NY State–Carl Paladino, the World Trade Center, and eminent domain
 

First, from the transcripts:

CARL PALADINO
(R), NEW YORK GUBERNATORIAL CANDIDATE:

On the paper trail of a pedophile, Part 5: Signs of Trouble?

Roy Atchison

This blog is the fifth in a series on John David Roy Atchison, Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of Florida, Pensacola, arrested in Detroit in September 2007 on charges relating to pedophilia. He committed suicide in federal prison in October 2007; arrest and suicide were not foregrounded by the Justice Department in the Bush administration. FBI material obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveals a possible clue to Atchison’s secret development as an adherent of child pornography during his federal career.

John Davenport Gay is not a household name in America, but he is a former defendant and inmate whose own troubles could possibly have served as a clue to those of Roy Atchison. Friends, relatives and community were stunned when Atchison was arrested in September 2007 on highly credible charges relating to pedophilia. One man who might not have been entirely surprised was Gay.

John D. Gay

Repeated efforts to reach Gay for comment have been unsuccessful. His present whereabouts are not known. However, federal records show that Gay, a longtime Florida resident, had his house searched under federal warrant in July 1994. According to the records, his difficulties with the law pertained to possession of pornographic materials.

John D. Gay, who lived in Pensacola, Florida, unsuccessfully sued Atchison for return of the materials collected. Gay was plaintiff in seven such unsuccessful lawsuits; he sued the city of Gulf Breeze, the United States government, the Gulf Breeze Police Department, the Florida Department of Corrections, and other federal officials as well as Atchison. In one of the civil suits, Gay was joined as plaintiff by his father, Kenneth R. Gay, Sr. The federal cases were defended by the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Northern District of Florida, where Atchison worked.

Some of John Davenport Gay’s legal motions were writs for habeas corpus. But several were efforts to reclaim property seized from him. In every such case, the “MOTION by plaintiff JOHN DAVENPORT GAY for return of seized property” was denied by a judge. Porn aficionados have certain First Amendment rights, viz. Larry Flynt and Hustler mag, but they tend to receive little sympathy in courtrooms, even in camera.

The United States was defended in the legal matter by Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Preisser in the U.S. Attorney’s office (1995). Atchison himself as defendant individually was represented by AUSA Michael P. Finney (1994). Preisser, still at the NDFL, and Finney were apparently not among co-workers interviewed by the FBI in Atchison’s 1995 re-investigation, who gave Atchison high marks.

As noted, Roy Atchison served under four presidents—Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush—before his problems came to light. His supervisors routinely gave him high marks, and neither the FBI background check for his initial appointment as Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of Georgia nor his reinvestigation in 1995 turned up any concern that was followed up on. His superior in the Northern District of Florida cheerfully told investigators that he “stole” Atchison from the Georgia office. The occasion for the 1995 reinvestigation was, according to the FBI, that Atchison was being considered for a “presidential appointment.” The Clinton Presidential Library, searching under a FOIA request, indicates by letter that no records responsive to the name John David Roy Atchison are found among Clinton’s presidential papers.

Reagan’s U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, serving when Roy Atchison came on board as AUSA, was Larry D. Thompson, to be replaced in 1986 by Bob Barr. Questions placed to Barr about Atchison’s tenure at the Atlanta office have not yet been answered. During Roy Atchison’s tenure at the Northern District of Florida, the U.S. Attorneys were Kevin Michael Moore, appointed to a federal judgeship by George H. W. Bush; Kenneth Sukhia, appointed by the elder Bush; and Bill Clinton appointee Gregory R. Miller, who was retained as U.S. Attorney by George W. Bush and continued to serve until 2008.

The statement publicly released by Miller’s office when Miller left for private practice reads in part,

“Mr. Miller oversees 34 attorneys in Gainesville, Tallahassee, and Pensacola. During the past six years, Mr. Miller and his office played a prominent role in fighting crime and terrorism in Northern Florida and elsewhere. He placed a special priority on the investigation and prosecution of child exploitation offenses, civil rights violations, white collar crime, organized crime, and drug trafficking.”

