A sting operation targeting sexual solicitation at a Hot Springs hotel by the Arkansas attorney general’s office, working with Hot Springs and Garland County law enforcement, resulted in the arrest of nine men Wednesday night, Attorney General Tim Griffin announced at a news conference Friday morning.

Via online ads the men accessed to arrange for meetings for sex, the men were directed to a local hotel, which was cooperating in the operation, where they were each arrested on charges of sexual solicitation or patronizing a prostitute, each classified as Class A misdemeanors punishable by up to one year in jail.

Those arrested included Isaias Martinez-Sanchez, 30, Carthon Kordell Cooper, 27, Vicente Elorza Santos, 41, David James Hicks, 22, and Jacob Douglas Benson, 32, all of Hot Springs; Gustavo Ruiz Gonzalez, 29, of Ellisville, Miss.; Edward Allen Freeman, 22, of Oil Trough in Independence County; Michael Lee McConnell, 32, of Bismarck; and Antron Dean Pearson, 37, of Mabelvale.

All of the men were later released on a $1,000 bond with a Garland County District Court date to be set, except for Martinez-Sanchez and Santos, who both remained in custody Friday on a zero-bond hold by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Griffin said agents with his Special Investigations Division worked with the Garland County sheriff’s office, Hot Springs Police Department and 18th Judicial District East Prosecuting Attorney Michelle Lawrence to conduct the operation in Hot Springs, along with Homeland Security Investigations, the FBI, the Little Rock Police Department and the Arkansas State Police.

“As a result of information collected during our human trafficking investigations of illicit massage businesses, my investigators identified online platforms where men would arrange meetings with prostitutes to engage in sex for money,” Griffin said, noting some of the women advertising on these platforms were “victims of human trafficking.”

“For the past two years, we’ve focused primarily on the supply side of these kinds of operations by going after the establishments where illicit activity is occurring. We have arrested seven individuals, including one mid-level ringleader, who is in the jail in Hot Springs with a $10 million bond, and we have provided services to about 30 victims,” he said.

“This week’s operation focused on the demand side, which are the individuals who are using these services, and without them, this cannot exist,” he said.

“Make no mistake, this is despicable behavior, and it perpetuates human trafficking, plain and simple. And our work is having an impact. One individual said on an illicit sex website, ‘Looks like Fayetteville is about to be out of the happy ending business.’ Another user wrote, ‘Beware our state AG is on a mission,’” he said.

While the meetings between potential “johns,” or customers, and the women at hotels and motels are commonly part of “traditional prostitution,” the women are “often victims of human trafficking,” Griffin said.

The operation was the result of intelligence gathered as “part of our ongoing human trafficking fight, and that’s where this idea came from,” he said. “As a result, we not only arrested these individuals, we recovered cellphones, other evidence, and confiscated $1,400 in cash.”

Griffin stressed that the hotel used in Hot Springs for the operation “is not one where we’ve had any reports of this sort of behavior going on before. This was a cooperative hotel owner who wants to see this crime eliminated and was a partner in this and supportive of the investigation.”

Addressing how the operation “fits into the broader fight” against human trafficking, Griffin said traditional prostitution and human trafficking are “different in many ways,” but they “overlap in the middle.” He said some of the tactics, websites and customers are the same, and their efforts against prostitution are impacting human trafficking.

“This is an important part of the puzzle,” he said. “Every one of the individuals arrested were charged under the law we fought to change in early 2023 in my first two or three months in office. What we did is we looked at the law relating to sexual solicitation and wanted to up the penalties.”

He said the charges were changed from an unclassified misdemeanor to a Class A misdemeanor, and if there is a second offense, it is a felony, which he noted “is a major, major change” and being used to “clean up this mess and make us safer.”

Griffin said authorities plan to “keep doing what we’re doing. It’s effective. We’re trying different tactics. … If you are a customer furthering this sort of business in Arkansas, we’re going to find you and put you up here, and you’re going to have a really bad day, month or year.”