Rabbi's Arrest Illuminates Darkest Side of Net
By Mary McLachlin, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Originally published in The Palm Beach Post, May 6, 2001
WEST PALM BEACH — In the privacy of home, behind locked doors, the intimate glow of a computer screen becomes a grow light for fantasies repressed in a disapproving, daylight world.
Click, and the Internet opens an infinite number of other locked doors, behind which are people who can fuel those fantasies and validate any behavior, no matter how deviant it's deemed by the rest of society.
"To individuals who have compulsive sexual problems, this is a bonanza," says crime consultant Ken Lanning, who studied sex offenders for more than 20 years with the Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va.
The arrest of Boca Raton Rabbi Jerrold Levy on April 5, on a charge of soliciting a teenage boy for sex online, shoved the cybersex phenomenon out of the shadows and into the shocked and disbelieving faces of his family, friends and congregants.
Members of Temple Beth El, to whom he had ministered for nine years, could not associate the lewd language and attempted seduction described by detectives with the scholarly, compassionate, spiritual leader they knew.
"This is so out of character for what we know of this man, it's as alien as can be," said Molly Shuchat of Deerfield Beach. "He's everything I wanted in a rabbi. He's knowledgeable, he's a good teacher. He's such a bright man. I simply can't understand."
More shocks have come since Levy's arrest. More indications that the brilliant mind and dynamic personality seen by the public sheltered an inner life strangely plagued by turmoil.
Despite earning up to $110,500 a year from his Temple Beth El salary and honoraria, the rabbi and his wife, Ruth, a real estate agent, lost their five-bedroom house in a mortgage foreclosure and moved to a home owned by their son.
The IRS filed liens against them for unpaid income taxes totaling nearly $110,000 from 1990 through 1996. In bankruptcy court in 1997, the debts written off included $34,500 in credit card bills. The bankruptcy trustee said he simply closed the case because they had no assets.
And there had been another arrest, 17 years ago. A charge of fondling an undercover police officer in a men's room in St. Louis, where Levy was the rabbi at a suburban synagogue. After that, the family left St. Louis and moved to Florida.
Levy, 58, had been a rabbi since 1969 and associate rabbi at Temple Beth El since 1992. He resigned four days after his arrest, and those closest to him still anguish over the broken bonds of friendship and trust.
"It's almost like a mourning period," said dentist Alan Slootsky of Boca Raton. The rabbi had comforted his family during a death, performed a bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah, and Slootsky fully expected him to officiate at the marriages of all three of his children.
"You go to temple and you look for him, and he's not there," Slootsky said. "It's like a loss."
Slootsky and other supporters are asking for donations to the Jerrold Levy Defense Fund, administered by defense attorney Ed Shohat, 800 Brickell Ave., Miami Fla. 33131.
Shohat says the rabbi intends to plead not guilty at his arraignment on Friday.
"It's the appropriate plea at the present time," he said. "It's our intention, at this point, to defend this case."
The case against Levy was built by Palm Beach County sheriff's deputies working with a federally supported task force that tracks Internet crimes against children in South Florida. They allege he used the screen name CoachBoca to set up a sexual encounter with someone he thought was a 14-year-old boy, after sending nude photos and graphic sexual e-mails. The recipient actually was Detective Patrick Paige, posing as a teen online after the real target's parents alerted authorities. Levy was arrested when he showed up at the meeting site.
Experts aren't shocked or surprised anymore when the people behind the screen names trading child pornography, asking kids to describe their genitals and trying to entice them to rendezvous turn out to be pillars of the community. They've seen it happen too often.
"People thought we were going to catch all these career offenders," Lanning said, "but when the guy you catch is a military officer with a chest full of medals, or a priest, a rabbi or a schoolteacher, all of a sudden people are saying, 'What's that all about?'"
It's about paraphilia, according to Lanning. The term encompasses many types of recurrent, intense, sexually arousing fantasies or behaviors generally considered abnormal, including well-known ones such as sadism and masochism. The most common is pedophilia, a sexual attraction to children.
Paraphilias are sexual preference problems that may not be evident in any other aspect of a person's life.
"We'd all like to believe the perpetrators are wearing trench coats and hiding under bridges," said Nancy McBride, director of the Florida branch, in Lake Park, of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "But they look like the rest of us, they talk like the rest of us and they function in society, until they get caught."
The center provides educational materials about online safety for children on its Web site, www.missingkids.com.
The evolution of computers and the Internet has brought out a phenomenon Lanning calls "latent offenders"—people who may have felt a desire for sex with children but repressed it because of societal pressures and the difficulty of acting on it. Three things offered by the Internet have changed that:
- Fuel for arousal.
