A Portland man has been sentenced to 15 years in federal prison on two child exploitation charges.

Police were investigating Paul Henry, 25, as a suspected pimp in a prostitution ring last year when they found videos he recorded of himself having sex with a teenage girl.

Henry also was sentenced Friday in U.S. District Court in Portland by Judge Jon Levy to serve an additional five years of supervised release after completing his federal prison term.

Henry had been under investigation for months as a suspected drug dealer and pimp in Maine and New York when Portland police discovered three videos he took of himself having sex with a 15-year-old Portland girl on Jan. 25-26, 2014, according to federal court documents.

Although Henry’s arrest last year on the federal charges was only indirectly related to allegations against him for drug dealing and prostituting women, details of that investigation came to light in documents contained in the federal child exploitation case. Those federal documents reference an affidavit filed last year by Portland police in state court seeking a search warrant for Henry’s phone.

Police came across the videos on Henry’s iPhone after receiving a tip on Feb. 12 from a federal agent in Detroit that a 19-year-old missing woman from Michigan, who is mildly developmentally disabled, was being held against her will at a Portland hotel and was being pimped out in the Portland area by unidentified men. Portland police began visiting hotels and motels in Portland until they located the woman and Henry in a room at Motel 6 on Riverside Street, according to an affidavit filed in federal court by Agent David Pawson, a Department of Homeland Security investigator.

The woman told police that she had worked as a prostitute in the past in New York City and that Henry approached her last Feb. 9 as she was walking around in Brooklyn and asked her to come work for him as a prostitute, first in Boston and then in Portland, according to the search warrant affidavit filed by Portland police Officer Daniel Townsend in state court.

“(The woman) said her movements were controlled while she was in the room, and Henry had told her she was not allowed to make outgoing calls. (The woman) described Henry threatening her multiple times over the course of the previous three or four days that she was staying in the hotel room,” Townsend wrote in the search warrant affidavit.

The woman also told police that Henry had forced her to have sex with him, that she thought he had a gun and that he forced her to smuggle crack cocaine inside her body, according to Townsend’s affidavit.

Police obtained a search warrant for Henry’s phone in February and as they reviewed the pictures and videos saved on the phone, an officer recognized the 15-year-old girl in the three sex videos. Henry, also known as “LT” and “Bro,” appears to have recorded the sex videos himself, and two of them show his face, according to federal court documents.

Henry pleaded guilty to the child exploitation charges last Nov. 26 as part of a plea agreement.

Scott Dolan can be contacted at 791-6304 or at:

sdolan@pressherald.com

Twitter: @scottddolan