A jail inmate was charged Thursday with running a prostitution ring in Woodbury from his jail cell in the Kanabec County Jail in Mora, Minn.

Washington County prosecutors say Daniel David Ellington, 38, of Brooklyn Park communicated with a sex worker by text and “advised, organized, promoted and profited” from prostitution activities in Woodbury last month.

“He was almost a hundred miles away and incarcerated in jail, and he was promoting prostitution and profiting from it by text,” said Imran Ali, director of the East Metro Sex Trafficking Task Force. “It’s definitely something I’ve never seen before.”

Ellington has been charged in Washington County District Court with two counts of sex trafficking and two counts of promotion of prostitution.

Members of the East Metro Sex Trafficking Task Force began investigating Ellington in April after Woodbury Police Detective Paul Kroshus discovered an online advertisement placed in Woodbury entitled “Blonde Bombshell” with a 651 area code phone number. He reached out, brokered a deal for sex in exchange for money and arranged to meet a 43-year-old woman at a hotel in Woodbury, according to the criminal complaint filed in Washington County District Court.

Hotel staff told police that a 24-year-old woman also was listed on the reservation.

At 11:40 a.m. April 24, a member of the task force observed a man enter the hotel room and leave about 20 minutes later.

Kroshus executed a search warrant on the hotel room and found the 43-year-old woman, a small amount of heroin, a cellphone and a “calendar documenting commercial sex appointments and the money collected,” the complaint states. “The (woman) admitted that she is a commercial sex worker and said (she had seen) between 10 to 15 sex buyers in Woodbury since she had been there.”

The woman, identified as T.M.H. in the complaint, said Ellington was her boyfriend and that she had put more than $500 in his jail account — through a third-party payment system called jailpayments.com — so they could communicate by text.

The next day, Kroshus executed a warrant on the woman’s cellphone and discovered “numerous text conversations with commercial sex buyers, pictures that were used in commercial sex advertisements and thousands of text messages” from Ellington, the complaint states.

“In those text messages, (Ellington) would discuss the commercial sex operation involving T.M.H., various narcotic transactions and suspected ongoing fraudulent activity,” the complaint states. “(He) would instruct her to deposit large sums of money in his jail account so he could continue to communicate via text/telephone and purchase canteen items.”

Ellington, a Minnesota Department of Corrections inmate, has been held at the Kanabec County Jail since April 2 on a counterfeiting/fraud charge. He was slated to be released July 12.

According to the criminal complaint, the woman deposited at least $890 into his jail account in April through jailpayments.com.

Also found on the phone: numerous searches for various commercial sex websites and hotel rooms around the metro area; 33 videos showing different sex acts; numerous photographs of the woman posing in lingerie that were linked to numerous commercial sex advertisements in the metro area, and photos showing Ellington “holding large amounts of cash in his hands and waistband,” the complaint states.

The text messages show that Ellington “was promoting and profiting from the commercial sex of T.M.H. while incarcerated,” the complaint states.

On April 8, Ellington texted T.M.H. and told her that she needed to raise her prices to $300 per hour. He also texted this message: “I’ll call in the morning at 8 or text me when you want me too ok and stop … getting close wit these tricks…they not yo friend it’s a job remember.”

On April 22, Ellington texted the woman to tell her she should raise her rates when working in Woodbury “and not to take any less because ‘they will pay,’ ” the complaint states.

Kanabec County Sheriff Brian Smith said the text messages were sent via a jail-issued iPod; Ellington paid a certain price per text.

Inmates have the right to reasonable communication with the outside world, and jail staff cannot be expected to monitor every communication, Smith said.

“I don’t think there is a facility in the state that has the resources to monitor every single inmate’s communications,” he said. “We wish we could, but we can’t, so we’ve got to go where the hot spots are.”

Still, Smith said, the news on Thursday was “embarrassing. We’re here to protect people, and we weren’t completely protecting people.”

“My staff is tasked with the safety and security of the facility and the people within the facility,” he said. “They are corrections officers, and they are looking for things that might harm other inmates or staff within the facility. They are looking for security threats — that’s what they are geared to look for. They are looking at people who are having problems with the facility, and they are monitoring communications so we can keep everybody safe. This one happened backwards.”

Ellington is expected to be brought to Washington County District Court next week for a first appearance on the four felony charges.

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Driver who killed Ramsey County deputy’s wife sentenced for another DWI Washington County Attorney Pete Orput said in a prepared statement that the investigation “demonstrates the tremendous work of the … task force and the partnership we have built with our hotel operators and employees.”

“This case is evidence that traffickers, even behind bars, control and manipulate their victims,” he said. “Our office will continue to work with law enforcement to investigate and aggressively prosecute these cases.”