Man gets 5 years for child sex trips
A former Ada bail bondsman was sentenced Monday to five years in federal prison for traveling to Peru and having sex there with underage girls.
Robert Earl Pierce, 63, also was fined $17,500 and required to register as a sex offender after his release.
“For the rest of my life, I’ll bear this shame, this humiliation, this stigma,” he told the judge Monday in a voice choked with emotion. “It will never go away I know.”
Pierce pleaded guilty last year in Oklahoma City federal court to engaging in an illicit sex act with one underage girl in Peru in 2012. A prosecutor said Monday the investigation actually turned up three specific victims. Two were 15 at the time.
The prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Petermann, said Pierce groomed potential victims through Facebook, even before his arrival.
Under sentencing guidelines, Pierce had faced more than a dozen years in prison. U.S. District Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange showed him some leniency, in part because he cooperated in the investigation and prosecution of a friend, Michael Dean Billings.
The judge in December sentenced Billings, a former Oklahoma City attorney, to 14 years in prison for repeated trips to Peru to have sex with underage girls.
The prosecutor said Billings pleaded guilty rather than go to trial because he knew Pierce would testify against him at trial.
Both the prosecutor and defense attorney had asked at the sentencing for even more leniency for Pierce.
“Mr. Pierce is on the road to redemption,” Petermann said, asking for a four-year sentence.
“We find ourselves here begging for your mercy,” said defense attorney Jacquelyn Ford, who asked for a sentence of two to four years.
Pierce’s downfall came after his longtime marriage fell apart when he returned home from serving with the Oklahoma National Guard in Operation Iraqi Freedom, both the prosecutor and defense attorney said at the sentencing.
He turned to a friend, Billings, to be his divorce attorney and they began taking trips together, records show. Their most frequent destination was Iquitos, Peru, a povertystricken city along the Amazon River that has been described by the FBI as a known child sex-tourism site.
Pierce took 30 trips to Peru, beginning in December 2005, according to court records. They ended in September 2013 when he was caught in a hotel room there with condoms, Viagra, four large bags of candy, 26 U.S. $100 bills, gift books and extra-small women’s undergarments.
During that last trip, both men had discussed with an FBI informant their “conquests ... with young girls” in previous trips to Peru, an FBI agent reported.
Pierce told the FBI in 2014 Billings had urged him to travel to Peru, saying he “was still a young man and needed to live life,” the FBI reported.