BANGOR, Maine — A Connecticut man who escaped from a halfway house in order to sell crack cocaine in Maine got extra time tacked onto his federal sentence for his role as a “pimp” to drug-addicted Bangor women, who sold sex in exchange for drugs, U.S. Attorney Thomas Delahanty announced Thursday.
“It is bad enough to be selling drugs, but it is a different magnitude of evil to be involved in selling human beings,” U.S. District Judge John Woodcock told D’Hati Coleman during his Thursday sentencing for drug dealing, according to a U.S. attorney’s office press release.
Coleman, 38, of New Haven, Connecticut, sold crack cocaine to a Maine Drug Enforcement Agency informant in Bangor on Sept. 3, 2014, and was sentenced by Woodcock to two years and eight months in prison, as well as three years of supervised release once he gets out.
At the time of the Maine drug deal, which was recorded on video by Christopher Gardner, a special agent with MDEA, Coleman was a fugitive from Connecticut. He had escaped from a halfway house where he was being held on a previous drug arrest in his home state, court records show.
When Coleman sold the crack cocaine to the confidential informant in Bangor, he “spoke openly about his work as a ‘pimp,’” Assistant Attorney General Joel Casey wrote in the prosecutor’s version of the offense.
“The defendant went on to explain that the women did movies, pictures, sex games and that he is just trying to get ‘his fair share,’” Casey states. “The defendant told the [undercover informant] that it was the world’s oldest profession and most lucrative.”
Also, when Coleman was arrested on Sept. 9, 2014, in New Haven, Connecticut, he was with a 28-year-old woman from Bangor who told investigators that she was selling her body for drugs.
“She admitted that she was addicted to crack cocaine and heroin,” the prosecutor’s version of the offense states. “She reported that [Coleman] supplied her with drugs and, in exchange, she had sex with other men who paid the defendant in cash. She was found in possession of a crack pipe.”
Coleman’s case is linked to another involving his cousin, Syriana Baldwin of Bangor, who was recently sentenced to 15 months in prison and three years of supervised release for his role in selling cocaine in the Bangor area. Baldwin also sold about three grams of crack for $300 to an undercover informant just two days after Coleman was recorded selling half a gram of crack to an undercover informant for $40, court records show.
A federal grand jury indicted Baldwin and Coleman for distributing crack cocaine in September 2015. Bangor attorney Charles Hodson represented both in court and did not return a message left for comment.
In addition to the MDEA, the two cases involved investigators from the New Haven, Connecticut Office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the New Haven Department of Police Services.
“Sadly, the facts described in the government’s exhibits illustrate an increasingly close connection between the illegal distribution of narcotic drugs and prostitution,” Casey states in the court documents.