Sex trafficking arrest spotlights ‘pimp circuit’ connecting L.A., National City and Las Vegas

A Las Vegas man, Vincent Bailey, has been sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for sex trafficking a 16-year-old, including for a time on a notorious National City strip that has been a magnet for prostitution for years, but which local law enforcement has failed to shut down. 

Bailey’s sentencing followed a guilty plea to one count of sex trafficking. The 25-year-old was sentenced in late June, but the U.S. Attorney’s San Diego office didn’t release details of the case until Monday because of the government shutdown.

Bailey’s criminal activity in this case spanned less than a month in the summer of 2024, but prosecutors allege in a court filing that Bailey made enough in that time to buy a silver Tesla Model 3.

Bailey connected with the girl, identified only as ‘J F’ in the court filing, on Instagram and eventually drove her around Las Vegas pointing out prostitutes and asking if she would like to make money selling herself for him.

She declined, but spent the night with him, according to Bailey’s plea deal. The next day he took her to Los Angeles to pimp her out; he later took her to the South Bay.

In National City, J F called her mother for help. She had no money, a common strategy by pimps to maintain control over their prostitutes. The teen’s mother paid for a rideshare to a cafe, where she called National City police and asked them to meet her. When Bailey learned of this, according to court documents, he threatened to “smack the ‘F’ out of” her if he had to come get her.  

She ignored his threat and returned to Las Vegas with a relative. But the San Diego Human Trafficking Task Force by then had begun to investigate her case.

Ten days later, J F’s mother again reported her missing. Prosecutors traced online sex advertisements in Las Vegas at that time to Bailey, because he used the same language as in previous ads in Los Angeles and San Diego.  

Finally, law enforcement arrested Bailey on Oct. 1, 2024 following a routine traffic stop by the California Highway Patrol. Investigators discovered the girl had been branded with a tattoo under her left eye, matching a tattoo Bailey had.

In National City, Bailey relied on a motel on the same stretch of Roosevelt Avenue described in a 2021 Times of San Diego story on extensive sex trafficking in the area.

The plea deal describes Bailey arriving in National City around 1 a.m., checking into a motel, and providing the teen a fake ID. He then told her to  “go out on the ‘blade’ on Roosevelt Avenue for several hours.” “Blade” is how pimps refer to an area with a booming sex trade.

The earlier story described how this same area, Roosevelt along Interstate 5, was a magnet for sex trafficking, with several motels in the immediate area. National City Police Chief Jose Tellez, told Times of San Diego then that the street was a long-running problem the department had wrestled with for years. 

“The area is frequented by pimps and traffickers” who have easy on-and-off access to the interstate, Tellez said. Former Mayor Alejandra Sotelo-Solis said at the time her office was “making efforts to improve” the situation, including more and brighter street lighting and removing foliage along the street that provided cover for sex acts.

After Bailey’s sentencing, Mayor Ron Morrison said he believes his office and the police department have made things tougher for the sex trade. The problem, he said, has “fallen off, like a rock going over a cliff” and is  “nowhere what it was.”

In addition, there is now  a police tower in the area to observe behavior on the street.

“The truth is we can’t get all of them,” Morrison said, but he argued targeted efforts like “driving off the johns” are a strong deterrent in reducing the activity.

National City’s police department did not respond to a request for comment.

Before Bailey set up shop in National City, he had the young woman working what’s considered the “blade” in Los Angeles, a two-mile section of Figueroa Street in South Central LA.

The U.S. Attorney’s filing described ‘J F’ being sold in Los Angeles in two ways — “working street-based sex acts and through commercial sex advertisements” placed by Bailey. She told investigators she had “five commercial sex acts per day” and all of her earnings went to the defendant. 

Stephany Powell — the executive director of a victim-serving nonprofit called Journey Out, and a former LAPD sergeant in charge of the city’s vice unit — said her LA cases regularly included victims from Bakersfield, Fresno, Las Vegas and San Diego.

Powell said a pimp like Bailey might leave Figueroa even when it’s still profitable if there is too much police activity.

“They’ll say ‘that the area’s hot,’ meaning that law enforcement’s paying a lot of attention to it,” she said. “So they’ll just move to another area until that gets hot, and they’ll move to another.”

The one thing the cities on the pimp circuit have in common, she said, “is the ability to make money there.”