Lavont Flanders will spend life in prison, a federal judge decided yesterday. The former Miami Beach cop was convicted in December of more than a dozen counts related to drugging and raping women on camera. The films were then sold around town as a porno series called "Miami's Nastiest Nymphos."
Last month we reported how Flanders and his partner returned to raping women after prosecutors initially bungled their case. But Flanders won't be getting out for decades, if ever.
"I'm very happy to hear that," one of Flanders's victims tells Riptide.
Flanders used dozens of pseudonyms -- Antone Cobe, Larry Griffin, Karen Watson, Darius Cove, and so on -- to entrap mostly young, black, aspiring female models from across the country on social media sites.
We told the story of one -- who we called Nicole Benson to protect her privacy -- in our article last month. Flanders invited her to South Beach for an "audition," offering a fictitious contract worth nearly $100,000:
Nicole Benson got her hair done, packed her best clothes, and jumped into her cousin's car. The 24-year-old beauty with a button nose and mocha skin had the January 2006 weekend off from her job as a Navy communications specialist in Jacksonville. She was on her way to Miami for her first modeling audition.Judge K. Michael Moore also sentenced Flanders's partner in crime, a Jamaican-born porn star named Emerson Callum (screen name: Jah-T), to life in prison.
Benson and her cousin checked into a North Miami Beach hotel. At 9 p.m., a talent scout named Antone picked her up and drove her to a beach. He pulled out a video camera and asked her to strip down to a bikini. Then he handed her three shots out of a Bacardi bottle. All she had to do was drink the liquor and deliver her lines for a chance at a hefty modeling contract.
She woke up the next morning in the same car. As Antone dropped her off at the hotel, he told her she had fallen asleep during the audition. It would be more than a year before Benson learned the horrible truth: She had been drugged and raped on camera by two men who later sold the assault as part of a porn series called Miami's Nastiest Nymphos.
Neither man met her gaze. According to a letter filed by Flanders earlier this week, however, Flanders remains defiant: "I have been convicted under a totally false indictment," he said. "This is a crime what's being done to me... If there is no justice in our Federal Court rooms then God help us all."
Follow Miami New Times on Facebook and Twitter @MiamiNewTimes.
