From luxury to lockup
In Santa Ana last April, a team led by Newport Beach vice detectives staked out two luxury high-rise buildings towering above MacArthur Boulevard near John Wayne Airport.
One detective, according to court transcripts, announced that the team’s target had just arrived in a silver Maserati at the glassy, resort-style complex that boasts sweeping views of Orange County.
The surveillance team watched as Ronald Spurlock exited the car and rode an elevator to his $3,500-a-month unit 15 floors above the spa, wine lounge and bocce ball court.
Detectives had trouble reconciling the lifestyle of a man they described in a search warrant as having no “legitimate employment.”
Three months later, on July 17, police would use that warrant to scour Spurlock’s two-bedroom apartment and small fleet of luxury cars.
The search turned up a backpack full of marijuana in the bathtub of the master bathroom, police said. The drug was packaged and labeled by strain, ready for sale, one officer testified. Authorities also took $15,000 in cash, two handguns, an iPad, cellphones and other small items, according to court documents.
Officers arrested Spurlock that day.
During a court hearing afterward, Newport Beach police Det. Elijah Hayward recalled Spurlock’s closet — stuffed floor to ceiling with expensive shoes, all in their original boxes.
Oddly, Anaheim police Lt. Craig Friesen added, only pictures of Spurlock decorated the apartment. None was of his girlfriend, who stayed in the second bedroom.
By the time of Spurlock’s arrest, Newport police said, their lengthy drug investigation had shifted focus and uncovered what appeared to be a lucrative sex trafficking and pimping operation.
Spurlock is now awaiting trial on charges that he imprisoned, abused or profited from more than a half-dozen women working in the sex trade across Orange County to fund his lavish lifestyle.
He has pleaded not guilty and is Orange County Jail with bail set at $3.5 million.
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He goes by the moniker ‘Ro Dinero’
Spurlock likes to be called “Ro Dinero,” according to testimony from Anaheim police Det. Shane Carringer.
He tweets under the handle @RoDinero, and his profile features an image of a metallic sports car and the message “Staying out the way of all suckas ... life is what you make it, so keep grinding like you aint got a cent to yo name ... $$$$.”
Spurlock, 36, pleaded guilty in 2008 to felony possession of a controlled substance in San Bernardino County. His driver’s license still lists an Inland Empire address.
It’s unclear when he arrived in Orange County, where he started racking up minor traffic tickets in 2011.
Now he faces four felony counts of pimping and eight counts of pandering — a legal term for persuading or recruiting someone to work in prostitution — stemming from 2012 to 2014. Prosecutors also have charged him with felonies related to drugs, weapons and conspiracy to dissuade a witness from testifying.
But the most serious accusations — two counts of human trafficking — allege that Spurlock coerced two women into the sex trade and kept them from leaving his employ.
One woman, who is in her 20s, told police that Spurlock knocked her to the ground, savagely beat her and tried to strangle her when she declined to work at a strip club on Super Bowl Sunday, according to a detective’s testimony.
The same woman said Spurlock followed her to Las Vegas in March 2014 and forced her into his car, Hayward testified.
The detective said the woman described the car peeling out of a hotel parking lot toward the desert while Spurlock flailed at her head and arm as punishment for “ho’ing behind his back.”
“They ended up parking in a remote area, and he hit her repeatedly, screamed at her,” Hayward testified. “She ... said she was convinced he was going to kill her at that point.”
After his arrest, authorities allege, Spurlock threatened his 29-year-old girlfriend from behind bars, fearing she would help police.
A search warrant details Spurlock’s recorded calls from jail during which he repeatedly called her a “bitch” and warned her not to “[mess] everything up.”
“Everything’s gonna be in the police report,’” he reportedly told her. “‘Anything you say, any information you give.’”
In November, Orange County Deputy District Attorney Daniel Varon made his case to a judge that Spurlock was not just a pimp but also a trafficker who controlled victims through abuse.
“We have somebody who uses repeated threats of violence, who uses actual force and violence against her multiple times,” Varon said. “And he does it to subjugate her and get her to bend to his will and do what he wants.”
Though Spurlock has denied all the charges, his lawyer in November reserved his most strenuous objections for the human-trafficking allegations. The women, the lawyer contended, had free will and could come and go as they pleased — hardly the actions of trafficking victims.
“I’m kind of taken back that we are even here dealing with those two counts,” attorney Richard Barnwell told Orange County Superior Court Judge Elaine Streger.
Spurlock’s girlfriend, Barnwell argued, had her own key to the apartment, took trips to Las Vegas without him and even had a car in her name given to her by Spurlock.
“I mean, please, if you’re going to buy me cars and gifts, please do,” he said. “That is not deprivation of liberty. At any moment, any one of these girls could have left.”
Barnwell said the woman Spurlock allegedly attacked for objecting to working at the strip club had her own apartment outside Orange County, never sought help from authorities and provided no proof of the Vegas beating she described to police.
