Main Street Monsters

By Elaine Shannon

The Wonderland Club took its name from Lewis Carroll and its alleged clientele from Main Street, U.S.A.--including an engineer from Portland, Maine, a scientist in New Britain, Conn. Other suspected members lived in sleepy towns like Broken Arrow, Okla.; Lawrence, Kans.; and Kennebunk, Maine. And just as the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland had a scandalous predilection for photographing half-clad little girls, these seemingly solid citizens--and as many as 200 other men (and a few women) who belonged to Wonderland--shared an unspeakable secret: the codes to a dark channel in cyberspace. After a raid coordinated with 13 other countries last week, law-enforcement officials charged that Wonderland and its Wondernet operated the largest, most sophisticated ring of child pornographers yet found. "This is a dangerous, dangerous crowd," says Glenn Nick of the U.S. Customs CyberSmuggling Center in Sterling, Va. "They're dangerous because they can be in any neighborhood."

"One of the requirements for membership is a stockpile of thousands of images of graphic child pornography," said U.S. Customs commissioner Raymond Kelly last week as he announced that Operation Cheshire Cat--the feds' counter-allusion from Carroll--had resulted in the arrest of five men and the seizure of dozens of computers believed to contain more than 500,000 images of children. Authorities in Europe and Australia locked up 49 people and planned dozens more arrests. Out of the personal stockpiles, Kelly explained, members traded "in the most vile pornography imaginable over the Internet. The images depict everything from sexual abuse to the actual rape of children"--some as young as 18 months.

Some club members in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Australia, says agent Nick, owned production facilities and transmitted live child-sex shows over the Web. Club members directed the sex acts by sending instructions to the producers via Wondernet chat rooms. "They had standards," Nick says grimly. "The only thing they banned was snuff pictures, the actual killing of somebody." According to Nick, a couple of members were barred because they trafficked in those pictures.

The case grew out of a 1996 Customs bust of a San Jose, Calif., child-pornography ring called the Orchid Club. A pedophile who began cooperating with agents identified an online purveyor of child porn in England. The information was passed to British investigators, who arrested four child exploiters and molesters. In May, London tipped U.S. Customs to the existence of the Wonderland Club. U.S. agents tried surfing into Wondernet but failed to gain entry. They discovered that after the Orchid Club busts, Wonderland, whose members include computer programmers and hardware specialists, deployed an imposing system of codes and encryption. "They took full advantage of all the technological capabilities of the Internet," Nick says. "We couldn't get in without tipping our hand." But they could lurk, like Carroll's elusive Cheshire Cat, in the cybershadows outside the Wondernet, watching transactions until they penetrated the veil of screen names and obtained the real names and addresses of 34 U.S.-based club members.

The raids had dramatic moments. A suspect living in a trailer park in St. Charles, Mo., was arrested after agents found, along with child porn, firearms and a stash of the black powder used to make bombs. According to Customs agents, a law student in New York City threw his hard drive into a neighbor's yard (it was later discovered by a police dog). Federal sources say an alleged club member in Allen, Texas, committed suicide last week after being served with a search warrant.

But other suspects have quickly admitted their involvement and provided their pass codes, screen names and cyberlinks to investigators. With those keys and decrypted data from seized computers, agents expect to make dozens more arrests. So far, the evidence suggests that Wonderland reached into 47 countries. The police services of those nations are being invited to join the next round of raids. At the same time, officials are looking for the ring's young victims. Customs has set up a 24-hour child-porn hot line, 800-BE-ALERT.

No one is claiming to be able to purge the Net completely of evil. As a result of the crackdown, says agent Nick, "I'm sure there are a lot of hard drives being reformatted throughout the world." But, he says, "we certainly disrupted a network, and with any luck, we'll be able to pick off a few of them." His warning to parents: "You can't just put a computer in your kids' bedroom, hook it up to the Internet and expect them not to run into trouble. That's like dropping your kids off at the playground at 7 a.m. and not coming back till 7 p.m. Anything can happen to them." As Operation Cheshire Cat shows, there are monsters hiding in plain sight, right in the middle of Main Street.