The Best American Crime Writing (42 page)

Detective Lieutenant John J. McLean rolls his chair up to his Compaq laptop. Time to go hunting. A big-bellied Irish redhead, McLean is a cop whose beat is patrolling cyberspace, and in his dingy second-floor office in downtown Medford, filled with metal desks and file cabinets, the fruits of his efforts are stacked along the walls like stuffed deer heads. A dozen computers line the shelves, all seized as evidence. His laptop beeps loudly, and he taps in a few secret codes before he goes into an Internet relay chat channel, or IRC. These are the back alleys of the Web, where users break out into private rooms on all sorts of subjects—often sex. Experts say the IRC is the most dangerous place on the Internet because it’s where kids go to explore and predators go to hunt, and the two inevitably cross paths like Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. What draws adults to kids and sex is still something of a mystery—some call it a disease, others a fetish. But officials are usually less
concerned with the why than the how: how the pictures and movies get here and whether the children shown were molested.

“In my experience,” says one investigator on Galliher’s case, “motive is different with every suspect. But one thing in common is the gratification they get from the images.”

McLean, who spearheads a regional computer crime unit for northeastern Massachusetts, points out the chat rooms for teen sex, cybersex, preteens, and family sex, before he enters a room called “Cute Asians,” using his undercover name. He begins to peek at the servers of people inside to see the images they’ve got. The smart ones here have masked their identities—not just their names, but also their service providers, so cops can’t track them down so easily. “There’s a perceived level of anonymity online,” McLean says. “You’re not 100 percent anonymous, but you can be close.”

He’s been inside the “Cute Asians” room barely a minute when he strikes up a dialogue with another user.

“Hi,” he writes.

“How are you?” comes the response.

“‘Kay. Skipped school. Sick.” McLean wants to sound like a teenager. “Are you from Boston, too?” he writes.

“No, sorry.”

“Where?”

“Australia.”

Probably a lie, but who knows. The dialogue dies—anyone who’s savvy reveals nothing online—and McLean moves on. It’s taken police years to catch up with the cyberworld techies, but now that they have, he says, they have to become more proactive, go out and find the porn and shut it down. Since the early 1990s, pedophiles, child molesters, and sexual deviants have increasingly turned to the computer to find porn. They use film-free digital cameras, CD-ROMs, and cutting-edge digital CD reproduction equipment. That’s what Operation Artus involved, and, like many child pornography cases, its roots were in western Europe.

It took five months for the case to unfold, but when it did it happened in a blink. On the evening of March 19, agents in the United States and around the world, from England to Canada, France to Switzerland, Spain to Japan, fanned out with search warrants. Because child porn is international contraband, with the Internet serving as the cargo ship that carries it across the oceans, Interpol led the probe. Forty-six suspects were targeted in eleven countries, including eight in the United States, in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Nevada, Oregon, and Alaska. When the raid was over, 12 computers, 600 CDs, floppy disks, and external drives, 200 videos, one digital camcorder, a book on how to seduce children, and thousands of images of children being sexually abused had been seized. Twelve people were arrested immediately as the warrants were being served.

When they got to Galliher, Skrocki, the assistant U.S. attorney, says, “We asked him if there was anything he wanted to say.” He said nothing, and a few hours later, Anchorage police and the U.S. Attorney’s Office were carting away his computer. He was never arrested. “The analysis of his computer left no doubt,” Skrocki says, refusing to elaborate on what specifically was found.

Why would a young man engaged to be married, a highly touted Air Force pilot with an engineering degree, spend his spare time camped in front of his computer sending and receiving pictures of kids having sex? Skrocki answers after a long pause. “The investigation revealed no evidence of hacking or of a third person collecting images.” Courts have sealed details of the closed case because of the broader ongoing porn investigation, but Skrocki says in Galliher’s case, as in most child porn cases in his district, investigators did not find an explanation for “why he made this turn.”

“Was he troubled?” Skrocki adds. “Yes, he was.”

No one knew just how troubled.