 Miller’s name turned up, reportedly to his surprise, on the highly publicized list of eight U.S. Attorneys designated for firing in the infamous 2007 U.S. Attorneys scandal, but no available record explicitly indicates that Miller’s being on the endangered list was in any way connected with Roy Atchison. Miller’s name was subsequently taken off the list.

Back to that civil lawsuit brought by John Davenport Gay against Roy Atchison:

Gay filed the first complaint in January 1994. As mentioned, Gay’s house was searched under a federal warrant issued in July 1994. A series of more than 25 legal motions back and forth clarifies that the legal action was over “the subject camera and camera equipment as well as those photographs that are the subject of the case,” along with “miscellaneous items of property” belonging to Gay.

It is not clear from the records why Atchison, who specialized in house/real property foreclosures and seizures, would also have had Gay’s camera, camera equipment and photographs seized. It is also not clear why the search warrant clearing authorities to search the house Gay lived in, on Char Bar Street in Pensacola, was issued only in July 1994, more than six months after John Davenport Gay initiated a legal action to retrieve his property from the authorities. The search warrant was signed by Magistrate Judge Susan M. Novotny, one of the judges who presided in Gay’s civil actions, along with Judge Lacey Collier. Gay’s lawsuits all ended up defeated in court or dismissed by the court. By the time Atchison was arrested in September 2007, as written, he had acquired a collection of hundreds of photographs of child pornography.

One of the longtime friends or acquaintances most surprised by what developed with Roy Atchison was Georgia attorney George Witcher, one of Atchison’s law school classmates at Cumberland and a reference given by Atchison as a close personal acquaintance for the background checks. Interviewed by telephone, Witcher says, “I knew him well, or thought I did—turns out I didn’t.” Witcher and Atchison were in close touch throughout law school “and for a while afterward.” Witcher adds that he and Atchison had fallen out of touch in recent years; in one attempt to communicate with Atchison, “he brushed me off.” Roy Atchison “was always upwardly mobile,” as Witcher puts it, but changed in recent years, becoming more distant or preoccupied for unstated reasons.

It will be noted that the over-all reflection on Roy Atchison’s chain of command does not look good. He came on board with the feds under Ronald Reagan, elected with the help of the goody-goody hard right, serving in Georgia and in Florida under a series of Republican-appointed U.S. Attorneys. His tenure in the Pensacola office overlapped with the extensive investigation into President Bill Clinton’s sex life by hundreds of FBI agents. Atchison then served for several more years—almost seven, to be exact—under George W. Bush, during both the post-9/11 ‘security’ ‘crackdown’ and the political designation of a cluster of federal prosecutors to be fired during Bush’s second term. It was during this latter period, if not before, that Roy Atchison distinguished himself by 1) spending so much time in the office on personal computers and on office computers that at least one colleague thought he had a business on the side; 2) engaging in collecting and viewing child pornography at work; 3) attempting to branch out in his sex life, allegedly, in connection with travel, possibly including official travel; and 4) finally attempting full-blown pedophilia acts that resulted in his arrest.

Much remains unclear. But one thing is clear: everything in Atchison’s track record suggests that the people who hired him, who supervised him and who worked with him were comfortable with him as a non-MENSA candidate. His story is among other things the story of a non-egghead go-getter who went along, seemingly, to get along, and that was enough to keep him positioned in a federal position that many more deserving people could never get.

Perhaps it could be considered fitting, in a macabre gallows-humor way, that Roy Atchison spared the feds further exposure and embarrassment by killing himself in prison. But his suicide raises further questions as to how he was enabled to carry it off.

Next, Part 6: How he succeeded in suicide while in federal custody.

On the Paper Trail of a Pedophile, Part 3: How did he get those federal jobs?

