When he walked off the jet at the international terminal at O`Hare airport in January, Roland Scherer was ready to party. For months he had carried on a correspondence with an American woman named Sheila-a hot number, judging from her letters. From what Scherer knew of her, Sheila ran an adult bookstore in Chicago but traveled a lot. Her letters arrived on hotel stationery from around the world.
Intially her missives were all business: ”It has come to my attention that you have certain materials for sale that are of interest to me. . . Most of my customers want young-girl magazines with lots of hot action. . . . I also would like any catalogues you have with these magazines, plus animal and discipline magazines.” But lately her notes had gotten steamy.
She made sexy suggestions about what she and Scherer might do together if Scherer ever came to visit the U.S. The letters were doused with perfume. She asked for his picture. The 30-year-old West German, who fancied himself a lady`s man, passed along a revealing portrait: He was buck naked.
Scherer asked Sheila for a photo. He received a head-and-shoulders shot of a fully clothed but pretty blond and an interesting offer. Sheila was so taken with him that she agreed to pick up the tab for a round-trip flight from Frankfurt to Chicago.
That was how things stood on that cold January day when Scherer left the plane. Coming down the steps that led from the jet to the runway, he looked for his lusty pen pal. As he stepped onto the Tarmac and was arrested on three counts of distributing child pornography, he found him.
The Sting Master had struck again.
Jack O`Malley`s undercover operations are, to put it mildly, aggressive. His life with ”the G,” as he calls the federal government, is anything but bureaucratic. Recently the lawyer for a man caught in one of O`Malley`s stings accused O`Malley of being ”a Wild West gunslinger.” Entrapment is a word heard frequently from defendants in his cases. The 38-year-old regional coordinator of child pornography investigations for the U.S. Customs Service in Chicago bridles at the reckless cowboy image.
”Entrapment means the government plants the seed to commit a criminal act, that we cause you to commit a crime for which you have no
predisposition,” O`Malley said. ”We go after a target group with a predisposition. We don`t create pedophiles.”
What he has created since joining the Customs kiddie-porn unit four years ago are dozens of elaborate scams aimed at people whose names have been culled from lists supplied by local and state police, federal law enforcement agencies or seized from distributors of child pornography and pedophile groups around the world. He calls this ”pro-active law enforcement.”
”Jack O`Malley is aggressive but fair,” said Jeremy Margolis, director of the Illinois State Police. ”He has the ability to take the best of standard procedure and combine it with imagination to produce projects that work. The projects may be tricky, but they`re never designed to trap people who would have otherwise not been involved in these things. They`re always designed to lure serious criminals.”
”Enthusiastic” is how Assistant U.S. Atty. Daniel Gillogly likes to refer to O`Malley`s performance. ”Entrapment is a question of law that may be raised in pending cases,” said Gillogly, who has overseen some of O`Malley`s undercover operations. ”I can`t comment on it. But it is safe to say we work together with an eye toward making a good case with evidence that is persuasive and usable.”
Since he became a kiddie-porn buster in 1983, O`Malley has stung enough bad guys to draw praise from other law enforcement officials. In 1986 he was named federal law enforcement employee of the year in Chicago. Later that year he received a special-achievement award from the Association of Federal Investigators in Washington and an honorable mention from the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Somewhere along the line, his colleagues nicknamed him the Sting Master.
Without doubt, his methods are colorful enough to set him apart.
”He`s a good actor,” said Chicago police detective Tom Bohling, a 13-year veteran of the kiddie-porn wars who taught O`Malley the ropes.
There`s more to this than stage presence. O`Mally combines creativity with tenacity. A participant in about 50 undercover operations at the local, state and federal levels, he has traveled the world to author, direct and star in some of police work`s strangest adventures. His trip to Thailand in 1985 to bust a pornographer trying to peddle his wares in the U.S. is the basis of a screenplay being marketed in Hollywood.
In that sting O`Malley struck up correspondence with the Thai pornographer, who also pimped child prostitutes and sold drugs. O`Malley convinced the man that he was legitimate-even after an American porn distributor warned the Asian that O`Malley was probably a cop-and negotiated to buy 600 obscene negatives with $5,000 he didn`t have. After a late-night romp through the back streets of Bangkok, Thai authorities arrested the pornographer, feted O`Malley and his partner, an agent from Detroit, at a dinner and sent them home with evidence that generated 25 criminal
investigations in the U.S. and led to two arrests, including one of a child molester.
O`Malley`s exploits range from the sensational to the seductive. Let`s face it: Writing perfumed letters as a horny female is not your typical G-man modus operandi. Nor is it what you`d expect of a person reared in a conservative household and educated in Catholic schools.
