Pembroke NH pornographer Brian Schultz

Qs re. Schultz: 
a) Were all of the children in Schultz's films identified?
b) Where were the "abducted" children taken from?
c) Did the pornographers have any connection to the incident below?

 

Schultz

3 men charged in child porn ring                                                                     Boston Globe 02 Mar 1991  Judith Gaines

CONCORD, N.H. -- Citing the seizure of films so grotesque that law enforcement agents were embarrassed to describe them publicly, the FBI and the US attorney yesterday announced the arrest of three New England men believed to be engaged in a large-scale child pornography ring.

At a news conference in Concord, Thomas Hughes, special agent in charge of Boston's FBI office, said law enforcement authorities arrested Brian Schultz, 44, of Barrington, N.H.; Mark Colen, 44, of Brooklyn, Conn.; and Wayne Bailey, 59, of Wells Beach, Maine, and Fairhaven, Mass.

Each was charged with interstate transportation of obscene materials for sale or distribution; activities related to material involving the sexual exploitation of children; and conspiracy, Hughes said.

In addition, law enforcement teams -- consisting of 28 FBI agents, assisted by 30 local and state police -- also seized "hundreds and hundreds" of videotapes depicting acts of child sexual exploitation, as well as equipment for preparing and reproducing such films, other sexually explicit photographs and magazines, and records identifying members of the child pornography network, said Jeffrey Howard, US attorney for New Hampshire.

In an affidavit summarizing the results of a four-month investigation, FBI agents alleged that the defendants produced and distributed films depicting young women engaged in sexual activity with animals, children urinating on each other, children ingesting human feces and various bizarre sex acts involving children apparently as young as 6 years old.

Howard said he is "hoping against hope" that the investigation does not reveal that many local children were used in making these films. But the affidavit quotes Schultz saying he filmed "several 13-year-old girls from Lowell, Massachusetts." Howard also said some of the children "were abducted from other parts of the country."

According to David Vicinanzo, assistant US attorney for New Hampshire, law enforcement agents first heard about the network in November, when a Portsmouth resident alerted them to an individual distributing videotapes involving children engaged in explicit sexual acts. Undercover agents subsequently purchased about 125 tapes at several hotels and restaurants around New England and at the Portsmouth traffic circle.

The films sold for $65 to $500 each, Vicinanzo said.

He added that all three of the accused men were cameramen who appeared in many of their films.

Kid-porn suspects had office in Clinton: Telegram & Gazette [Worcester, Mass] 09 Mar 1991: 2. George Snell

CLINTON - Three men arrested in an alleged "kiddie porn" ring may have used an office space in Clinton to store film equipment and video tapes for their New England network.

William J. McMullin, a FBI special agent in Boston, said the Wachusett Building, at 52-72 High St., is listed in an affidavit as one of many locations used for storage by the members of the alleged child pornography ring.

McMullin said the men rented the space from October 1990 to January 1991 before moving all their Clinton equipment to Manchester, N.H.

TWO FROM CONNECTICUTT
Arrested on charges of interstate transportation of obscene materials for sale or distribution, activities related to material involving the sexual exploitation of children and conspiracy were: Brian Schultz, 44, of Barrington, N.H., Mark Colen, 44, of Brooklyn, Conn., and Wayne Bailey, 59, of Fairhaven, Conn.

McMullin said the men rented the office space under the guise of "New England Video Exchange."
McMullin said the men probably used the Clinton location to make reproductions of the tapes. He was not sure if the office was used for actual filming.

"EXTREMELY OBSCENE'
McMullin called videotapes "extremely obscene."

"After reading the affidavit I don't think any normal person would have any inclination to see these films," he said.

McMullin said about 28 boxes and thousands of video tapes were stored at the Clinton location before being moved on Jan. 17.

Pauline Houle, owner of the Sugarbowl, said the men used to come into her restaurant for coffee. The Sugarbowl was next door and underneath 52-72 High St. The restaurant has since moved across the street.

"At least one of them came in for coffee every morning," she said.

Houle said she and her employees used to hear noises coming from upstairs.

"I asked one of the guys what they were doing up there and he told me they were making video tapes on how to get out of debt," she said.

