'She Turned Ghost White:' How a Ragtag Group of Friends Tracked Down a Sex Trafficking Ringleader

Five people huddled together in a small library on the second floor of the Sir Victor Hotel on the waterfront in Barcelona, Spain. Occasionally, a custodian passed by, cleaning the floors or bathrooms nearby, and the group would pause their conversation. When they were alone again, they’d continue.

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.

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