Word of the investigation spread quickly through the Air Force base with Galliher’s apartment complex, and early in the afternoon of March 22, George Crowley, a friend of Galliher’s, went over to the Highlands office. Crowley urged Debbie Wilder, the property manager, to go into Galliher’s apartment because he hadn’t been returning calls. At 2:19
P.M.
, Wilder found Galliher’s body hanging from the bedroom door, a small blue chair tipped over in front of him, the computer cable over his black turtleneck stretched from his neck lengthwise around the door twice and then around both doorknobs three times. An Ace bandage covered his left wrist, and smears of blood were on the toilet, in the sink, and on the floor. He had tried to cut his wrist.

For investigators, the suicide was more frustrating than an acquittal would have been, because death leaves lingering questions. “It’s tragic,” says Michael Fleming, a spokesman for U.S. Customs. “None of us in Customs has a sense of relief or satisfaction or anything less than concern for his family.”

The reaction of suicide after being charged with child porn is not unusual, says Parry Aftab of WiredPatrol, which uncovers 600 child porn websites each week, some depicting children as young as two, which it reports to authorities. “In the old days, people would plead guilty just to avoid the stigma.” A 1998 case called Operation Wonderland, the largest child porn case to date, saw four suicides in the days after arrests were made in twelve countries.

“The allegation is taboo,” says Michael Netherland, assistant director of the CyberSmuggling Center for U.S. Customs. “These people operate in the shadows. And when this comes to light, it’s very stressful and they see suicide as the only way out.”

Since Wonderland, the laws regarding child pornography have changed to eliminate the possibility that police might arrest someone who has only a few images on his computer and might not
actually be trafficking in kiddie porn. That’s why, Aftab says, she has little doubt that Galliher was doing what authorities suspected when they raided his apartment and took his computer. “There is no way they would have taken on someone in the military unless they were sure he could have been convicted,” she says. But she’s quick to add: “You’re innocent until proven guilty, and this young man is still innocent and maybe really is innocent. I hope this boy wasn’t innocent, but it’s so sad that he thought there was no choice.”

When the news got back to Newton, it was talked about only in whispers. No one cared that the Customs CyberSmuggling Center, which since 1992 has arrested more than 1,200 people for child porn-related charges, has never lost a case. They were burying a soldier, a hero who’d come home, and his funeral had all the trimmings—flags, military uniforms, and a flyover by a C-130. The eulogies were warm, recalling Galliher’s love of community, the water, his family, and his fiancée. He was remembered for what he did, not what he was accused of doing. But for some, the questions hurt.

“There is definitely a frustration that our fond memories are tainted now,” Jonathan Taqqu says a few weeks after the funeral. “But the fond memories are what I’ll remember.”

Jim Marini, the ex-principal at Newton North, doesn’t see the sense in trying to understand a dark side he never saw. He talks about the thousands of students he’s come to know over the years, who have passed through the halls of his school, graduated, and disappeared. “You never know what happens to people in life,” he says. As for Galliher, he says, “It didn’t fit for me, to the point where we don’t talk about that. What is that all about? I can say with all honesty, it’s about what a great kid he was.”

And Sean Galliher was a great kid, as far as Marini knows. He may just not have known all of him.

Sadly, there is no final twist to this story. There was no discovery that it was all a horrible mistake, there was no announcement that Sean was never really involved in this international child porn ring, there was no statement from his family. I was drawn to this story because it just didn’t make sense, and even to my frustration, it still doesn’t. Psychologists will tell you there has to be some scar, some wound, deep down in the soul, to drive someone to this kind of activity. But sometimes, as the D.C. sniper shootings showed us, experts are wrong. Maybe this really was nothing more than one man satisfying his urges that no one knew he had, and his unbearable shame at getting caught
.

T
he plan called for a “soft entry,” which meant that the police officers would ask to come in, rather than break down the door. It was 1:45 on the morning of July 6, 2001, and a convoy of white-painted U.N. police vehicles were gunning through Priština’s deserted streets on their way to raid the infamous Miami Beach Club. The convoy passed a dead dog and a row of overflowing garbage bins and the destroyed post office and groups of tough-looking young men who turned to stare at the SUVs as they went by.

