3 | Pulling Strings

A warning before I begin. This episode contains depictions of sexual trauma. Please listen. With care.

I have a prepaid call from Summit County Jail.

Happy birthday baby. What happened?

They’re stupid mom, because they put me on restriction even longer. I made that phone call to you guys.

In the fall of 2010, Akron Vice Detectives began listening to recorded phone calls from inside the Summit County Jail.

I punched the mattress. This girl went and told them that I was trying to deliberately hurt myself, so they thought I was going to hurt myself or somebody else, so they sent me back here for the rest of my time.

The call is between a mother and her daughter. A woman struggling with addiction and exploitation on the streets. Let's call her Jane.

Listen, why do you have trouble everywhere you go?

Maybe because I have a big mouth and I talk too much. I tell my business too much. I don't know.

Detectives weren't listening for anything incriminating. They listened for something else. Vulnerability, the kind of desperation that makes someone easy to manipulate.

It sucks that I'm here now because now I can't see the kids. I cried myself to sleep last night because I don't know where I'm going to go, and I'm scared, Mom.

The detectives were determined to catch a predator, a jailhouse chaplain who allegedly preyed on women, locked up in the Summit County Jail.

And all I wanted to do was call you. They wouldn't let me call you.

Detectives said this chaplain first found Jane on the streets. He took her to his so-called halfway house on Yale Street. You know how this story goes. He allegedly gave her crack cocaine, fed her pills, and handed her $70 for sex. Then came the promise: stay with him, let him take some photos. He would help her make money. He would protect her. Even when Jane landed back in jail, Chapalin Rich didn't give up on her. He visited twice a week filling her head with scripture and promises. But Jane's life never got any better.

I'm really trying to do what's good this time. I feel like every time I try harder, this devil brings me down even more. That's what I feel like. So it just makes me mad. I can't wait to be done with life. I hate this life.

I'm Carol Costello. This is the God Hook episode 3 of 10: Pulling Strings.

Amy hated the life too. She wanted out badly.

At some point, is it that you just had enough of this and you decided to tell police about Rich Beasley? What was it that sparked you to do that?

Yeah, I was tired of it. I was just sick and tired of the control and him following me around, and I just could not figure how to get out of this. I tried everything. I thought maybe I could. I had talked to everybody, bounced ideas off. I was just seen any other way out. I didn't want to stay here anymore. And he was violent. I mean, I saw him violent. I saw him get crazy and break things.

Amy had once believed in Beasley's promise of redemption, but that illusion had long since shattered. The so-called man of God had trapped her in a world of abuse, addiction, and fear, threatening to send her back to jail if she ever tried to break free. But Amy was done being his pawn. She'd seen too much. The rages, the violence, the way he could flip from unhinged to smooth-talking preacher in an instant, the way he manipulated everyone around him.

I'd see him fall apart sometimes at the house and go crazy. He'd flip out and he had to lose his temper, and he'd go into fits of rage. That's what scared– I'd see him break things and stuff, because sometimes he couldn't find his drugs or he couldn't find money. And then other times he was so well put together and everything was just so, I don't know, well-versed, and it just seemed so strange to me. It was like, so I didn't know who I was dealing with sometimes, and it confused me on the God thing. Sometimes I think, is he really changing or is he, and then no, he's not changing.

She had talked to detectives before, but never fully cooperated. She had never become an informant, but nothing could stop Amy. Now she went to the one detective she knew she could trust. The one detective, she said, cared whether she lived or died. Lieutenant Detective Terry Pasko.

I know him. I was in the street for a long time. I had given information on certain things before. So he knew that I had been past been honest about things. I said, I can wear a wire where, take pictures of what you want me to do because I said, I'm telling you right now. If you go in there right now, you're going to see this stuff going on right now.

Hi, Terry. Yeah. Hello. Hi, Chris. Pleasure to meet you.

Our producer Chris met, Lieutenant Detective Terry Pasko on a balmy summer day. Pasko ran the Akron Police Department's Vice Squad for years.

So we're talking about years worth of work here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a ton of work and lots of detectives involved.

Pasko is long retired, but he hasn't forgotten the Beasley case. He remembers that one like it was yesterday. It still bothers him.

