making
headlines

Parents shocked when learn family friend charged with prostituting their son

DANBURY - After Sam Marino took his own life more than seven years ago, his friend Robert King attended the memorial service and set up a Facebook page in his honor. Marino’s parents were grateful for King’s support and compassion, because he had always seemed to be a good influence on their 26-year-old son, who struggled for years to overcome a drug addiction.

As time passed, Lin and Michael Marino came to terms with their grief, and Lin believed Sam’s spirit was always hovering nearby.

But that hard-won peace was shattered one morning last spring, when she looked at the front page of her local paper. King had been charged with running a sex-trafficking ring he built by getting troubled young men hooked on drugs and maneuvering them into prostitution.

One of the victims had committed suicide after writing a note to King, the story said, and the note was quoted in the story.

Sam had been diagnosed with dyslexia as a child and spent years in special education classes, and Marino said she instantly recognized his writing.

“I felt so angry at Bob at myself guilty ashamed and discusted,” it read. “What hapend was an act of survival I was minibilated and taken advantage of. It wasn’t my falt. It wasn’t my falt. it wasn’t my falt. I love my self for who I am and were I am going.”
As Lin read, she realized with horror that King had been prostituting her son.

“I began to scream,” she recalled. “My legs fell out from underneath me.”

Compounding the horror was a feeling of guilt, because Lin and her family had known and trusted King. Each time Sam had come of out rehab, King was there to greet him, and the Marinos thought he was doing what he could to keep Sam on the straight path.

But what once looked like compassion and concern now looked more sinister — an effort on King’s part to ensure that Sam would not get free of him.

Marino said her son had been a challenge to raise, because he had no fear.

Academics hadn’t been his strength, but he excelled in every sport he tried, from diving to wakeboarding to BMX racing. By the time he became a teenager, he had already broken his collarbone four times.

After high school, Sam decided to move to Hawaii - a place he had never been and where he had no friends.

“He was just so brave,” his mother said. “He would find work at different plantations, go cliff diving, things like that.”

Upon his return, Sam began working in the construction trade.

“He would complain that he was in pain every night after work,” Marino said. “He began to take Oxycontin to help with the pain. When that wasn’t enough, we believe that’s when he moved on to heroin.”

Marino said her son was determined to kick his drug habit, because he checked himself into rehab facilities several times. She believes he met King at one of these facilities, and King’s concern for him seemed genuine.

Every time Sam was released from a rehab facility, King would be waiting for him at the front door.

“I know that Sam wanted to be clean and be part of our family,” Lin Marino said. “Now I know he never had a chance.”

King does seem to have been attached to Sam’s memory. According to his arrest warrant affidavit, he kept a shrine to Sam inside the mobile home on Danbury’s West Side that was the headquarters of the sex ring.

Authorities have said that King ran the ring for more than two decades, and more than a dozen victims are listed in the affidavit. But Joel Faxon, an attorney representing the Marinos and other families in a civil case against King, said there might be hundreds of victims - most of whom have yet to come forward.

The day that Marino read about the prostitution ring, she got a phone call from the FBI. She knew what it was about.

“The agent told me that there was no way we could have know what was happening, because they were extremely sophisticated in how they operated the ring,” Marino said. “But as parents the guilt is insurmountable. It’s the responsibility of a parent to protect their children.

“These monsters were in our home,” she continued. “They infiltrated our family. We were totally fooled. We thought King was a good guy.”

King was arrested in March by Danbury police on a charge of human trafficking. Two of his purported clients, William Trefzger, a previously convicted sex offender from Westport, and Bruce J. Bemer, a businessman from Glastonbury, were also arrested on charges of patronizing a trafficked person.

Criminal cases are still pending against Trefzger and King, who are each being held on $500,000 bond. Bemer, the owner of the Waterford Speedbowl and several other businesses, posted a $500,000 bond shortly after his arrest.

The Marinos also knew Trefzger, who Sam had lived with a short time before his death.

“He told me he was a former Green Beret and that he liked to take in kids like Sam in and help them out,” said Michael Marino, Sam’s father. “We were all pretty shocked when the news came out. It was real hard to bring it all back again and reading it in the paper and not knowing what was happening. It was tough.”

“These guys are monsters,” he continued. “King even came to our house for Thanksgiving dinner and told us how much of a good kid Sam was. And the whole time they were just lying to us and playing some game. These guys are snakes.”

Earlier this year, Lin Marino had decided to have some old home movies of Sam transferred to DVD. She hadn’t watched them for years — the pain of seeing him as a baby was too great — but she had finally reached a point where she felt ready to see them again.
Then came the revelations from the newspaper.

“It was more or less equal to Sam dying all over again,” Marino said. “This nightmare has taken us back so many steps. I still have nightmares every night of Sam being abused.”

Shortly after the news broke Marino went for a hike in the woods to clear her head. She found a broken and bent piece of plastic that she thought looked much like an angel’s wing.

“I like to think it was a sign from my son, that he is still with me,” Marino said. “Since then I’ve found other similar wings while taking walks and have given them to some of Sam’s friends and relatives.”

Marino now regularly sees a therapist to help her with the grief, and she hopes other families and victims do the same.

“I just hope that other victims and their families are seeking the help they need to recover from this,” she said.

As for King and the others accused of exploiting Sam and others, “I really hope they never see the light of day again.”