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Trafficking ‘happens every day’ in O.C.
Human trafficking in California comes with a hefty penalty. When the victim is an adult, one count can carry up to a 20-year prison sentence, as opposed to the six-year maximum for pimping or pandering.
But the crime can be lucrative for the perpetrator, according to Sandra Morgan, a human-trafficking expert and director of Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Costa Mesa.
The nonprofit Polaris Project in Washington calculated that a brothel with five women could make $837,200 a year if each woman sees six men a day and pays weekly fees for food and “management,” Morgan said.
In wealthy areas, the profits can rise even higher, said Morgan, who previously worked on the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force.
“Is this an oddity for Orange County? No, it happens every day,” she said.
It’s not clear how much money law enforcement believes Spurlock made, but detectives pointed to a lavish lifestyle absent of legally earned income. In addition to the Maserati, his stable of extravagant cars included a Bentley, Porsche and BMW. Before moving to the Santa Ana high-rise, he lived in another high-end apartment in Costa Mesa in 2012.
In the span of a few months in 2014, more than $80,000 passed through his bank account, according to a sworn statement from a police detective.
Spurlock also had enough assets on hand to post a $1 million bond to secure his release from jail in August. However, he hasn’t been able to make bail since a judge increased the amount to $3.5 million in October, when prosecutors leveled more charges.
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Nine possible victims
Authorities counted nine “Jane Does” who they alleged worked for or were victimized by Spurlock.
Police said at least one paid Spurlock $1,200 — her entire savings — before he agreed to “manage” her.
According to Morgan, the scale of the alleged operation isn’t rare.
But, she said, an expansive case that can take down a pimp or trafficker and put him away for good is indeed uncommon, and proving such a case is complicated.
“It’s layered,” she said. “It’s kind of like peeling an onion.”
There’s no comprehensive system used to track human trafficking, according to the county task force, which is composed of law enforcement and victim-assistance groups.
However, a 2014 task force report estimated it helped 183 victims of sex trafficking in 2013. In that year, officials prosecuted 48 human trafficking cases, an increase from 33 in 2012 and 24 in 2011, according to the report.
However, a minuscule percentage of those convicted ended up serving lengthy prison terms.
According to the report, 17% of offenders received probation. An additional 30% were sentenced to three to eight years behind bars, and 2% received life sentences. The report did not provide a time frame for the conviction data.
But those numbers could change dramatically. According to the report, 44% of trafficking-related cases were awaiting trial and 7% of suspects were listed as fugitives.
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Case begins as drug investigation
Prosecutors and police declined to discuss Spurlock’s case with the Daily Pilot. However, search warrants, sworn statements from investigators and hundreds of pages of transcripts of police testimony paint law enforcement’s version of events.
Many of the details come from a November preliminary hearing when Newport Beach police and members of the task force who investigated Spurlock testified.
Based on their four days of testimony, Judge Streger ruled there was enough evidence for a trial.
It’s not clear how police became aware of Spurlock. A judge sealed almost 20 pages of Newport Beach police’s original search warrant.
But during a March awards ceremony for his officers, Newport Beach Police Chief Jay Johnson mentioned the case — though not by Spurlock’s name — and said it began as surveillance of a possible drug dealer before expanding into the trafficking investigation.
The April 2014 stakeout of Spurlock’s Santa Ana apartment is one of the earliest police actions described in detectives’ November testimony.
According to their account, Spurlock’s girlfriend went downstairs and left in a white BMW moments after Spurlock arrived in his Maserati.
Detectives said they followed as she drove to a nearby shipping store and pulled a small white package from the trunk. She addressed the box to a Baltimore location and used a return address that a detective later said he believed was fake.
At law enforcement’s behest, a store employee opened the package and found 2 pounds of marijuana in vacuum-sealed bags, police said.
In May, after shipping another box that police said contained marijuana — later intercepted by Baltimore police — Spurlock and his girlfriend drove to a Harbor Boulevard motel in Costa Mesa, where they picked up a woman from a room and headed back to his apartment.
Investigators said they noticed multiple women frequently in Spurlock’s company. They said they were able to identify some of them and match them to pictures found on a website known for prostitution advertisements. They said they watched while Spurlock and his girlfriend shuttled the women to and from appointments with alleged johns.
On July 17, detectives arranged their own meeting.
Hayward testified that he watched as Spurlock dropped off his girlfriend and another woman at a motel in Santa Ana. The two agreed to a “date” with an undercover investigator, Hayward said.
Soon after, Newport Beach officers pulled over Spurlock at a parking lot where some of his cars were being detailed.
After downloading the contents of Spurlock’s cellphone, police found the same pictures used in prostitution ads and dozens of pages of text messages among Spurlock and the women involved, Hayward said.
