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March 19 issue — Father Fortunato Di Noto counts himself as having
once been among the innocent, or at least the blissfully ignorant. He is
everything you might expect an Italian priest to be: portly, balding, popular
among the local kids, prone to passionate bursts of indignation. |
HE WEARS A FLOOR-LENGTH BLACK CASSOCK, and sometimes drops his glasses low on his nose, so his blue eyes gleam over the rims with added intensity. His parish church, the Madonna del Carmine, occupies a square in an old part of Avola, a small coastal town in Sicily. The neighboring buildings, chipped and peeling, have empty holes for windows. The outside of Father Fortunato’s church is drab concrete. Inside, overhanging the pews and altar, is a garish modern painting portraying the seven deadly sins. A group of children has gathered in a small wooden alcove for a Bible class. Beyond them, in a small back office, two boys are playing Super Mario Brothers on a computer.
It was here, by grim
happenstance in 1996, that Father Fortunato experienced an epiphany. He had
begun to offer an Internet course to parish children, believing it was a vital
learning tool. During one of the first meetings of his informal study group, a
little girl said she wanted to search for “lollipops.” Using an Italian slang
word for lollipop— slurpy —Father Fortunato punched the letters into the
search engine. But slurpy is also slang for a sex act; what came back was a
connection to an outfit called the Pedophile Liberation Front, which defends
the lifestyle of pedophiles—people who are sexually attracted to children.
Through that link, Father Fortunato found other sites, and discovered letters
addressed to kids attempting to lure them into relationships. “I’m lucky
because I have faith,” says the priest. “If I didn’t, I’m sure I would have
gone out there with a machine gun and taken justice in my own hands.”
MIND-NUMBING ATROCITIES
Father Fortunato did seek justice of a different
sort. Four years and thousands of Web searches later, he and three colleagues
have uncovered evidence of mind-numbing atrocities, including photos of child
rape involving children as young as toddlers and infants. The priest traced a
criminal trail linking distributors and users of such child pornography with
those who molest children or worse—many of them like-minded spirits who have
created a subculture in the dark corners of the Web. “In the beginning, it was
photos of nude children,” he says. “But progressively, I began to discover
tortures.” Various clues led his mouse around the globe—to sites and peddlers
of child porn in Russia, Europe, America. Eventually, he helped investigators
break a major international ring of pedophiles, based in Russia, leading to a
series of crackdowns that is expected to continue shortly in the United States.
Within the next few weeks, the
U.S. government plans to announce a wide sweep against alleged consumers of
child pornography in more than a dozen cities across the country. Customs
agents have already secretly executed search warrants on several targets of the
investigation, who are alleged to be customers of a Moscow Web site called Blue
Orchid. Sources told NEWSWEEK that the American targets of the Blue Orchid
investigation may be involved in trading photos with other pedophiles. Some of
the targets may also be charged with actually molesting children. One of the
most distressing aspects of this investigation, law-enforcement sources say,
was the discovery that Blue Orchid was peddling a tape to American suspects in
which a molester was depicted severely beating up a child.
This kind of material makes most people turn away
with profound revulsion. Other people will dismiss the problem as one of lone
perverts trading dirty pictures. But that very instinct—to turn away—serves the
child pornographers well. “The problem is that these kinds of things aren’t
very well known, and since they’re not well known, people have a hard time
believing them,” says Father Fortunato. “Silence is what allows pedophiles to
win.” The fact is, thousands of children around the world have been brutally
abused to create these images, and demand for the pictures is burgeoning,
fueled by the Internet. That in turn encourages more abuse. Child pornography
comes in many forms, ranging from photos of kids in baths to the terrible
images that Father Fortunato discovered. Some are old images that have been
scanned into computers; others are new. Many pedophiles never act on their
urges, while others commit acts of cruelty that are, simply, unthinkable. Yet
the thousands of children in the photos, tapes and videos pinging around the
Internet never had the option to turn away.
