[Infowarrior] - Web Site Hunting Pedophiles Racks Up Arrests

[Richard Forno]

December 13, 2006
Web Site Hunting Pedophiles Racks Up Arrests
By ALLEN SALKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/13/technology/13justice.html?ei=5094&en=acd48
03fc0d4d9d3&hp=&ex=1165986000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print

Last month, the Web site Perverted-Justice.com posted news of the conviction
of Sean Young, a Wisconsin man sentenced to 10 years in state prison for
soliciting sex online from a 14-year-old girl. According to a transcript of
an online chat posted on the site, at one point Mr. Young had asked the
girl, identified only as Billie, what she was wearing. When she answered
³sweats,² Mr. Young typed back that if she were his daughter, ³i¹d make u
wear sexy clthes.²

Billie turned out to be an adult volunteer for Perverted Justice, an
anti-pedophile group, and when Mr. Young drove to a house where he expected
to meet the teenager for sex, he was arrested by sheriff¹s deputies.

The conviction was logged as the 104th that Perverted Justice says it has
been responsible for since 2003, a tally that as of yesterday had reached
113. What started as one man¹s quest to rid his regional Yahoo chat room of
lewd adults has grown into a nationwide force of cyberspace vigilantes,
financed by a network television program hungry for ratings.

³It¹s a kind of blog that has turned into a crime-fighting resource,² said
Robert McCrie, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in
Manhattan.

Perverted Justice is best known for putting its online volunteers at the
disposal of the television newsmagazine ³Dateline NBC,² which has broadcast
11 highly rated programs in which would-be pedophiles are lured to ³sting
houses,² only to be surprised by a camera crew and, usually, the police.

Despite that publicity, the inner workings of Perverted Justice and its
reclusive founder remain largely a mystery, even as the group has emerged as
one of the most effective unofficial law enforcement groups in the country,
a kind of Neighborhood Watch of the Net. But the group is also criticized by
some legal and law enforcement experts, who accuse it of entrapment, making
mistakes that ruin innocent lives and, paradoxically, disseminating its own
brand of child pornography.

Peter D. Greenspun, a lawyer who defended a rabbi from Rockville, Md.,
caught in a ³Dateline² sting arranged by Perverted Justice, said that by
posting online transcripts of conversations between would-be child molesters
and volunteers posing as 12- and 13-year-olds, Perverted Justice was
encouraging, rather than deterring, pedophiles.

³They are putting out for unfiltered, unrestricted public consumption the
most graphic sexual material that they themselves say is of a perverted
nature,² Mr. Greenspun said.

Perverted Justice¹s founder, Xavier Von Erck, 27, a former tech-support
worker, has a dedication to the cause bordering on obsession, his mother and
associates said. Mr. Von Erck lives in an apartment in Portland, Ore., but
rarely gives out his address, and he would not allow a reporter to visit
because he feared retribution from men exposed by his group. In a telephone
interview, he said he worked for his group seven days a week, mostly from a
laptop in his bedroom.

³Every waking minute he¹s on that computer,² said his mother, Mary
Erck-Heard, 46, who raised her son after they fled his father, whom she
described as alcoholic. Mr. Von Erck legally changed his name from Phillip
John Eide, taking his maternal grandfather¹s family name, Erck, and adding
the Von.

In many ways, Mr. Von Erck, who said he and his mother moved 13 times when
he was in high school because they were often short of money, continues to
live that messy life of deprivation. His meals often consist of ramen
noodles, he said; his bed is perpetually unmade. For years, he has been
trying unsuccessfully to find his father, who, he says, still owes his
mother child support.

³I have a low opinion of men in general,² he said. ³The most heinous crimes
in our society are committed by males.²

Perverted Justice has 41,000 registered users of its online forums dedicated
to the cause of stopping predators, 65 volunteers trained as chat room
decoys and three salaried leaders: Mr. Von Erck, a woman who is a liaison
with law enforcement and a business manager.

Typically, a Perverted Justice volunteer creates a false online profile,
posing as, say, a 13-year-old girl on MySpace. The volunteer will wait to
receive e-mail messages or will enter a chat room. If an adult contacts the
volunteer, the decoy responds and sees if the conversation becomes sexual.