Roy Atchison

The FBI conducted its first background check on John David Roy Atchison in May 1985, when he applied successfully for a position as Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of Georgia, in Atlanta. The full and detailed application packet is unremarkable, with the possible exception of a one-day arrest on innocuous charges, to be discussed in a later article. It is worth noting that Roy Atchison spent years moving around, both during college and after graduating from college. Many people move several times in their twenties, but the numerous moves—taking one job after another before he settled down in Birmingham, Ala.—meant that the FBI Director on May 2, 1985, had to direct SAC’s (Special Agents in Charge) in ten cities to check into and verify Atchison’s application.

Northern District of Georgia federal building

As shown in the signed job application, when Atchison applied to the DOJ he had been an attorney with the General Services Administration in Atlanta since September 1983 and had lived in a rental duplex in Smyrna, Ga., since his marriage in 1983. In the background check, neighbors called them a nice quiet couple taking frequent trips on weekends but having few guests. No noise; no financial problems; the only tiny blot on his record a single account dispute with Continental Airlines. Moving, changing and traveling were a continuing pattern in his young adulthood, but not in ways to be picked up on by investigators.

He was born Aug. 28, 1954; his application memorandum is dated Apr. 25, 1985; so he became an AUSA at thirty. Not bad for an uncommitted student, school hopper and job hopper, but then these were the anti-egghead Reagan years. His father, a physician, was from Alabama, and his parents had settled in Gulfport, Miss., where Atchison graduated from high school.

The moves were numerous—at least eighteen times or eighteen residential addresses from September 1971, when he left his parents’ Gulfport home, to the time of his DOJ application.

Atchison finished high school in August 1971—high school grades not included in the application–and attended three universities, spending a year at the University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg (Sept. 1971-May 1972, GPA 2.43), and the next year at the University of South Alabama, Mobile (Sept. 1973-May 1974, GPA 2.44), before transferring again to the University of Florida, Gainesville, where he graduated with a B.S. in Business Administration.

He worked at a series of short-term jobs in college, including a few months in sales at the Stag-N-Drag in Gainesville Mall. Reason for leaving: “found better position,” i.e. six months as Acquisition Clerk at the U. of Florida Medical Center Library, in Gainesville. After the B.S., Atchison worked in sales from 1976 to 1978 at the Home Life Insurance Co. in New Orleans, then a month at the Ashcraft Corp. in Mobile, Ala.

U Florida medical center library

So far, nothing remarkable in any sense–years of twenty-something drift, school transfers, a series of jobs, some obtained through relatives and acquaintances. Supervisors, if they remembered him, gave him high marks. Several small businesses had folded by time of application, the FBI notes; co-workers had moved; many supervisors, co-workers and professors did not remember Atchison. Bartholomew LaRocca, Atchison’s supervisor at Home Life Insurance, praised him and according to the FBI, “still maintains contact with the applicant [in 1985] and handles his insurance affairs.”

The other partner, Frank Freilder, Jr., was unavailable for interview by the FBI.

Five years after college, in September 1978, following a summer as construction supervisor for [a company] in Houston, Tex., Atchison enrolled in the M.B.A. program at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, attending UAT for three semesters, 1978-79 and summer 1979. While in B-school, Atchison secured a part-time appointment as a graduate research assistant for most of 1979. This was in a management institute funded by a federal grant, Atchison’s first stint on a government paycheck. The professor who supervised the program did not recall Atchison at the time of the background check. The FBI check notes that Atchison completed course work for the M.B.A. in 1979 but had two Incompletes (“I” grades) that had to be removed–he was admitted to candidacy for the M.B.A. in February 1981—and the interviewee assumes this is why he did not get the M.B.A. until May 10, 1981 (GPA 2.64).

At that time, he was enrolled at Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law in Birmingham, Ala., returning to the place where his family had roots. During the same year–the exact dates are inconsistently given–he also worked as a clerk at the Birmingham law firm of Starnes & Atchison, co-founded by a cousin, W. Michael Atchison. (Well-regarded local attorney Mike Atchison moved to another firm in 2010, and Starnes & Atchison changed its name; see later post.)

