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The world's biggest convicted child pornographer
Thomas Reedy used to be a nurse. Then he found the Net
and made a fortune. Now he faces 1,335 years in jail
By Pip Clothier
11 May 2003

Last week Pete Townshend lost his reputation and
gained five years on the sex offenders register after
accessing a child porn website. Should he ever
feel the need to find out, his troubles began in a
handsome but small red-brick building on the corner of
Main Street in Fort Worth, Texas. That was where a
geeky Texan called Thomas Reedy first set up an
internet adult porn business. It was a business that
mushroomed into something far more chilling. Reedy's
desire for cash led him to galvanise an illegal but
rampant desire for hard-core child pornography.

Within two years, the hard drives on the computers of
Thomas Reedy's Landslide Productions were bulging with
credit card details from 250,000 internet customers
across the globe. Child porn consumers from 60
countries were being satisfied by Reedy's operation.
One of those who entered their credit card details was
Pete Townshend of The Who. In February, Reedy's
building was demolished to make a car park. A global
centre for child porn was in ruins - as Townshend's
career also appears to be.

Reedy is now sitting in a Texan prison contemplating
one of the world's longest ever sentences - 1,335
years, 15 years for each of the 89 charges, to run
consecutively. His wife, Janice, who worked at the
business, received 14 years.

Despite the "only in America"-style sentence, the
woman who prosecuted Reedy, Assistant District
Attorney Terri Moore, regards it as well-deserved.
"He was making a tremendous amount of profit off the
misery of children," she says. "He was feeding these
perverts. He was feeding a beast. Granted, he wasn't
hurting them himself. He wasn't in the photo
committing the rape and he was not developing the
photo, but he was feeding that. In my mind he
just facilitated the rape of a child and should have a
very harsh sentence." It is a pat speech from a woman
used to dealing with nasty criminals in Texas. Yet,
investigating the horrendous world of Landslide, it is
hard not to agree with her.

Thomas Reedy, a former care nurse, was known in some
quarters as "Greedy Reedy". His plan was to make a
small fortune from some of the most sordid
images conceivable, by putting them on the internet.
While not the first to handle this kind of material -
it's some years since paedophiles first used the net
to swap the lurid collections that, previously, they
had only been able to post to each other, or sell in
back-street shops - he was the first to sell
pay-per-view child porn on the net, and the first to
succeed. His example has caused the net to be deluged
by copycat sites.

"We're now receiving 80-85 new reports per week about
pay-per-view child porn websites, nearly all of them
housed in eastern Europe, Russia, the Ukraine and in
different countries in South-east Asia," says John
Carr from the Internet Watch Foundation. "I'm
absolutely certain that one of the reasons we're
seeing the growth is precisely because, following the
Landslide case, criminals from all over the world
realise how much money there is to be made in it."

Until recently, and on the Landslide site, the images
were predominantly recycled child porn. But the huge
amounts of money that web-based porn has injected into
the industry is changing all that. "More and more
children are being abused on a regular basis in order
to provide new material for those websites," says
Carr. "We know about certain individuals who are, on a
regular basis, bringing children into a studio, a
garage, photographing them and within 48 hours that
material is up on the web."

Reedy grew up in Brownwood, a small town in central
Texas. His father, a flea-market trader, provided a
solid middle-class upbringing for his two boys. In his
late teens, Reedy, the elder son, thought he might
make it as a rock star. The family photo of him
wearing black with an odd goatee beard makes him look
like a heavy metal fan, although his taste was more
country and western, true to his Texan roots. His
future was to be more mundane, and he eventually
headed off to nursing college, where his graduation
shot reveals a smiling, ordinary man. However, between
his long shifts at care homes, Thomas got going on the
computer and quickly developed a talent for
internet ideas. Some of the 54 different computer
domain names that he registered were innocent enough -
Harley Lovers.com, Payhere.net, Geekpay.com. There
were some lurid sounding ones - net.sex.magazine and
Pussies4U - but these were never activated by the
canny Reedy. His most grotesque imagery was eventually
marketed under the innocuous domain names of
Landslide.com and Quayz.com.

Between 1996 and 1999, Landslide took nearly $10m, 85
per cent of which came from child porn. After paying
handsome salaries and expenses that covered luxuries
such as Mercedes sports cars for himself and Janice,
investigators say, it still recorded profits of nearly
$3m. Thomas and Janice, and her daughter from a
previous marriage, moved into a sumptuous house on the
prairies outside Fort Worth. Apart from throwing the
occasional pool party at which he played loud
classical music, Reedy kept a low profile.

On the net, however, he was brazen. In retrospect, it
is surprising that he was able to trade unhindered for
so long. One of the pages of Landslide, discovered by
law enforcers, brags about its illegality. "I warn
you, you are entering the most controversial site on
the web. In this you will find adult explicit
pictures, no legal content. All sick, all sex maniacs.
We are frequently banned everywhere."