The group¹s collaboration with ³Dateline² since 2004 has been lucrative. A
person familiar with Perverted Justice¹s finances who requested anonymity
because he is not authorized to discuss the matter publicly said NBC was
paying the group roughly $70,000 for each hour of television produced.

³They do a lot a work for us, and they deserve to be reimbursed for that
work,² said David Corvo, the executive producer of ³Dateline,² who met with
Mr. Von Erck earlier this year in New York to discuss their collaboration.

Mr. Von Erck said the NBC money had been used in part to buy computer
servers that would not be overwhelmed every time the group was mentioned on
television.

Ratings for the ³Dateline² broadcasts, a series called ³To Catch a Predator²
that has become a network franchise, have averaged 9.1 million viewers,
compared with 7 million viewers for other ³Dateline² episodes, according to
Nielsen Media Research.

Six new episodes are planned for the first half of 2007. Two were shot at a
house in Long Beach, Calif.; two in Flagler Beach, Fla.; and two others in
Murphy, Tex. The Texas sting drew a burst of publicity in early November,
months before the episodes were scheduled to be shown, when a prosecutor
implicated as a would-be predator, Louis W. Conradt Jr., shot himself to
death as the police approached his home.

Supporters of the NBC broadcasts say they have helped increase awareness of
online predators, allowing parents to educate children and spurring law
enforcement to action. One in seven youths ages 10 to 17 who have gone
online at least once a month for six months have received unwanted sexual
solicitations, according to a 2005 study by the Crimes Against Children
Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.

Last month, the ³Dateline² correspondent Chris Hansen, who is featured on
the Perverted Justice specials, addressed about 500 students at a school in
Rye Brook, N.Y., about the dangers of Internet predators. One of the first
questions was why the stings filmed by ³Dateline² were not entrapment.

The answer, legal experts say, is that it is hard for a defendant to prove
entrapment, in this context or in any other. Some states allow prosecutions
as long as there was a ³predisposition² to the conduct. Others require
police misconduct for a defendant to claim entrapment.

One concern about Perverted Justice¹s nonprofessional force of vigilantes,
raised by Lt. Joseph Donohue, head of the New York State Internet Crimes
Against Children Task Force, is that decoys impersonating teenagers may be
too aggressive, not understanding the need to let predators initiate the
sexual chat and therefore not gathering chat-log evidence that will stand up
in court.

Mr. Von Erck responded that so far prosecutors had not dropped charges
against any man arrested in an investigation begun by Perverted Justice.

Of the 113 convictions Mr. Von Erck¹s group claims, some have been for
misdemeanors resulting in no jail time, and others have brought stiff
sentences, like the one of the Maryland rabbi, David A. Kaye, who on Dec. 1
was sentenced to six and a half years in prison on federal charges of
enticement and traveling to meet a minor for illicit sexual contact.

Mr. Von Erck¹s most vociferous critic is Scott Morrow, a retired Canadian
Air Force serviceman who runs a Web site, Corrupted-Justice.com, chronicling
what he says are excesses by Perverted Justice.

³These are anonymous, unaccountable Net junkies doing this work,² Mr. Morrow
said in an interview.

He said that Perverted Justice listed personal information for many men it
accused of being sexual predators and had sometimes mistaken their
identities and humiliated innocent people.

Mr. Von Erck said the criticisms were out-of-date; in its first years the
group did post the phone numbers, employers and photographs of men it
accused of being predators, and anyone could humiliate the individuals by,
say, e-mailing transcripts of a man¹s lewd online chats to his friends and
colleagues.

But since early this year, Perverted Justice has made a policy of not
immediately posting the information it gathers in most cases; instead it
contacts law enforcement and encourages pursuit of an arrest.

³We are now a conviction machine,² Mr. Von Erck said.

Mr. Von Erck, who said he was not molested as a child, prefers not to
analyze his own motivation for dedicating himself so fully to the effort.
Asked to explain why he did it, he did so with spare emotion.

³It gets tiring,² he said, ³but when you find somebody that¹s already been
successful doing something harmful to a child and then you get him arrested,
you can¹t beat that.²

Happy Blitt contributed research.