'King Kobra' convicted of sex trafficking

THE PIMP will serve hard time.

A federal jury yesterday convicted Rahim McIntyre, known to women as "King Kobra," of three counts of sex trafficking.

The panel of six men and six women deliberated for about two hours before delivering guilty verdicts - finding that McIntyre, 34, had forced or defrauded three women into at least one act of prostitution or attempted prostitution.

The youngest victim was 16 when she met him in 2006. The other two were 18 when they met him; one in 2009, the other in 2011.

McIntyre, dressed in a black pinstriped suit, winced when hearing the jury's verdicts, then looked back at four supporters. One woman cried loudly.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Morgan told jurors in her closing argument yesterday that the three women, who did not know one another, testified to similar stories about how they were "taken from hotel to hotel to hotel and they had to give the defendant all their money."

The two women who were 18 were beaten by McIntyre, Morgan said. One lived with him for a time at 5th and Rockland streets, in Olney. One day, she was so tired after a prostitution job in Center City that she took a cab back to their place instead of walking. When McIntyre returned home, "he came busting in the door and beat her" on her feet "with a metal hanger over and over again," Morgan said.

The girl who was 16 at the time had watched McIntyre beat another prostitute - a woman who was McIntyre's favorite girl, who called herself "Lauren Love" - with the heel of a shoe, which Love had bought without McIntyre's permission.

McIntyre sang about his lifestyle in rap songs, the prosecutor said. Lyrics in one song included: "You'll be kidnapped/If you can't pay a charge, bitch," she said.

"I admit to you my client was a pimp," defense attorney Lawrence Bozzelli told jurors. But he argued that the three women had prostituted themselves voluntarily and were not credible.

The jury foreman, a 39-year-old Philadelphia man who did not want to give his name, said after the verdicts that the "prosecutor did a good job" and that he found the victims to be credible "for the most part."

McIntyre, most recently of Dorset Street near Mansfield Avenue in East Mount Airy, is to be sentenced on July 21 by U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III. He faces a mandatory-minimum sentence of 15 years behind bars and a maximum sentence of life in prison.