On Sept. 20, FBI violent crime task force members staked out a two-bedroom ranch house in south Davidson County, at a Brentwood address near the intersection of Nolensville Road and Old Hickory Boulevard. There they saw Timothy Ryan Richards, 24, get out of a vehicle and enter the red brick house with a young teenage boy. Two days later, as Richards was reportedly planning to leave town, they moved in to arrest him on charges of advertising and distributing child pornography. It was the next tentative step in a sweeping nationwide investigation that had begun only months before when a young man approached the FBI with details about a sordid world of Internet child pornography. The man, Justin Berry, was the subject of a lengthy story in Monday’s New York Times by reporter Kurt Eichenwald. Berry’s tale of exploitation, molestation and underage sex for profit has led to a broad nationwide Department of Justice investigation that included Richards’ arrest in September. According to the Times report, Berry, now 19, provided the FBI with information about 1,500 men who had paid for access to nude images he posted on his website, including child pornography in which the troubled young man had appeared since age 13 and then sold. Court documents reveal that he also gave federal authorities information about associates from around the country who were until recently at the center of a vigorous online child pornography trade. Tim Richards was one such associate. According to court filings and news reports, he and a friend named Aaron Brown started an Internet hosting company while they were students at a Maryland middle school. By 2000, the company, Nimenet, was providing web space and e-commerce services to customers who paid between $12.95 and $995 per month. In turn, these clients put their respective business endeavors online and, in many cases, charged their own customers for access to the sites. Sometimes that included access to child pornography. Complaints that Nimenet was hosting sites full of illicit—and illegal—images prompted the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office to open an investigation in 2000. At the time, Richards told the Boston Herald that he was unaware of any illegal activity on sites hosted by his company, and he and Brown pledged full cooperation with the state investigation. “We don’t check out most of our people,” a newspaper story quotes Richards saying of the questionable sites with which his company was affiliated. “They’re certainly not being run by my company. Hosted, yes, but run, no.” Brown echoed those comments. “It’s against our service agreement,” he told the Herald in 2000. “If [the sites] are in fact kiddie porn, we’ll shut them down tonight.” The attorney general’s investigation turned up no evidence of criminal conduct—specifically, the deliberate dissemination of child pornography. After executing two search warrants and performing forensic analyses on seized computer equipment, the state closed its investigation without bringing charges. Five years later, Richards sits in federal custody. Meanwhile, Brown and the credit card processing company he now runs are targets of the ongoing federal investigation, the Times reports. That would not be the case had Justin Berry not come forward to federal authorities with damaging information about Richards, who also went by the aliases Casey Masterson and Casey Lee. But first, Berry’s account and the records he provided led authorities to Greg Mitchel, Berry’s business partner in the porn site he ran until June of this year. Mitchel, 38, was arrested Sept. 12 in Virginia on child porn charges; he is believed to be labeled “Cooperating Witness 1” in the federal arrest warrant for Richards, and has apparently given federal authorities information on Richards that corroborates Berry’s story. According to the arrest warrant, Richards began hosting Berry’s website, justinsfriends.com, in spring 2005, in addition to maintaining his own group of affiliated sites, caseysapartment.com, caseyscondo.com and caseyandkylescondo.com. The sites were maintained on computer servers in Los Angeles that Richards leased. On Sept. 12, hours before Mitchel was arrested in Virginia, federal agents raided Richards’ servers in California. When they arrested Mitchel, Richards had just alerted him that authorities had raided his California servers earlier in the day. Eight days later, Mitchel gave FBI agents the information they would need to obtain a warrant for Richards’ arrest. Richards was living in Nashville with a 13-year-old boy named “Dew,” putting his image online and having sex with the boy, Mitchel said. (“Dew” was with Richards when he was arrested.) According to Mitchel, Richards had operated child porn sites since 1996, and had gotten to know Berry when they were both minors and Berry was broadcasting webcam images of himself online. Brown and the credit card processing company he owns, neova.net, also worked with Berry, Mitchel and Richards, although as of press time, Brown remains free. Six days after Richards’ Sept. 22 arrest, local authorities seized over 40 pieces of computer equipment from his house, including seven computers (Dell and Compaq are the alleged pedophile’s brands of choice), multiple hard drives and numerous cameras, as well as plenty of Internet equipment. On Sept. 22—more than two months after Berry provided federal authorities with specific information about young boys actively being molested—officials questioned “Dew,” who had become the star of a bizarre brand of online reality programming. In it, he and “Casey”—apparently Nashville’s Richards—lived together and performed on camera while legions of fans around the world sent them encouragement and money. It was not always overtly sexual; rather, they billed caseyanddewtv.com as the story of a gay teenager growing up and learning about himself. Like everything in this case—which is slated to go to trial on Valentine’s Day 2006—the fans around the world who followed the exploits of “Casey” and “Dew” came from a part of society most folks pretend doesn’t exist. “Casey seems to live to have fun, and it shows,” a devotee named “Patch” wrote on a message board. “When he is in chat it comes alive because he inspires us. Casey, I wish I had half of your enthusiasm for life. “I hope this doesn’t sound too ‘kiss upy’ but when I respect someone I like for them to know it,” Patch continued. “Dew, what a lucky guy you are!”
