16 local men have been arrested in the Regpay case
Thomas Farnham was up early one Monday morning sitting at his computer in the bedroom of his house trailer in Mayville.
Soon, the 49-year-old school bus driver went to one of his favorite Web sites, which asked for his credit card in exchange for a secret password. Farnham complied. In fact, he twice typed in his credit card number, authorizing $49 payments each time.
Within minutes, he was looking at pictures of young children engaged in sexual activities.
At the same time, thousands of miles away from Farnham’s Chautauqua County home, child pornographers associated with an Eastern European company known as Regpay fattened their bank accounts.
U.S. authorities eventually got the names of Regpay’s 90,000 worldwide customers. They found 168 from Western New York.
Given limited staff in an already overburdened criminal justice system, federal agents working in the Buffalo area sifted through the names, looking for people who work with children, had prior arrests, and those with the biggest child pornography collections. They identified 60 or so people they felt were the most threatening among the 168 and began investigating.
So far, 16 local men have been arrested from the Regpay list, including Farnham, a banker, a teacher, a police officer, a priest, another school bus driver, two doctors, a laborer and a tourist who overstayed his visa.
Eleven stand convicted. Four cases are pending. The other involves a fugitive.
Most of those arrested, like Farnham, were serious viewers of child pornography, with seemingly addictive habits and large stashes of illegal images on their computers.
Farnham had more than 600.
So did Terryl J. Noyes, 45, of Buffalo, also a school bus driver.
And Donald Anson, 50, an unskilled laborer from Rochester, who had nearly 93,000 images on his computer.
Anson collected and organized his child pornography like a kid does with baseball cards, authorities said.
Most of the men arrested were strictly collectors. Some traded and e-mailed images back and forth, but generally weren’t producing pornography, molesting children, or profiting from their Internet pastime.
The exception was Farnham, who admitted he molested a teenage boy 20 years earlier.
Given this past undetected crime, Farnham got 10 years in prison.
And Anson, given his vast collection and refusal to take responsibility, got 20 years.
“They claim I had 90,000 images that were illegal. I totally disagree … 300 to 500 would be a very high estimate in my opinion,” Anson wrote to The Buffalo News.
Most of the other Regpay convicts got three to six years in prison, although a few got less.
Hamburg Police Officer George Adymy Jr. got one year, after he and his attorney pleaded with the court, arguing Adymy was in counseling, and that the loss of his job, his reputation and his family’s respect were punishment enough.
Also getting a light sentence was Julius Goepp, a former Rochester-area doctor who headed emergency pediatric medicine at Strong Memorial Hospital. A judge took into account that Goepp had voluntarily entered a counseling program before agents arrested him. Goepp was sentenced to three years’ probation, a $5,000 fine and nine months of home confinement.
“That is the sentence of the court,” U.S. District Judge David G. Larimer said, adding: “Mr. Goepp, to whom much is given, much is expected.” Farnham, meanwhile, contacted in prison, declined to comment. But in court papers, he expressed remorse.
“Those men [who arrested me] did me more of a favor than they will ever know, by removing that filth from my life,” he wrote to a judge.
— Lou Michel and Susan Schulman
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