From The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 4/2/05:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05092/481645.stm
Penn Hills man faces child porn charges
Local arrest related to prosecution of Boy Scouts national official
Saturday, April 02, 2005
By Torsten Ove, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A Penn Hills man has been arrested on federal child pornography
charges that developed out of the prosecution of a top Boy Scouts of
America official in Texas who pleaded guilty Wednesday.
Federal prosecutors said Richard Reichert, 64, was caught in a sting
by a Dallas customs agent posing as Douglas Sovereign Smith Jr., 61,
the former national director of programs for the Boy Scouts in Irving,
Texas.
Smith was arrested in February after being nabbed in a similar sting.
The case began in Dusseldorf, Germany, in November 2003, when German
police raided the home of a man suspected of trafficking in child
porn.
The German officers seized the man's computer, assumed his identity
and received hundreds of e-mails containing child porn.
Several of those came from Smith.
The Germans turned over his e-mails and those from other U.S. suspects
to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, who started
tracking people down across the United States.
Agents in the Dallas office searched Smith's house in Colleyville,
Texas, on Feb. 22 and recovered more than 500 computer images of boys
under 12 engaged in sex acts.
A few days later, Smith agreed to cooperate in catching more porn
traffickers with whom he had corresponded online.
Among those, according to an affidavit by U.S. Postal Inspector Tom
Clinton, was a Pittsburgh man who used the screen name "biman49x" and
had sent Smith a CD of child porn.
In fact, according to the affidavit, the package arrived the day of
the Feb. 22 search.
Agents in Dallas and Pittsburgh decided to set up a sting of their
own, standard procedure in child porn cases.
Smith agreed to let a Dallas ICE agent assume his identity online,
where he had used the screen name "kevinsauc."
The undercover agent then offered three porn videos to "biman49x."
On March 4, "biman49x" said he was traveling in Ireland but was
interested in the tapes.
Agents subpoenaed records from America Online and determined that
"biman49x" was Reichert, a married man who lives on Lewis Drive and
earned $70,000 a year working for Bechtel Inc.
On March 21, about two weeks after he returned from Ireland, Reichert
asked "kevinsauc" to send him the tapes and instructed his pen pal to
not include a return address.
"If it were to get snaged (sic) there is no link and of course i do
not know where it came from," Reichert wrote.
He also indicated he wanted to keep the tapes secret from his wife.
"Try to wrap it so it does not look like a tape," he wrote, according
to the affidavit.
"I will tell her it was a part for my computer or a tape on roller
blading or something whatever."
After the tapes arrived at Reichert's house on Tuesday, Clinton,
Pittsburgh ICE Agent James Kilpatrick and other agents executed a
search warrant.
According to the affidavit, Reichert told them they would find the
tapes in the basement.
Agents said they found them hidden on a shelf under his computer desk.
Reichert is being held in custody pending his arraignment Tuesday.
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