Case of accused "Street Mobb" pimp goes to jury

DeShawn "Cash Money" Clark, an accused pimp and gangster, said he wasn't trying to brag when he testified before a King County jury this week that girls would give him money and clothes to buy his affection.

"I don't want to sound cocky or nothing, but they were trying to compete for me," said Clark, 19.

Clark, an alleged member of West Side Street Mobb, a West Seattle street gang, is the first person in the state to stand trial on human-trafficking charges.

Prosecutors said the "Mobb" in the gang's name was an acronym for "Money Over Broke Bitches."

During closing statements Friday, Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Sean O'Donnell and Clark's defense lawyer, Alfoster Garrett Jr., presented two starkly different portraits of Clark.

O'Donnell cast him as a charming, street-savvy and violent thug motivated by money. Garrett said he was a troubled youth condemned for the company he kept — the drug dealers, pimps and hustlers who occupied Clark's childhood and inhabit his neighborhood.

A jury of four women and eight men now must decide Clark's guilt or innocence on nine criminal charges: two counts of second-degree human trafficking, two counts of promoting the commercial sex-abuse of a minor, and one count each of first-degree promoting prostitution, second-degree assault, unlawful imprisonment, criminal conspiracy to promote prostitution and possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver.

Should jurors find Clark guilty, they must then determine whether seven of the charges — all but the assault and unlawful-imprisonment charges — were committed for the benefit of his gang, which could mean additional prison time. In all, he faces between 20 and 26 years.

Five co-defendants involved in the West Side Street Mobb's prostitution enterprise already have pleaded guilty to a variety of prostitution charges, including Clark's older brother, Shawn Clark.

More than 50 witnesses — half of them law-enforcement officers — took the stand in the seven-week trial before King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North. Roughly 300 exhibits were submitted as evidence, including recorded phone calls from the King County Jail. In one, Clark tells a young prostitute to tell detectives: "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know" when questioned. In another, he tells the woman to get the word out that one of his co-defendants, who'd agreed to testify against Clark, was "a snitch."

O'Donnell argued that Clark and his fellow gang members preyed on vulnerable, impressionable girls and sold them a dream, making the girls believe they were loved when really "they were nothing more than a revenue stream."

Garrett argued that "middle-aged white men" — like O'Donnell and officers who testified in the case — don't understand the street culture Clark came from.

He said Clark grew up "in absolute degradation" with no father and a drug-addicted mother, and he implored the jury not to find him "guilty by association."

"Don't condemn this man to substantial prison time ... because of the friends he knows," Garrett said.

Garrett questioned whether the jury really is a jury of Clark's peers, since none of them is African American and none grew up in the environment Clark did.

Garrett said each of the girls Clark is alleged to have run as prostitutes was working the streets before meeting him. He called the state's star witness, a 20-year-old woman, "crazy" and "a liar."

O'Donnell, acknowledging that Clark "is smooth," said there's no doubt that Clark is a pimp.

"Promoting prostitution is the life blood of Street Mobb ... and the focus of this gang is money," O'Donnell said.

O'Donnell said fellow Street Mobb members showed up for testimony by the state's star witness in order to intimidate her. During the trial, jurors also heard that Clark's friends followed her to a women's shelter where she'd gone to escape Clark, O'Donnell reminded them.

The cooperation between Street Mobb members "didn't stop at prostitution — it continued into this very room," O'Donnell said. "They showed up in this courtroom and brought fear and intimidation to this trial."

Sara Jean Green: 206-515-5654 or sgreen@seattletimes.com