Detective Richard Love signs on to his computer using the identity of a girl, and enters an Internet chat room. It’s usually just a matter of minutes, sometimes seconds, before a pedophile takes aim.
“How old are you?” a stranger asks Love’s 14-year-old persona.
“I’m 14,” the 45-year-old Fort Lauderdale detective types into the computer.
“Where do you go to school? What bands do you like?” asks the faceless person on the other end of this cyber-connection.
Love, who prepares for these computer conversations by watching MTV and listening closely to the conversations of his adolescent nieces, answers the way he thinks a 14-year-old girl would. Sometimes it is only a matter of minutes before the stranger is asking the girl if she is a virgin.
And so Love, a member of Law Enforcement Against Child Harm, or LEACH, begins building yet another case against a pedophile using the computer to satisfy his illegal desires.
“Sadly, it’s like fishing in a barrel to get these people to solicit you,” said Dennis Nicewander, an assistant state attorney in Broward County who provides legal guidance to the task force. “They’re everywhere.”
The multi-agency LEACH Task Force, now in its third year, is working on 30 to 40 cases every month. And it boasts of a conviction rate of more than 95 percent of its cases, charging its targets with crimes ranging from possession of child pornography, to exchanging child pornography and soliciting minors for sex.
Among the more recent high-profile task force arrests were Tony Gentile, 54, longtime president of the Broward Teachers Union arrested July 26; Byron Matthai, 52, a 25-year veteran Fort Lauderdale police detective, arrested June 21; and Jerrold Levy, 58, a rabbi from Boca Raton arrested May 12. All three men were arrested after arranging to meet what they thought was a boy or girl they had communicated with via the computer.
The task force is also part of an on-going nationwide undercover investigation called Operation Avalanche, in which 100 people have already been arrested, including a Texas couple sent to prison last week for running the largest child-pornography business ever uncovered in the country. Five Web-site managers connected to the outfit are wanted overseas, and federal officials have begun forwarding the names of 9,000 Web subscribers to local authorities across the country because of the users’ “predilection” for child pornography. Members of LEACH would not talk about their role in the investigation, because it is ongoing.
LEACH member Sgt. Lloyd McElhaney from the Broward Sheriff’s Office began to see an increase in computer pedophile cases about nine years ago.
“Computers and the Internet have become the freest and easiest way in the world to buy, rent, sell and auction anything, and pedophiles figured why not children?” McElhaney said.
The bad guys have a bit of a head start, Nicewander said. But through the 13 task forces such as LEACH that are working around the country with funding from the Department of Justice, law enforcement is trying to close off a growing maze of Internet back alleys that have made children more susceptible than ever to sexual exploitation.
LEACH, the brainchild of Broward Sheriff’s officers Bob DeYoung, Lt. Paul O’Connell and others, has members from the FBI, the U.S. Postal and Customs services, Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Broward Sheriff’s Office and local police agencies from Indian River County south through Key West. While they are often on the prowl for pedophiles operating within that area, they have also helped in the arrest of pedophiles who find a child online and then travel across the state or country to meet with that child.
Some of the recent high-profile cases, such as the one involving the head of the teachers’ union, throws the typical stereotype of the pedophile in a trench coat hanging around the playground right out the window, Love said.
“The Internet has given closet pedophiles an avenue to fulfill their desires,” said Love, who has worked on vice, organized crime and racketeering squads over the past 20 years. “I think these people feel safe about what they’re doing in their own homes and offices because they believe there’s anonymity on the Internet and nothing can go wrong,” he said.
Before home computers were so prevalent, pedophiles used the mail to traffic child pornography.
And parents protected children from strangers outside their home who might be looking to lure youngsters into illicit encounters.
“But the Internet has now put the pedophile in the child’s bedroom with the computer,” Nicewander said.
Love spends about four hours of each workday online — “Four hours is about all I can stand” — pretending to be a young girl, a young boy and sometimes a 57-year-old man.
As the older man, he might go in a chat room that looks like it is for fathers.
“If you think they are talking about power tools, you’re wrong. They’re talking about what they like to do to children,” Love said.
Inevitably, someone from one of these chat rooms will send him an instant message, something that only he can see, to determine whether he might be interested in talking about child sex or receiving pornographic child images.
Talking about sex online is not illegal. It’s protected by the First Amendment.
“But actually trading photographs or going somewhere to meet children in person is the next level, and those are the ones we are really going after,” Nicewander said.
Civil libertarians are concerned about the breadth of these undercover computer investigations. And lawyers defending people implicated in these cases often accuse police of entrapment. So LEACH members take care to learn what they can say in these online undercover operations, and they are regularly checking in with lawyers such as Nicewander. “We just open the door and let the pedophile come through,” Love said. “You have to show that the person is predisposed to commit the crime. So it could take days and days, or weeks on the Internet with these people to develop probable cause [for an arrest].”
Once the police have a target, they put on the old gumshoes and go to work using standard investigative techniques such as developing intelligence on the person’s background and keeping a person under surveillance, McElhaney said.
If a pedophile is a target and wants to talk to who he thinks is a child to arrange for a meeting, LEACH has female and male officers who will get on the telephone and pretend to be that child. And there are officers who are smaller in stature who will pose as a child for the arranged meeting.
A female officer was posing as a child when Matthai, the Fort Lauderdale detective, showed up with condoms and a teddy bear. He was arrested.
Matthai, like others who are snared in similar stings, contend their online conversations were merely acting out a fantasy.
“That fantasy becomes reality the first time an adult looks at the first child pornography image, or when they first start talking to that 14- or 15-year-old child,” said Love, who worked on the Matthai case. “Any person who knows right from wrong knows you don’t talk to a child that way.”
Nicewander credits the task force’s intense training for helping the officers to put together strong cases, with no mistakes that create holes for defense attorneys to exploit.
Many of the LEACH cases are prosecuted in federal court, where the penalties are higher and people are more likely to receive a jail sentence, he said.
If the arrest is for possession of child pornography and enticement, it is likely to go to federal court, he said. There, possession of three pornographic photographs with children could land someone in prison. In state court, a person would have to possess about 50 photos before a judge could sentence him to the low end of the sentencing guidelines, which say five years is the maximum sentence, Nicewander said.
But if the pedophile has physical contact with the child, it will most likely be prosecuted under state molestation charges, he said.
“The laws are not as severe as I’d like them to be,” he said.
On July 1, Florida’s laws regarding transmitting of pornography on the Internet became a bit tougher, he said.
“Finally the Legislature and the courts are coming around to realize the Internet has become a playground for pedophiles,” Nicewander said.
The LEACH members caution parents to supervise their children’s computer activities.
“It’s pretty scary because there are a lot of lonely kids out there looking for comfort somewhere,” he said. “And unfortunately, they are finding it in these guys.”
Terri Somers can be reached at or 954-356-4849.