The upfront websites did encourage several visits from
the police but Reedy avoided investigation, promising
to report any illegal child porn. This early success
appears to have made him over-confident about his
ability to get out of a tight situation. His own email
address was in honour of a man he would have liked to
emulate: Houdini.

Reedy's big idea was to take money on behalf of adult
and child pornography sites that had been developed
and published by other people, the so-called
webmasters. He would eventually be linked up with
5,700 such sites. Reedy was the middle man, taking a
33 per cent cut. Customers were asked to pay
about $30 a go - and some were paying every day. The
webmasters advertised their sites with eye-catching
(or rather, stomach-churning) slogans and banners on
Reedy's homepages. Bizarrely, Reedy claimed he was
doing children a service by allowing access to the
sites only through credit cards. This theory was based
on the premise that in the US only over-18s are
allowed to apply for a credit card. It did not account
for the fact that nobody, whatever their age, was
allowed to supply or view child porn.

The names of the sites pulled no punches in describing
what the punters were about to experience: "Fucking
Little Kids", "Child Rape", "Children Forced To Porn",
"Children Of God", "Lolita Hardcore", "Blackcat Lolita
Series".

A further glance at Reedy's 89-count criminal charge
sheet reveals that the images contained shots of
children and adults in any and every sexual
position. Count One talks of "visual depictions of
minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct"; Count
Two refers to the "Lascivious Exhibition of minor
female genitals and pubic area in a playpool". The
long charge list shows still further degeneracy. Some
charges refer to the abuse of babies, some of the acts
reportedly taking place while the victims were still
attached to their umbilical cords.

The jury in Reedy's trial was evidently appalled,
taking just a few hours to convict. The only person
who seems to have been surprised was Thomas Reedy,
who to this day professes his innocence and says that
he has been the victim of an appalling injustice.

When his business was closed down, Reedy wrote an
on-line diary for six months which he thought that his
customers might pay to access. It's the diary of
somebody who refuses to face reality. An entry, dated
October 1999 reads, "The main thought running through
my head is that I will finally be able to defend my
company as we have done nothing wrong. I have learned
a
lot of valuable lessons and that just makes me
stronger." Later that month he adds, "Carrying on
usual daily activities and my family has started to
settle down somewhat." A month later he is back online
with a new adult porn site which he describes as "way
Kewl". Bizarrely he devotes another entry to a Lennox
Lewis world heavyweight fight.

In letters from jail, Reedy bemoans his fate. "To my
eyes the facts are crystal clear and believe me," he
laments, "I have wept over them a thousand times. Each
night I lay in my cell forced to replay each minute of
testimony in my head, watching as if it's a movie on a
tape. Knowing every line, every mistake, every lie.
Seeing the facts that prove my innocence." The
seven-page letter is the defence speech that Reedy
never made, refusing to take the stand at his trial.
At first glance it is a persuasive and detailed
rebuttal of the charges, focusing on the claim that
webmasters, not Reedy, published the offensive
material.

The US police would dearly love to catch the
webmasters, too. The names of three of Reedy's most
prolific porn suppliers still lie on the charge sheet.
However they were pumping their grotesque pictures out
of countries such as Poland, Russia and Indonesia.
Complex internet technology is on their side.
The police fear that as soon as they shut one site,
another will pop up somewhere else on the net.

But Reedy was sitting in one of America's most
hard-line states and would not be allowed off so
easily. As they pursued him, Dallas Police and the US
postal service uncovered a few anecdotes about his
sexual behaviour, but could not isolate him as a
paedophile. They decided that he was self-deluded
and greedy, corrupted by his transformation from
struggling nurse to millionaire computer baron. And
there will be more like him. Lieutenant Bill
Walsh of the Dallas Police suggests that Thomas Reedy
was a prototype. "I think some people are quick to pat
themselves on the back for the largest internet case
in the world," Walsh says. "I've got news for you. The
next will be the largest. And the next after that will
be the largest. These people are not going to go
away."

In Britain, the Pete Townshend affair has shone a
light on the dark side of the worldwide web. As John
Carr says, "We are in the middle of a technological
arms race. As soon as the police crack one approach
the
criminals come up with another. The police have
stopped counting because the numbers of child porn
images available on the net are overwhelming. Four
years ago a dozen, 20 would have been considered a
large number. Today the British police have got a
database with five million."

'Crash Of An Internet Porn King: Operation Landslide',
produced and directed by Pip Clothier, is on BBC2 at
9pm on Tuesday, 20 May

So much for the mall analogy...


=====
I SUPPORT PETE TOWNSHEND.
NO 'What Ifs' NECESSARY. 
.
.
.
.

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