By Doris Quintanilla,
A former Baltimore police officer has pleaded guilty to being a pimp to his 19-year-old bride.
Lamin Manneh, 32, admitted Wednesday that he arranged meetings between 300 clients, his wife and another woman online between February and May 2013.
Manneh drove the women to the meetings and waited outside with a service weapon in case the clients became aggressive, according to an FBI investigation. The former cop kept all his wife’s prostitution earnings and a percentage of the other woman’s, the Baltimore Sun reports.
He was arrested in May after an undercover police officer on a child-sex trafficking task force responded to one of his online ads and set up a meeting. The officer met with Manneh’s wife, Marissa, in a hotel room as Manneh waited in the parking lot.
After being arrested, Marissa Manneh said her husband “posts the ads and uses his credit cards to do so. He drives her from date to date since she cannot drive.”
She was arrested on a prostitution charge, but it was dropped in September because prosecutors said she had entered a “contract of slavery” with Manneh and agreed that he was her “master.”
The allegations against Manneh are a “disgrace and embarrassment to every member” of the police force, Baltimore City Police Deputy Commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said, according to the Daily Mail.
“We expect every member of this department to hold themselves to the highest of professional standards,” Rodriguez said in a statement. “Our colleagues and our community deserve nothing less.”
Manneh could get up to fiver years in prison when he is sentenced on May 8.