The same day, police searched Spurlock’s apartment and arrested him.
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Girlfriend allegedly was intimidated
Two days after the arrest, Friesen, the Anaheim police lieutenant, interviewed Spurlock’s girlfriend. She also was arrested, but the Pilot is not publishing her name because prosecutors allege she was a victim of human trafficking.
She reportedly told Friesen that she first met Spurlock at a club through a mutual friend.
The two began dating, but according to Friesen, Spurlock soon proposed that she work for him as a prostitute. They traveled to Las Vegas, where she performed her first sex act for money, the lieutenant testified.
“She told us ... ‘I might as well try it.’ She was at a point in her life where things weren’t going well for her,” Friesen said on the witness stand.
Police testified that she worked for Spurlock for about a year until his arrest. During that time, they said, she became his trusted assistant, running day-to-day operations for other prostitutes and turning tricks herself.
But that did not shield her from abuse, Friesen alleged.
During her interview with police, Friesen showed her a video taken from Spurlock’s phone.
“The minute I started playing it, she kind of heard and knew which video I was talking about,” Friesen said during the preliminary hearing. “And she began to shake uncontrollably, got really upset and curled up in a ball and said she couldn’t watch it, she didn’t want to watch it.”
According to Friesen, the video showed Spurlock’s girlfriend on her knees, cleaning dog urine off the floor as Spurlock narrated.
“He is also demeaning her, telling her, ‘That is what you do, you clean up dog urine,’” the lieutenant said.
Spurlock’s defense counsel argued that the video showed nothing more than a possibly dysfunctional relationship between a boyfriend and a girlfriend who owned a dog together.
But Friesen said Spurlock’s girlfriend feared leaving him. She wrote Spurlock a letter saying she wanted out, but she never gave it to him, Friesen said.
“Mr. Spurlock knew everything about her,” Friesen testified. “He knew where her mother lived and her, I believe, 10-year-old son. And she felt that if she left, that was really the only place she could go. And Mr. Spurlock would just come find her and force her to get back into the business of working as a prostitute.”
Throughout their interview, Friesen said, the girlfriend said she was embarrassed that she had tolerated the abuse.
“She was mad at herself,” he said. “I believe, at one point, she said that she had become the girl that let herself get hit by a man.”
But later she seemed to contradict Friesen. In August, she petitioned the court to lift a restraining order that barred Spurlock from contacting her.
“There is no history of physical violence between myself and the defendant,” she wrote.
After Friesen’s testimony at the November hearing, when prosecutors called the girlfriend to the stand, she declined to answer questions, citing her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
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Difference between pimping and trafficking
According to Morgan, a case for human trafficking hinges on whether victims have been coerced or tricked into the sex trade.
They don’t have to be physically held against their will but must be made to believe that they can’t leave a pimp’s employ without something bad happening, she said.
“The problem for adult victims is it’s much harder to demonstrate that to the average person,” Morgan said. “You and I assume, ‘Man, if someone did that to me, I’d just walk away.’ We look at this from our own perspective, and we are not living in that moment of fear where our judgment is clouded and we don’t feel like we have any other option.”
To illustrate that point, Varon, the prosecutor, cited a phone call Spurlock made to his girlfriend from jail. According to a search warrant, Spurlock’s demeanor varied from comforting to threatening as he told her to deny any allegations of prostitution.
“You’re my girlfriend,” he said. “Y’all are strippers. Period.”
During the call, Varon said, the girlfriend went from standing up to Spurlock to a point where she began to “whither away” and apologize in an attempt to “get back into the fold.”
“That 10-minute phone call encompasses their entire relationship,” Varon said. “Opportunities for escape mean nothing if the defendant gives the victim reason to fear leaving.”
In an earlier recorded call from the lockup, before Spurlock’s arraignment in July, he seemed to place his hopes for exoneration on his girlfriend and other women involved.
“If nobody rolled over, they ain’t got nothin’,” Spurlock said, according to a transcript of the conversation contained in a search warrant.
He continued, “You gonna sit on that stand, me and you together, and hope and pray this ... works out in our favor.”
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Accused declines to comment in jail
In January, a judge threw out one charge each of pimping and pandering after Barnwell argued that police didn’t have evidence to support them. The validity of the rest of the charges, including the trafficking allegations, likely will be up to a jury.
A trial date hasn’t been set, and Spurlock recently retained a new lawyer who responded to calls and emails by saying he is still reviewing the “voluminous” case file.
But according to court documents, his former counsel was fighting to have some evidence thrown out.
Though police had a search warrant for his phone, Spurlock contends they went beyond the legal scope of their power by forcing his thumb onto the device’s fingerprint reader to unlock it when he wouldn’t provide the access code.
Spurlock declined to talk with a reporter who approached him in jail April 10, saying he had family visits planned. He gave a thumbs-up signal and walked away from the visiting room.