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Enna Gonzalez, 58, was sentenced to a plea-bargained four years in federal prison last Thursday, July 6, by U.S. District Judge Madeline Cox Arleo in Newark for crimes that one federal official said “defy humanity.”
Her husband, Jean “Poison” Noriega, 52, also took a deal from the government and was sentenced last month to 20 years in prison in exchange for a guilty plea, U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Philip Sellinger said on Monday, July 10.
The Paterson couple must serve out the time because there’s no parole in the federal prison system. Noriega would have to live into his early 70s to taste freedom again.
He and his wife each must remain under supervised release for five years under the terms of their deals, Sellinger said.
With help from Gonzalez, Noriega used “violence, threats of violence, threats of drug withdrawal, and other means, to compel the victims to engage in commercial sex for his profit, including after his incarceration in New York in 2017,” the U.S. attorney said.
“These bitches are dumb bitches, dumb m***** f****** bitches,” she was secretly recorded by the FBI telling Noriega. “I can see why you can manipulate them.”
“Nah,” Noriega responds. “I can't do this with somebody that has got a head on their shoulders.”
Noriega was arrested at a hotel in New York in 2017, then pleaded guilty to promoting prostitution and drug possession in exchange for a two-year state prison sentence that records show he’s since completed.
The FBI obtained Noriega’s recorded jail phone calls, including one made on Aug. 11, 2017, the day after he was arrested in New York.
During the call, agents said, Noriega directed an associate to take two victims to a Connecticut hotel, with help from Gonzalez, to pay his bail.
A week later, the associate called to tell Noriega that he was still looking for both women and would beat them if he found them.
The defendants “plied young women with promises of a better life and then used drugs, violence and extreme emotional manipulation - including death threats - as a means of control,” as one now-former federal official put it.
The women were forced to engage in commercial sex, “exposing them to both health and physical danger,” while they raked in the dough, he said.
Noriega “treated them as chattel, branding some with his name, raping them, and beating them when it suited him.”
Before he was jailed for another conviction in New York state, Noriega brought several of the victims from his Paterson home to hotels in New Jersey and New York, according to an FBI complaint on file in U.S. District Court in Newark.
Noriega and his accomplices kept the victims hooked on drugs, while beating and threatening them in front of the others, the complaint says.
The couple had bought advertisements on Backpage.com using sexually explicit photos of the victims and the numbers of cellphones that were given to them, according to federal authorities.
Noriega paid for several hotel rooms at a time – most of them immediately next to one another -- and monitored the activity, they said.
He also made the victims call him while they were engaged so that he could listen in on the sex and payments.
Noriega “recruited and enticed already drug-addicted young women, including the victims, to stay at [his] Paterson residence with the promise that he would provide them with more,” using their addictions to get them to turn tricks for drugs, the FBI complaint says.
Gonzalez helped maintain the “climate of fear” among the victims by telling them Noriega would beat them if they didn’t comply, it says.
Sellinger credited special agents of the FBI’s Newark Child Exploitation Human Trafficking Task Force, the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office’s Human Trafficking Unit and the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision Office of Special Investigations with the investigation leading to the charges.
Securing the pleas and sentences was Assistant U.S. Attorney Sophie Reiter of Sellinger’s Cybercrime Unit in Newark.
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