Cyber-Sting Lawyer Jailed For Kid Porn

Originally published in the New York Post, March 12, 2002

TRENTON — A Long Island lawyer who represented abused and neglected children was sentenced yesterday to 22 months in prison for transmitting child pornography.

Bradley Kurtzberg faced 27 to 33 months in prison, but U.S. District Judge Garrett E. Brown Jr. gave him less than the minimum sentence after hearing that the lawyer was getting treatment. He fined Kurtzberg $3,000.

Kurtzberg, 35, of Melville, was arrested at a Paramus mall in March 2000, where he had arranged over the Internet to meet someone he thought was a 15-year-old girl from New Jersey for a sexual tryst.

"April" was actually an undercover investigator with the Bergen County prosecutor's office, who met the lawyer two months earlier while trolling a computer chat room called "Special Interest - I Love Older Men" as part of an FBI task force against child exploitation.

Kurtzberg pleaded guilty Oct. 22, admitting he sent three computer files containing sexually explicit pictures of girls.

As part of the plea bargain, prosecutors dropped a charge of traveling interstate to have sex with a minor.