"It used to be a white professional male between the ages of 25 and 45 who are involved in kids activities," said FBI supervisory special agent Joseph Dooley, who heads the Connecticut Computer Crimes Task Force in New Haven. "Now that's out the window. We get guys from all walks of life."
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Source Bristol Press
The two men probably didn’t mingle in the same social circles.
Robert Cecca was a successful businessman who lived in a million-dollar home and raced classic muscle cars as a hobby. Bradley Sweeney was a burley loner who sent pictures of himself over the Internet posing next to a motorcycle.
But according to federal authorities, the two men, 60 and 46, respectively, share a common passion: very young girls.
Their arrests and others like them, authorities say, illustrate a change in the profile of a pedophile.
"It used to be a white professional male between the ages of 25 and 45 who are involved in kids’ activities," said FBI supervisory special agent Joseph Dooley, who heads the Connecticut Computer Crimes Task Force in New Haven. "Now that’s out the window. We get guys from all walks of life."
Since its inception in July 2003, the task force has arrested 25 suspected sexual predators, most of whom targeted their victims over the Internet. In many of the cases, the young "teenagers" the men had groomed as their next victims were in fact undercover FBI agents or police officers who surf through chat rooms searching for pedophiles.
Last week, agents arrested Cecca when he came to New Haven to allegedly have sex with a 13-year-old eighth-grader he had been chatting with on-line for months. The girl was really a New Haven cop.
Cecca, 60, of Medfield, Mass., is the president of Diagnostic Equipment Service Corp., a company that provides clinical engineering, repair and calibration services for medical equipment. He lives in an upscale suburb of Boston and has been the president of the Mass Cruisers Auto Club, a club for classic car and racing buffs. Cecca owns a 1965 Ford Mustang.
In another case, jury selection is scheduled to begin this week for Michael Simpson, 51, of Norwalk, on child pornography charges. Simpson, a nurse practitioner, also faces state charges for a sex act performed on a 15-year-old patient.
Last year, Sweeney, 46, of New Hampshire was sentenced to 65 months in federal prison after an Internet sex sting.
Also last year, Dr. Michael G. Spero, 42, a New Jersey anesthesiologist, was sentenced to 99 months for traveling to Connecticut and having a sexual encounter with a boy.
Supervisory Assistant U.S. Attorney John A. Danaher III, who has prosecuted a number of the task-force cases, said it would be impossible to pick out a pedophile from a crowd.
"Sometimes you walk into court and you say, ‘Oh yeah,’ and other times you would never guess," he said. "We’re seeing them of all ages."
The task force comprises FBI agents, a Postal inspector and police from New Haven, Milford, Bridgeport and Glastonbury. A state trooper is scheduled to join the task force.
Through experience, they learn to sift out the men interested only in "cyber sex" and focus on the "travelers," jargon for online predators who will travel -- sometimes hundreds of miles -- to meet a potential victim.
For Cecca and Sweeney, both wasted no time, quickly turning their online conversations to the topic of sex within minutes, authorities said. Sweeney very plainly indicated he wanted a "sex slave," according to transcripts of his instant messages.
For most of the people who are assigned to the task force, the work is tiring and personal.
Most have young children, Dooley said, giving them a very personal investment. Some undercover agents have as many as six conversations going at once online, Dooley said, and work with an urgency knowing that their targets may be grooming other, real victims at the same time.
"As parents, you just have to be aware that these guys are out there targeting our kids on line," said Dooley.
They’re particularly active from 2:30-5 p.m., when latch-key kids are home from school and parents are still at work.
"Everyone’s got young kids in here and everyone feels they’re doing God’s work, or God’s cleanup work."
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