James Barrett, owner of 52-72 High St., could not be reached for comment yesterday.


HEARING SCHEDULED
McMullin said the three men are scheduled for a preliminary hearing in Concord, N.H., March 21. Prosecuting the case are Assistant U.S. Attorneys David A. Vicinanzo and Miguel A. Pereira.

Concord - Child porn case lurks behind charges - Murder-for-hire suspect did time          Concord Monitor (NH) - July 1, 2012      Tricia L. Nadolny, Monitor staff

The films have long been destroyed. Only a partial index of the pornographer's catalog remains.

Two decades ago, FBI agents watched the tapes with unsettled stomachs and analyzed each one. Some of their clinical descriptions - sound or silence, gray or color or faded hues, approximately six minutes or 21 minutes of film - hint at nothing.

But then the ages of the people on screen - "over 18" or "12-14" or "6-7" years old, just children - stand out. The acts themselves - "engages" or "touches" or "tortures" - begin to tell a different story.

Brian Schultz once moved the tapes across New England, cutting copies in a Manchester office he rented for $100 and shipping the product to buyers with fetishes he fed for a profit.

But in the winter of 1990, as Schultz was preparing to expand his reach, FBI agents infiltrated his ring, buying each of the 125 tapes he offered and then creating the lists prosecutors used to put Schultz in jail.

At the time, it was one of the biggest pornography busts in New England and the first of its kind in the New Hampshire. In Washington, D.C., President George H. W. Bush mentioned the case out of Concord while calling for further prosecution of such crimes.

But a national dialogue on the true harm of child exploitation was just getting under way, and Schultz was given a sentence that might seem brief under today's judicial guidelines: five years in federal prison.

Then, Schultz lived in Barrington; more recently he has lived in a trailer in Pembroke. Today, he's being held at the state prison in Concord on charges he attempted to hire a hitman, identified only as J.K. in court documents, to kill the 48-year-old L.F., a woman who told the Monitor she met Schultz online. They dated for eight months before she cut it off.

Authorities have offered no information about that alleged crime, and Schultz, through his lawyer, declined to be interviewed for this story.

The Monitor recently obtained the archived court filings pertaining to the investigation and prosecution of Schultz and his two conspirators - three thick folders that include court transcripts, quotes from secretly recorded conversations, a catalog Schultz used to promote his materials, indictments and FBI descriptions of many tapes the agents purchased.

A 48-page affidavit details how agents took the initial tip, a call from a man named George Menkello, to an arrest.

The following account is based on the contents of those files as well as interviews with the men who put Schultz behind bars 21 years ago: the prosecutor, David Vicinanzo; the head of the FBI team, Ralph Gault; and the undercover agent who earned Schultz's trust, a man the group called "Charlie from Chicago."

The agent and informant met in the parking lot of a Dover coffee shop, in a dark corner outside the yellow glow of store lights and the curiosity of a few late-night patrons.

When the informant - a towering figure wearing cutoff gloves around his thick fingers - got out of his truck, Gault thought for a second that he shouldn't have come alone. The informant slid into the agent's car and passed over the tapes he had promised on the phone a few days earlier.

The meeting took place just after Thanksgiving 1990, after Menkello called the Portsmouth FBI office and told Gault he had information on possible distribution of pornography, including material considered obscene and films involving children.

Menkello, who had provided valuable tips to other agencies in the past, told Gault he had met Schultz, then 44, at an adult book store in Kittery, Maine.

"It was just lucky that the original informant overheard Brian shooting his mouth off, something to the effect of 'I can get much better stuff than this,' " Gault said in a recent interview, remembering how his first investigation of child pornography got started. "And the informant thought the stuff was pretty juicy as is, so he put two and two together and said, 'What's better than this?' "

The file on the four-month investigation started with the 14 tapes exchanged that night.

Back in his office, Gault watched a twisted scene of young girls engaging in intercourse with adults and confirmed that Schultz had access to what Menkello thought he meant by "better" - child pornography.

"I trusted the informant to that extent, that Brian had the type of product that Brian bragged at," Gault said. "And it turned out he did."

