Photographer Arrested in Sexual Assault

Los Angeles police Friday arrested an Arleta man who allegedly posed as a photographer for a modeling agency to entice teen-age girls into posing in lingerie or in the nude and then sexually assaulted them.

Police said Jack Cone, 52, is suspected of using the modeling scam for more than two years to entice victims--all Latinas from poor families in the central and northeastern San Fernando Valley.

Police said they have interviewed six victims so far, and the district attorney’s office has charged Cone with rape with a foreign object in a 1990 case involving a 15-year-old Pacoima girl. Police are hoping to identify about 40 young girls depicted in photographs seized from Cone to determine if they were victimized.

Cone, who was being held at the Foothill Division Jail in lieu of $100,000 bail, was arrested Friday morning following two days of police surveillance, Officer Teri Roble said. On both days, officers watched Cone make the rounds of several high schools and junior high schools in the northeast Valley, observing girls, she said.

He did not approach any of them but was arrested because he was making rounds of the schools “like clockwork,” and had access to several cars, houses and a motor home in which to elude surveillance, Roble said.

Sgt. Cary Krebs, head of the Foothill vice unit, said officers expect to ask the district attorney’s office to file additional sex-related charges against Cone next week in at least three cases involving 15-year-old girls.

Krebs said that in those incidents, Cone allegedly approached the girls in recent months, gave them business cards identifying himself as a photographer for the “Eyecatchers Glamour Model Agency” and enticed them to houses or the motor home with promises of helping them become models.

The card had a business license number, but both the modeling agency name and the license number were phony, police said.

Police said there is no evidence that Cone used any photographs of the girls to launch modeling careers.

“The whole thing is a scam,” Krebs said. “He is very slick. He can talk to these girls and play to their dreams. Sometimes he buys them clothing. Sometimes he gives them money.

“Most of these kids have impoverished backgrounds, broken homes. They don’t even have money for clothes. He preys on them.”

Roble said one of the cases under investigation involves a girl who repeatedly went back to Cone because he had paid her for modeling sessions during which she was allegedly molested. The girl did not tell her grandmother of the molestation because she was ashamed and the unknowing grandmother kept encouraging her to go back because the family needed the money, Roble said.

Roble began investigating Cone two weeks ago after receiving a tip from a vice officer assigned to another division. She said she learned that Cone had been arrested for having sex with two 15-year-old girls in 1990, but the case was dismissed when the two victims left the country for their native Mexico.

But the file on that defunct case contained photos of several unidentified girls in nude or near-nude poses that had been seized from Cone during his arrest. Roble took them to area high schools and was able to identify some of the girls with the help of yearbooks and school administrators.

Roble said she interviewed six girls and all reported that they had been molested by Cone. She said their accounts varied, but the girls generally said they allowed Cone to molest them or have sex with them after he pressured them, paid them for modeling sessions or gave them alcohol.

After prosecutors agreed to file the initial charge against Cone, he was arrested and the house and motor home he was using were searched. Roble said she found several more photographs of young girls and records listing girls by their first names, ages and phone numbers.

“We are going to have to sit down and start calling numbers and talking to these girls,” Roble said.