Posted on 01/18/2003 5:26:59 PM PST by MadIvan
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."
Tell me where "due process" has been violated? It hasn't been.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.