While Schultz later boasted to Menkello that he was in the process of filming young girls in Massachusetts, Gault said today he believes Schultz was lying. Schultz was never accused or convicted of filming child pornography, just distributing it across state lines.

As Gault started his investigation, he called Vicinanzo, an assistant U.S. attorney in Concord. The two men would work closely for the next four months, Vicinanzo helping the agents identify the thresholds for federal crimes, then telling them when they had enough to get search warrants and shut it down.

Vicinanzo wanted to have at the case from the start, but others in the bureau, he remembers today, hesitated.

"It was as if child pornography, like any other pornography, was just a big joke, a joke and a victimless crime," said Vicinanzo, who spent 13 years with the U.S. attorney's office and now works at the Nixon Peabody law firm. He still lives in Concord.

It was a crime that some thought wasn't worth the bureau's resources.

"I had young kids myself at the time," Vicinanzo said. "And I thought, 'How is it that anyone isn't taking this seriously?' "

Gault went home each night to nine boys and two girls.

On many evenings during the investigation, as he turned off his car in the driveway, he paused to ground himself in their innocence. Inside the front door, he focused on his own children's tiny stories, their candor, rather than the horrors he had seen inflicted on others their age.

It was just a coincidence that the file of a man who profited from the exploitation of children had landed on the desk of an agent with 11 of his own, that a father who lived to protect his kids from predators now found himself watching images of children who had been preyed upon.

Every few days Menkello bought more films from Schultz. Gault watched every tape.

In his small second-floor office in downtown Portsmouth, he played the films at a low volume on a square monitor beside his desk.

"The informant would call me on the weekends and say, 'I've got some more.' And I'd oftentimes say to him, 'Can they wait until Monday?' "

But he didn't want to carry them around. So they'd set up a time and place, and Gault would leave with another dozen films. Eventually, more of the child pornography Schultz had hinted at surfaced.

Gault had never seen anything like it in his 20 years at the bureau. At 26, he had spent his first year with the FBI pursuing Vietnam War deserters in the hills around Syracuse, N.Y., before a nine-year stay investigating bombings and bank robberies in Boston. In 1979, he asked for a quiet assignment and took a move to the three-man Portsmouth office.

He'd always loved the job.

But now it made him sick, the images on his television set. Over time, he learned to control his stomach as he studied the size and shape of each young victim's elbows and kneecaps, scrutinized their facial features, trying to distinguish an age.

Schultz explained to Menkello how he coded these videos as "C material."

In reality they are crime scene evidence, copies of an offense that would be rehashed each time the buyer pressed play.

Videos Schultz pieced together from tapes others had filmed depicted children being raped. Adults are shown in some but in others several children fill the screen, looking vacantly past the camera as if being coached by someone who stands beyond it.

Many films involved objects and animals. At times the children appear much younger than they are, like the teenager filmed reading a comic book and eating candy before she is assaulted.

In one film, text cards lay out a fictitious dialogue between the young victim and the man raping her, the girl protesting throughout. As he continues, she begins to bleed.

Gault watched the films with the same determination he brought to every case. He saw the facts, the list of federal violations the FBI could prosecute and the evidence that either did or didn't cut it.

But with Schultz, there was more, brutalized victims that have stayed with Gault until today. After two decades, one young boy stands out.

In the tape of the assault, which Gault remembers watching and is also described in the affidavit, an Asian boy about 14 years old is shown in a living room with an older woman. As she seduces him, her husband watching on a monitor in a nearby room, the boy makes no direct eye contact with the camera, unaware that it is hidden in a corner. The shots are intercut with text that narrates the scene, childlike phrases to describe acts and body parts.

In one, the boy is identified as "Tuyungto," indicating to the viewer that he is too young to be consenting.

Another FBI team who tracked the boy to Chicago found the woman was a neighbor and the abuse was ongoing. Gault learned later that the boy, always bright, had dropped out of school and landed in jail.

Gault and the others who worked on the Schultz case know it spurred investigations across the country as agents tried to track the victims. One report noted 30 such leads.

It might have been because the abuse was continual or because of the victim's precipitous turn in life, but today the boy from Chicago is the only one Gault remembers clearly.