I've been a cop since ‘93 up to that, and I've seen lots of crazy people, lots of bad people, but that, to kill somebody for pennies on the dollar – there's a whole nother level of depravity out there.

Detective Pasko led the investigation into Beasley's House on Yale Street. It started as a whisper on the streets. Then those whispers grew louder. Pasko knew the streets, he knew the women, and he knew the cycle: arrest, release, repeat. But in November of 2009, he caught wind of something out of the norm. A woman he picked up on South Street had a story that didn't sit right. An older white man had approached her, promised to get her off the streets and onto the internet. She thought his name was Rich. Said he hung out at the Hope Cafe, a refuge for lost souls affiliated with the Akron Bible Church. It sounded ridiculous. Street workers in Akron did not get recruited by pastors at coffee shops, did they? So your initial instincts were telling you, “I don’t know?”

Yeah, when we got that information from a prostitute, we have to take in consideration how reliable is the source of information. But she had enough detail in there that we thought we should take a look at it. And then as we picked up some of the same things from other girls, gave it some credibility, and that's what really was the impetus for us moving forward.

Then, a few weeks later, another woman was arrested. Same story, same older white man, same promise. But this woman knew what getting her online meant. Backpage.com. Back then, it was the go-to site for online sex work. Classified ads masquerading as adult services. Samantha Salomon is with the Summit County Ohio Collaborative Against Human Trafficking.

So Backpage used to be the prime page. It used to be the dark web of when it came to solicitation, prostitution, trafficking. Everybody knew about Backpage, but the problem was that prosecutors had a lot of issues in terms of actually trying to shut it down.

Backpage would eventually be taken down, not for sex trafficking, but for conspiracy and money laundering. But in 2009 it was thriving, and this chaplain rich person was actively using it. The police had a pattern, but they still didn't have a name, just a description.

We didn't know his name at the time. It was just Preacher Rich or Pastor Rich or some other thing. But the physical description was a large man, white beard, looked like Santa Claus.

But even with that, Pasko still didn't have much to go on – the word of a few sex workers, all of them addicts. It wasn't enough. Pasko knew how the system worked: judges, lawyers, juries. These women weren't seen by them as victims. They were seen as criminals. If he wanted to take down the man pulling the strings, he would need more than rumors. He needed proof. So when the FBI offered a workshop on a concept, he'd barely heard of – human trafficking – he signed up. And what he learned changed everything.

When I got there, I learned quite a bit about human trafficking. Not the typical thing you think of in human trafficking like you'd see in LA or anything, but I learned what the elements were and I realized that we could have potentially some cases here. The goal wasn't just to arrest the girl, it was to see the person behind the girl. In Akron, we had facilitators more or less. We had some drivers. We had people that were assisting on the periphery and they were equally guilty of promoting prostitution. But what we found is we have a few guys that would put them on the internet, take 'em into their house, take pictures and say, okay, I want 50 bucks from each trick or 40 bucks from each trick. That's pimping, that's promoting prostitution. They're making a profit off that.

Constitutes human trafficking today. In 2009, human trafficking laws in Ohio were still new, but they would change the game. Here's Emily.

I believe that Terry's case would've been the first human trafficking case that was indicted in Summit County, and I don't even know that it was done the way that it would be done today.

So he did the best he could with the education that he had at the time.

Absolutely. And too, the way that he was doing these cases, it was above and beyond, and he really was forward thinking in a lot of his ways of trying to pull this investigation together and pull the case together.

Still proving a human trafficking case then or now is one of the hardest things to do in court. Jennifer Rausch prosecutes those cases.

These are incredibly hard cases because we're asking so much of people who have been traumatized, who have been broken, who have been manipulated, who have been exploited, and we're asking them to trust us and to come to a system that has not typically been in their favor, and they have heard over and over again “nobody's going to believe you,” and we're telling them, come on, we're going to give it a go. And I would believe me because I know that I mean it, but why would they believe me? So I mean, it's a huge ask that we're making in these cases,

But Pasko wasn't giving up. This time, he was going to find the person pulling the strings.

What we're looking for actually is the person behind the curtain, the person pulling the lovers, the person delivering dope or driving them because that's the bigger fish.