A LONELY AND HUNTED BREED
Fifteen or 20 years ago, law-enforcement officers in
the United States figured they had child pornography under control. They
cracked down on peddlers and buyers—who were using overland mail and
neighborhood photo labs—to such an extent that it was hard for pedophiles to
find and interact with one another. A lonely and hunted breed, they often
resorted to crossing national borders to places like Sri Lanka and the
Philippines that had more available victims and less strict law enforcement.
“Child pornography was pretty much eradicated in the 1980s,” says Kevin
Delli-Colli, who runs the U.S. Customs Cyber-Smuggling Center, a unit that
combats the import of child-sex photos and films. “With the advent of the
Internet, it exploded.”
Suddenly, pedophiles could use
their own computers to make instant copies of pictures—grabbed from an Internet
club on a Web site located in, say, Moscow—and send them to like-minded friends
around the world. Men who had fantasies that they were once ashamed to admit or
afraid to act upon now found a “community” in online clubs and chat rooms
devoted to preteen sex. No longer did pedophiles have to prowl the seedier sections
of the city for photos or films; they could meet friends and download, in their
living rooms, child pornography made with film-free digital cameras (no need to
risk exposure at a photo store) and home-made CD-ROMs. Nor did Americans
believe they had to travel to lands where sexual laws were milder. Scarier
still, sexual predators interested in older kids no longer had to lurk near a
school or neighborhood hangout. Via the Internet, they could enter a home,
introduce themselves to a teenage child and carry on a long process of
seduction.
Today, international pedophile
rings sell and trade hundreds of thousands of images. When police in 13
countries, including the United States, broke up the Wonderland Internet ring
in 1998, they discovered computer files with three quarters of a million images
of child pornography in Britain alone. (The 200 members of the Wonderland
Internet relay chat group each had to provide 10,000 images in order to join.)
Collating the photos and extracting head and shoulder shots, police in the
United Kingdom working with other specialists identified 1,263 different
victims, all of them under the age of puberty. In the Netherlands, when
activists broke up the Apollo ring of child abusers led by Gerald Ulrich the
same year, they discovered CD-ROM duplicating facilities in his home; on the
first Ulrich disc alone, Dutch police identified more than 200 victims—and 16
more such discs have yet to be fully cataloged. Many of the images on the
Ulrich CD-ROMs and Wonderland computer tapes showed children as young as 3
months subjected to explicit sex acts.
THE BELGIAN CONNECTION
A number of recent cases illustrate how global these
networks are. When authorities last year took down a child-porn Web site run by
Wayne Camolli in Palm Beach, Fla., they were acting on a tip from Belgian
police. They found that confederates of the notorious Belgian pedophile Marc
Dutroux had sent pornography to Camolli, who was later sentenced to 16 months
in federal prison after being convicted on one count of transmitting child
porn. In Dutroux’s dungeon-equipped house, police had found 500 videotapes,
many depicting the rape of children, according to Belgian police investigative
files obtained by NEWSWEEK.
In Italy, police with the help of Microsoft Italia
last year ran a sting in which they “mirrored” a Russian Web site—believed to
be connected to the current U.S. investigation—that was offering all manner of
child pornography. Italian police have started criminal proceedings against
1,700 Italians for actively purchasing the pornography, and passed on to police
in eight other countries details on other nationals who did so as well.
Documents filed with Internic, the Internet registration agency, show that one
of the Russian child-pornography Web sites—which was in English—was actually
registered to someone in Tuscaloosa, Ala. A Ft. Worth, Texas, couple, Thomas
and Janice Reedy, last year were charged with providing access to child-porn
Web sites with names like “Child Rape” and “Children Forced to Porn” through
hyperlinks on their own home page, making more than a million dollars in fees
from it, prosecutors said. A bulletin board on the site included ads from
parents offering to swap their children for sex to like-minded parents. They
now face sentencing, having been convicted on more than 80 child-porn-related
counts. Charged with them were two Indonesians and a Russian, the apparent
producers.
An investigation of a child-porn Web site by U.S.
Customs agents in the summer of 1999 reveals the appetite for photos of
sexually exploited children. The Web site, known to Customs as the Tajik
Express because the Web address was in Tajikistan (although the actual computer
server was in Massachusetts), recorded 4,107 hits from different Internet user
addresses in the first month, as well as 95,450 downloads of images. In its
third month, the site recorded an astounding 147,776 hits from individual
users, and the download of 3.2 million images. The site was later shut down at
the request of Customs, and six people were arrested.