Roy Atchison got his J.D. at Cumberland School of Law in May 1982. He failed one course, Property I, in fall 1979, but re-took it fall 1981, got an A. Several Cumberland professors interviewed by the FBI in 1985 did not recall Atchison; professors who did remember him recommended him for a position of trust and confidence with the U.S. government. He graduated with a scholastic average of 1.81 on a three-point system, 85^th in a class of 190. Prof. Howard Walthall, one faculty member who did recall Atchison, stated that he was a very good student and received a grade of C in Walthall’s Securities course, and recommended him for the AUSA position. Atchison took the LSAT three times, each time scoring in the 500s out of 800.

While commuting to Tuscaloosa for business school and then attending law school in Birmingham, Atchison was putting down roots in Birmingham. Neighbors interviewed in the background check corroborated in 1985 that Atchison had lived for five years on 13^th Street South, in Birmingham, where he had bought a house and converted it into several apartments, occupying one himself.

The files do not elaborate on Atchison’s move from Birmingham to Georgia, or his later move from Georgia to the Northern District of Florida. The move from GSA office to prosecutor’s office, in Georgia, is summarized thus:

“Kathy Buono, Office of Regional Counsel [GSA], advised the applicant commenced employment with the Office of Regional Counsel on September 19, 1983, and terminated employment with same on May 11, 1985, in order to accept a position with the Office of the United States Attorney, Northern District of Georgia, Atlanta, Georgia. Records reveal [name redacted] Office of Regional Counsel, to be the applicant’s supervisor during the applicant’s period of employment with the [GSA]. Buono advised that [name redacted] is presently away from the Atlanta area, and could not be contacted for further comment concerning the applicant until mid-June, 1985. Buono could provide no further information identifiable with the applicant.”

The Georgia track record is otherwise scant, as at the time Atchison applied as AUSA, he was not listed as a member of the Atlanta Bar Association or the Georgia State Bar Association. His application does, however, list membership in the Alabama State Bar from September 1983 and in the Florida State Bar from June 1984. He had been the subject of a full background check for Secret Clearance by the GSA, 10-12-1983.

Between finishing law school in spring 1982 and starting at the GSA in fall 1983, Atchison worked for a brother-in-law, Steven P. Randall, at STR Petroleum Properties in Laurel, Miss. Atchison listed Randall, of Jackson, Miss., as a close personal associate for the background check. According to Randall, Atchison handled general legal matters March-September 1983. In applying to the DOJ, Atchison initially wrote down the STR Petroleum period as “self-employed,” a statement he later clarified/corrected for the Bureau. While handling legal work for Randall, Atchison simultaneously managed a 7-Eleven store in Madeira Beach, Fl., and was given a highly favorable reference by his Southland Corp. supervisor.

Duval County FL

Atchison’s other references include a public defender in the Duval County, Fl., office; a friend from the Home Life Insurance Co. days, Royce Blanchard, who is active in New Orleans politics; and two law school classmates, one being Vincent T. Cheatham of Birmingham (presumably equipped with a snappy comeback for the old joke about a law firm named ‘Dewey Cheatham and Howe’.)

The tacit question in these records remains: How did Atchison get good federal jobs in the first place? Part of the development is clear—law school to a government agency to a more desirable federal job. Questions about who provided references, who co-signed notes if any, etc., are not answered. Beyond that, attorney Maurice R. Mitts of Mitts Milavec replies matter-of-factly, “It’s not that hard” to get a job in the Justice Department. If you “have a good work ethic and keep your grades up,” Mitts repeats, “it’s really not that hard.”

Whether or not Atchison’s academic career met the good-grades-and-work-ethic standard, Atchison managed to gain entrée in a professional job market that many other professionals have found a tough row to hoe. Mitts, a defense attorney, never encountered Atchison, but he did meet ADA Don Russell of Birmingham in court, years back. Russell was the ADA who gave Atchison a pass by dropping reckless driving and narcotics possession charges.

Next, Part 4: Things that would have gotten you and me into trouble . . .

[Note: This blog was originally published in September 2011 but was deleted by the system in May-June 2011. Here re-posted from Word files.]

