Sex-tour trial set to begin

July 15, 2007

Adapted from the Inquirer

Eight teenage boys left Moldova, a post-Soviet village where indoor plumbing is a luxury, and boarded a bus that carried them down a one-lane dirt road to begin an unlikely journey to the United States.

The boys, few of whom speak English, are the prosecution's star witnesses in an extraordinary child-molestation case against a U.S. millionaire. A federal official said the trial may be the largest U.S. sex-tourism case ever.

The boys are likely to face cross-examination by one of America's most recognizable defense attorneys—Mark Geragos, the cable-television regular whose former clients include singer Michael Jackson, actress Winona Ryder, and wife-killer Scott Peterson.

The accused is a 44-year-old hotel owner. He is one of four dozen men arrested since 2003 under a strengthened but controversial U.S. law that makes it an American crime to travel overseas with the intent of having sex with minors. So far, 36 have been convicted.

"People traveling over there to these poorer countries think they are safe, that this is tolerated, and that they won't get caught," said the chief of the Child Exploitation Section at the Justice Department. "It's not easy to make these cases and not easy to prosecute them, but they are important."

Of the case, he said, “I'm not aware of a sex-tourism case with a greater number of victims.”

The indictment alleges that the accused, working with a Romanian translator/pimp, took the boys to pool halls, swimming pools, and bowling alleys. He lured them to his boardinghouse room.

"(The perpetrator) used (the translator) to help him meet poor families with young boys," said an assistant U.S. Attorney in a pretrial filing.

"He then groomed both the boys and their families to make his sexual advances less likely to be reported . . . ."

The man had sex with five of the boys, the indictment said, and tried unsuccessfully to seduce three others. He allegedly plied another boy with wine during a visit to Romania then had sex with him. One boy allegedly received cash, sneakers, and a $389 red scooter. At trial, prosecutors will present jurors with phone records of calls to the Moldovan boys, a wiretap of a 2005 phone conversation the man had with the translator, and excerpts from the man’s diary.

The assistant U.S. Attorney also has alleged that the man threatened the mayor of the Romanian town, who had grown suspicious, and that the man later plotted to flee the United States once he suspected that Immigration Customs Enforcement agents were closing in. Jurors will not hear about the alleged threat, but they may hear about the man's alleged plans to flee.

Geragos, meanwhile, has alleged that the man is the victim of blackmail and extortion by villagers, and that the translator confessed only after Moldovan police had tortured him. Geragos has argued that the man simply befriended the boys.

“While he was there, (the man) was a benefactor for a large number of people in the village, young and old, male and female,” Geragos said in a filing. “He provided money for food, medical care and transportation to much of the village.”

Geragos unsuccessfully tried to have the case dismissed, arguing that while the U.S. government had paid to bring the Moldovan boys to the States, the man had been unable to compel or pay for defense witnesses to attend the trial.

“The alleged illegal activities took place half a world away from where the trial is being held,” Geragos said. For some Moldovan witnesses, he said, “the idea of coming to the U.S. would be akin to an American citizen contemplating a voyage to the moon.”

Several depositions of defense witnesses were taken in Moldova recently, but details have not been made public. One possible witness by video is the translator, who is serving a 20-year sentence in Moldova.

During a pretrial hearing, Geragos said several of the boys had recanted their allegations of sexual abuse. He also said a couple who rented the man a room were prepared to testify that boys never slept with him there. Several Moldovan investigative documents—summaries of the boys' statements—contradict this.

Although the man has never been accused of trying to have sex with boys in the United States, he was arrested in Moscow in 2000 and charged with having sex in a hotel room with boys ages 10, 12 and 13, records show.

According to a translation of an explicit 18-page judgment by the Moscow court, he seduced boys he met at train stations and video-game parlors, often paying them for sex.

"It is frightening how close the facts are" between the Russian and Moldovan cases, the prosecutor said during a pretrial hearing.

The man was sentenced to three years in a Russian prison but soon was freed under a general amnesty. The prior Russian conviction is not admissible in the U.S. case.

If convicted in the U.S.-Moldovan case, he could face 20 years in prison, according to the advisory sentencing guidelines.