A ‘LEGITIMIZING EFFECT’
Many law-enforcement officers worry that the spread
of child pornography, as well as the easy access to like-minded people via the
Internet, has a “legitimizing effect”—making the pedophile believe that his own
impulses are OK, because they are shared by so many others. That feeds
appetites for this material, meaning more kids will be victimized. “They’re all
looking for fresh stuff,” says FBI agent Peter Gulotta. “They’re all looking
for photos they haven’t seen before.”
But how many consumers of pornography actually
cross the line to soliciting and abusing children? Overall, the evidence on
child molestation in the United States is mixed: after a surge in the early ’90s,
the total number of substantiated cases of sexual abuse known to
child-protection authorities declined by 31 percent between 1992 and 1998, from
149,800 to 103,600 cases per year. At the same time, however, the number of
people incarcerated in state facilities for sexual assault against juveniles
went up by 39 percent between 1991 and 1997, from 43,500 to 60,700. And
American law-enforcement officials generally agree that there is a link between
voyeurism and abuse. In 36 percent of investigations undertaken by the United
States Postal Inspection Service since 1997, for instance, pursuit of child
pornography turned up actual child molesters. Some of them were known
pedophiles with criminal records; others were found, during the course of the
investigation, to have been abusing kids.
For those who do act on their
urges, computer technology has also become a powerful vehicle for preying on
potential young victims. Michelle Collins is an online analyst for the National
Center for Missing & Exploited Children, a nonprofit agency that gets
government funding and which serves as a clearinghouse for tips about online
sexual exploitation. With a few clicks of her mouse, she demonstrates how a
predator might use the Internet. First she goes into America Online, then pulls
up a window to search AOL “member profiles.” She punches in the name of a town
and types “student” under the “occupation” category. Just from one midsize town
in New Jersey, up pop more than 100 personal profiles of AOL members who have voluntarily
provided personal information about their interests and hobbies. To narrow the
search further, Collins keys in kid-friendly search words like “Britney
Spears.” One girl notes that “My life sucks.” (AOL spokesperson Nicholas Graham
says that the company always advises members not to post personal information
they want to keep private, and provides parental-control software free. “We
also don’t allow children under 13 to create a member profile,” he says.)
PUSH-BUTTON PREDATORS
Now the would-be molester can punch a button that
will alert him whenever the target kid comes online. When he or she does, the
predator sends an instant message, and begins “grooming” the child. If she has
mentioned an interest in soccer, the predator might ask what her jersey number
is, so he can check her out at the local playing field. He’ll play on her
insecurities. “Girls in their teens can be very vulnerable,” says Collins.
“They may not think they’re pretty enough or popular enough, and the predator
will say ‘You’re beautiful on the inside,’ and provide a relationship. The girl
will think: ‘He knows me for me’.”
A few more clicks, and Collins is out of AOL and
into an Internet relay chat channel for people interested in preteen sex. The
creator of this group, clearly aware of the laws on child pornography, has
written warnings not to post photos. But, as Collins explains, people who meet
here can then make separate arrangements to trade illicit materials via the
Internet. Some of these methods are extremely difficult to monitor. Many of the
same kids appear again and again in the graphic photos posted on the Web or
seized by police from offenders’ hard drives. They turn up so often that
Collins and her analysts have classified several “series” of photos: the Amber
series, the Marion series, the Cindy series, the Kevin series and so on.
One group of recent photos involves two blond
girls, aged roughly 4 and 7. Collins is trying to identify a man, who presents
himself online as a married, middle-class American marketing agent, who has
been disseminating the photos. But, she explains, the subject she is trying to
locate is certainly not the man who made the photos. The chances of locating
that person—and helping the two girls—”are slim to none.” “It’s so, so big,”
she says of the amount of pedophilia on the Internet.
