Bonita Man Offers Undercover Deputy Two Cents for Sex

BONITA SPRINGS, FLORIDA– Fausino Diaz Hernandez should be well known to Lee County Sheriff’s deputies.

He has seven aliases and 19 arrests, most of them for trespassing and open alcohol container charges. He is homeless and can often be found near the Circle K gas station at Old 41 Road and Dean Street in Bonita Springs.

On Thursday night, Hernandez was arrested again. This time, the charge was different — soliciting a prostitute.

The 46-year-old offered two cents to an undercover deputy posing as a prostitute at the Circle K, according to his arrest report.

But Hernandez was far from the only one nabbed. He was one of 10 men arrested in a three-hour prostitution sting along Old 41 Road, when an undercover female deputy hit the streets with a one-way radio and several officers nearby for backup.

The sting comes 15 days after a Bonita Springs City Council meeting in which two Lee County deputies told council members that prostitution levels had declined due to previous stings.

One of those council members, Janet Martin, said the arrest total was disappointing.

“For this to happen, it’s unfortunate,” she said. “You don’t want to hear there’s a backslide.”

On Friday, acting Sgt. Matt Chitwood, the new head of narcotics and vice operations for the Bonita Springs Community Policing unit, defended Hernandez’s arrest, while promising to put more pressure on the Old 41 corridor. The unit is part of the Sheriff’s Office south Lee County district.

Hernandez, he said, “offered (the undercover deputy) a lot of other things as well, but two cents was the monetary value.”

Those other items included cigarette lighters and a bicycle, Chitwood recalled.

The point of the arrest, he said, was that someone like Hernandez might harass other women in the same way he harassed the deputy. And harassment complaints are exactly what pushed Lee County deputies into fighting Old 41 Road prostitution in the first place.

“Who knows how many other people he’s talked to or approached who were just citizens,” Chitwood said.

But isn’t there a difference between a deputy posing as a prostitute and a random woman going into the Circle K for a gallon of milk?

Chitwood says not necessarily. The deputy didn’t wear any flashy clothes, he said, but shorts, a shirt and flip-flops. Sometimes she was walking, he said. Other times she sat on a bench.

“If she’s walking down the street, sometimes these guys ask, ‘Hey, are you working? I’ve got $20,’” he said.

The deputy worked three areas of Old 41 Road: The intersection with Rosemary Drive, the intersection with Crockett Street and the Circle K.

The latest sting was the 12th along Old 41 Road in the past two and a half years, since residents along the corridor began complaining of men approaching and propositioning random women.

In total, deputies have arrested 102 men.

Each is accused of approaching an undercover deputy and offering money in exchange for sex. Once each deal was done, deputies in marked cars moved in for the arrest.

The operations can’t be considered entrapment, Chitwood said, because the undercover deputy doesn’t initiate the agreement process.

Thursday’s sting was Chitwood’s first in Bonita Springs. The acting sergeant has worked for the Sheriff’s Office for roughly nine years, joining the Community Policing unit last month after working as the department liaison to the federal Drug Enforcement Agency.

He said Thursday’s arrest total surprised him.

Prostitution, he had heard, was down from past years, when stings netted as many as 16 johns.

In an August 15 interview, Chitwood’s predecessor, Sgt. Paul Trombley, said the unit had made “huge strides” in cracking down on prostitution. When deputies first began the stings in 2006, he said, they averaged “12 to 15” arrests an hour.

“Since then, the activity has decreased to where we’re lucky to get one or two in an hour, hour and a half,” he said at the time.

Indeed, the most recent stings before Thursday’s had netted fewer arrests. A February 2 operation nabbed six men, Trombley said. Before that, a July 2007 sting caught eight men. An April 2007 sting caught seven men. And in a sting the month before, 14 men were arrested.

The positive results seemed to continue into the spring of 2008. That’s when a sting operation netted zero johns, Sgt. David Piasecki, a member of the unit, told City Council members in an August 6 meeting.

Lt. Traci Sonier, head of the Community Policing unit, joined Piasecki at the meeting.

“To not be able to get those numbers (now) says something positive,” she told council members.

The news, coupled with other lowering crime statistics in the area, was greeted enthusiastically by city officials.

Despite her disappointment over Thursday’s results, Janet Martin said she still considered the stings to be valuable operations.

“It is worth our resources,” she said. “I think maybe with having that many (arrests), I hope they continue the sting operations, and maybe the word will get out that on Old 41 Road, we don’t tolerate that.”

Martin also said she hadn’t heard as many complaints about prostitution as in the past.

Chitwood said the unit will conduct more stings. Typically, they’ve conducted a minimum of four a year. Given the arrest total, he’ll probably run one next month, he said.

He also believes Thursday’s arrests could have been due to recent area brothel crackdowns by the unit.

Nonetheless, he sees the problem as one that can be eradicated completely, so long as the resources are available.

“I think personally, any crime, if you invest enough manpower and money in it, can be brought to a zero level,” he said. “It’s just, there’s only so much manpower, so much money.”

Courtesy of the Naples Daily News