what happened to fredrick a reeker attorney at law
PORTSMOUTH, Ohio – On a clear morning, the four-story Scioto County Courthouse casts its shadow over the smaller brick building just beyond Courtroom Street, where criminal defense attorney Michael Mearan lives and operates his namesake legal practice.
Mearan, 73, is a onetime city councilman who since the 1970s has been a fixture in this small but troubled town along the Ohio River, which separates southern Ohio from northeastern Kentucky.
The area was once dubbed "America'due south pill mill," and when Mearan shuffles over to the courthouse in his rumpled suit, it'due south often to represent someone in the relentless grip of opioid addiction.
Simply according to a federal wiretap affidavit, which was filed under seal with the Southern District of Ohio but was obtained by The Enquirer, Mearan is not just a jowly, silver-haired local attorney.
The 80-page affidavit states that Mearan is also a prolific sex trafficker who for decades has supplied his immature, female clients with drugs "in substitution for and as an incentive to participate in acts of prostitution."
The affidavit – filed in August 2015 by a senior special amanuensis with the U.South. Drug Enforcement Assistants – casts Mearan as a central effigy in a drug and sexual practice trafficking band operating throughout the Midwest.
The amanuensis linked to Mearan 27 women who worked for him as prostitutes, including 1 who has been missing since 2013 and another institute dead of "multiple traumas" the aforementioned yr.
The agent added that Mearan has been "known to law enforcement" in Portsmouth since the 1970s and has been indirectly tied to multiple prior FBI investigations into human trafficking, extortion, violent gangs and "White Slave Trafficking."
The DEA investigation appears to have concluded in October 2016, when the last of 8 defendants pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute heroin and other drugs.
Mearan, however, was not amidst those charged. The allegations concerning him remain investigative findings in a sworn affirmation that have not been proven in court.
Rumors about Mearan, sexual activity trafficking and local corruption take been something of an open secret in Portsmouth for years. And those tales gained credibility in December 2017 subsequently an ex-reporter with the Portsmouth Daily Times posted excerpts of the DEA affidavit on a Facebook page.
But the lack of follow-through by whatsoever investigative torso has fueled suspicions in Portsmouth that complicit local authorities let Mearan trap women in a bicycle of drug abuse and sexual servitude, and that outside agencies but don't care most the social and economic horrors afflicting forgotten Rust Chugalug towns like theirs.
Enquirer reporters picked upward where the DEA affidavit ended by spending a year visiting Portsmouth to investigate the allegations concerning Mearan. The effort included interviews with more than 65 individuals and a review of hundreds of documents, including arrest and court records.
Amidst those interviewed were ten women who separately shared accounts of working for Mearan as a prostitute at various times over the last ii decades. Records prove that Mearan had represented half-dozen of the women facing drug charges.
Those women said Mearan, as their defence force attorney, promised lenient sentences from judges he knew and parole officers who would ignore probation requirements – as long every bit the women were willing to have sexual activity for money.
Mearan, they said, would give them coin to feed their drug habits and arranged sexual liaisons with men in Portsmouth, Cincinnati and Columbus, and out-of-land trips to New York, New Jersey, Louisiana and Florida.
The women say they earned anywhere from $200 to $ii,000 per run across, and that either the men involved or Mearan himself handled the payment.
In 2 interviews with The Enquirer, Mearan – who was sometimes joking and dismissive and other times angry and combative – consistently denied any proposition that he had engaged in prostitution or sex trafficking. At i point he said he didn't fifty-fifty know what a sex trafficker was and asked for a definition.
Mearan said the accusations about him are due to "jealousy" and are "totally faux."
"That affidavit was the production of a couple gals that the FBI tried to fix me upwards," he said. "This affidavit that yous have says that they've been investigating me since the '70s. Now, you lot think in fifty years they would take possibly come upwards with something?"
A spokeswoman for the DEA, which does non handle sexual activity trafficking or other offenses unrelated to drugs, said the agency had forwarded "information regarding possible corruption and prostitution" stemming from the heroin investigation to the FBI.
"It is unknown what if whatsoever investigation was initiated past the FBI every bit a issue of our tip," DEA spokeswoman Cheryl Davis wrote in an e-mail last year.
Trapped and Trafficked: Ane boondocks's dark secret
Several women say they were lured into an alleged sex trafficking ring run by a local defense attorney in Portsmouth, Ohio.
Liz Dufour and Kate Potato, The Enquirer
Todd Wickerham, special agent in charge of the FBI's Cincinnati function – which includes Portsmouth in its jurisdiction – said he does not know what happened to the DEA investigation subsequently the initial drug convictions.
