The enormity of the allegations drew wide media coverage.

In 16 years as a U.S. customs agent, many of them spent busting child pornography rings, Mike Netherland rou­tinely comes across photographs and film that no one should have to see. But in January Netherland, who is as­sistant director of the Customs Service’s Cyber Smuggling Center, began working on a case of Internet child porn that left him shaken to the core. “There were many times when we had to get up and get away from the case for a while, ” says Netherland, 40, the father of a 12-year-old boy. “Sometimes I went home and gave my son a hug, just to make sure he was safe at night.”

According to authorities, the ring called itself the Club. And while not the largest child porn conspiracy ever broken, it was certainly among the most perverse. In contrast to other purveyors of kiddy porn, the 12 Americans and 10 Euro­peans, whose arrests were announced starting on Aug. 9, allegedly transmitted photos and videos over the Internet not for profit but for their own gratification. What’s more, most of the roughly 1 million images seized depicted the members or the Club sexually molesting their own children. In all, at least 37 chil­dren in this country and 8 in Europe, rang­ing in age from 2 to 14, are believed to have been abused.

It now appears that the ring had been operating since 1999. Prosecutors believe that the alleged members met in cyber­space. By using sophisticated encryption technology, they were able to send stills and videos to each other without much risk of detection. But last No­vember Mats Albinsson, who works for the private watchdog organization Save the Children, in Stockholm, got an anonymous tip to his child porn hot line alerting him to some disturb­ing images on an Internet newsgroup. Albinsson, whose job is to trawl the Web searching for such material, quickly downloaded the photos. “These had bondage in them, ” says Albinsson, 40, himself a father of two. “There was only one girl in the pic­tures. She was 8 or 9, and she was tied to a chair.”

The man standing behind the girl was fully visible. But who was he? Given the fact that the image was plucked off the Internet, he could have been from anywhere in the world. That's when Albinsson got a break. He noticed the partial lettering of a company logo on the blue T-shirt the man was wearing. Plugging those few letters into a search engine, Albinsson came up with the name of a company called NetService, a Danish Internet organization. He immediately notified Swedish police, who in turn flagged Danish authorities. By the next day, with the help of NetService, they had traced the image to Eggert Jensen, 41, a former employee, and his wife, Bente, who were arrested on charges of abus­ing their 9-year-old daughter. “Within 24 hours of receiving the tip, we had an arrest, ” says Albinsson. “That’s a world record, I think.”

A search of Jensen’s home and hard drive turned up a trove of other evi­dence, including signs of an American connection, which quickly found its way to Netherlands desk at the U.S. Customs Service in Fairfax, Va. “I as­signed somebody to start digging im­mediately, ” says Netherland, who was in charge of the investigation. “We were very concerned about the actual molestation. We had to take action as soon as possible to ensure the safety of those children.” Agents dubbed it Op­eration Hamlet − after the line in the Shakespeare play “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, ” explains Netherland.

Under Netherlands direction, cus­toms agents and local police began running down leads. Investigators quickly zeroed in on Lloyd Emmerson, 45, a chiropractor in Clovis, Calif., whose name had allegedly turned up on Jensen’s computer. Mar­ried and the father of four children ranging in age from 7 to 15, Emmerson was arrested the night of Jan. 26 after police searched his computer and allegedly found thousands of kiddy porn photos, including some of his own children. Cops now believe that Emmerson, who has denied all charges and whose wife, Gina, has not been implicated, was the ringleader of the Club. “The images floored us, ” says Clovis police detective John Weaver, who coordinated the bust. “How could a human being do this to his own child? ”

Among the others charged in the case were Paul Whitmore, 43, a mar­riage and family counselor in San Diego. Whitmore has been accused of molesting his preteen daughter. An­other man, Jeffrey Naimo, 34, a night clerk at a Tour Inn in Killeen, Texas, pleaded guilty in July and was sen­tenced to nearly 20 years in prison. U.S. customs officials say that Naimo, who was living with his estranged girl­friend’s two young daughters, had al­ready photographed one of them bound and gagged.

Authorities waited so long to an­nounce the busts because they did not want to alert others in the ring, who could then destroy evidence. Emmer­son is being held on $2 million bond and is scheduled to go on trial in No­vember. Some of the U.S. defendants could be facing 60 years in federal prison. And all of the children in the case, which is still being actively in­vestigated, have been placed in foster care, or with relatives. Not that they are home free, especially since some of the images remain suspended in the eternal world of cyberspace. “The sad thing is their children will be there for­ever, ” says Netherland. “They will be victims forever.”

(From People (August 26, 2002)