East Bay man gets probation for trafficking teens who fought each other at Oakland hotel

OAKLAND — An East Bay man was sentenced to probation and ordered to stay away from two girls who fought each other at a local hotel this year, leading to the man’s arrest on human trafficking charges.

Marquise Webb, 21, pleaded no contest to pimping and was sentenced on Sept. 3 to a two-year probation term, court records show. He was also ordered not to register at local hotels unless he uses his real name. Prosecutors dropped the human trafficking charges as part of a plea deal.

Webb, of Antioch and Oakland, still faces pending charges that accuse him of robbing a grocery store on the 3400 block of Adeline Street in Oakland. He is next due in court in November, but remains out of jail in the meantime, records show.

Oakland police say this investigation started last June 1, with a 911 call regarding a robbery at the America’s Best Value Inn on East 12th Street, near Lake Merritt in Oakland. Investigators identified both the victim and the suspect as 17-year-old girls who were listed as missing from different parts of California, including one who had been detained before in undercover prostitution stings. Before being booked for alleged assault, one of the girls requested to call someone who was saved on her phone as “Mr. Billionaire.”

The number turned out to belong to Webb, whose name had already surfaced in another trafficking investigation — but no criminal charges, authorities said. In that case, a girl had accused Webb of trafficking her from ages 14 to 17, and said that he used the proceeds to buy a home in Antioch.