The owner of the Miami Beach, Milam Maraj, was suspected of trafficking in women and forcing them into prostitution. What to all outward appearances was a regular strip club was, in fact, a brothel, and the girls who worked there—teenagers from the former Soviet Union—were in all likelihood being held in conditions amounting to virtual slavery. Several months earlier, Maraj had been crippled by a bullet to the knee because he was willing to testify against a local strongman named Sabit Geci, who was also involved in trafficking and prostitution. Geci was sentenced to six years in prison—the first major victory against organized crime in Kosovo—but it cost Maraj his knee. Now he had to walk with crutches and carry a gun for protection and was suspected by the U.N. of engaging in the same kind of crimes that had put his archrival in jail.

The convoy of SUVs ground up the dark, pitted streets of Jablanica Hill and came to a stop a hundred yards from the bar. The raid went down fast. A team of heavily armed U.S. soldiers stood guard
on the perimeter while half a dozen police officers rushed the front door and flattened the two bouncers up against the wall. From there they moved into the dimly lit bar and screamed for more light as they pushed the men to one side of the room and the women to the other. Maraj hobbled out on his crutches and played host with as charming a smile as he could muster. “Please, do your jobs,” he invited, sweeping one hand toward the girls, who were already sitting at a table, waiting to be questioned by the police. “There is no problem. You will see.”

And in fact he was right. An hour later the police left, empty-handed. Of the dozen or so girls found at the club that night, not one had a forged visa, not one had entered the country illegally, not one admitted having been trafficked, beaten up, raped, or threatened. They just flirted with the police officers and then waved goodbye prettily when the officers trooped back out the door. The incident was all too typical of the failure to combat forced prostitution, which has spiraled out of control, becoming one of Europe’s major problems.

Most of the prostitutes in Kosovo have been trafficked illegally from the poorest parts of the ruined Soviet state. They are lured by the promise of a good job, usually in Italy or Germany, their passports are confiscated, and they generally wind up sold to Albanian pimps, who force them to work in brothels to pay off their “debt,” i.e., what it cost the pimp to buy them. Not surprisingly, the system is set up so that that is virtually impossible, and the women essentially become trapped in the dark, violent world of the Albanian Mafia. A moderately attractive young woman goes for around $1,000. Tall ones are worth more, and very beautiful ones are worth more. Moldovan women are preferred because they are particularly desperate—the living wage in their country is calculated at $100 a month, and the average income is a quarter of that—and they are remarkably beautiful.
Moldova seems to have beautiful women the way Sierra Leone has diamonds—peculiar national treasures that haven’t done either country much good.

The problem with investigating human trafficking in Europe is that the women themselves often deny needing help. They are too scared, manipulated, or desperate for money to dare admit anything to the police. The only way around the problem is undercover work, but the U.N. mandate in Kosovo until very recently did not include such intelligence gathering. Journalists, however, have never been bound by such rules. One weekday night in the pouring rain, photographer Teun Voeten and I drove out of Priština toward the Macedonian border, where there are dozens of brothels tucked away in the smaller towns. We were with two Albanian translators, Erol and Valon, who spoke Serbian and whose appearance let them pass for anything—Serb or Albanian, Kosovo or Macedonian. Our idea was to walk into a brothel, pretend to be American servicemen in Kosovo, and buy an hour or two with one of the women. In the privacy of a motel room, out of sight of the Albanian Mafia, which runs the brothels—in fact, some would say, runs the whole country—we could interview the woman with a tape recorder and get the real story of how she got there.

