(Part 3 of a series. In the previous installment, federal and state police raided Larry Benedict's home and accused him of trading electronic child porn with Mikel Bolander.)
CANANDAIGUA, New York -- If a federal prosecutor ever wanted to offer a disquieting example of a child pornographer, it would be Mikel James Bolander.
Bolander, 37, is a convicted, self-confessed pedophile who dabbles in child porn. He is incarcerated in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal prison in San Diego.
Court documents paint Bolander as the archetype of a sex offender -- a distressed soul who can't stop himself from running afoul of the law. A magistrate judge once dubbed Bolander "a deeply troubled man who has been unable, despite opportunities at treatment and supervision, to control his pedophilia."
Bolander, according to the federal government, was caught trading illegal diskettes and tape backups with Larry Benedict, a Xerox engineer who lives in New York state.
A troubled history
Bolander was born in January 1964 in Wadena, Minnesota. He enlisted in the Navy when he was about 19 years old and became a data processing specialist on the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson.
A pre-sentence report prepared by the court concludes that Bolander's first known run-in with child porn came aboard the 95,000-ton warship, which is now part of Operation Enduring Freedom: "He was given an honorable discharge after pornographic materials featuring boys were discovered in his foot locker."
After getting the boot from the Navy in early 1986, Bolander gravitated to the computer industry, spending three years at International Management Services in San Diego as a $9.50-an-hour network administrator. At Grossmont Community College, he took classes and worked as a part-time programmer and network administrator.
During this time, Bolander's private predilection for young boys seemed to be simmering just beneath the surface of his public life. It came to a boil in August 1988, when an 11-year-old boy told police that for more than six months, Bolander had performed oral sex on him and had photographed the boy dressing and undressing, according to court documents.
Bolander pleaded guilty to violating California penal code Section 288(a), which prohibits "lewd or lascivious" acts involving a child younger than 14 years old. In April 1989, Bolander was sentenced to six years in prison.
Perhaps the most telling glimpse into Bolander's personal demons came in March 1989, when psychologist Wister MacLaren pronounced his patient to be suffering from exclusive same-sex pedophilia. MacLaren said, according to the pre-sentence report, "There is little doubt that the defendant is highly fixated on prepubescent boys (rationalizing that after 10 years old they) know what homosexuality is and know what they are doing.... He is at very high risk to re-offend in the future."
Bolander was paroled in 1992 and moved in with his mother and stepfather. California law, which the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reaffirmed this week, says the homes of parolees are subject to warrantless searches.
But Bolander didn't seem to care.
Bolander raided
After Bolander became confrontational during a routine meeting with parole officer Gerry Roberts on Jan. 12, 1995, Roberts grew suspicious. He and a colleague ransacked Bolander's home that evening and arrested Bolander on the spot.
Roberts' report says Bolander had stashed 43 magazines, three books, 46 photos and 18 videotapes of nude children inside the sleeper sofa in the living room. A few weeks later, Bolander's mother discovered adult gay magazines, 19 videotapes with child porn and a box of color slides of nude boys taped under file drawers in her son's bedroom, according to a police report.
The images and art appear to have been fodder for "Thumbs Up," a kind of child porn 'zine that Bolander confessed to creating.
Armed with this evidence, investigators searched a mailbox that Bolander had rented at a nearby Mailboxes Etc. store. San Diego police obtained a warrant for the first search on Jan. 26. Parole Officer Maritsa Rodriguez did the second search on her own on Jan. 31 after discovering the mailbox key in Bolander's home.
Bolander's defense attorney later questioned the validity of the second search. A warrant almost certainly was required for Rodriguez to open the mailbox legally.
In any event, Bolander eventually pleaded guilty to distributing a catalog titled "Thumbs Up" of photographs showing males under the age of 18 engaged in sexually explicit conduct including masturbation, oral-genital and anal-genital sexual intercourse.
Trading pirated software -- or porn?
Not mentioned specifically in the plea agreement is what investigators say they found inside Bolander's mailbox: Two packages, each with a Rochester, New York, return address and handwriting that matched that of Larry Benedict, the Xerox engineer.
One package contained a floppy disk, the other a floppy disk and a magnetic tape. All three media included some form of child porn, police say.
Those packages represent the heart of the prosecution's case against Benedict. If he knowingly exchanged those disks and that tape backup with Bolander, and the media contained child porn, Benedict committed a federal felony.
If, on the other hand, Benedict innocently copied the archive files without perusing their contents, or if the files included no illegal images, he would not have broken the law.
Benedict readily admits to trading pirated software, starting with Amiga disks and eventually shifting to PC disks, with Bolander. He says he found the phone number of a bulletin board system that Bolander ran in the 1980s from a "crack screen" inserted in a program by a pirate who had yanked its copy protection scheme.
"I was trading Amiga games with him. I was trading for a couple years," Benedict says. "He disappeared for a while. I now know why. When he started writing me again he told me he had an IBM and wanted to know if I still have my Amiga. He was one of the people trying to talk me into getting rid of my Amiga and getting an IBM."
Benedict said their correspondence began when Bolander "sent me the list of games that he had. I sent him the list of games that I had. We just swapped stuff back and forth. It was all done by way of floppy. I would mail it to him."
Benedict says he was trading games with about 150 people during that time, not just Bolander.
Buttressing the government's case is a series of letters reportedly found on Bolander's PC. The letters, saved as text files or Microsoft Word files, include no names or personal identifying information beyond the initials "LB" and "L" and "MB."
The government claims "MB" stands for Mikel Bolander and "LB" for Larry Benedict.
If the letters are accurate, they represent a grisly excerpt from a conversation between a pair of child pornographers.
Wrote LB: "Please don't send me any pubic hair material. I like pre pube boys 10 time more than post pube boys. Most of the stuff I burnt was post pube stuff."
MB replied: "The only hard core sex (videotape) I have at this point is one I got from one of my other friends that is very poor quality. About 20th generation tape. I remember that you only like the pre-pube fuzzies."
LB at one point suggested a rating system for labeling image files: "F-Fucking P-Perverted E-Erection D-Dick A-Ass... If there were two kids in the photo I rated the best looking kid. The catagories (sic) are also in order so that if the kid has an erection do not rate it D for Dick...."
MB wrote back suggesting that LB visit the famous gay-themed story archive at nifty.andrew.cmu.edu (now at nifty.org), peruse the Usenet newsgroup alt.binaries.erotica.children, and use PGP encryption software to cloak sensitive e-mail conversations from prying eyes: "This Internet address is through my work. Its (sic) ok to mail me their (sic), but keep it non-explicit unless you encrypt it with PGP."
That sheaf of correspondence, about a score of letters that have been introduced as government exhibits in this case, represents what seems to be damning evidence in the case of U.S. v. Larry Benedict. But, like other aspects of the prosecution, the government's version of events has puzzling inconsistencies.
Microsoft Word recorded the author of a crucial "LB" letter as Bolander, not Benedict. The government has introduced two versions of exhibit DCN162: One signed "L" and the other signed "LB."
Some letters appear to be dated long after Bolander's computer ended up in a police evidence room. And Bolander admitted last month in a written statement that he traded child porn with plenty of people -- but never Benedict.
(In Part 4 of this series: Challenges that courts face when handling electronic evidence.)
