A good news story on a bad news front
Montreal journalist's new book details Edmonton's role in breaking international Internet child-porn ring
Richard Helm,
The Edmonton Journal
June 26, 2007
EDMONTON - Of all the spiders out there crawling the World Wide Web there are none as creepy as the pedophile, masquerading behind some benign online identity, trading in abhorrent images, and waiting to pounce on the innocent.
Montreal journalist Julian Sher knows that sinister community all too well as author of One Child at a Time, an account of the global battle to rescue kids from online predators.
He has stories to tell, not all of them awful, including the remarkable Edmonton connection to the latest policing triumph that made international headlines out of London last week.
British police announced the crushing of a global network of pedophiles, child abusers and pornographers; the dismantling of an online trading post for images of child sexual abuse involving more than 700 members in 35 countries, including Canada; and the rescue of 31 children.
"It's a good news story on a very bad news front," Sher said in an interview. "We're talking about horrific abuse of children. This was live streaming of infants being raped and tortured, video on demand. Extremely vicious and yet the good news is that the police have reached a level of sophistication on this battlefront that they were able to penetrate into the highest levels of the predators' own private club."
According to Sher, none of it would have happened if an Edmonton woman hadn't acted on her conscience after overhearing an exchange between a nine-year-old girl and her six-year-old brother at a ball hockey game in May 2005.
"It's an interesting thing -- what do you do as a concerned citizen?" Sher mused. "You hear some disturbing conversation but you don't see abuse, it's not like you're walking away from a car accident. She wrestles with it and for whatever reason she decides to report it to Child Services.
"The pedophile, who we call Mark Langham in the book, gets arrested for abusing his children, and it could have stopped there. But he decides through remorse, guilt or whatever, that he has a desire to help other victims, and the call goes to Randy Wickins. Another stroke of luck, that could have fallen into somebody else's hands, but Randy won't let this go. He meets the guy, becomes consumed with this case, eventually hooks up with Toronto police, and the rest is history."
History will recall it all as a highly sophisticated undercover police operation called Project Wickermen, documented in fascinating detail in Sher's new book. Wickins got the ball rolling as an Edmonton police detective assigned to the province's Children Exploitation unit.
He and counterparts in Toronto begin monitoring an international pedophile chatroom with many Canadian and American clients and eventually drew a bead on one of the site's administrators -- incredibly, someone else living back in Edmonton.
In January 2006, police in Edmonton, Toronto and Chicago co-ordinated a raid on the Edmonton bungalow of a 49-year-old clerk named Carl. A. Treleaven, whose wife worked in a local day care. They timed their raid with exacting precision, sweeping in and cuffing their suspect at exactly the moment the "kiddievids" site administrator was online in the deep web -- where no IP addresses can be traced -- but in his kitchen getting coffee. A policeman immediately sat down and assumed Treleaven's online identity, with none of the other visitors to the site suspecting the switch. After several months of "administering" the site and collecting identities, police in several countries arrested 27 people, including 14 Canadians, and rescued at least six children from across Canada.
When the site migrated to the United Kingdom, a London police officer took it over and ran it for another half-year, collecting dozens more identities, before London police shut the site down last week, drawing Project Wickermen to a close.
"Because of all of what happened between those three people in Edmonton, a concerned citizen, a remorseful child sex offender and a determined cop, thousands of children around the world have been saved, and hundreds of people have been arrested in one of the biggest-ever international police operations," Sher said.
In One Child at a Time, Sher delves into a form of crime that puts every kid using the Internet at risk and tells the stories of a new breed of professional crime-fighters who are spearheading international collaborative efforts to combat these crimes. Sher writes that one of the first indications of a new type of criminal was "Landslide," a web portal set up by a Dallas, Texas couple, Janice and Thomas Reedy, in the late 1990s that offered paying subscribers access to more than 5,000 adult and child-content porn sites.
The couple quickly discovered that the real money was in sites like "Child Rape" which attracted 1,277 registrations in a month; in two years, after specializing in child porn, the Reedys generated revenue of in excess of $9.2 million and logged more than 300,000 credit-card transactions from 60 countries. The Reedys were caught and received hefty sentences, but like all these cases, the investigation has just begun. Their seized computers revealed a massive database with 100,000 names, credit card numbers and contact information from clients in Canada, the U.K., Australia and the U.S., all of whom were possible pedophiles.
Sher has reported from Baghdad for the New York Times and CBC and covered wars throughout Africa, but says none of those hellholes matched the difficulties of this assignment. "You can't look at more than a handful of these images without being scarred," he acknowledged.
The abuse involved in these cases is horrific, but citizens turn away from this sort of material at their own peril, Sher said.
"If you think it's too dark, what about the children who are living it every day? The children who could be your kid's friends, your kid's school buddies. These are not missing children. These children are going to school every day, they're going to church every week, they're going to the soccer games. These are not kids who have been kidnapped and are being held in some dark cellar somewhere."