U.S. Arrests 45 in Mail-Order Child Porn Sting

Forty-five men have been charged nationwide for buying child pornography in a U.S. Postal Service sting operation and several dozen more are expected to be charged, postal inspectors in San Diego and Washington announced Thursday.

The sting was a continuation of an investigation that began when authorities arrested a San Diego electrical engineer in 1994 as a suspected ringleader of Overseas Male, which has been called the largest child pornography operation uncovered in this country.

After the arrest of James Leroy Kemmish, authorities used the mailing lists seized from Overseas Male and set up a dummy company called Island Male with a mailing address in the border community of San Ysidro. Dubbed Operation Special Delivery, the sting resulted in searches of the homes and offices of 130 would-be customers in 36 states.

Pornographic videotapes were sent to people who responded to mailed advertising from Island Male. As soon as someone took delivery of a video, investigators arrived with a search warrant.

“Merely shutting down Overseas Male was not enough,” said Chief Postal Inspector Kenneth J. Hunter in Washington, “because those who created the demand for child pornography were still out there.”

Among those arrested were a serial child molester in Reno, Nev., a Presbyterian minister in New Jersey, a paramedic and youth leader in Wichita, Kan., an attorney in St. Louis, a youth leader in Tulsa, Okla., and a printer in Billings, Mont., who had a computer with 900 files of child pornography downloaded from the Internet.

David Fast, a postal inspector in San Diego, called child pornography “an insidious form of terrorism.”

“You take the Unabomber and the Oklahoma City bomber cases, it doesn’t come close to the number of victims of just one child pornographer,” Fast said. “The difference is that these children are alive and have to live with the trauma all their lives.”

Overseas Male mass-produced videos filmed in Mexico, Asia and Europe for sale in the United States. Some depict boys as young as 7 engaging in sexual acts with other boys or adults.

Kemmish, 55, was arrested in June 1994 at San Diego’s Lindbergh Field as he returned from Mexico with a cache of child pornography videos. After pleading guilty to advertising and distributing child pornography through the mail, he was sentenced last month to five years in federal prison.

Although there have been other child pornography operations broken up in recent years, officials said Overseas Male signaled a disturbing trend in the illicit industry. The videos were of a higher visual quality than the grainy films of the past. Also, the advertising and marketing were bolder and more widespread.

The suspected mastermind behind Overseas Male was Troy Anthony Frank, who fled from Colorado to Mexico in 1990 after being indicted on child pornography charges.

From Acapulco and Mexico City, Frank produced videos and purchased videos from other countries. He committed suicide at his lavish home in Acapulco in 1995 after learning that postal inspectors were seeking his arrest and extradition.

Kemmish’s role was to bring the videos to his home in the Pacific Beach neighborhood of San Diego to be reproduced and mailed. At its peak, Overseas Male had a mailing list of 2,000 people and grossed $10,000 a week, with individual videos selling for between $50 and $290, officials said.

Unlike sexually explicit videos involving adults, child pornography is not covered by 1st Amendment protection, and the sellers and buyers can be prosecuted under the 1984 federal Child Protection Act.