SEXUAL SOLICITATIONS
Now that the problem is global, how much does an
average American child have to fear? Once again, the statistical data are
imprecise. A survey of 1,501 U.S. kids aged 10 to 17 conducted in 2000 showed
that approximately one in four had had an unwanted exposure to some kind of
image of naked people or people having sex in the last year. Roughly one in
five kids had received a sexual solicitation or approach. One in 33 kids had
received an aggressive solicitation, meaning that someone asked them to meet
somewhere, or called on the phone, or sent them regular mail, money or gifts.
And less than 10 percent of sexual solicitations and only 3 percent of unwanted
exposure episodes were ever reported to authorities, such as a law-enforcement
agency, an Internet service provider or a hot line.
The study and its authors caution, however, that
parents and educators shouldn’t jump to the most frightening conclusions. “Many
of the solicitors, when their age is known, appear to be other youth and
younger adults and even some women,” says the report, supervised by David
Finkelhor of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of
New Hampshire. “Not all of the sexual aggression on the Internet fits the image
of the sexual predator or wily child molester. A lot of it looks and sounds
like the hallways of our high schools.” Overreaction by parents, Finkelhor and
other experts say, may make teenagers less apt to speak up when a real threat
appears. As it is, many kids may not want to tell their parents about sexual
advances over the Internet for fear that the adult will cut off Web privileges.
“Teens need to be talking to other teens,” says Finkelhor. “As long as they
perceive this as a dialogue between adults about how best to control them, they
are going to be more resistant.”
The vast majority of child molesters turn out to be
members of victims’ families or local communities, experts say. In the United
States, the typical pedophile is white, male and well educated, with no
criminal record. Most of these people are not part of an organized,
international ring; nor do they snatch children off the street. Yet a family
member or friend who photographs a child will often trade the images with
like-minded people via computer, and soon the photos gain a life of their own
in cyberspace—a form of child abuse that goes on indefinitely.
THE TECHNOLOGY WAR
Luckily, in this war, technology cuts both ways.
While the Web has fed the boom in sexual exploitation, it has also given
law-enforcement authorities powerful weapons to fight back. “This same
technology—the Internet—also is making it easier to catch people,” says Finkelhor.
Arrests for possessing and distributing child pornography have been climbing
steadily, in part because federal agencies are putting more resources in this
area. In fiscal year 1992, U.S. Customs recorded 57 arrests for possession of
child pornography transported across borders, 48 indictments and 69
convictions. By 2000, those numbers had grown to 320 arrests, 299 indictments
and 324 convictions.
FBI agent Peter Gulotta, who works for the bureau’s
Innocent Images task force hunting down online pedophiles, says the unit’s
primary investigative technique is to stake out chat rooms, posing as kids and
waiting for potential molesters to engage them. “We’re fishing in a pond full
of hungry fish,” he says. “Every time you throw a hook, you pull one out.” In
fiscal year 1998, the FBI opened up roughly 700 cases dealing with online
pedophilia, most of them for posting child pornography, and about a quarter
dealing with online predators trying to get children under 18 to meet with
them. By 2000 that figure had quadrupled to 2,856 cases. Among them was that of
a former Infoseek executive, Patrick J. Naughton, who pleaded guilty last March
of crossing state lines with intent to have sex with a minor. Naughton had
corresponded with an FBI agent posing as a 13-year-old girl in an Internet chat
room called “Dad&DaughterSex.”
Some critics think that big Internet companies like
AOL and Yahoo bear at least some responsibility for the online child-porn boom.
Both companies say they have absolutely no tolerance for child pornography, and
cooperate with law enforcement to combat it. But companies can’t monitor
everything that goes on. Internet firms have also defended, in the past, their
right to be conduits for adult porn—a multibillion-dollar business—and for hate
speech under the First Amendment. Now a new law, signed by President Bill
Clinton more than a year ago, will require electronic communication and
computing services to report violations of child-pornography laws. If a company
knows of a violation and fails to report it, it will face fines of up to
$100,000.
REPORTING VIOLATIONS
That information will be sent to the National Center
for Missing & Exploited Children in Washington. Since the center launched
its CyberTipline in March 1998, it has analyzed some 37,000 reports about child
exploitation. (If you have information, call 800-843-5678 or e-mail
cybertipline.com.) All tips are categorized and passed on to federal
law-enforcement agencies or to local and international police. One case began
when the tip line received information about a posting requesting pictures of
“young, white (10-13) year-old boys.” “I’m new to this stuff and am a little
skeptical about mailing a check to someone I don’t know,” the online message
read. “I don’t want to get in trouble with the cops. But I love naked
children.” The author of the site also offered photos of naked boys, aged 9 to
14, “from summer camp.”
The perpetrator was tracked to a
fraternity house in Burlington, Vt., where police took over the investigation.
The cops went to the frat house under a pretense and found that the
perpetrator, Jeremy Lacey, was spending his summer as a counselor at a boys’
camp in New Hampshire. Police then obtained warrants, searched the frat house
and the camp, and found 1,238 images on one of Lacey’s zip drives. Later they
retrieved thousands more, as well as photos of boys taken at the camp. In June
last year, after pleading no contest, Lacey was sentenced to three years in
jail on two counts of using a child for a sexual performance and required to
complete an in-house sex-offender program while serving his time.
Despite such victories, analysts at the
CyberTipline worry they’ll soon be overwhelmed. Currently, they receive roughly
400 to 450 leads on Internet child pornography and child sexual exploitation a
week, but they expect that to surge to 7,000 or more when new regulations
enforcing the law passed last year go into effect. “Instead of treating every
specific tip or lead, we’re going to have to triage as you would in the ER,”
says the center’s operational head, John Rabun. “The federal law-enforcement
system is simply not equipped to deal with this kind of volume.”
DEPICTIONS OF TORTURE
Law-enforcement officials around the world also lack
resources and tools they need, even when they catch hard-core offenders. In
Britain, seven men pleaded guilty last month to running the Wonderland Internet
Club. Judging from clues like furniture and fashion in many of the photographs,
investigators believe the Wonderland photos were relatively recent. They mostly
feature American, European and Russian children. “Club rules excluded the
killing of kids,” says British police detective Alex Wood. They didn’t exclude
the depiction of torture. In a sound file on the hard drive of Wonderland’s key
organizer, Ian Baldock of the United Kingdom, investigators could hear a little
girl being sexually abused and begging for mercy in English-accented tones,
says Wood. Baldock got 30 months in jail for distribution of child pornography.
But many of the Wonderland suspects have still not relinquished the passwords
that would open all of their confiscated hard drives to scrutiny. Nor have
experts been able to break the state-of-the-art encryption, based on KGB codes,
that the Wonderland pedophiles used.
Back in Italy, Father Fortunato often finds himself
depressed by the slow progress and official and public indifference. The priest
helped to bust the major Russian child-pornography outfit, only to learn that
the ringleader of the group had earlier been arrested and released in a Moscow
May Day amnesty. When Italian authorities then brought charges of their own
against the child-porn peddler, Dmitry Vladimirovich Kuznetsov, he called a
newspaper to mock them. Kuznetsov told a reporter in Moscow that he had renamed
his enterprise Lucky Videos in honor of Father Fortunato, whose name loosely
translates as Lucky. He also promised to give child pornography away free just
to spite the Italians. Kuznetsov has little to fear in making the taunts: child
abuse is not considered serious enough in Russia to justify extradition.
Yet while sometimes frustrated, Father Fortunato is
undeterred. After partially shutting down his child-protection hot line for two
months to shame the Italian government into providing support for his campaign,
he recently got funding and pledges of more cooperation from top Italian
officials, including Prime Minister Giuliano Amato. Father Fortunato’s modest
organization is now turning its attention toward the possibility of “search and
rescue” operations in conjunction with Interpol. “We need to find and free
these poor children who are the victims of online pedophilia,” he says. “We
just need to free all those babies.” The Internet may be a very useful
instrument in those efforts. But for now, at least, it seems to work better for
the global criminals that make Father Fortunato, in his weaker moments, want to
pick up that machine gun.
With Scott Johnson in Brussels, Mark Hosenball in
Washington, Barbie Nadeau in Rome, Christopher Dickey in Paris and Brad Stone
in San Francisco
© 2001 Newsweek, Inc.