The Florida woman was in jail accused of selling cocaine. But while in the Orange County facility in 2018, investigators said, another inmate told her she could call a man named Bruce Moncrief, a local bail bondsman, and tell him that she would “wash his car and lick his eyebrows.”
In return, they said, the woman was told that Mr. Moncrief would bail her out of jail and that she would have to do something for him once out, according to a court document filed in Orange and Osceola Counties.
The woman knew that the coded language meant the favor was, in fact, a sexual one, prosecutors said. So she called Mr. Moncrief, they said, he bailed her out 21 days later and picked her up from the jail. And in subsequent weeks, they said, she performed a sexual favor for Mr. Moncrief in his car and later sent him naked photos of herself at his request.
According to the authorities, this pattern — of bailing women out of jails in Central Florida in return for sexual acts for himself and others over years — led to Mr. Moncrief’s arrest on Tuesday by the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office on three counts of human trafficking for commercial sexual activity and one for racketeering. In some instances, the women also made some payments to the bondsman, according to an affidavit for an arrest warrant filed by an investigator in the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court.
Mr. Moncrief, 75, “has created a system where women, who are desperate to get out of jail, contact him knowing he will get them out of jail in exchange for having sexual intercourse with him,” wrote Fredy Maestre, an agent with the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation, a multiagency task force in Central Florida, in the affidavit.
Ashley Moody, the state attorney general, said in a statement on Tuesday that Mr. Moncrief “used his position as a bail bondsman to prey on women in the criminal justice system.”
She said he used “his power over them to sell the women for sex to others for his own financial gain” and called it a “sickening scheme.”
Mr. Moncrief is the owner of Moncrief Bail Bonds, which has various locations throughout Central Florida and was started in 1978, according to the company’s website. A woman who answered at the Orlando office on Wednesday said a message could not be left for Mr. Moncrief and hung up. It was unclear whether Mr. Moncrief had legal representation.
Investigators said that Mr. Moncrief also bailed out some of the women to pimps, who prostituted them. He “would use threats of revoking, pulling or violating” the women’s bonds “as a form of force, fraud or coercion,” the attorney general’s office said.
One woman told investigators that every time she had sex with Mr. Moncrief it counted as “a hundred dollars” toward the debt. If not, she told investigators, he would revoke her bond. Investigators said that Mr. Moncrief’s personal cellphone number was shared among women in jail.
A witness told investigators that she had heard women talk about Mr. Moncrief’s alleged sex-for-bond scheme in jails in Orange, Brevard and Osceola Counties. Another woman told investigators that she even performed oral sex on Mr. Moncrief in exchange for him posting bond for her boyfriend, according to the affidavit.
Prosecutors said the investigation into Mr. Moncrief stemmed from a previous case involving a former defense lawyer who committed similar crimes, and that those victims had told investigators that they had also performed sexual acts for Mr. Moncrief.
Investigators surveilled Mr. Moncrief for several months, and shared photos in the court filing of him meeting women. It was unclear how many women provided sexual favors as part of his scheme, but investigators said that they had reviewed “hundreds of calls” between him and inmates.
Mr. Moncrief is being held without bond, jail records show.
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