”You really get caught up in the sting,” O`Malley said. ”It forces you to become another person. You`re not sitting there like the Maytag repairman waiting for a call. You have to put yourself in the role of the violator.”
That is exactly what O`Malley did with Scherer, whose name was found in magazines seized in a raid in Alabama.
”I initiated correspondence with Roland as a man,” O`Malley said. ”I asked him for a catalogue of his available materials.”
Then, having learned from other agents that Scherer thought of himself as a red-hot lover, O`Malley hit upon the idea of a female persona. He asked a female agent in his office if he could use her first name, had her copy letters he wrote and sprinkle them with her perfume.
He created a jet-setting swinger. ”I used stationery from hotels around the world so Roland would think, `Hey, this lady gets around.` ”
O`Malley, still writing to Scherer under a male pseudonym, purchased some kiddie porn from the West German distributor and turned the evidence over to the West German police, who arrested Scherer. O`Malley, however, wanted the pornographer prosecuted in the U.S. Under international law, distributing child pornography is not an extraditable offense; he had to figure another way to get Scherer to this country.
”I tried to make the letters from Sheila more and more personal,” he said.
At first, there were subtle hints: ”Is it true what they say about German men?” The language got progressively graphic. O`Malley convinced state police officer Kim Collins to let him send Scherer her picture. Finally Scherer agreed to visit. His vacation turned into a six-month stay in federal prison. He since has returned to Germany.
O`Malley is not the least bit defensive about how he lured Scherer.
”Child pornography is the beginning and the end of the cycle of child sexual abuse,” he insisted. ”You have to sexually abuse children to manufacture it. Sometimes child molesters use it to stimulate themselves. About 25 percent of the people we investigate either have records of child molestation, or we find evidence that they have molested children.”
This knowledge keeps O`Malley alive and kicking in a corner of law enforcement that many people view as a depressing dead end.
According to law-enforcement officials, convicted child pornographers rarely draw long prison sentences and frequently resume their activities after release. Furthermore, they tend to operate in a sleazy subculture far removed from the usual customs beats of drug dealing and weapons smuggling. There`s no ”Miami Vice” quotient here.
”When Jack began (child porn investigations), some people in the
(Customs) service didn`t think we should be involved,” said O`Malley`s boss, Richard J. Tierney, the special agent in charge of Customs` Chicago office.
”He had to overcome that. He went out and conducted joint operations with other law enforcement agencies, such as the postal service, that we hadn`t had much contact with.”
These shared operations convinced the naysayers within the bureaucracy, but O`Malley still had to survive the sleaze and sadness of the work.
”His is the type of position that burns people out,” Tierney said.
”Jack is the exception. At the office we call him `Father O`Malley.` He hasn`t become jaded or cynical. The victims` sense of anguish motivates him.” A connection between child pornography and child sexual abuse is crucial to O`Malley`s perception of his job as ”one of the most important in law enforcement.”
”Back in 1985 we did a search warrant on the Southwest Side of Chicago,” he said. ”The guy had a computerized sex-pal business. I reprinted his applications and added questions about children, then mailed them out. About 25 people wrote back and said they wanted to have sex with children. I made contact with a half-dozen of these people all over the country, including one guy in Charlotte, N.C., who had just started having sex with his sister`s kids.
”I flew down there right away and met him in a motel room. He videotaped some of my (pornographic) pictures. As he was leaving, we arrested him. He tried to run over me with his van. Then he started screaming that his life was over. Child pornography is the scarlet letter of the 1980s.”
In O`Malley`s office, it is easy to see why. The room on the eighth floor of the Customs House at 610 S. Canal St. contains one of the country`s largest and most disgusting collections of child pornography, all of it seized from distributors and consumers. Beside a videocassette recorder in the back of the room are tapes titled ”Suzie and Her Little Brother” and ”School Girl Report.” Hidden inside file cabinets are such publications as ”Joyboy,”
”Loving Children” and ”Liza & Her Dog.”
For his latest and most far-reaching sting-Operation Borderline-O`Malley drew on this collection to produce a sales brochure and a package of dirty pictures.
”I took all (the product names and advertisements) from child porn cases I had working and cut and pasted the best until I had a very believable brochure,” O`Malley said. ”We offered 48 different sets of 12 photos, each costing $15.”
The brochure, written in French and choppy English lifted from the leaflet of a child pornographer in Stockholm, was mailed all over the country to prior offenders and suspects taken from local, state and federal police lists. The brochure included no illustrations and suggested that what was being offered was illegal.