The highway was two narrow lanes of ruined pavement. Convoys of trucks blasted past us in the oncoming lane, and U.N. tanks and armored trucks slowed traffic heading south, toward Macedonia, to a crawl. Albanian rebels had seized a large part of the mountainous border between the two countries, and the U.N. peacekeepers were building up their presence in case they had to intervene on short notice. Off in the distance we could see the diffuse yellow glow of Camp Bondsteel reflecting off the cloud cover. Bondsteel is an enormous American base built close to a nasty little industrial town called Ferizaj. As a result, Ferizaj has an inordinate number of brothels, and at a gas station outside of town, with the rain drumming down and the trucks roaring past, the pump attendant
advised us to check out one called the Apaci. It had the best girls in town, he said, so that was where all the American officers went. We thanked him and drove around the ghastly apartment blocks and ruined factories of Ferizaj until we found a low concrete building covered in camouflage netting. It had a photograph of an Apache attack helicopter on the door. We parked by some railroad tracks and walked in.

There are very good reasons why something amounting to slavery has been allowed to thrive in the middle of Europe. Not only is the Albanian Mafia notoriously violent—Kosovo has one of the highest murder rates in Europe—but it has attempted to infiltrate and buy off both the local police force and the government. “Those who have money here have power,” as one United Nations police officer says. “And the Mafia has money.” Undercover work in the brothels is dangerous, and attempting a police action that the Mafia doesn’t get tipped off to is extremely difficult. Furthermore, the Mafia is deeply intertwined with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which fought the Serb Army and then started an insurrection in Macedonia, and it has access to plenty of weapons. Last year a German relief worker made the mistake of talking to some trafficked women about the possibility of escape, and that night someone attempted to throw a grenade into his hotel room. It was tossed into Room 69, which was empty; the relief worker was staying in Room 96.

No one paid us much attention when we walked in. There was a group of tough-looking Albanians in one corner, talking very seriously among themselves, and an American officer in uniform in another corner with his back to the wall. He was sitting with two Albanian translators and a blond in a very short skirt who was feigning interest in whatever he was saying. Between her bad English and the music, she couldn’t have understood much. We sat up front by the stage and made sure that the bartender couldn’t get a clear
view of Teun, who had a small, low-light camera in his pocket. He carefully took it out and put it under his hat.

There were eight or ten girls ranged at the table in front of us, drinking soda and smoking cigarettes and barely talking. Some had hair dyed jet black, and the rest had hair bleached so blond it almost looked blue. Occasionally I’d catch one of them looking at us, but then I’d realize she was looking right through us and was too bored even to make eye contact. They sat with their legs crossed, waiting for their next shift on the stage, occasionally getting up without much enthusiasm to go talk to the table of Albanian men. They were pretty, but not extraordinarily so. A couple looked to be straight out of the Romanian peasantry—big, strong girls with rough faces and too much makeup—but one stood out from the rest. She was petite and had platinum-blond hair pulled back tight across her skull and dark glossy lipstick and one of those heartbreaking Slavic faces—high cheekbones, dark eyes, a slightly Asian cast—that you remember for years. She sat off by herself, oblivious to everyone around her, and when the DJ put on an Algerian song called “Aicha,” she stubbed out her cigarette and got up to dance.

There was something different about her—she was distant from the other girls, almost disdainful. I thought that maybe she would speak more openly than the others. “Her,” I said to Erol before she’d even finished her dance. Erol waved the bartender over, a young guy with his hair bound improbably into a topknot, and negotiated the deal: We were to wait until closing time and then go out to our car and follow the security guys to a motel. The girls would already be there. Erol would go up alone at a cost of about $150. If he wanted to take her home with him he had to put down a deposit of her full price—$2,000—and if she escaped he would forfeit all of it.

After she finished her dance the bartender sent her over to our table. She was young—in her late teens, maybe—and unnervingly self-possessed. She sat there playing with her hair and smoking cigarettes
and said that it was her first night at the Apaci and she was not happy to be there. She also said that her name was Niki and that she was from a small town in Moldova. (In order to protect her, I have changed her name.)

“Where did you work before here?” I asked.

“Banja Luka.”

Banja Luka was the capital of Serb Bosnia, the site of some of the worst ethnic cleansing in the war.

“What did you think of Banja Luka?”

“If I could drop a bomb on Banja Luka,” she said, “I would do it tomorrow.”

