read about this topic, the more it seems that most of these situations are exploitative when you peel the onion.
 

djbayko

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Jul 18, 2005
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I’m always torn on this stuff. I’m all for legalized prostitution. But it doesn’t seem like there’s always space between that and trafficking/coercion/rape. The ecosystems overlap. Maybe the answer is just legalization and then cracking down harder on the actual trafficking and underage stuff.
Of course the ecosystems overlap. Once there is an infrastructure in place for the practice of some illegal shit, it becomes that much easier for people to use that as cover for even more illegal shit. If the more prevalent illegal shit arguably shouldn’t be illegal in the first place, then you’re doing a lot more harm than good. The Venm diagram of prostitution and and human trafficking isn’t a perfect circle - it’s not even close.