"I don't have whatsoever other information on this, but if nosotros get credible information on a human trafficking ring we would absolutely act upon that," Wickerham said.
Sources with firsthand knowledge told The Enquirer that at that place is, in fact, an ongoing investigation into Mearan past multiple police enforcement agencies. The sources requested anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the existence of an active investigation.
Besides Mearan, the women who spoke with The Enquirer collectively named several well-known individuals from the Portsmouth surface area who they alleged had paid to accept sexual practice with them. The list includes former police officers, lawyers, a medical professional, a old high school football star, businessmen and probation officers. The Enquirer is not naming the men unless the allegations against them have been otherwise corroborated.
Nearly all of the women interviewed asked to remain anonymous, citing their fears of Mearan'south connections to a corrupt law enforcement organisation equally well equally unsolved deaths or disappearances of more a dozen women in southern Ohio this decade.
During interviews, some of the women cried, visibly trembled or stole furtive glances over their shoulders to make certain they couldn't be overheard.
"I'm scared. I'm not gonna lie," i woman wrote in a message to reporters. "I accept to live hither. I'm on eggshells right now. U don't know this town."
"My family is kinda scared for me to talk. Too many missing woman (sic)," some other wrote. "I know I want to be a part of putting a finish to it. But I also have family to protect."
Merely one of the women, Heather Hren, agreed to accept her proper name used in this story.
Hren, 37, said Mearan arranged for her to have sex with a Cincinnati doc for $200. On another occasion, she said Mearan brought her to the probation role, where an officeholder took naked pictures of her in exchange for letting her avoid customs service obligations. She said she likewise performed oral sexual practice for a different probation officer.
It was like "walking into your ain decease or into your own prison house," she said. "Because now you're stuck."
For close to three years, Mearan "trafficked me to his friends or pimped me out," Hren said.
Although Mearan hadn't forced her into prostitution, she said his law enforcement connections and her addiction ultimately left her feeling trapped.
"It wasn't like you could become to the police department," Hren said. "There is no one that these girls can tell... Everybody'southward in each other's pocket."
The 'EUBANKS/MEARAN organization'
Portsmouth once was an economic rival to cities such as Cincinnati, and in the 1930s was home to a National Football League squad.
But like other small, manufacturing plant towns in certain parts of America, Portsmouth's manufacturing base of operations started collapsing in the 1970s. With a population of roughly 20,000, nearly half as many people alive in Portsmouth today than during its heyday of the 1940s, when it was the country's shoemaking capital letter.
Scioto County, where Portsmouth is the canton seat, is i of the poorest and least employed regions in the state. In downtown Portsmouth, boards are as prevalent every bit windows, and quondam section stores and office buildings now firm depression-end apartments for the elderly. Prostitutes walk the streets day and nighttime almost an abandoned shoe factory east of boondocks.
The expanse has been especially hard hit past drug abuse – more often than not prescription painkillers, fentanyl and heroin. The Portsmouth City Wellness Department recorded near 120 deaths from drug overdoses in just the past 3 years.
"The conditions are ripe for human trafficking," Scioto Canton Prosecutor Shane Tieman said. "Yous take drug addiction rampant. You have unemployment. Yous have poverty. You have a born group of folks who are desperate, maybe hopeless, that could be preyed upon."
Co-ordinate to DEA Senior Special Agent Keith Leighton, that's exactly what was happening.
Leighton's Baronial 2015 affidavit sought and received authorization from a U.S. District Courtroom judge to set a wiretap on phones used by Mark Eubanks, a suspected heroin, Oxycodone and steroids dealer.
The affirmation details a sprawling investigation that had been underway for at least 20 months. Agents had installed a GPS tracking device on Eubanks' golden Hummer H2; surveillance teams followed him and documented with whom he met; a subconscious camera behind Eubanks' residence recorded when he came and went; agents sifted through Eubanks' garbage in search of evidence; and at least four confidential sources provided agents with incriminating data.
The DEA investigation listed 13 "target subjects," and while Eubanks is named the chief target, the affidavit depicts Mearan as just every bit important a figure.
Leighton wrote that the investigation "was predicated on the illegal activities" of Mearan and at one point refers to the criminal enterprise as the "EUBANKS/MEARAN organization."
The affidavit reveals a symbiotic relationship betwixt the duo in which Eubanks supplied drugs and prostitutes to Mearan, and Mearan arranged for the women to have sex for money and represented arrested associates so he could use his connections to secure favorable treatment.
Mearan too warned Eubanks about agile investigations and once gave him the identity of a confidential informant sent to make drug buys from Eubanks, the affirmation states.
