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Two recent sentencings, one from the "Landslide" ring got 1335 years, the other, from "Candyman" got 30.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/825224/posts

An American couple grew rich on the misery of children until a tip-off on a post box number shattered the anonymity of the internet. Julian Coman in Fort Worth talks to the team who caught them

Postal inspectors at the Jack D Watson Post Office in Forth Worth, Texas, spend most of their days investigating credit card fraud, the theft of parcels and other abuses of the US mail system. Early in 1999, however, a very different kind of case came along.

The tip-off that would eventually lead to the arrest of Pete Townshend, the guitarist with The Who, came from an acquaintance of Bob Adams, a postal inspector.

The friend, from Minnesota, who has never been named, stumbled upon a website operating under the name Landslide Productions Inc.

The name of the site was innocuous; its content was not. At the bottom of Landslide Productions' home page, which was illustrated with a scenic mountainside view, was an invitation to click on a button marked "child porn".

Viewers were invited to subscribe by credit card. For those who had no card and wanted to pay by cheque, however, the website also gave a mailing address: a post office box in Fort Worth, Texas.

Mr Adams contacted the nearby Dallas police department, which had set up a unit to investigate the exploitation of children on the internet.

The undercover investigation that followed uncovered the biggest child pornography enterprise in American history. The Dallas police provided Steve Nelson, one of its detectives, with a fake identity and credit card number.

After entering Landslide's child porn site, Mr Nelson found a menu advertising selections such as "children forced to porn", "child rape" and "children of God".

Each selection cost $29.95 for a month's subscription. To join up, the surfer needed to give credit card details and choose a password.

Landslide Productions was traced to Tom and Janice Reedy of Fort Worth, a couple who had recently arrived in the city.

Tom Reedy was a former nurse and had never owned a home. Janice Reedy had lived most of her life in a trailer. Now the couple lived in a mansion and each drove a Mercedes.

The postal inspections service and the Dallas PD brought their investigation to the attention of Terri Moore, an assistant district attorney with a reputation for typically Texan straight-talking.

Under her guidance, the agencies tightened the net around the Reedys. America's laws on child pornography place a far greater burden on investigating authorities to show that a crime is being committed.

"The bigger this became, the more careful we were to get everything right," Ms Moore told The Telegraph.

A consultant from Microsoft was hired to make copies of the sites. The Reedys' bank accounts were tracked. Gradually the scale of the operation became clear.

Tom and Janice Reedy were not running a grubby backstreet service for local paedophiles. They were the middlemen for a global child pornography business, procuring customers to view horrific images of child abuse, usually shot far way in eastern Europe and Asia. More than 7,000 of their customers were British.

At a conservative estimate, Landslide Productions was making $1.3 million (£810,000) a month profit. "We discovered that this couple were making an absolute fortune," said Kenny Smith, a postal inspector at the Jack D Watson building.

Most subscribers, it turned out, could not resist sampling as many of the porn categories as they could afford. In all, there were 2,000 available.

A separate site of "adult classifieds" included entries from fathers advertising their children for sex. The company's outgoings included payments to Russia and Indonesia, where the images originated.

When the Reedys' lavish home was raided, a database was removed containing the names and credit details of 350,000 subscribers in 60 countries.

"Tom Reedy had been playing the role of a madam in a whorehouse and this was a list of the visitors," said Ms Moore.

"I went through my area of Fort Worth straight away and looked for the prominent names. There were lawyers, doctors, teachers. The database was a cross-section of respectable society."

The frustration for the assistant DA, however, was once again that American law requires prosecutors to catch subscribers online.

Had Townshend lived in America, Ms Moore could not have arrested him for previous visits to child pornography sites.

Instead, prosecutors monitored the website, intercepted letters and emails and amassed evidence. Then they moved against the Reedys.

In December 2000 a federal jury convicted the couple on more than 85 counts of child exploitation. Tom Reedy was sentenced to 1,335 years in prison. Janice, for aiding and abetting, received 14 years.

"Reedy's emails buried him," said Ms Moore. "We read somewhere that he was trying to get stronger stuff on the sites. He was saying that customers weren't satisfied."

The conviction enabled the US authorities to pass on the identities of all the couple's foreign clients to Interpol: in September 2001 Britain's National Crime Squad received 7,200 names.

Detectives in Britain were horrified at the number of people on the list, which they knew would generate their biggest paedophile inquiry.

Carole Howlett, the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and the lead officer in the inquiry, immediately recognised more than a dozen household names on the list.

A colleague said: "The list was held in great secrecy. The few officers who did know were amazed at the extent of interest in child porn.

"We realised that most forces did not have enough expertise and manpower for a national swoop. Instead, it was decided to proceed with caution and arrest those who worked with children first."

Last month, rumours began to circulate in Texas that among those on the list was Townshend. Kenny Smith, the postal investigator, was in church when a colleague rang with the news of Townshend's arrest. "It was startling to think how far the Reedy case had gone," he said.

For Ms Moore, though, the news was painful. It reminded her that the vast majority of American subscribers were beyond her reach: the authorities could simply monitor them and hope to catch them if they reoffended.

As a music-lover, the news also affected her. "I love The Who," she said. "When I heard that Pete had been arrested it just made me sad." Townshend said that he had looked at the site only a couple of times for research.

Ms Moore remains proud of her achievement in breaking what is thought to be the biggest internet child pornography operation in the world.

"The case was pretty precedent-setting. Maybe it means a particular kid won't get molested. To feed the hunger of paedophiles is disgusting. These people were getting rich off the misery of children

http://heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,5719024%255E401,00.html

30yrs for child porn ring head
From correspondents in Houston

A TEXAS man behind a worldwide email ring that traded pornographic images of children, some as young as 18 months old, was sentenced today to the maximum of 30 years in federal prison.