And in late 2010, he got his break: Amy. She had watched it all happen and she was ready to talk. Now Pasko had something real. Now, the hunt for Chaplain Rich had truly begun.

We had an idea of what he was doing, which is running girls back and forth, but we have to prove that. We also knew that he was providing some with drugs. He was putting money on their jail credits. He was asking them to recruit other girls. But finding this out from one or two prostitutes and then putting it together in a package that is believable based on research and corroborating evidence is two different things.

That's where Amy came in. She had lived inside the Yale Street house. She had recruited women at Chaplain Rich's command. She had heard their stories, their dreams, and their nightmares. Amy would become the detective's eyes and ears.

Amy said she became an informant, and I don't think that many people understand what exactly that means.

I mean, they're not going to say, “Hey, go prostitute yourself out and then let us know how it went.” That's not what they're going to do. But perhaps using Amy in a way that she was able to give information back as to, Hey, this is what's going on in this house, or I'm aware of this individual who has been brought into this rehab facility or rehab church house, whatever he wants to call it.

Amy would not wear a wire. Still, she was worried for her safety. She had to play the game carefully so Chaplain Rich would not become suspicious.

He was real paranoid about this, he would check you for wires. Sometimes he got paranoid and he would say, if anybody tries to wear a wire on me or tell on me, or he said that, trust me, I will find out and I will kill you.

So yes, detectives knew that sending Amy back into that house with a wire was not an option. Instead, Pasko turned to an investigator's most valuable and underappreciated asset: jailhouse recordings. Like I told you in episode one, jail calls are the poor man's wire. A way to listen in to get inside a criminal's head without the red tape or a van full of surveillance gear,

Getting a wire hooked up on someone. It is quite a process. It's quite a process. That's why he listened to those jailhouse recordings, right? Those things are amazing. I sat and listened to all of them. I liked them. I thought they were absolute gold.

As for Amy, she was willing to take risks to stop Beasley because she wasn't just helping detectives for herself, she was doing it for someone else. Someone still trapped in Beasley's con. Her name was Savana.

She was really young and she was very lost. She'd been through a lot of abuse, and I've always thought about her a lot because I feel so bad for her. She just didn't have a chance in this world.

The Akron Beacon Journal reported that Savana's brother killed their father after the siblings endured years of horrific abuse. As children, they were confined to dog cages while their father, a male prostitute, turned tricks. On the streets of Akron, Savana was known as fresh and a newbie. She was young, just 21 years old, pretty, street smart, and so, so lost. But Amy saw something in her. Maybe it was the same thing she saw in herself.

She was trying to find love anywhere she could.

For Savana, that was an old man who looked like Santa Claus and could quote the Bible.

She had a very bad addiction, and Rich got her out of jail. She was one of the ones that thought she was going to get sober.

Chaplain Rich Beasley had his hooks at her from the start. Savana would call him from jail. He answered her calls with “Hey baby” and ended them with, “I love you.” He told her he was close with two judges and a bailiff, people who could make an early release from jail possible. But there was a catch: to earn her freedom, she had to bring him more women. So she did. Detectives say Beasley didn't rush to get Savana out of jail. Instead, he kept her there dangling hope, the promise of a safe space. When Savana recruited women, he rewarded her. He put money on her jail account. When she didn't, she apologized and promised she'd do better, and when she finally got out, she went right back to him. Police say she even recruited a 17-year-old boy to turn tricks with her, splitting the prophets with Beasley. She believed, she truly believed that if she just did what he asked, he would help her escape the life. But she never did.

I always do this exercise with people when I'm talking to them about human trafficking.

Again, Samantha Salomon.

The first thing I say is close your eyes. And when I say human trafficking, what are the visions that you see?

Maybe you see a child sold overseas, maybe a woman forced into slavery in a country far away, but you should be seeing Savana.

You're dealing with a young community. You're typically dealing with a community that no one wants to actually help. It shows a lack of value that they have in themselves, and it goes back to what the human needs are.

For some it's food. For others, it's shelter or love. For Savana, it was all of those things. The pipeline to trafficking always starts in the same place. Trauma, foster kids, addicts, runaways, survivors of abuse. People who are often forgotten.

