Man guilty in child-porn, extortion case

LITTLE ROCK — A man is facing a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years in federal prison, where parole is unavailable, after being convicted Thursday of seven charges accusing him of masquerading as a social media star to entice women and girls to send him nude pictures of themselves.

Devion Marquette Cumbie, 24, was convicted of four counts of extortion, one count of production of child pornography and two counts of attempted production of child pornography. The child-pornography convictions are punishable by 15 to 30 years in prison.

Jurors agreed after deliberation Cumbie committed the crimes in late October through early December of 2018, while he was on home detention at his Lancaster Road apartment on a federal gun charge for which he hasn’t yet been tried.

It was the first criminal jury trial in the state since the coronavirus pandemic invaded Arkansas in March. It was held before U.S. District Judge James Moody Jr., who last week presided over the first civil jury trial in federal court since jury trials resumed June 1.

Represented by attorney Robby Golden of Little Rock, Cumbie admitted he created a Facebook page using the identity of Chink Capone, the internet persona of actor Alex Drummond of New Jersey whose comedic YouTube posts are popular with teenagers and young adults. Cumbie also admitted to engaging in sexually charged conversations with, and even accepting scantily clad photos from, female followers who believed he was Capone when he messaged them directly and said he would like to meet them.

But he steadfastly denied from the witness stand that he used the sexy pictures they sent willingly to extort them into sending him more photos and videos, this time while they were fully nude, under the threat of exposing the first photos to all their Facebook friends, including close family members and classmates. He said a friend who stayed with him for over a month in late 2018 must have borrowed his cellphone and sent the illegal extortion messages. One of them resulted in a teenage girl sending a video of herself naked, leading to the child-pornography-production charge.

The accused friend testified that he didn’t even know the pass code to use Cumbie’s cellphone, but said he may have borrowed it once or twice to make an anonymous phone call if Cumbie unlocked it for him. He denied sending any messages to unknown women.

“Mr. Cumbie disguised his true identity on the internet and then callously exploited numerous victims for his own sexual gratification,” said Diane Upchurch, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Little Rock office, which investigated the case after a 16-year-old girl in Colorado reported the threat to police.

“Our agents and law enforcement partners worked tirelessly on this investigation, and we feel like justice has been served with the jury’s verdict,” Upchurch said.

U.S. Attorney Cody Hiland, whose deputy prosecutors Kristin Bryant and Erin O’Leary prosecuted Cumbie, said the verdict “sends a clear message to those who engage in these disgusting acts under the cloak of perceived anonymity: you will be identified, and you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent available to us under federal law.”

During three days of testimony, agent Aaron Hurst of the FBI described for jurors how he used messages stored by the Colorado girl to unearth conversations Cumbie had with other women and girls through Facebook Messenger and Snapchat. Hurst testified that in all the cases, after Cumbie received an initial partially nude photo, he showed the sender that he kept the photo and said, “Now we’re going to play a game called Cooperate or Get Exposed.”

Hurst said Cumbie, still pretending to be Capone, then instructed each young woman to strip, position her cellphone camera on a table, stand in front of the camera and “shake your a**” for a full minute.

Not all complied. One sent photos she found of other women on the internet. Another claimed she was shopping for sexy underwear in a Victoria’s Secret store, using a photo supplied by a friend. One claimed the camera on her phone was broken. One told her mother, who called police.

Moody will sentence Cumbie after federal probation officers file a presentence report with the court, which could take three months or more.

Cumbie was first tried in February by another jury, but the panel deadlocked, leading to this week’s retrial.