A former security guard at a residential program for pregnant teens in Boston has been sentenced to 18 years in prison for transporting a minor across state lines and forcing her to work at a strip club for his financial benefit, prosecutors said Wednesday.
Sheriff Cooper, 37, of New York City, was convicted earlier this year of sex trafficking of a minor by force, fraud and coercion; transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity; and forced labor.
In 2017, Cooper was working as a security guard at the facility when he met the victim, who was then 15 years old. They began having a sexual relationship and by early 2018, Cooper “began sex trafficking the victim around Boston,” prosecutors said.
He would advertise her on commercial sex websites and then take all the money she’d make. He also used “violence, threats of violence and coercion” to make her have sex with others and then pocket her money.
According to court records, he later began transporting the minor across state lines to sex traffick her in New York, when he gave her a fake ID and forced her to strip at a club — still keeping all proceeds for himself and using force and physical threats to control her.
In 2019, after the victim gave birth to Cooper’s child, she returned to Massachusetts where she obtained a restraining order against him.
Cooper was arrested at his mother’s house in New York in July 2021 and later transferred to the District of Massachusetts. He was convicted by a federal jury in Boston earlier this year.
“Using physical threats to control another human being, to force them into sexual servitude, is unconscionable,” Jodi Cohen, special agent in charge of the FBI, Boston said, slamming Cooper’s crimes as “stomach-turning.”
On Wednesday U.S. District Court Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton sentenced him to 18 years in prison followed by five years of supervised release. He was also ordered to pay $97,200 in restitution to the victim.