"I'm sorry for the children in the pictures," said Mark Bates, 33.
"I was using the pictures so I wouldn't go out and hurt anyone. I wasn't thinking there was actually a person behind the pictures."

Bates pleaded guilty to trafficking in child pornography via computer. He was the moderator of the "Candyman" e-mail group that served more than 6,000 users, who were expected to contribute images as well as receive them. More than 80 people in 26 states were arrested in the case last March.

Defence lawyer David Cunningham argued against the maximum penalty, citing evidence that Bates himself was a victim of sexual abuse several times before the age of 11.

But the scope of Bates' Internet groups, the nature of the material, Bates' two molestation convictions and a confession in psychiatric records that he sexually abused about 30 children - and possibly as many as 100 - led the judge to impose the harshest penalty under law.

"It is the only sure way to safeguard children from this sexual predator," US District Judge Melinda Harmon said.

Two suburban Houston men arrested because of their involvement with the Candyman e-mail group were also sentenced in the same hearing. Robert Froman, 49, was sentenced to 15 years. Billy Loyd White, 46, received about four years.

Froman's sentence was increased by Interpol's discovery of a video clip in Europe showing Froman having sex with his young daughter.

Prosecutor Jim Buchanan said the video and more than 500 posed images of Froman's daughter probably will keep being viewed and traded indefinitely over the Internet.

"In this time of year where fathers bestow gifts on their children, he has taken a child's life away," Buchanan said.

This was in our local paper today (what a sicko):

Mistake by FBI in porn case leads priest to plead guilty on lesser count

By PETER SHINKLE Post-Dispatch

02/04/2003 12:00 AM

Father John Hess (P-D)

A priest accused of possessing child pornography took advantage of an apparent error by the FBI to obtain a reduced sentence Monday, although he still must spend three months in confinement.

His lawyer warned that the FBI's mistake may have an impact nationwide on the "Candyman" ring crackdown, although the top federal prosecutor here said many cases should escape the taint.

The Rev. John P. Hess, former pastor of Most Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Florissant, was sentenced to probation and fined $5,000. He also must spend three months in a halfway house.

Hess, 57, pleaded guilty in May on one count of possessing child pornography. He admitted that his computer, which the FBI seized, contained multiple images of it. With that plea, he faced a prison term of up to 27 months.

But after his attorney complained that the FBI had used a false statement to obtain a search warrant, prosecutors agreed to let Hess withdraw his child pornography plea and plead guilty instead to possession of obscene materials.

For the new charge, which makes no mention of child pornography, he faced a penalty of up to six months in jail. U.S. District Judge Richard Kyle ordered probation plus 90 days in a community correctional center.

Defense attorney Richard Sindel said the search warrant problem could lead to challenges by other Candyman defendants. The FBI has said as many as 700 people were under scrutiny in the United States.

The FBI seized Hess' computer from the church rectory in March as it cracked down on the Candyman child pornography ring, arresting about 100 people nationwide.

"I think it will have significance in all of them," Sindel said Monday.

But Ray Gruender, the U.S. attorney for eastern Missouri, said, "Don't make the mistake of thinking that this jeopardizes all the other cases, because it does not."

For example, Gruender said, some of the defendants consented to searches, so search warrants weren't always used.

Also, some defendants had participated in another Internet group, "Girls 12-16," and prosecutors believe the warrants in those cases are not vulnerable to the challenge used by Hess, according to Gruender.

At the core of the dispute is FBI agent Geoffrey Binney, of Houston, who started the investigation of Candyman, a group hosted on the servers of eGroups, a company later acquired by Yahoo.

Binney prepared a description of how he joined the group. That language was used by agents in St. Louis and elsewhere in January last year as they applied for search warrants to examine the computers of suspected Candyman participants.

Binney testified in St. Louis against a different defendant last year that at the time he joined, he was not offered an option not to receive e-mails automatically from the group.

But an examination of Yahoo records later showed that when Binney joined, he was, in fact, offered that option.

Sindel claimed that Binney's mistake was either deliberate or reckless. But Gruender said Monday that Binney still insists he did not recall seeing the option.

It is important because the FBI affidavits claimed that any member's e-mails containing child pornography were automatically redistributed to all the other members.

But if they could opt out, it undercuts the probability that they received illegal materials, defense lawyers have contended.

Sindel, arguing to withdraw Hess' plea, said that without the false information, a judge would not have had probable cause to issue a search warrant. He also asked for a hearing to argue that evidence seized was thus inadmissible.

Gruender said prosecutors chose to compromise and accept the obscenity plea rather than fight and possibly lose.

"We know there was child pornography there because he pled guilty to it, but the compromise here - to avoid the risk that he would walk away scot-free - was that he would plead to the felony of obscene material," the U.S. attorney said.

Meanwhile, a federal judge in St. Louis has granted a request by another Candyman defendant, Gregory Strauser, to withdraw his plea on the same basis.

In that case, U.S. District Judge Catherine Perry set a hearing Feb. 14 to consider whether to throw out evidence seized in the FBI's search of Strauser's home and computer.

Hess could not be reached for comment after his sentencing Monday. Sindel said, "I know he feels a great deal of remorse for letting people down and for the difficulties people have experienced as a result of this mess."

Hess, of the 12000 block of Bellefontaine Road, remains a priest, although he has no priestly duties, said Jim Orso, spokesman for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis.

Reporter Peter Shinkle:

BTW, this local lawyer Sin-del is a major league klymer.