Federal and local law enforcement officials announced the arrest of 71 individuals for possessing, producing and distributing child pornography in NYC, Long Island, surrounding NY counties and NJ. Special Agent-in-Charge James Hayes of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations said, "The sheer volume of confirmed and suspected instances of individuals engaging in the sexual exploitation of children identified through Operation Caireen is shocking and the professional backgrounds of many of the defendants is troubling."
The arrestees include police officers, a rabbi, a Little League coach who is also a Boy Scout den master, an airline pilot, an FDNY paramedic, a nurse, computer programmers and other professions. Of the 71 arrested, all but one were men. Some have families with young children, and some allegedly made sexually explicit films using their relatives. Staten Island D.A. Daniel Donovan said one defendant, Yuriy Eydelnant, had been taking spycam videos of his stepdaughter for 11 years (not all continuous) since she was 14.
According to ICE, "Operation Caireen" ran from April 4th to May 15th, with "HSI special agents, NYPD detectives and other law enforcement partners surreptitiously infiltrat[ing] peer-to-peer file sharing networks to identify users in the New York City metropolitan area who sought to acquire or distribute known or suspected images of children engaged in sexually activities." They found just under 150 distinct IP addresses actively involved in trading those kinds of images: Hayes said they found "tens of thousands" of images after they did searches on the networks, looking for terrible filenames like "real child rape" and "PTHC," which stands for "pre-teen hard core."
Eighty-seven search warrants were executed, and with the numerous defendants, ICE enlisted the local district attorneys to help process charges. Hayes said there would have been no way the feds could have handled so many and was thankful for the partnership with local law enforcement.
Donovan was particularly withering when describing the defendants, "The confiscated videos are nothing more than sadomasochistic snuff films showcasing a defenseless child—be they an infant, a toddler or a teen—being repeatedly raped and/or sexually assaulted. These are videotaped crime scenes watched by predators lurking in the shadows of the Internet."
Queens D.A. Richard Brown said, "It must be remembered that the images involved in these cases are of real children being sexually abused and that each time an image is viewed, traded, printed or downloaded, the child in that image is being victimized again." And Manhattan D.A. Cy Vance said, "The perpetrators collect and trade this media as one might trade or collect baseball cards."
In one instance, NJ resident Lori Bauer is accused of making child pornography with her own son—at the direction of Albert Randazzo, an NYPD police sergeant who was charged with child porn last year. Randazzo is a level 2 registered sex offender and is currently out on bail. Court papers allege he "indicated the last video he had downloaded and viewed depicted a mother sexually abusing her 3- or 4-year-old child."
One of the arrestees, Eduardo Salcedo Urzola of Brooklyn, had been working as an au pair. Another, Rabbi Samuel Waldman, was accused of distributing videos of young girls being raped by adult men; he admitted to possessing the videos, but denied that he was sharing them, insisting, "It’s absolutely being misconstrued completely, 100%, and we will fight that to the end."
ICE is in charge of the investigation because a lot of the child porn was made overseas in Russia and Europe (ICE takes jurisdiction over monetary/interstate commerce issues). Hayes praised his team of agents, who volunteer to work these troubling investigations because they "really believe in it." (The operation is named after a Celtic goddess who is known as a protector of children.) He revealed that ICE does limit the time the agents spend on these kind of cases, for their own "health and safety."
Marveling at the educated, middle-class defendants, he emphasized, "We can no loner assume that the only people who would stoop to prey on children are unemployed drifters. Clearly this criminal activity has reached epidemic proportions."