And you know what traffickers are really good at? They're really good at doing that. They're really good at finding what are the needs an individual has and fulfilling those needs.

Police say Beasley identified those needs.

He specifically targeted folks that were the most desperate of the desperate. He basically controlled every aspect of their lives.

And then figured out so many ways to reel in those vulnerable people. Court appearances on their behalf calls to their public defenders, conversations with their probation officers, jail visits under the guise of ministry.

A lot of those visits were to meet with the girls and in some cases help recruit other girls, and they'd have conversations. Hey, I met this girl from the west side. She's in a cell. She's really cute. You'd like her. And Rich would say, give her my number. Tell her to call me. I'll put a 20 on her account if she calls me when she gets out. So he was there all the time, but it was a recruiting trip.

And of course, letters to judges like the one police say he sent to Judge Unruh on Amy's behalf.

Amy has been in constant contact with Hope Ministries and has undergone spiritual instruction during this time. I believe this is her best chance for successful reintegration into society. Wow. I mean, just the balls to say that in a letter like this.

So the letter was in the clerk of courts. Does that mean that the request was granted and this woman was released early into Richard Beasley's custody?

Yeah, I believe that happened, and if it's in the file, that means the judge saw it and it was entered in.

Pasko's team investigated things that did not seem to arouse suspicion among judges, bailiffs jail guards or lawyers, but were red flags in detectives’ minds.

But here they just took him at face value.

They took him for his word, which–

Yeah, and I think part of it is he's somewhat charismatic, but with the girls, he had the religious aspect of it. He was born again Christian. He knew enough about the Bible to be dangerous, but at the same time, he had street credibility because he was convicted felon and been to prison so he could walk the walk and talk the talk. So they bought into him hook, lane, sinker. He literally got one girl out, took her to Target, bought her a bunch of clothes, took him to his halfway house, and then said, it's time for you to go to work.

Amy confirmed many of the details that Pasko needed, namely who was in the house on Yale Street and how Beasley managed the business. Did he have rooms where he would take pictures of some of the women that he conned into going into this house?

Yeah, he didn't know.

Wow. Did he ever write those little blurbs for the back page ads for women or yourself?

Yeah, I sit with him while he did it. He'd take pictures and he'd put in whatever phrases he'd want to put.

Here's how one ad read:

Pixie hard body athlete will give you the girlfriend experience. A new level of satisfaction. A swim team, body hotty. I'll give you a workout you'll never forget. For companionship only. Agree that you are not affiliated with any type of law enforcement agency or police department. $180 an hour, $145 for a half hour.

I know. Seriously?

The ads on back page never listed the Yale Street House as the rendezvous point, but various hotels in the Akron area.

He would take you to your dates. As the phone calls would come in, he would take you to and from. He'd wait outside and then you would come out with your money and he would take the money. He would provide drugs.

Amy told detectives there was a guy who grew marijuana in a room upstairs at the Yale Street house, and that Beasley sold meth and offered her oxycodone and a box of syringes.

And if he could, he would work you to death, if he could. Some girls, depending on how they took him, he would be having sex with them all night and then making them go out and work, and it was horrible.

Pasko’'s goal was to match the ads on Backpage with images that were most likely on Beasley's computer. A computer Pasko did not have access to unless he could obtain a warrant. Still, his team tried to match the ads with receipts from the hotels. It was a slow painstaking process.

We were also kind of in a shock by the number of hotels that were used by these women, and did they know what was going on or what was up with that?

So yes and no. Yes, a lot of 'em do know. It depends on the location and whether or not Richard was a regular there and if you're working the hotel, and I have no doubt, there were times when Richard would pay the hotel clerk at two in the morning, X amount of dollars, and it was a cash transaction. A lot of times Richard would use his own credit card, which was his downfall. But I suspect that some of the hotels, the problematic hotels, absolutely knew what was going on, especially with the amount of vehicle traffic coming and going. If Richard would set up in a six, eight hour period, they could turn over every half hour to every hour.

At any point in your investigation did you suspect that Beasley was on to you?

No, not at all. Again, there's a guy with a tremendous ego, so he believed he was street smart and smarter than everybody else. I don't know if any of the girls would tell him they talked to me, but if they had, he probably would've blown it off because he thought he was so well insulated.