On the Paper Trail of a Pedophile, Part 2: The Friendliest Little Old Workplace in Florida?

Roy Atchison

This blog article is the second in a series on John David Roy Atchison. Atchison, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Northern District of Florida, Pensacola office, was arrested in Detroit in September 2007 on charges relating to pedophilia. He committed suicide in federal prison in October 2007. Arrest and suicide were not foregrounded by the Department of Justice in the Bush administration. The first articles, based largely on FBI material obtained under FOIA, focus on the criminal acts and their context in 2007 in the Pensacola office.

One question arising from Roy Atchison’s workplace at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Pensacola, Fl., (see previous post, 9/9/2010) is whether his computer use at work was monitored by anyone in authority. Given that 2007 was well post-9/11, the guess would be yes. Given the data collected by the FBI on Atchison, the actual answer seems to be no.

Take the continued information provided by [name redacted], the contract employee who helped Atchison out by buying doll clothes for the “Dora the Explorer” doll he was taking with him to meet a fictional five-year-old girl in Detroit, Sept. 2007.

Dora The Explorer

[Name redacted] recalled seeing Atchison bring his personal laptop into the office. “She recalls seeing him wrapping it up to put away, such as unplugging and putting it into a bag.” [emphasis added]

When Atchison was arrested, his personal laptops—two, one being used by his wife—were confiscated, along with his workplace desktop and removable flash drives. Setting aside the criminal acts under investigation, this would seem a lot of computer drives to keep an eye on, just with a view to general security and privacy, and the trekking laptops to and from the office would seem an obvious security breach.

One question is whether Assistant U.S. Attorneys are even allowed, let alone encouraged, to bring their personal laptops to and from the office. Detailed questions placed with the U.S. Attorney’s office in Pensacola are routed to press handlers in another office. The Northern District of Florida includes the Gainesville area, where Pastor Terry Jones’ Dove World Outreach Center is located. The U.S. Attorney’s office is probably busy with other questions. However, spokesperson Laura Sweeney does transmit a statement of official policy; see below.

The workplace friendliness shown to Roy Atchison by the unnamed contract employee also extended to other people in the office. An Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Pensacola office, for example, told FBI investigators that she would have trusted Atchison “with her life” before the arrest, knew his family, and usually met him for a drink when they were both on a trip out of town. He had declined drink plans for the most recent trip to Detroit.

Remarkably, the name-redacted AUSA also had observed Atchison’s extensive computer use. Follow this one closely, for it is truly astounding:

“[AUSA, name redacted] stated Atchison had always been a “wheeler dealer” type. Atchison was always known for finding a deal. [Redacted] believed Atchison had a business on the side. [Redacted] stated she inferred this because Atchison was always using his personal laptop in the office. Atchison stated, “He was on it a lot.” [Redacted] said that Atchison even showed her how he connected the laptop to his cell phone. According to [redacted] Atchison had been bringing his personal laptop to work for approximately six months. A week prior to her Detroit visit, [redacted] told her husband that Atchison must have a side business because he had been on his personal laptop a lot more than usual.” [emphasis added]

The obvious question here is whether AUSAS are allowed to have personal ‘business on the side,’ conducted from the office. Officially federal policy prohibits moonlighting while on the job, for any federal employee and particularly for federal prosecutors. Spokesperson Laura Sweeney replies as follows:

“Ms. Burns, With respect to your questions concerning office policy in general, there are specific federal statutes and regulations governing the conduct of Department of Justice employees.  These statutes and regulations are summarized in the Department of Justice Ethics Handbook.  The handbook provisions most relevant to your inquiry include: Use of Government Property and Time Generally, you should be mindful of your responsibility to make an honest effort to use government property and official time, including the time of a subordinate, for official business only. However, as a Justice Department employee, you are generally authorized to make minimal personal use of most office equipment and library facilities where the cost to the Government is negligible.5 CFR 2635.70428 CFR 45.4General RuleYou should not engage in any outside employment or other outside activity that conflicts with your official duties. Employees are prohibited from engaging in outside employment that involves criminal matters, the paid practice of law or matters in which the Department is or represents a party. Only the Deputy Attorney General may waive these prohibitions.5 CFR 2635.8025 CFR 3801.106Approval for Certain Outside ActivitiesYou are required to obtain written approval for certain outside employment including the practice of law that is not otherwise prohibited or any outside employment involving a subject matter related to the responsibilities of your component.5 CFR 3801.106 These provisions, which were in effect in 2007 and long before that time,  prohibit an employee from using the time of a subordinate employee for non-business purposes.   They also prohibit an employee: from engaging in outside employment during business hours, from using government property for a side business, and from making personal use of government property except where the cost to the government is negligible.   The events that led to the arrest of J.D. Roy Atchison and followed in its wake have caused great suffering to his family, his colleagues, and his friends.  We will not compound that suffering by commenting further on those events.”

Arguably the suffering might have been minimized had Atchison not been able to take his own life while in custody, the issue for a later post in this series. In any case, in fall 2007 there was apparently no effective monitoring within the Justice Department to keep Atchison from extensive computer use for his own purposes.

The question arises whether AUSAs under the Bush administration were typically allowed to have ‘a side business,’ so long as no one caught them at it. A further question is whether they were typically allowed to conduct personal business of any kind from the office. It may be noted that the fellow Assistant U.S. Attorney not only speculated that Atchison had a ‘side business,’ but was cool with it, discussing it at home with her spouse.

Like the contract employee, the AUSA also did small personal favors for Atchison at work: “[Redacted] stated the week before she came to Detroit, she helped Atchison with digital images. Atchison had asked her for assistance in cropping photos,” and she cropped some photos, although none pertaining to child pornography.

Unbeknownst to her, the help provided by the female AUSA pertained to some unsavory fruit. When the FBI seized Atchison’s two laptops, a hard drive and two removable drives, information recovered included more than 2,900 “Possible Sexual Exploitation of Children Pictures,” 51 “Possible Sexual Exploitation of Children Pictures Involving Bondage and/or Torture,” ten “Possible Sexual Exploitation of Children Movies,” eight “Possible Pictures of the Subject of Investigation,” and hundreds of Yahoo! Chat Files including 210 files for profiles aaronpottypants and fldaddy04.

So much for ‘Big Brother’ in the Bush Justice Department of 2007: There is no reasonable doubt whatsoever that Atchison spent a noticeable amount of time online in the Pensacola office, pursuing  interests it would be Bowdlerization to call ‘illicit’, without raising an alarm at work. Not only did unnamed colleagues unwittingly help Atchison, on the job, in his disturbed pursuit, nothing in the FBI file indicates that he was ever called out for using his personal laptop in the office or for using the office computer for personal business. To the contrary, Atchison’s co-workers’ attitude on his having a business on the side seems to have been favorable if not somewhat congratulatory. Atchison may have had the friendliest little old workplace in the Sunshine State.

Arrest

But Atchison himself, when arrested, told authorities that he had been under increasing stress at work:

“Atchison stated that he was stressed because of a reckless AUSA that was making his life miserable. Atchison asserted his case load was three times the size of anyone else in the office. Atchison stated there were two prosecutors from his office currently on an evaluation team in Detroit, Michigan.”

Presumably the “reckless AUSA” was a different person from the helpful digital photography expert. Setting aside that Atchison might have been wiser to steer clear of Detroit for what he thought was a pedophile rendezvous if two colleagues of his were posted there, this first FBI interview is noteworthy in that Atchison fails to acknowledge how helpful and friendly his female co-workers were, how supportive of him. Rather, Atchison “asserted he has been under a lot of stress in the past year. This led to an increase in Atchison’s drinking and Internet activity. Atchison stated he found chatting with various people on the Internet interesting.”

