The Prosecutor And The Prostitutes
The Michigan Attorney Discipline Board has suspended an attorney convicted of felony misprison of office.
From the Detroit Free Press
Rumors and allegations about Ingham County Prosecutor Stuart Dunnings III’s alleged involvement with prostitutes began at least 10 years ago and police had seen Dunnings in public with women who were not his wife long before Attorney General Bill Schuette announced 15 criminal charges against Dunnings on March 14, Sheriff Gene Wriggelsworth said in an interview Thursday.
But local investigators’ follow-up inquiries into past innuendos about Dunnings, the county’s elected prosecutor since 1997, never yielded any solid information, Wriggelsworth said. It wasn’t until about a year ago, when federal investigators working on a Lansing-area human trafficking case brought information to his department, that the Ingham County Sheriff’s Office could launch a full investigation into the prosecutor.
By the time Dunnings was arrested last month at a Lansing coffee shop and Schuette filed 14 misdemeanors and one felony charge against the 63-year-old, Dunnings had paid at least six different women for sex hundreds times over several years, the Sheriff’s Office alleges in court records.
The Lansing Journal had this report in May 2016
The name Dunnings already carried a lot of weight in Ingham County when a 43-year-old Stuart Dunnings III first sought the capital region’s top law enforcement post.
And around the same time he was embarking on what would become a long political career, the man whose criminal case would be linked to Dunnings’ downfall stepped into the public eye in a Lansing courtroom.
It was in summer 1996, shortly after Dunnings declared his candidacy for county prosecutor and promised to build upon his father’s nearly 50 years of community service in the region, that a 26-year-old Lansing man named Tyrone Smith was convicted of killing someone in an apparent case of mistaken identity.
Nearly two decades later, information obtained during a federal investigation into a sex-trafficking ring Smith ran would ultimately land Dunnings in jail, put there by one of his longtime political allies, and facing 15 prostitution-related criminal charges.
More from the Washington Post.
When it came to hiring prostitutes for sex, police say, Stuart Dunnings III preferred escort websites such as Escort Vault and Backpage.com.
Most of the time, police say, Dunnings would meet the women at motels. Occasionally, they’d meet at a pimp’s house.
His was a ferocious habit, one that led the 63-year-old to shell out hundreds of dollars three or four times a week for a revolving cast of heroin-addled sex workers.
By the time he was arrested Monday outside a Lansing, Mich., coffee shop, Dunnings had racked up hundreds of illegal encounters in three Michigan counties between 2010 and 2015, according to an arrest affidavit.
(Mike Frisch)