As Menkello continued to meet with Schultz, buying tapes and now flirting with the possibility of distributing films as well, other players in the circle emerged.

There was 44-year-old Mark Colen of Brooklyn, Conn., who both filmed and starred in videos he produced under his own company. (Schultz told Menkello he also stepped in front of the camera in adult films at times.)

Wayne Bailey, an editor at a Massachusetts television station who had anchored the news as a younger man, was the source of much of the group's child pornography. Bailey, then 59, told Menkello his stock came from a friend who was jailed for distributing the films a few years before.

Schultz called his own operation New England Video Exchange, and at an office in Manchester and another in Clinton, Mass., he spliced different films together, adding music, titles and text and often his own company's initials and mailing address.

Obscene adult films made up most of his catalog, and while agents never uncovered the exact source of Schultz's materials, he told them about suppliers in Florida and Arizona. Many of the tapes were grainy and aged, while others came from overseas, the origin sometimes distinguishable by the language, a visible license plate, or, in a few cases, the unfamiliar animals involved.

In late November of 1990, Schultz told Menkello about a tape he planned to edit, a film shot by a father showing his two children engaging in intercourse. The girl, by then an adult, had spoken on the Phil Donahue Show about the harms of child pornography.

Schultz said he was eager to splice together a clip from the interview with video of her assault.

"I'm giving them something for their money," a hidden microphone once recorded Schultz saying. "I give a fair product for a fair price."

As the weeks passed, it became more clear to investigators that Schultz was at the center of the group. The agents say today he was the only one with an ego, and it worked to the FBI's advantage.

The undercover agent Gault brought into the investigation around week five had no trouble prying Schultz open.

"He was the kind of guy who you didn't have to say too much to get him talking," Charlie, who asked to be identified only by his first name, said in an interview. "He wanted to tell you how much of a smart guy he was.

"I mean, people want to talk. I'm here to listen."

Charlie from Chicago," whom Menkello introduced to Schultz as a business acquaintance, joined the operation without a hitch. Two decades later, leaning over a coffee cup at a Massachusetts Italian restaurant just off the interstate, Charlie said it wasn't an act.

If he was playing, Schultz never would have bought it.

So when he layered on gold chains and rings - because no one questions the guy wearing 10 grand in jewelry - he picked the pieces from his collection at home. And when he chatted with Schultz about collecting baseballs - because he needed common ground to spend that much time with a man so repulsive - he thought of his days playing ball in college.

Today, dissecting his moves on old cases seems foreign to Charlie, who still slips seamlessly between the personas of retired agent and Chicago kingpin.

"I said I have a select clientele that will pay for specialty videos. That's the way I kind of, when I was talking, it was clear that I meant the child pornography. The 'young stuff' as they used to call it. And anything that was a little different. Everybody has their interest in those things, and we can move forward and make a business out of those things," Charlie said.

Gault moved Charlie into the picture just before the new year, knowing informants can be difficult to control and wanting to put some space between Menkello and Schultz.

"They had never dealt with anybody like Charlie. We know that," Gault said. "They kept saying, 'When are we going to meet Charlie? When are we going to meet Charlie from Chicago?' "

When they did, Charlie said Schultz didn't ask many questions.

Schultz gave him a tour of the operation, starting with a storage locker in Newington where he pulled up the gate to show 500 tapes stacked inside. They drove to the Manchester electric company where Schultz worked and also rented office space, and Charlie was introduced to a woman there who helped make the copies.

Schultz was jittery, Charlie remembers, a fast talker who tried to play the part of a ringleader but lacked the finesse. He was determined, unpredictable but focused clearly on having the largest catalog in the area.

On a later trip, Charlie and Schultz drove to his office in Clinton, Mass., a room with little more than a dirty couch. Schultz pushed a tape into the VCR, a German "snuff" film, he called it.

These films promise a murder as the finale, coming after the victim is severely beaten and sexually tortured. This tape depicted a woman being assaulted by a masked female.

"That doesn't hurt," Schultz said to Charlie, according to the affidavit. "I've done that to a couple of women. That doesn't hurt. If you do it right. If you do it right. If you know what you're doing (dominance and submission) can be fun."

