SANTA ANA, CALIFORNIA –Sentenced to 10 years behind bars for transporting minors to work as prostitutes in 1999, a man didn’t learn his lesson.
Friday, William Earl Flavors, aka “Andre,” 40, who most recently resided in Long Beach, was sentenced to another 10 years for engaging in the same conduct involving a 19-year-old victim.
Flavors restarted his pimp business immediately after he was released from custody in the first case, officials said.
After U.S. District Court Judge Josephine L. Staton sentenced Flavors to 10 years in prison, she ordered that this sentence run consecutive to a four-year prison term. The judge tacked the four years onto the 10-year sentence because Flavors violated his supervised release on his 1999 felony conviction, according to authorities.
So, Flavors will serve 14 years behind bars for acting as a pimp for girls in 2012, officials said.
At today’s sentencing hearing, Judge Staton discussed a letter that Flavors wrote to the Court in which he blamed the judicial system and the probation department for his current “predicament” and that he “not given a fair chance.”
The judge noted “beating women and forcing them into prostitution is not a ‘predicament,’ but a choice – a choice that defendant made.”
Flavors pleaded guilty in December to transportation in interstate commerce for purposes of prostitution.
Flavors admitted that he transported his victims between Long Beach to Las Vegas, forced or coerced them to work as prostitutes in Las Vegas, and used physical abuse and threats of additional physical abuse to make one of his victims work for him as a prostitute, officials said.
“In order to coerce and force [the victim] into continuing to engage in prostitution, defendant physically abused her, threatened her with additional physical abuse, and did not allow her to leave him,” according to a sentencing memo filed by prosecutors.
The sentencing memo also details the physical abuse defendant carried out on his victim, including “beating her with his fists and on one occasion burning her legs with a lit cigarette.”
Today’s sentencing concludes the second case in which Flavors has been convicted in federal court of trafficking women across state lines and forcing them to work as prostitutes.
In December 1999, he pleaded guilty to transportation of a 15-year-old girl and a 17-year-old girl in interstate commerce for prostitution. In addition to transporting these minors from Washington to California, Flavors beat, raped and forced these girls into prostitution on his behalf, according to court documents.
In the 1999 case, officials said Flavors’ “depravity towards his victims included, among other acts: breaking one victim’s nose from beating her; and beating another victim with clothes hangers, burning her with curling irons, and forcing her to drink cups of urine and cigarette butts,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo.