Anyone You Want Me to Be

by John E. Douglas

  XXXVII

  John Robinson’s was the most spectacular crime yet connected to the Internet, but it was only one of thousands that were being uncovered at the turn of the new millennium. In recent years, the biggest explosion of on-line lawlessness had occurred in the realm of child pornography. In 1999, the FBI had opened up fifteen hundred new cases of child porn in America alone, and many experts contended that it was the fastest-growing criminal frontier in cyberspace. In 1998, five thousand child porn Web sites had been identified by police working in high-tech crime units. By 2000, the number had grown to twenty-three thousand and the next year it climbed to one hundred thousand. Mainstream magazines like Newsweek were now running cover stories on the dangers of letting youngsters explore certain corners of the Net, and Web sites were providing tips and clues for how parents could protect their children from on-line predators.

  By the end of the nineties nearly every week saw arrests of suspects (almost always men) who’d gone on the Net looking for a pedophilic connection but who’d instead made contact with an FBI agent or a police officer posing as a minor. When the adult tried to hook up with the “child,” in a physical location, he got busted. The authorities had become adept at setting traps for these men. Even citizens were playing a role in these stings. In 1997, Randy Sluder, a Disney employee, snared a predator in Florida named Billy Charles Burgess after Sluder had told Burgess via the Internet that he was a blond-haired, blue-eyed, thirteen-year-old girl named Maggie 284.

  In 1998, the U.S. Customs Service broke up the largest Internet child porn ring yet uncovered. Called Wonderland, it had buyers and sellers in at least twelve countries and thirty-two American cities.

  Numerous professional people were involved in the ring, and some of them could not cope with the consequences of their actions and the public humiliation that came with charges of being a pedophile. Within a few days of their arrests, four men associated with Wonderland—a veterinarian and a former military officer among them—committed suicide. The need for fantasy and exploitation had always existed—just as it had for John Robinson—but the Internet afforded countless more opportunities for people to explore these desires. Unlike Robinson, some of those arrested for on-line crimes were shamed into self-destruction.

  In September 1999, an even bigger bust occurred when a team of computer specialists and U.S. postal inspectors entered the home of Thomas and Janice Reedy of Fort Worth, Texas. Investigators soon determined that the Reedys’ Internet business, Landslide Productions, provided access to three hundred child porn sites around the globe, reaching thousands of people across the United States and nearly 320,000 clients worldwide. Thirty federally financed task forces were involved in the dragnet against the Landslide owners. The Reedys, parents of a nine-year-old daughter, were earning $1.4 million a month from Landslide, and at the time of their arrest, the family was living in a large suburban home and driving a Mercedes-Benz. The uncovering of this business caused postal inspectors to create Operation Avalanche, a much larger investigation into on-line child pornography, and a year later the operation led to one hundred more arrests.

  Thomas Reedy was the main focus of the allegations and was given the opportunity to work with the FBI to catch other child pornographers, in exchange for a twenty-year sentence. He declined the offer and chose to go to trial, perhaps thinking that successfully prosecuting on-line child porn charges was a new and difficult case to make. He was wrong. Reedy was convicted on eighty-nine counts and his wife on eighty-seven, although she was viewed as an accomplice and received only a fourteen-year sentence. He got 1,335 years in prison—the first life sentence ever given in a federal child porn case where the defendant was not accused of actual molestation of a youngster. With Reedy’s arrest and subsequent conviction, the government had made a huge statement to potential on-line predators: you didn’t have to harm children physically to be put away forever.

  You only have to take illicit pictures of kids or buy and sell their photos on the Internet.

  In March 2002, the FBI announced the breakup of yet another vast Internet child porn ring, arresting eighty-six people in twenty-five states. Those busted in the government’s Operation Candyman—Candyman was the on-line name of this group of offenders—included two Catholic priests, six other clergy members, a child photographer, a school bus driver, a preschool teacher’s aide, and at least one police officer. In August 2002, the government broke up still another American and international on-line gang called the Club, which had allegedly sent out about a million child porn images, many of them depicting group members molesting their own children. By now it had become clear that those engaged in such crimes were no more obvious or exotic-looking than John Robinson. And it was frighteningly apparent that these types of criminals were proliferating at an alarming rate. But it was just as clear that the government was catching up with the cyber-criminals.

  “A new marketplace for child pornography has opened up in the dark corners of cyberspace,” Attorney General John Ashcroft said at the time of the Candyman arrests. “There will be no free rides on the Internet for those who traffic in child pornography.”

  Sex wasn’t the only growing criminal realm on the Net. There were many elaborate check-kiting scams as well. In a popular one throughout the Midwest, con artists were going to the yellow pages and scanning logos from well-known corporations. Then they added that logo to a phony check they’d created by using Internet software. Then they wrote a payroll check to themselves and cashed it at a local convenience store. A small group of people would quickly do this in one major city, cashing a lot of checks at many different locations, before leaving town for the next score. In one day, they could easily cash $10,000 worth of checks. The method worked well because most convenience-store employees would not think of refusing to cash a check with a logo from a Fortune 500 company, especially not when a respectable-looking person was asking them to do this. Corporations weren’t the only entities having their identities stolen. The country’s largest personal-identify-theft ring, which was using databases to carry out their scam, got busted in New York in November 2002.