After reviewing the tape himself, Gault wrote in the affidavit that the torture seemed very real, and that the woman "may not have escaped without serious physical injury, if she escaped with her life at all."

As Charlie left town, he'd tell the group he was coming back in a few days, maybe a week.

Through January and February of 1991, Gault moved his agent around with the group, nabbing recordings in a few different states so they'd meet the threshold for interstate transportation crimes.

The team had thought about bringing in another player - maybe "Tony from L.A." - to try reaching some of Schultz's suppliers. But Vicinanzo thought they had enough, and even with more evidence he said they probably wouldn't get a harsher sentence.

So on March 1, they moved in for an arrest.

Nearly 60 agents and local officers executed search warrants at the homes of Schultz, Colen and Bailey and at their businesses and storage units. They gathered several thousand tapes, Charlie remembers.

The men all went quietly, Colen at his home in Connecticut, Bailey at the Portsmouth traffic circle as he sold a tape to an undercover officer and Schultz at his office in Manchester.

Vicinanzo remembers Schultz expressing no remorse.

"He did not strike me as a person with a delicate conscience," Vicinanzo said.

All three men posted bail, but Schultz didn't stay out of jail for long. He tested positive for cocaine, and a judge didn't buy into his explanation that a false positive was caused by a medication he took for erectile dysfunction or maybe because he had slept with a woman who used drugs.

As they prepared for a possible trial, Vicinanzo remembers Schultz's appointed lawyer, Warren Nighswander, coming to view some of the tapes, thinking there was a free speech argument to be made in Schultz's defense.

Vicinanzo pulled a few examples from an evidence locker, placing one of the worst at the top.

"He came out of the room with a blanched look on his face and wanted to discuss the possibility of working on a plea," Vicinanzo remembers. (Nighswander died in 1998.)

Schultz pleaded guilty to two counts, conspiracy to transport and distribute obscene matter and distribution of child pornography. At his sentencing hearing, Nighswander wanted to make it clear Schultz hadn't filmed any child pornography himself, though he was recorded saying he could.

"Nothing ever came of that. It was nothing but talk. BS," Nighswander said.

"Well, sometimes when you BS you get yourself in trouble," the judge, Nicholas Tsoucalas, replied before handing down a sentence of five years in federal prison with three years of supervised release.

Schultz was ordered to undergo sex offender treatment, and his fine was waived because of an inability to pay.

Colen and Bailey each were sentenced to two years, though Colen was released after seven months because he testified against a man in another pornography case.

Schultz served out his term with short stays at federal prisons along the East Coast and was released in December 1995.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s he registered as a sex offender with the Manchester Police Department. Except for a 1999 criminal threatening charge, available records show no other brushes with the law.

Then, while living in Pembroke in 2008, he was arrested by the police there for failing to register as a sex offender and sentenced to a year in jail with the full 12 months suspended on good behavior.

Again last November Schultz was arrested for failing to correctly register as an offender. He pleaded guilty to a felony and received a 12-month sentence with three months suspended.

He was scheduled for release in August.

But then, the police say, he tried to hire a hitman from behind bars.

If the child pornography case had happened today, Schultz running his business with modern equipment and the state prosecuting under modern sentencing guidelines, experts say he surely would have received a longer prison term.

But in 1991, Congress had only just made it a crime to possess child pornography. And it wasn't until about 12 years after Schultz was charged that the federal government set a mandatory minimum sentence of five years for trafficking and receipt of child pornography.

Vicinanzo said that at the time, Schultz's was the harshest sentence given in New Hampshire on a child pornography case. Then, five years seemed substantial.

"I thought that was the best deal we could get considering the guidelines," Gault said. "I certainly would have liked to see him get more time. But I think when you've been at it long enough, you take what you get. You accept the judge or the jury's decisions, and you move onto the next case."

But first Gault had to destroy the tapes, the 125 the FBI had purchased but also thousands they had seized from the men's operation.

He loaded the boxes into busted cars at the dump. As the vehicles went up the conveyor belt and the compactor came down, Gault and Charlie watched shards of plastic and wrinkled film blow over the junkyard.

(Tricia L. Nadolny can be reached at 369-3306 or tnadolny@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @tricia_nadolny.)