He provided the same explanation in his initial written statement:

“I, John D Roy Atchison, over the past year or so I have been under increasing stress at work and at home. This caused undiagnosed depression, excessive alcohol consumption and I began to frequent the internet, particularly a website called Hi5. As I became more involved in that site I came across several individuals who appeared to have a network of families who allowed adults to have sexual contact with their minor daughters. Prior to this contact I had never known such a thing existed on any organized basis. Because of my state of mind at the time, I found conversation with these individuals strangely interesting . . .”

Little of this was picked up by co-workers, although one interviewee did tell the FBI that Atchison was ‘paranoid’ and always thought someone was watching him. But all of those in daily contact with Atchison expressed surprise at his arrest, and none of them had noticed any excessive drinking. As the FBI noted, Atchison’s “family, coworkers and members of the community were shocked” when he was arrested.

“The only indications of deceit,” investigators noted, “were related to his travels”:

“At the time of Atchison’s arrest, his family believed that he was on a government sponsored trip; and coworkers believed he was on authorized vacation/leave to visit a brother . . . A general comment made by those who know Atchison was that he did a lot of traveling.”

As with Atchison’s office computer use—on at least three computers and two removable drives—the office apparently facilitated, rather than monitored, his frequent traveling. Judging from the FBI file, the one travel request turned down was the trip to attend a child molestation seminar.

In his first FBI interview, according to Special Agent Matthew Bowman, Atchison “stated he doesn’t know any mothers that allow men to have sex with their children”—perhaps a true statement as far as it goes, since the correspondent he was in touch with was an undercover agent. He denied traveling to have sex with a minor, saying that “he flew to San Diego right after September 11, 2001. However, he had never flown to San Diego to have sex with a minor.” (The reason for having Atchison, a specialist in asset forfeiture proceedings, fly to San Diego just after 9/11 is not disclosed or indicated in the files. He seems to have been drafted in the push for extra manpower for 9/11 investigation.)

His explanation for the Detroit trip, in this Sept. 16 interview, was that “he came to Detroit, Michigan in order to speak to “this lady”, Jessica LNU [last name unknown]. Atchison stated that “this lady” was allowing men to have sex with her daughter. Atchison asserted that he wanted to change this woman’s mind about turning her child out for sex. Atchison stated that while he was in Detroit he was going to show her there are other ways to raise a child, without sex.”

Asked, dryly, why he did not get in touch with a child protection agency “or an investigative agency such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Atchison “replied he did not because he was ‘stupid’.”

The story about trying to set a misguided mother straight was quickly jettisoned. Pursuant to a signed proffer agreement, Atchison confessed to an interviewing agent on Oct. 3 that he traveled to Detroit intending to have sex with the fictional child, and that he brought the petroleum jelly to use as a lubricant for the purpose. He also copped to purchasing the Dora the Explorer doll and some doll clothes and admitted pornographic Internet correspondence. In the subsequent FBI interview, Atchison continued to deny that he had ever had sex with a child and said he did not know why he had embarked on this particular trip to Detroit. He did, however, admit to having taken three trips to different cities to have sex with women who were “adult baby diaper lovers.” “Atchison stated these were fetish related encounters”; on two of the trips, the woman never showed.

In the later FBI interview, Atchison also “gave details about a ring of pedophiles located in the Western United States,” according to a heavily redacted page of FBI transcription, and provided information about some of his Internet pals. Regrettably, his suicide Oct. 5, 2007, in the federal prison in Milan, Michigan, may have truncated investigation into the pedophile ring, although before his death Atchison did give authorities permission to use his online identity.

In what might be fruit from his information—although the authorities aren’t saying—the Northern District of Florida announced the convictions of seven members of an international child exploitation ring Jan. 14, 2009. Seven other defendants indicted in the same case had previously pleaded guilty. A 40-count superseding indictment came out in March 2008; members of the illicit group, described as a complex and sophisticated enterprise connected on the Internet, were said to have traded more than 400,000 images and videos of child sexual abuse before it was dismantled by law enforcement.

How much Atchison’s death impeded further investigation into the pedophile ring has not been disclosed.

[Note: The original post here was deleted by the system in May-June 2011. This article is reconstructed from Word files.]