But child porn grew right out of adult pornography. It was all one and the same. The worst years in our country were '73, '74, '75 and '76, when you could go in just about any porno store and buy kids depicted on lamp shades engaged in sex acts, on the back of playing cards, and in movies, with each other, with adults, with animals, whatever. It was just all part and parcel of the total pornography industry.
In 1977, the FBI launched a major case called MIPORN. Two FBI agents went undercover and established a business called Gold Coast Specialties and foreign bank accounts in the Cayman Islands, and set up a warehouse in Miami and then went across the country and into Hawaii, meeting with major pornographers and purchasing what they believed to be obscene material. They had it all shipped to their warehouse in Miami. All the cases involved the organized crime strike force in Miami. On Valentine's Day 1980 we did simultaneous search warrants at 54 locations across the country.
In 1986, the Final Report of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography (The "Meese Commission") was followed by a book titled "How the Meese Commission Lied." It was total propaganda, untruth put out by the pornographers and their attorneys, and it sold in bookstores and airports and everywhere. Not only that, but members of the Meese Commission were sued by the American Civil Liberties Union with money from the pornographers. I can remember donating to Dr. James Dobson's legal defense fund because he had no money to fight the suit. After all kinds of expenses had been incurred by Dr. Dobson and others, the ACLU dropped the suit.
In 1987, the FBI began a case called Blue Darcy to go after the wealthiest, most prolific producer and distributor of pornography in history, Reuben Sturman of Cleveland, Ohio. Sturman wound up serving time for tax related felonies, obscenity and racketeering in Federal prison in Kentucky, where he died in 1997.
In 1989, the FBI initiated a case called Woodworm, targeting all major producers and distributors of pornography in the San Fernando Valley.
In 1995, Congress authorized $10 million a year for Internet crimes against children, based on the FBI's "Innocent Images" investigations.
Mr. Young noted that President Reagan met with leaders of all major religious faiths in 1983, and that "it's time for such a meeting to occur again with President Bush."
The Reagan meeting, he said, was attended by the directors of the FBI, the Postal Inspection Service and Customs, along with the religious leaders, and that this meeting led to the enactment of a law that "placed interstate transportation of obscene matter under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute - RICO."
[Editor's Note: In 1984, Morality in Media general counsel Paul J. McGeady recommended to Congress that legislation be introduced to make federal obscenity violations "predicate crimes" under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law. Enacted that year, the RICO-obscenity law allows the Government to confiscate the assets of convicted pornographers. The Supreme Court upheld the law, and many states have added obscenity offenses to their RICO laws.]
We could treat pornography cases like drug cases," Mr. Young said. "We could seize all the assets of the business, the property, the building, the cars, the boats, the airplanes - everything, just like a drug case. When my father did these cases, the only thing he could touch was the owner, or the clerk, or the person carrying the material in interstate traffic. He could put the owner in jail, but he couldn't touch the business, and the owner could still run the business from prison. Do you think the pornographers and the American Civil Liberties Union screamed to the high heavens when this law was signed? Absolutely. They put out a barrage of negative publicity and tried to get Congressmen to reverse this law. But it's still strong today."
Mr. Young had this advice for anyone selected for jury duty in an obscenity case:
Try to use common sense. In one of the MIPORN cases in Miami, a film showed foreign objects being inserted into a body cavity of a woman. Defense attorneys argued that this had scientific value because it showed elasticity of female muscles of this particular body cavity. The prosecutor, a woman who happened to be seven months pregnant at the time, asked the ladies of the jury, 'How many of you have had babies? How many of you needed to see a film like this to learn about your elasticity?' The defendant was convicted.
The defense doesn't want you to use common sense. The defense doesn't want the word pornography to be used in court. They want to say "adult material" or "sexually oriented material." They want to confuse you. They want to create doubt.
Mr. Young noted there has been an explosion of pornography and sexually oriented businesses. He said 86% to 88% of porn comes from the San Fernando Valley of California, just outside Los Angeles; 40 to 50 porn producers there distribute two movie releases per week for sale through the Internet and porn video shops.
"Why the explosion of porn?" he asked, and answered: "Court decisions in the 1960s supporting freedom of 'expression' and 'adult' entertainment. We will have porn until we bring it to the attention of investigators and prosecutors and complain."
FBI Agent Roger Young is now an adjunct professor in the Criminal Justice Department of the University of Nevada. He teaches an upper division course on "How to Investigate Obscenity, Prostitution and the Sexual Exploitation of Children."
Mr. Young notes, "I investigated pornography for 23 and a half years and today the worst stuff I've ever seen in my life is on the Internet."
He and another veteran obscenity fighter, former Indianapolis Police Detective Lieutenant Tom Rodgers, are consultants to Morality in Media and its website,
www.obscenitycrimes.org, which was launched in June 2002. This website provides citizens with a means to report what they believe may be obscene material on the Internet. MIM forwards reports to the U.S. Justice Department in Washington and to each U.S. Attorney where a report originated. In the first three and a half years of its operation (June 2002 through December 2005),
www.obscenitycrimes.org processed more than 50,000 such reports from citizens in all 50 states.
Andrew Oosterbaan, Chief of the Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS), has said reports from Morality in Media's web site and two other sources - the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) - "have served as the basis for a useful and comprehensive criminal intelligence database and numerous obscenity investigations... "