Ex-cop forces teen girls into sex acts, recruits them from Florida, NC, feds say
A former Washington, D.C., police officer using the nickname “Nico” was identified as a pimp by a 15-year-old girl who revealed he forced her “to perform lap dances and have sex with men” at a Maryland nightclub, according to federal court filings.
At least two other teens identified Linwood Barnhill, 59, as a pimp with the same alias, including another 15-year-old who told authorities that he recruited teens from Baltimore, Florida and North Carolina for prostitution, court documents say.
The teen reported to law enforcement that “Nico” visits those areas “to pick up girls that he meets online and then brings them back to Washington D.C. to work for him in commercial sex” and that “the females whom Nico was ‘pimping out’ ranged in age from approximately 16 to 24 years old.”
After a decades-long career as a Metropolitan Police Department officer in the 1990s and 2000s, Barnhill stepped down in 2014, when he pleaded guilty in a separate case involving sex trafficking minors, WUSA reported.
Now Barnhill, a registered sex offender who lives in D.C., faces more sex trafficking-related charges that stem from April 2024 through April 29, 2025, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia announced in a May 7 news release.
He’s charged with:
sex trafficking by force, fraud, or coercion
sex trafficking of children
coercion and enticement
transportation with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity
interstate travel or transportation in aid of racketeering enterprises
Barnhill’s federal public defender, Alexis Morgan Gardner, didn’t immediately return McClatchy News’ request for comment May 7.
Following his conviction in 2014, Barnhill was sentenced to seven years in prison, according to WUSA.
The current case against Barnhill began when the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency received a sex trafficking report in August involving the 15-year-old who said Barnhill sexually exploited her while she had been missing for two months, Assistant U.S. Attorney Caroline Burrell wrote in court documents.
The girl explained “she had been running away from home, off and on, for the past year” and that she used to work for Barnhill as a stripper at the Ebony Inn in Fairmount Heights, Maryland, about a 10-mile drive east from D.C., filings say.
The Ebony Inn didn’t immediately return McClatchy News’ request for comment May 7.
“(Barnhill) would pick up (the girl) in Washington, D.C., and drive her, along with the other girls who worked for him, to the Ebony Inn in Maryland, drop them off, and then pick them up after the club closed,” Burrell wrote.
Barnhill is accused of profiting off of underage victims earning money from commercial sex acts.
The one girl reported Barnhill beat her if she didn’t earn enough money, according to prosecutors, including during one occasion when she accused him of beating, raping her and confining her to his basement for days.
Barnhill was arrested May 1, court records show.
When he “committed the present offenses” from April 2024 through April 2025, Burrell wrote Barnhill “was on supervised release for committing remarkably similar crimes,” referencing his prior criminal case.
The FBI’s Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force continues to investigate Barnhill.
This story was originally published May 7, 2025 at 4:00 PM with the headline "Ex-cop forces teen girls into sex acts, recruits them from Florida, NC, feds say."
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