DEA affidavit, women tie lawyer to sex trafficking in Portsmouth
PORTSMOUTH — On a clear morning, the four-story Scioto County Courthouse casts its shadow over the smaller brick building just across Court Street, where criminal defense attorney Michael Mearan lives and operates his namesake legal practice.
Mearan, 73, is a one-time city councilman who since the 1970s has been a fixture in this city of about 20,000 people 90 miles south of Columbus along the Ohio River, which separates southern Ohio from northeastern Kentucky.
It was a thriving industrial city that fell on hard times and in recent years was dubbed “America’s pill mill.” When Mearan shuffles to the courthouse in his rumpled suit, it’s often to represent someone in the relentless grip of opioid addiction.
But according to a federal wiretap affidavit, which was filed under seal with the Southern District of Ohio but was obtained by The Cincinnati Enquirer, Mearan is not just a silver-haired local attorney.
The 80-page affidavit states that Mearan also is known as a prolific sex trafficker who for decades has supplied his young, female clients with drugs “in exchange for and as an incentive to participate in acts of prostitution.”
The affidavit — filed in August 2015 by a senior special agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration — casts Mearan as a central figure in a drug and sex-trafficking ring operating throughout the Midwest.
Mearan dismisses the affidavit and says the allegations are not true.
The agent linked to Mearan 27 women who the agent indicated worked for Mearan as prostitutes, including one who has been missing since 2013 and another found dead of “multiple traumas” the same year.
The agent added that Mearan has been “known to law enforcement” in Portsmouth since the 1970s and has been indirectly tied to multiple previous FBI investigations into human trafficking, extortion, violent gangs and “white slave trafficking.”
The DEA investigation appears to have concluded in October 2016, when the last of eight defendants pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute heroin and other drugs.
Mearan, however, was not among those charged. The allegations concerning him remain investigative findings in a sworn affidavit that have not been proved in court.
Some of the details became public in December 2017 after a former reporter with the Portsmouth Daily Times posted excerpts of the DEA affidavit on a Facebook page.
The lack of followthrough by any investigative body has fueled suspicions in Portsmouth about corruption or that local and outside agencies simply don’t care about the allegations or the social and economic horrors afflicting forgotten Rust Belt towns like theirs.
Enquirer reporters picked up where the DEA affidavit ended by spending a year visiting Portsmouth to investigate the allegations concerning Mearan.
The effort included interviews with more than 65 individuals and a review of hundreds of documents, including arrest and court records.
Among those interviewed were 10 women who separately shared accounts of working for Mearan as prostitutes at various times in the past two decades. Records show Mearan had represented six of the women facing drug charges.
Those women said Mearan, as their defense attorney, promised lenient sentences from judges he knew and arranged for parole officers who would ignore probation requirements — as long as the women were willing to have sex for money.
Mearan, they said, gave them money to feed their drug habits and arranged sexual liaisons with men in Portsmouth, Cincinnati and Columbus and out-ofstate trips to New York, New Jersey, Louisiana and Florida.
The women say they earned anywhere from $200 to $2,000 per encounter, and that either the men involved or Mearan himself handled the payment.
In two interviews with The Enquirer, Mearan — who was sometimes joking and dismissive and other times angry and combative — consistently denied any suggestion that he had engaged in prostitution or sex trafficking. At one point, he said he didn’t know what a sex trafficker was and asked for a definition.
Mearan said the accusations about him are due to “jealousy” and are “totally false.”
“That affidavit was the product of a couple gals that the FBI tried to set me up,” he said. “This affidavit that you have says that they’ve been investigating me since the ‘70s. Now, you think in 50 years they would have maybe come up with something?”
A spokeswoman for the DEA, which does not handle sex trafficking or other offenses unrelated to drugs, said the agency had forwarded “information regarding possible corruption and prostitution” stemming from the heroin investigation to the FBI.
“It is unknown what if any investigation was initiated by the FBI as a result of our tip,” DEA spokeswoman Cheryl Davis wrote in an email last year.
Todd Wickerham, special agent in charge of the FBI’S Cincinnati office — which includes Portsmouth in its jurisdiction — said he does not know what happened to the DEA investigation after the initial drug convictions.
“I don’t have any other information on this, but if we get credible information on a human-trafficking ring, we would absolutely act upon that,” Wickerham said.
Sources with firsthand knowledge told The Enquirer that there is an ongoing investigation into Mearan by multiple lawenforcement agencies. The sources requested anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the existence of an active investigation.
Besides Mearan, the women who spoke with The Enquirer collectively named several well-known individuals from the Portsmouth area who they say paid to have sex with them. The list includes former police officers, lawyers, a medical professional, a former high school football star, businessmen and probation officers. The Enquirer is not naming the men unless the allegations against them have been otherwise corroborated.
Almost all of the women interviewed asked to remain anonymous, citing their fears that Mearan has connections to what they believe is a corrupt local law-enforcement system, as well as concerns about unsolved deaths or disappearances of more than a dozen women in southern Ohio this decade.
During interviews, some of the women cried, visibly trembled or stole furtive glances over their shoulders to make sure they couldn’t be overheard.
“I’m scared. I’m not gonna lie,” one woman wrote in a message to reporters. “I have to live here. I’m on eggshells right now. U don’t know this town.”
