The Untold Hunt for a Sex Trafficker

Charles DeBarber, Brian Holm, Ben Owen, Danni Brooke, and her teenage daughter Amelia were gathered there to follow the trail of a man who authorities had not been able to capture in the three years since he fled the U.S. This library would become the group’s unofficial war room for a three-day mission to find Michael James Pratt, the ringleader of a sex trafficking operation called Girls Do Porn.

The team had few clues as to Pratt’s location and weren’t themselves law enforcement, but with their combined expertise—as career spies, ex-military undercover agents, legal experts and manhunters—they’d built a dossier of the fugitive as a serial gambler, audacious and vindictive risk-taker, cryptocurrency enthusiast, and rare sneaker collector, on top of being a longtime sex trafficker.

Pratt fled the U.S. in the middle of a massive civil trial in 2019—where 22 victims sued him and his co-conspirators for $22 million—and just before being charged with federal counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion. (Today, there are more than 100 women who’ve come forward in lawsuits as victims of Girls Do Porn.) Facing life in prison, Pratt was a fugitive, but investigators hadn’t been able to apprehend him. He’d been wanted by the FBI for two years when the small team of open-source and human intelligence experts—who called themselves OP Phoenix Fury, after DeBarber’s investigative firm—decided to try to find Pratt themselves. They had traced Pratt to Barcelona, Spain.