SAN DIEGO — 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.