It was around two in the morning when the lights went up. A hard, ugly rain was coming down outside, and the place had cleared out except for us and the thugs and the girls, who had been herded into the corner. The thugs who ran them were putting on their leather jackets. We were getting ready to go when a heavyset man—later thought by U.N. investigators to be Bashkim Beqiri—walked in the door. Beqiri was a local boxing champion who ran a strip bar called Europe 2000. One hand jammed in his pocket, he planted himself before an Apaci security guy and started yelling. The security guy didn’t say much, and his buddies stood around, shifting from foot to foot while the girls looked away and Beqiri hollered. I asked Erol what was going on.

“That man wants his money,” Erol whispered back. “He says he wants [$2,000] right now or he’s going to kill the girl.”

We couldn’t tell which woman he was talking about. Beqiri turned and walked out the door, saying he would be back the next day. The security guys held a quick council and then herded the women outside into the pouring rain to a couple of late-model BMWs parked next to the railroad tracks. They looked dumb and well-muscled, and they squeezed themselves into a couple more
cars and motioned for us to follow. We trailed them in our car through the dark streets of Ferizaj to a place called the Muhaxheri Motel, off a side street at the center of town.

The Muhaxheri was a slapdash five-story modern building with a cheap plastic sign outside and no one at the front desk. The thugs got out of their cars and looked around and then pulled the women out and shoved them toward the door. A police car drove by slowly but didn’t stop. One of the men motioned to Erol, who got out of our car and nodded to us and disappeared into the motel. Another carload of men pulled up and went into the Muhaxheri and came out ten minutes later and drove off. We waited an hour like that, the rain coming down, an occasional car pulling up and then driving away, and Erol never emerged from the motel.

War has been good for the Albanian Mafia. In February and March 1998, Serb military and paramilitary forces carried out a series of massacres in the Drenica region of central Kosovo that quickly grew into a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing. By the time NATO intervened a year later, as many as 10,000 ethnic Albanians had been killed and an estimated 800,000 driven across the country’s borders. A massive NATO bombing campaign finally forced the Serbs to concede defeat, and they withdrew on June 10, 1999. Within hours, approximately 43,000 NATO troops poured into Kosovo to impose order, but it wasn’t fast enough. Groups of young Albanian toughs were already patrolling the streets of Priština and other large towns, establishing control in a society that had been completely sundered by the Serb occupation. Already in a position of power because they had helped fund and arm the KLA, the Mafia bought off local officials, infiltrated the police force, and killed anyone they couldn’t intimidate.

Kosovo was, and still is, the perfect place to base a criminal network—chaotic, violent, and ringed by porous borders. Local and
international authorities can’t hope to control the trafficking routes. To the north are Serb gangsters who work closely with the Russian Mafia and are only too happy to overlook old ethnic hatreds in the interest of business. To the east are Bulgarian
moutri—
“thick-necks,” mostly graduates of wrestling schools—who work for security firms that double as racketeering outfits. Criminal clans in Albania proper, given free rein by a corrupt, bankrupt, and utterly impotent government, have taken over the port town of Vlorë and use 500-horse-power inflatable rafts called
scafi
to run illegal immigrants and drugs across the Adriatic into Italy. An estimated 10 percent of the population of Vlorë are in business with the local Mafia, and two-thirds of the cars on the streets have been stolen from Western Europe.

Worldwide, the effect has been disastrous. The Balkan drug trade, which moves more than 70 percent of the heroin destined for Europe, is valued at an estimated $400 billion a year. By early 2001 the Albanian Mafia had muscled its competition out of the way and all but taken over London’s crime-ridden red-light district, Soho. Albanian organized crime has established alliances with the Italian Mafia and with criminal gangs in Turkey. In February 2001 an Albanian insurrection started in Macedonia, and the Mafia quickly moved in to help arm and pay for the guerrilla movement that went from several hundred to several thousand men in a matter of months. In some cases, Mafia bosses simply became local rebel commanders and funded their military operations through criminal enterprises that could operate much more effectively under the cover of war.