- Validation of behavior.
- Access to victims.
Child pornography, a visual stimulant for many pedophiles, was limited 20 years ago.
"During the 1980s, the easiest way to get kiddie porn was to buy a video camera and make your own," Lanning said. "The computer has surpassed the video camera as the (pornographer's) greatest tool."
No longer does a seeker of such pornography have to go to a seedy part of town or a foreign country or risk ordering it by mail. Now anyone with an Internet connection can sit in his own home and download a vast array of porn, store it, print it and swap it with other collectors.
Possessing, selling or transmitting child pornography is a third-degree felony in Florida, punishable by up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
Pornography doesn't create pedophilia, Lanning said, but it strengthens and fuels the arousal patterns, helping to break down inhibitions. At the same time, a person who fears that most people would consider the urges driving him deviant and disgusting finds comfort in an online fraternity.
"There is a great deal of material out there, far more than people realize, which presents a different view of having sex with children," Lanning said. "It doesn't present it as evil, disgusting and perverted, but as something that is misunderstood by society, that was considered a good thing in other societies and other times.
"Most of these philosophies would say they are against kidnapping children and forcing them into sex. But they say it's OK to have sex with kids as long as you ask them first and they want to do it."
Lanning uses the analogy of someone who has kept a collection of toy soldiers since childhood and who still likes to take them out, line them up and play with them, but doesn't tell anyone for fear they'll think it odd.
"Then I get on the Internet and discover 15,000 people, at a minimum, collecting and trading toy soldiers. It all validates my behavior, changes my concept of myself, that what I was doing was wrong or strange. You're getting active validation through communication on the Internet, simply in the discovery of the number of people who share your interest."
With arousal strengthened and inhibitions weakened, a pedophile then can turn to the computer for the final element of satisfaction—access to children. In most cases of online sex solicitation, that means kids from 12 to 17, the ones most likely to be surfing the Internet and most likely to be curious about and titillated by sexual overtures.
Approaching children used to mean hanging around schools or other public places and risking identification and capture. Computers changed that.
"A child is sitting in the false sense of security of being in his own home, and the perpetrator can be completely anonymous, he can pose as any persona he chooses," said Lt. Paul O'Connell of the Broward County Sheriff's Office. "The persona he proposes fits the needs of the child he's approaching, and he finds out those needs through conversation. They are extremely skilled and extremely patient."
O'Connell directs the six-county task force called Law Enforcement Against Child Harm, or LEACH, which monitors online solicitation of minors in South Florida. LEACH was authorized in October 1998 as one of the first 10 such entities in the nation, operating with a $300,000-a-year grant from the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Its territory runs from Fort Pierce to Miami and includes county sheriff's departments, city police forces, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, FBI, Customs and Postal Service.
In 1999-2000, LEACH's first full record keeping year, its members logged 45 felony arrests, and O'Connell estimates the total now is more than 80. The majority have been in Palm Beach, Broward and St. Lucie counties, which O'Connell calls "the core of task force activity."
Among them was Daniel Sandler, 36, a Parkland aircraft mechanic arrested last May when he traveled to Fort Pierce to meet a 15-year-old boy and instead encountered St. Lucie County sheriff's Detective Neil Spector. Sandler had brought along a 16-year-old former neighbor, with whom he allegedly had been having sex for three years. Sandler was jailed in lieu of $14 million bond on 27 sex counts stemming from his relationship with the teen and 1,417 counts of possession of child pornography based on the pictures of children found in his confiscated computer.
Most convictions, according to O'Connell, are for possession and transmission of child pornography, both felonies. Only 20-25 percent involve "travelers," people who actually set up meetings with potential victims.
Most of those arrested are white males, and their ages cover a wide range.
"We've had a male in his early 20s travel to meet what he thought was a 13-year-old girl, and a man in his early 60s travel to meet what he thought was a 14-year-old boy," O'Connell said. "Both 'juveniles' were task force people."
Prime time for Internet pedophiles is after school and early evening, when kids are likely to be surfing the Internet. But authorities say parents should be vigilant any time children are on the computer.
"Parents think they're safe because they're in their own home," said Special Agent Jim Born of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, who works with the task force. "But you wouldn't let a kid walk around in a mall by himself, and you should do the same on the Internet. The computer shouldn't be in a bedroom, it should be in a public room, so children can't just sit there and chat all day long."
The Internet is not a baby sitter, as some parents think of TV, O'Connell added. When children are online, parents should look over their shoulders and ask them to identify to whom they're talking.
"The kids we come in contact with seem to spend too much of their life on the Internet," he said. "There's an absence of communication between parents and the child. That seems to be the common denominator."
