The founder of a California-based porn empire that recruited women with false modeling offers was sentenced Monday to 27 years in federal prison.

Michael James Pratt , who was once placed on the FBI's notorious "10 Most Wanted Fugitives" list , pleaded guilty in June in federal court in San Diego. Federal prosecutors said Pratt and his co-defendants used force, fraud and coercion to recruit hundreds of women, many of whom were in their late teens, for their adult videos.

At the sentencing hearing, 40 women urged the court to hand down the maximum sentence, with "some tearfully describing their ordeals in San Diego hotel rooms where they were exploited, coerced, raped, abused and trapped," the Justice Department said in a news release .

"The life I was meant to have, died in that

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