The rules for ordering were: Payment was to be sent to a post office box in Canada. The product would be delivered by courier service, not by the postal service. The company name was not to be given to others. Potential new customers were to be recommended to the distributor, who would contact them.
Operation Borderline produced more than 200 orders, which were shipped to the Chicago Customs office, where agents, wearing surgical gloves to keep from smearing buyers` fingerprints, filled them. Other agents, posing as couriers for DHL Worldwide Express, delivered the dirty pictures to addresses around the country, then different agents returned with search warrants to confiscate the photo sets and to look for other kiddie porn.
Thus far, the sting has led to 50 indictments. More are expected. Federal prosecutors are just beginning to bring cases to trial. These trials will test the entrapment issue. But the undercover work already has left its mark. In Chicago four people charged in Operation Borderline have pleaded guilty;
nationwide, three others have committed suicide.
”One person left notes saying he was sorry,” O`Malley said. ”He said it was hard to live when you`ve been cursed with a demon for a sexual preference.”
Although the suicides shook O`Malley, they do not haunt him.
”I feel sorry for their families,” he said. ”But I don`t feel responsible for their deaths. We didn`t take these people out of the phone book. They came from lists obtained from law enforcement sources. These people were clearly aware of the consequences of their actions.
”There was a Chicago lawyer who once told me and a federal attorney that he was going to kill himself if we indicted him. If you get caught up in this I`m-gonna-hold-my-breath-if-I-don`t-get-to-play stuff, it will undermine you as an investigator. I`m not coldhearted, but after a while, that would become a game.”
To remember what the stakes are in this contest, O`Malley need only recall the desparate parents of missing children who come to his office to peruse smut in hopes of finding their sons or daughters.
Jack and Judy O`Malley have a daughter and two sons. Five-year-old Kevin climbed the basement stairs and interrupted the conversation in the family room of the O`Malleys` home in the south suburbs. The subject of discussion changed abruptly. The O`Malley children, ages 7, 5 and 10 months, have no idea what their dad does for a living. ”They don`t even know he carries a gun,”
Judy O`Malley said.
Most of the neighbors have some inkling but no real grasp of what O`Malley`s job entails.
”Social events are a problem,” O`Malley said. ”People want to talk. When publicity about me hits, it becomes a popular topic of conversation. But Judy and I have gotten to where we won`t talk about it anymore. This stuff is interesting, but it`s depressing and morbid. You tend to talk about it in a matter-of-fact way, and people are shocked.”
”My friends think child pornography is 12-year-old girls in lingerie,”
Judy O`Malley said. ”I don`t think you understand it until you see it.”
As confidant and sounding board for her husband`s undercover operations, she has seen photos of it all-children being raped, bestiality. ”The scary thing,” she said, ”is you begin to think there are more creeps than normal people.”
When Judy Zimmermann met Jack O`Malley in a South Side Irish bar in 1974, she had no idea that one day she would help him plan big-time criminal investigations. At the time, O`Malley, the oldest of five children of an Oak Lawn real estate developer, was collecting overdue taxes for the Internal Revenue Service. He had come to the IRS a year earlier after graduating from Northern Illinois University and selling real estate for his father.
”I wasn`t really interested in real estate,” O`Malley said. ”I had talked to some people I knew who worked for the `G` and liked it. I was aiming for a job with the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, but the first people to call were from the IRS. They offered me a job as a revenue officer on the South Side of Chicago, and I took it.”
It wasn`t what O`Malley had in mind. He wore no badge and wasn`t authorized to carry a weapon, yet he was expected to confront recalcitrant taxpayers.
In 1975, after two years as a revenue officer, O`Malley transferred to the IRS` internal-security division as a criminal investigator looking into allegations of misconduct against IRS agents. By 1983 he needed a change. Customs and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms both offered jobs, and he chose the former. He figured he`d work with narcotics, high-technology spying and weapons smuggling. A month after he arrived, his supervisor came to him.
”I understand we`re going to gear up our child pornography effort,” the boss said.
Bohling, the Chicago vice cop, and a couple of other early mentors did what they could to prepare O`Malley. Before they took him undercover, they warned, ”Don`t think you`re just going to deal with pictures or 8-mm. films. You`ll be dealing with child molesters and pedophile groups.”
That hardly softened the shock of seeing pictures of Thai children being painfully sodomized or hearing a suburban Chicago man matter-of-factly describing how he sprayed little girls with a hose in order to get them to take off their wet clothes so he could steal their underwear. After four years, undercover meetings still make O`Malley feel strange.
”It`s a very eerie situation,” he said. ”These people are confiding in me, as a pervert, how they`d like to get ahold of my kids.”
