The owner of a charter-jet company has been charged with sex trafficking after being caught in a sting operation offering sex with a 12-year-old girl and 14-year-old girl for $300, authorities say.
On LinkedIn, Paul Alexander was the high-flying CEO of Central Jet Charter—but before he launched the company, he was a two-time felon with convictions for sex assault and child pornography.
In March, an underage girl went to the police and told them Alexander, 57, had been abusing her and pimping her out to johns. That sparked an investigation, dubbed Operation Mile High, by the NYPD and the New York Attorney General’s Office.
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Investigators say the initial probe determined that Alexander, who lives in the Bronx, was bringing girls across state lines, and they decided to catch him in the act.
An undercover cop posing as a customer met with Alexander—who showed him nude photos of the girls, charged him $300 for sex with them, and suggested he ply them with drugs and pot so they would be more cooperative, authorities said.
Alexander was arrested Thursday—the first time that Attorney General Letitia James has charged someone under a new law covering sex trafficking of children. “There is nothing more reprehensible than sexually exploiting a child,” she said in a statement.
Alexander, who was being held without bail, faces up to 50 years in prison—where he has served time several times over the years. He’s a Level 3 registered sex offender from a 1996 sexual assault conviction against a female of unknown age, and in 2o03 he was convicted of possession of an obscene performance by a child who was not a stranger to him.
A neighbor Dan Santiago, told the New York Post that Alexander’s apartment was a hub of strange activity.
“I would always see him with little girls up there,” he alleged. “It was never one person coming out of the apartment, it was always like a group. I found that suspicious. He was doing something up there for sure.”