The affirmation notes that there were more than 200 phone calls and text messages over a one-yr menstruum between the men and that a surveillance squad watched Eubanks make it at Mearan's law role one day toting a thermos that agents suspected concealed $1,600 in cash.
Federal prosecutors with the Southern District of Ohio indicted Eubanks in October 2015, and he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute heroin. He was sentenced to 150 months in federal prison.
Eubanks, 37, declined to comment when reached at the Federal Correctional Institution in Morgantown, West Virginia.
'I'm a pretty decent lawyer'
Mearan's law office is on the ground flooring, side by side to a bedchamber separated but past a sliding door. His bedroom used to exist on the second floor, but the stairs now brand the trek too arduous.
During two split interviews, his phone seemingly never stopped ringing. His secretary shuttled in and out to deliver paperwork for him to address. At least 3 potential clients knocked on his door in search of help. A pack of mixed-breed rescue dogs roamed virtually in search of attending. And his adult daughter yelled at reporters to get out her father alone.
Mearan, who has no known criminal history, said the details in the DEA affidavit shouldn't be taken seriously because agents relied on confidential informants looking to cutting deals to reduce their ain sentences.
I brand my living as a lawyer, and I retrieve I'yard a pretty decent lawyer. I'grand not going to stoop to defending myself against these people.
"I make my living as a lawyer, and I think I'm a pretty decent lawyer," Mearan said. "I'm not going to stoop to defending myself confronting these people."
The affidavit acknowledges that some of the informants are cooperating in exchange for consideration on drug charges. Simply information technology also notes that the sources accept "provided reliable intelligence information to constabulary enforcement regime in the by."
Three of the iv confidential sources in the investigation are associated with Mearan, not Eubanks, according to the affirmation. Most of the sex trafficking allegations concerning Mearan announced to come from either those sources or more than ii dozen unnamed women who are not specified as confidential sources.
The affidavit notes that data nigh Mearan was obtained during prior federal investigations and from "numerous complaints" the FBI has compiled about him.
One unnamed source – identified every bit a former prostitute of Mearan's – reported that he would requite her $100 every time she introduced him to a new woman. Another confidential source said Mearan arranged a 2014 trip for her and a 2nd woman to fly to Palm Beach, Florida, to have sex with ii subjects from New Jersey.
Airline records, photos and telephone records corroborated the Florida rendezvous, according to the affirmation.
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Some of the damning information about Mearan is presented in the affirmation as non coming from a source simply every bit a fact, with no qualifications about its veracity.
For example, information technology flatly states that Daren Biggs, ane of the 13 targets of the investigation, "has been supplied with prostitutes in the by" by Mearan. Biggs, who was not charged in the case, could not exist reached for comment.
Lindsey Porter, another target who was ultimately not charged, "used to piece of work for Mearan equally a prostitute," according to the affidavit.
Porter declined to annotate when reached in prison, where she is serving a sentence on charges unrelated to the DEA investigation.
'At that place used to be a code in this canton'
The affidavit cites two Portsmouth individuals who are not named every bit targets of the DEA investigation, but who are implicated as Mearan'due south associates.
Frederick Brisker, 68, a former high school football game star who became a well-known financial adviser in Portsmouth, is alleged to have helped Mearan coordinate the sex trafficking performance.
"The prostitutes are provided drugs and paid cash for their services by Mearan and their dates with clients are scheduled past Mearan and Brisker," the affidavit states.
Brisker has no known criminal record. His fiscal firm fired Brisker in March 2018 for allegedly forging the signature of another insurance agent. Brisker as well has state and federal revenue enhancement liens that, every bit of Jan, full more than $566,000.
Brisker declined to annotate. In an email, he referred questions to Mearan, whom he called his personal chaser.
"I gauge Fred Brisker's biggest vice is that he's a friend of mine," Mearan said. "Fred would give you the shirt off his dorsum."
The other individual is not named in the affirmation, but is referred to several times as a Portsmouth judge "in collusion" with Mearan. It alleges that Mearan provided the judge women, according to data "obtained through numerous interviews, including interviews with erstwhile prostitutes."
Some of the women interviewed by The Enquirer said the judge in question is one-time Common Pleas Court Judge William Marshall.
Marshall, 62, denied whatsoever interest with drugs or prostitutes.
"Are you serious? I would never practice annihilation like that," he said.
He declined to annotate farther.
Marshall retired last year amidst controversy after spending 16 years on the state bench. Land officials found he improperly confronted Ohio Thruway Patrol officers who had written his daughter a speeding ticket.
