Woman Gets Prison for Prostituting Teen Girls

(North Andover, Massachusetts) In September 2007, a local woman, Melissa Halstrom, was arrested for allegedly operating a prostitution ring of teenage girls.

Halstrom was accused of recruiting four girls to service customers out of her apartment and in local hotels.

Halstrom was charged with inducing minors to prostitution, maintaining a house of prostitution, deriving support from prostitution, exhibiting a child in a sexual act, distribution of obscene material, and distribution of a Class E substance.

In April 2009, a full 20 months after her arrest, 34-year-old Melissa Halstrom was put on trial along with an alleged accomplice.

Police say Halstrom and Anthony Gorgoglione Jr., of Milbury, recruited four teenagers to be "call girls," supplied them with drugs to help loosen them up and set them up on $200 an hour sex sessions with older men, many of them in their 60s.

The pair is also accused of taking lurid photographs of the girls for their Web site, the now defunct www.angelicdelights.net, advertising the sex-for-money business.

Three of the call girls were Merrimack Valley natives; one was from Andover.

Last week, Halstrom and Gorgoglione were convicted after a jury deliberated for two hours.

The jury in Lawrence Superior Court found Halstrom guilty on three counts of inducing a minor into prostitution and three counts of deriving support from a child prostitute. She faces a sentence of five years to life in prison.

Gorgoglione was also found guilty on two charges of inducing a minor into prostitution.

Yesterday, Halstrom was sentenced by Judge Kathe Tuttman to six to eight years in prison. Gorgoglione received three to five years in prison.