  In the spring of 2000, the U.S. attorney’s office in New York City filed charges against 120 persons, including several prominent members of organized-crime families, who were charged with allegedly swindling stock-market investors out of more than $50 million. Among those named were Anthony Stropoli and Frank Persico, reputed associates of the Colombo crime family, and Robert Lino, an alleged capo in the Bonanno family. According to the authorities, the suspects used phony press releases to falsely hype certain stocks over the Internet to boost the price of securities that they already owned. As soon as the stock prices had been inflated, those generating the false information sold their securities and left other investors with shares that were basically worthless.

  In September 2001, the use of the Internet to create much larger crimes became shockingly apparent after international terrorists flew planes into the twin towers of New York City’s World Trade Center and drove another commercial aircraft into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., killing thousands of people. Investigators eventually discovered that the terrorists had left “footprints” in cyberspace, communicating with one another through the Internet and writing cryptic messages behind on-line pictures. The attackers had employed the ancient Greek practice known as steganography—a method of placing secrets on the back of images. Following the deadliest attack ever on the United States, FBI agents set about obtaining records from Yahoo! and America Online, as well as confiscating computers that the terrorists had allegedly used in Florida and Virginia. As one part of its response to the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration created a new high-level, high-tech office designed solely to fight cyber-terror.

  The age of on-line innocence was over. In less than a decade since it had achieved mass popularity, the Internet had revealed an astonishing range of abilities. It could be used as a global tool for the highest purposes of communication and educatio
n—or as a force for mass destruction. It was as good or as evil as the human beings who were punching its keys.

  XXXVIII

  As crime had spread across the Net, law enforcement had begun to gain ground on those using the Web for illegal ends. In 1996, the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the U.S. Department of Justice created the Infotech Training Working Group to investigate on-line violations of the law. This office evolved into the National Cybercrime Training Partnership (NCTP), and the NCTP worked with various levels of law enforcement to develop long-range strategies, raise public awareness, and build momentum to combat the problem on many different fronts. The National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), based in Richmond, Virginia, offered operational support to the NCTP and functioned as an information clearinghouse for cyber-crime (on-line white-collar crime involves identify theft, theft of assets, or fraud). All these agencies worked together to generate more funding to help law enforcement keep up with the ever-changing computer world. Those in charge of policing the Net looked upon their mission as a battle that they could not afford to lose.

  “The technology revolution is here and it is not only assisting law enforcement, it is working for the criminals,” said Richard L. Johnston, the director of NW3C. “There is very little time to accomplish a lot with limited resources. We are at a crossroad. The sense of urgency to focus on program coordination, deploying a plan quickly, and underwriting every initiative with a solid base of training is real because the window of opportunity for law enforcement to keep pace with cyber-crime is not only short—it’s closing.”

  One problem for the authorities was the difficulty police departments had in competing with private companies for computer expertise. Trained technical personnel could usually earn far more money in the private sector than working for public agencies. Near the end of his second term as president, Bill Clinton took measures to alleviate the situation by announcing plans for congressional funding for scholarships to those who studied computer security and then agreed to join the Federal Cyber Service after graduation. The program was modeled on the military one that had been successfully used by the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps on college campuses.

  In 1999, the FBI and hundreds of police departments around the country began using software called the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or VICAP, so they could share information to track kidnappers, rapists, and murderers. The software allows the agencies to send requests for information electronically and to cross-reference their investigative work, and it has led to a database holding eighty thousand cases. The program has connected vital clues found in different locations and helped solved many cases. Two examples are the Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, the Texas Railroad Killer, case, and the Samantha Runnion murder case in California. VICAP now churns out about eighty leads a month.

  Also in 1999, the Training and Research Institute of NW3C conducted an in-depth survey on white-collar violations of the law. The institute found that in part because of the recent emergence of the Internet, one in three American households were now the victims of white-collar crime. Traditional street crimes were falling in many places around the nation, but high-tech crimes were on the rise. The institute also found that only 7 percent of these on-line victims contacted a law enforcement agency. To boost this figure, in May 2000, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the NW3C announced the creation of the Internet Fraud Complaint Center (IFCC). The new organization was established to provide a vehicle for victims nationwide to report incidents of on-line fraud (in 2002, eBay introduced a “university,” where one could go on the Net and take classes that helped a person avoid cyber-fraud).

  “The Internet Fraud Complaint Center allows consumers who suspect Internet fraud to share that information with law enforcement quickly and efficiently,” Attorney General Janet Reno said at the time the IFCC was introduced. “Our ability to work with private citizens and industry is extremely important to our efforts to fight Internet crime, and the IFCC is a major step forward in that fight.”

