By JAMES R. PETERSEN
From The Playboy Forum (forum@playboy.com)
March 1995
Last spring the papers were full of editorials that warned about
the dangers of pedophiles lurking in cyberspace. The new medium gives creeps
complete anonymity. Predators can cruise chat rooms looking for innocent kids
with confused notions of sexuality. They can explore the target-rich bulletin
boards on America Online, Prodigy, Compuserve and Genie, then pull unsuspecting
youths into the dark shadows of e-mail, ply them with porn, set up meetings and
work their magic.In reality, cyberspace has created a unique tool for proactive law enforcement. Or so say the police.
"You can't hang a 14-year-old out as a goat and wait for the pedophiles to pounce," says Doug Rehman, an agent in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. "But in cyberspace you can pretend to be 12 or 20 years old, male or female, gay or straight. The same anonymity that protects the pedophile also protects the police."
Last year, a concerned citizen called the police to tell them that pedophiles were cruising the chat rooms on America Online.
Rehman was assigned to investigate the charge. He logged on as a 14-year-old boy and had no trouble carrying off the ruse. He talked about personal problems, about battling authority, about the difficult transitions of adolescence. Soon he was talking with a man who signed on as Coach NH. Within minutes, the new friend was making sexual overtures, sending porn GIFs--images of adult porn, child porn, young men engaged in sex.
Subsequent conversations were more sexually explicit. Coach NH said that he would like to visit and described in lurid detail what he wanted to have happen.
Then he got on a plane.
Instead of finding a 14-year-old boy eager to experience homosexuality, Coach NH, a.k.a. Donald Harvey, found a team of police at the airport. They arrested him on two counts of attempted lewd and lascivious acts with a minor, two counts of solicitation to commit lewd and lascivious acts and one count each of attempted intercourse with a chaste minor and solicitation. Federal agents later added their own charges.
A school textbook salesman, Harvey had never been arrested for molesting a youth in his hometown, according to police there. The fantasy he found in cyberspace was enough to draw him clear across the country.
"It wasn't a crime until he got up from the computer," says Rehman, aware of the difference between talk and action. Rehman's case seems a clear-cut example of the successful use of a decoy. But not all cybercops are so restrained.
In 1989 San Jose, California police began a dialogue with Dean Ashley Lambey, a self-professed pedophile who spoke fondly of sex with 8- to 13-year-old boys. He introduced his pen pals to Daniel Depew, an acquaintance who was into S&M. This strange chat group wove a fantasy about kidnapping a youth and making sexually explicit videos.
The undercover agents posed as Mafia types looking to make a snuff movie. At the height of the investigation, Lambey and Depew were playing to an audience of a hundred or so FBI agents and Henry Hudson, the U.S. district attorney who headed the Meese Commission. Around-the-clock surveillance was expensive but necessary. When you've planted the idea of making a snuff movie, you have to guard against someone acting on your order. Agents arranged meetings with Depew and Lambey in motel rooms in Virginia, at which the agents and suspects discussed what it might be like to kidnap someone, torture and film the victim for two weeks, then commit a murder. No victim was ever targeted, yet the two were arrested and tried for conspiracy to commit murder. They each received a sentence of more than 30 years.
No kids, no crime. A government obsessed with the idea of snuff films. The case troubled an appeals judge who wrote: "Even to talk of such awful crimes is abhorrent, but the extent of what occurred was just that, talk. If a defendant, instead of talking about kidnapping his intended victim, conspires to murder him, attempts to murder him and inflicts permanent or life-threatening injuries, his [sentence] would nevertheless be strikingly lower."
And if Uncle Sam had not been on the other end of the computer, there would never have been talk of a crime.