Amy gave Pasko the details he needed, the names, the locations, the truth about the house on Yale Street. It was enough to build a case, but was it enough to break Beasley down? As September of 2010 came to a close, Pasko was ready to put his theory to the test. A sting operation at an Akron motel – an undercover detective would respond to an ad on back page. The ad was for a woman named Tiffany. She'd met the detective, agreed to have sex, and when she was arrested, she confirmed what Pasko already suspected: Beasley had posted the ad. It was a win. Yes, but not nearly enough because to convict a man like Beasley, Pasko would need more. He needed survivors, a lot of them who were willing to talk, and that was the hardest part of all. Take Amy's decision to talk to police, to become a police informant. It wasn't a simple choice. It was a sacrifice, a leap of faith, trusting the very system that had failed her that had labeled her and locked her up again and again. Her decision to help police was excruciating.

Did you think that they would believe you?

No. No, I didn't. I knew they weren't going to believe me because of who he was.

And because of who she was. In 2009, Annie wasn't seen as a victim. She was a prostitute, a heroin addict, a frequent flyer – police slang for someone arrested so many times they were practically expected to fail. But survivors don't always look or act the way we expect them to. Here's Emily.

If you think that the court system is like this warm place where judges step down and give hugs and say, we're going to help you out. It's a cold place and it's hard to navigate.

I do think that many Americans find it difficult to really feel sorry for someone who's a drug addict, number one. Who's prostituted themselves, number two, and who's been arrested 85 times.

Oh, for sure. If it's an impoverished woman, if it's someone of color, they're going to not be given the same benefit perhaps of someone who's convicted of say, like a white collar felony. No, Americans are not forgiving of these kinds of crimes. They're just not. Of course, they judge them. They judge addicts as dirty. They judge sex workers as this is the choice that you made. Why should I feel badly for you? People are not nice. Empathy is something that's not around much these days.

And that's exactly why Amy's choice was courageous. And what made Paco's case so difficult. Detectives needed hard proof, something tangible to back up witness testimony like Beasley's computer sitting inside that Yale Street House, evidence that needed a warrant. But getting one was a challenge and time was running out. Then just days before Christmas in 2010, Beasley, the chaplain who looked like Santa Claus, handed Lieutenant Detective Terry Pasko a gift.

9 1 1. What's your emergency?

A hellacious fight that erupted inside the Yale Street house.

Stay where you are. They'll be there as soon as they can. I'm going to stay on the phone with you. Okay?

A desperate call to nine one one. A woman screaming. A mother begging for help.

Stay on the phone with you until our deputies get there. Okay.

Beasley. The self-proclaimed savior had allegedly turned violent. So there was one big, horrible fight that went down there that supposedly involved a gun. Can you tell us about that?

Somebody was threatened with a gun, and I think at that point, Beasley was putting out one of his residence that he did not want to return, and he made some threats.

Was that a woman?

Yes.

And not just any woman, someone he knew. Someone who lived in that Yale street house. She claimed he put a gun to her mother's head. Amy remembers it.

One girl. She was with him for a long time. He was in love with her. She was a girl from the street. Her mom was there with me at the time. Her mom was there the whole time, and her mom was the one that he ultimately pulled the guns on. When the police came.

When cops arrived, Beasley wasn't exactly a commanding presence. He was a man in a panic, frantically dumping potting soil, trying to dispose of marijuana seeds. After months of surveillance, of witnesses fearing for their lives, of Beasley, operating untouched, his arrest was almost ordinary. No gunfight. No standoff. Just handcuffs, a squad car, and a one-way trip to jail. The same jail where he had handpicked women for his halfway house. But if anyone thought this was the end, they didn't know Richard Beasley, a two-time convicted felon, a man who'd spent over a decade in prison. He knew the system, and he knew how to play it, and he wasn't going down without a fight.

Next time: Beating the System.

Yeah, they didn't issue a protection order. I couldn't believe it.

Yeah, and he says that they would've put you on a signature bond, except there's a pending weapons charge.

Really? Okay. Come on down and get me.

They're releasing you?

That’s me. I'm Beasley.

Okay.

Come on down and get me.

Okay. All right. I'll be down here in a few minutes.