“My family is kinda scared for me to talk. Too many missing woman (sic),” another wrote. “I know I want to be a part of putting a stop to it. But I also have family to protect.”
Only one of the women, Heather Hren, agreed to have her name used in this story.
Hren, 37, said Mearan arranged for her to have sex with a Cincinnati doctor for
$200. On another occasion, she said, Mearan brought her to the probation office, where an officer took naked pictures of her in exchange for letting her avoid community service obligations. She said she also performed oral sex for a different probation officer.
It was like “walking into your own death or into your own prison,” she said. “Because now you’re stuck.”
For close to three years, Mearan “trafficked me to his friends or pimped me out,” Hren said.
Although she said Mearan hadn’t forced her into prostitution, his law-enforcement connections and her addiction ultimately left her feeling trapped.
“It wasn’t like you could go to the police department,” Hren said. “There is no one that these girls can tell . ... Everybody’s in each other’s pocket.”
Ripe conditions
Scioto County, where Portsmouth is the county seat, is one of the poorest regions in the state with high unemployment. In downtown Portsmouth, boards are as prevalent as windows, and former department stores and office buildings now house low-end apartments for the elderly. Prostitutes walk the streets day and night near an abandoned shoe factory east of town.
The area has been hit especially hard by drug abuse — mostly prescription painkillers, fentanyl and heroin. The Portsmouth City Health Department recorded nearly 120 deaths from drug overdoses in the past three years.
“The conditions are ripe for human trafficking,” Scioto County Prosecutor Shane Tieman said. “You have drug addiction rampant. You have unemployment. You have poverty. You have a built-in group of folks who are desperate, maybe hopeless, that could be preyed upon.”
According to DEA Senior Special Agent Keith Leighton, that’s exactly what was happening.
Leighton’s August 2015 affidavit sought and received authorization from a U.S. District Court judge to set up a wiretap on phones used by Mark Eubanks, a suspected heroin, Oxycodone and steroids dealer.
The affidavit details a sprawling investigation that had been underway for at least 20 months. Agents had installed a GPS tracking device on Eubanks’ gold Hummer H2; surveillance teams followed him and documented with whom he met; a hidden camera behind Eubanks’ residence recorded when he came and went; agents sifted through Eubanks’ garbage in search of evidence; and at least four confidential sources provided agents with incriminating information.
The DEA investigation listed 13 “target subjects,” and while Eubanks is named the primary target, the affidavit depicts Mearan as just as important a figure.
Leighton wrote that the investigation “was predicated on the illegal activities” of Mearan and at one point refers to the criminal enterprise as the “EUBANKS/ MEARAN organization.”
The affidavit reveals a symbiotic relationship between the duo in which Eubanks supplied drugs and prostitutes to Mearan, and Mearan arranged for the women to have sex for money and represented arrested associates so he could use his connections to secure favorable treatment.
Mearan also warned Eubanks about active investigations and once gave him the identity of a confidential informant sent to make drug buys from Eubanks, the affidavit states.
The affidavit notes that there were more than 200 phone calls and text messages over a one-year period between the men and that a surveillance team watched Eubanks arrive at Mearan’s law office one day toting a thermos that agents suspected concealed $1,600 in cash.
Federal prosecutors with the Southern District of Ohio indicted Eubanks in October 2015, and he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute heroin. He was sentenced to 150 months in federal prison.
Eubanks, 37, declined to comment when reached at the Federal Correctional Institution in Morgantown, West Virginia.
Too big to investigate
Mearan, who has no known criminal history, said the details in the DEA affidavit shouldn’t be taken seriously because agents relied on confidential informants looking to cut deals to reduce their own sentences.
“I make my living as a lawyer, and I think I’m a pretty decent lawyer,” Mearan said. “I’m not going to stoop to defending myself against these people.”
The affidavit acknowledges that some of the informants are cooperating in exchange for consideration on drug charges. But it also notes that the sources have “provided reliable intelligence information to law enforcement authorities in the past.”
Three of the four confidential sources in the investigation are associated with Mearan, not Eubanks, according to the affidavit. Most of the sex-trafficking allegations concerning Mearan appear to come from either those sources or more than two dozen unnamed women who are not specified as confidential sources.
The affidavit notes that information about Mearan was obtained during previous federal investigations and from “numerous complaints” the FBI has compiled about him.
Portsmouth Police Chief Robert Ware declined to comment on “the existence or status of any possible investigation.”
If any previous Portsmouth police were involved, Ware said, it would be “disappointing, because all that does is bring a scar to law enforcement.”
“I am confident that the law enforcement that is in office right now is doing everything in their power to keep the community safe,” Ware said.
Scioto County Sheriff Marty Donini said it’s the scope of the activity described in the affidavit, and not the clout of the people who may be involved, that would hamper an investigation by local authorities.
“If it’s that big a deal, and it’s that far-reaching — out of state, out of country or whatever — I just don’t think we have the ability, the manpower or resources to do it,” Donini said.
This is an abridged version of the full-length Cincinnati Enquirer story that can be found at www.cincinnati.com.
If you or someone you know needs help: National Human Trafficking Hotline: 1-888-373-7888. Drug Helpline: 1-888-633-3239.