  “The Internet,” said then FBI director Louis J. Freeh, “provides a boundless new medium for many traditional frauds investigated by the FBI. That there are real victims suffering significant losses remains unchanged. This center is another positive development as law enforcement responds to yet another facet of cyber-crime.”

  In early 2001, the IFCC issued its first study on Internet fraud, and the numbers were significant. In its initial six months of operation, the IFCC received 20,014 fraud complaints, and 6,087 of those were referred to law enforcement agencies throughout the nation. California ranked first in Internet fraud victims and criminals, followed by Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, and New York. The FBI does not have a statistical percentage for the clearance or solution rate, but due to the difficulty of tracing the origin of on-line fraud violation and the overall complexity of this kind of investigation, the clearance rate is currently low.

  “E-business is no longer just a buzzword,” said Texas State securities commissioner and NW3C board member Denise Voigt Crawford in response to this report. “It’s here to stay and we must find ways to help consumers and businesses have confidence in the transaction technology they choose. Part of the commitment to our electronic commerce community rests in law enforcement’s ability to respond quickly to crime problems as they arise. To do that, enforcement professionals at all levels must have training and programs in place to prepare them to meet new challenges.”

  Later in 2001, the National Cybercrime Training Partnership held a number of focus group meetings and found that “electronic crime is having a profound effect on law enforcement and no agency is escaping it.” After conducting a survey of thirty-one state and local law enforcement agencies responsible for training more than eighty-four thousand people to combat Internet crime, the NCTP called for more program coordination, fast-track initiatives implementation, and skills training. In its report, the NCTP listed the ten most critical issues surrounding Internet crime:

  Raising public awareness of the problem

  Getting citizens to report on-line crime

  Uniform training of legal personnel

  On-site management assistance for electronic-crime units and task forces

  Updated laws applied at the federal and state levels—to keep pace with electronic crime

  Cooperation with the high-tech industry

  Special research and publications to give investigators all the research they need to fight electronic crime

  More management support for the tools to investigate and prosecute on-line cases

  More investigative and forensic tools to provide police with expensive up-to-date technology

  Structuring and training computer crime units so they can best analyze electronic evidence

  In May 2001, as a result of the growing sophistication on the part of law enforcement, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the NW3C announced that criminal charges were being brought against nearly ninety individuals and companies accused of Internet fraud. The massive investigation, called Operation Cyber Loss, was initiated by the IFCC and included charges of on-line auction fraud, systemic nondelivery of merchandise purchased over the Internet, credit /debit card fraud, bank fraud, investment fraud, money laundering, multilevel marketing and Ponzi/Pyramid schemes, and intellectual property rights violations. Altogether these frauds victimized fifty-six thousand people who lost in excess of $117 million.

  “Just as neighborhood watch programs keep watch over their neighborhoods and report suspicious activity to law enforcement,” said Attorney General Ashcroft, “Internet users now have a ‘cyber-community watch program.’ When individual citizens, businesses, and consumer agencies work with law enforcement at all levels, we help ensure the safety and security of the Internet.”

  Government groups weren’t the only ones sending out warning signals about the Net. Two Virginia-based private organizations, the National Law Center for Children and Enough Is Enough, provided information to
parents, teachers, and local, state, or federal employees about the dangers of child pornography, while supporting legislative efforts to control or get rid of it. Written material produced by Enough Is Enough described child porn as a billion-dollar-a-year industry that was a threat to children “both morally and physically…. Any child with a computer can simply ‘call up’ and…‘printout’ pictures that are unspeakably pornographic.” The literature described in detail how child predators used the Internet to find kids before meeting them in person and molesting them.

  “There are more outlets for hard-core pornography in America,” it concluded, “than McDonald’s restaurants.”

  (For statistics regarding these Web sites and a list of tips to avoid their dangers, see Appendices A and B starting on page 287.)

  Waiting Him Out

  XXXIX

  John Robinson’s preliminary hearing had originally been scheduled for the fall of 2000, but it was postponed twice at the request of his lawyers. After months of delay, the proceedings finally began on the morning of February 5, 2001, in the sober courtroom of Judge John Anderson III. With his Kansas Death Penalty Defense Unit at his side, led by Ron Evans, Robinson prepared to face the first of his accusers in court. Sitting across from the defendant was Paul Morrison and his assistant district attorney, Sara Welch. Because of the hearing, the Johnson County Courthouse had heightened security and everyone who entered the courtroom had been carefully screened. All media people had to get passes and go through a metal detector. Armed deputies were on hand, and most reporters felt that they were being watched closely. This judge wanted them to behave respectfully in his courtroom. The sense that one mistake could derail the entire process for months and months—or get a spectator ejected—pervaded the atmosphere. This was the first case in Kansas in thirty-six years that many people felt could end with an execution, and from the start it was surrounded by gravity.