Bay View man gets 3 years
He will be on sex offender registry
A 50-year-old Bay View man who once faced more than 50 charges related to his predilection for recording his sexual encounters with drug-addicted prostitutes was sentenced Thursday to three years in prison.
Bradford G. Harrington will also serve three years of extended supervision, under the sentence both the prosecutor and defense recommended as part of a plea agreement that saw all of the most serious charges dismissed. Circuit Judge Jeffrey Wagner also ordered Harrington to spend six years on the state’s sex offender registry.
From January to June, in six separate cases, the Milwaukee County district attorney’s office filed dozens of felonies against Harrington, ranging from soliciting prostitution and secretly recording sex acts to sexual assault, drug delivery and possession of child porn.
But the defense questioned whether a detective had misled a judge to get the search warrant that produced the only physical evidence in the case, and Harrington agreed to plead guilty to just three offenses — soliciting a prostitute, capturing an image of nudity without consent and keeping a drug house.
He got three consecutive one-year sentences on those convictions.
A key claim in the detective’s affidavit was that one of the women, a 26-year-old with several past convictions for theft and fraud, said she had never agreed to be filmed having sex, or to have the video posted on the internet. She described Harrington driving her to buy heroin and asking to watch her make the purchase, and giving her Xanax and wearing a gun in an ankle holster during sex.
But the same woman later told a defense investigator she lied about Harrington assaulting her, and videotaping her without consent, only because she felt angry toward him after the detective told her Harrington had posted the video on the internet.
But that, too, was a lie. There is no evidence Harrington made the video public.
On Thursday, Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Williams told Wagner the case began when a deputy at the House of Corrections noticed that many women jailed on drug and prostitution offenses were having contact — either in person, by phone or via deposits of money to their account — with Harrington. The deputy turned over a list of 25 names to detectives.
Harrington, she said, would later help the women find and buy drugs, then pay them for sex at hotels, his home or garage and often record the encounters, or record the women shooting up with heroin.
While the women were very vulnerable, they willingly engaged in the behavior, she said. Many of the women were unreliable witnesses, she said. Two died while the case was pending.
“He really selected the perfect victims,” Williams said.
“It would be easy, but disingenuous to characterize the defendant as a monster,” Williams said. He is a college-educated Air Force veteran with steady professional employment, an IQ of 136 and no criminal record.
In a brief statement, Harrington offered no real explanation. He said he was sorry and that he realized the money he paid them wasn’t really helping any of the women since they just used it for drugs.
“I will never do anything like this again,” he told Wagner.