The state Supreme Court last month suspended Marshall from practicing law for half-dozen months due to the incident. Marshall explained his behavior to a county prosecutor past maxim: "I didn't like the trooper. He didn't mind to me. There used to be a code in this county – I'm a judge and he shouldn't have written my daughter" a ticket.
The 'number one daughter'
The manufacturer of Oxycontin – the make proper noun of a powerful opioid painkiller – recommends an introductory dose of 10 mg every 12 hours.
Hren said that in 2006, at the height of her habit, she was taking 160 mg a day.
She said she was drastic for cash when a friend suggested she could make some coin if she was willing to "practice a little dance for" Mearan.
Hren said she was hesitant at first but gave in.
I was fabricated to feel like I had to do those things and that there wasn't really any getting out.
"When you're needing actress money for drugs, you lot get to a point where definitely you want to practice any it takes," she said.
Hren said she quickly became Mearan'southward "number one girl" as he arranged for her to have sex with numerous men, including Brisker.
"I was made to experience like I had to do those things and that there wasn't really any getting out," she said.
If she left, she said, she was worried Mearan might employ his connections to have her sent to prison – or worse.
Hren said she was scared that she "would disappear," or that "they would kill me and get rid of me and that would exist the end of it."
After nearly 3 years, Hren said she was able to escape when she secured a few thousand dollars in a workers' compensation settlement related to an injury in a medical function job.
She used the money to relocate to another metropolis in Ohio and said she is working to stay sober. She has a job in the medical field and is raising two children.
"I'm ane of the few who got away," she said. "I'll make sure that I have a roof over our head and nosotros don't accept to depend on a nasty sugar daddy to pay for it."
'Men who give money'
Like Hren, many of the women who spoke with The Enquirer pointed to the case of Megan Lancaster, a prostitute who disappeared from Portsmouth in April 2013. Police found her white Ford Mustang outside the Rally's fast food restaurant with her wallet left on the front seat.
Lancaster's disappearance is referenced in the DEA affirmation.
Lancaster'south sister-in-law, Kadie Lancaster, said she understands why women in Portsmouth are afraid to talk.
"Yous could be the next Megan Lancaster if they recall that you know something that you lot could tell," she said.
Kadie Lancaster has continued to dig into what happened to Megan. She keeps one of Megan's bras in the freezer, just in case it has Dna evidence, and compiled a five-inch thick folder filled with documents that she considers potential clues.
The binder contains 246 different names and phone numbers that Megan kept in colour-coded notebooks. The entries include notations like "dance for" and "men who requite money." Mearan's name and number are there, along with both notations.
Kadie Lancaster said she has called nearly every phone number in the notebooks. One human who answered was a retired police captain, she said.
"He said he didn't know what I was talking nigh," Kadie Lancaster said. "Then why did she have his number, and information technology was the correct number, and he answered?"
Portsmouth Police Primary Robert Ware declined to annotate on "the existence or condition of any possible investigation."
If any previous Portsmouth police were involved, Ware said, information technology would be "disappointing, because all that does is bring a scar to constabulary enforcement."
"I am confident that the police enforcement that is in office right now is doing everything in their power to keep the community safe," Ware said.
Scioto County Sheriff Marty Donini said it'south the scope of the activity described in the affidavit, and not the clout of the people who may be involved, that would hamper an investigation past local regime.
"If information technology'due south that big a deal, and it's that far-reaching – out of state, out of country or any – I just don't think nosotros accept the ability, the manpower or resources to do information technology," Donini said.
One of the women who still lives in Portsmouth said now is the fourth dimension for those involved to speak out.
The women are "used upward and thrown away and discarded like they're trash, and you know they're not trash. They're in an emotional wreck. They are anarchy. They need aid and they're non getting the help they need."
The squad backside this investigation
Reporting and research: James Pilcher, Liz Dufour, Kate Murphy
Editing: Bob Strickley, Matt Doig, Beryl Love
Photography: Liz Dufour
Videos: Liz Dufour, Kate Murphy, Mike Nyerges
Drone footage: Michael McCarter and Sam Greene
Graphics and illustrations: Mike Nyerges
Digital production and evolution: Spencer Holladay, Jason Bredehoeft, Annette Meade
Copy editing and design: Jim Calhoun, Spencer Holladay, Jason Bredehoeft
Social media, date and promotion: Sallee Ann Ruibal, Andrea Brunty
Source: https://www.cincinnati.com/in-depth/news/2019/03/21/sex-trafficking-trapped-and-trafficked-portsmouth-ohio/2839816002/
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