A 31-year-old Woodhaven tutor who admitted to sharing child pornography – including more than 100 “disturbing” videos and 1,770 iimages – on the Internet was sentenced to one to three years in prison, Queens District Attorney Richard Brown announced last week.
Robert Edele, 31, who worked as a tutor and holds a New York teaching certificate to instruct first through sixth grades, appeared last Thursday before Queens Acting Supreme Court Justice Dorothy Chin-Brandt and was sentenced to prison following his guilty plea in September to promoting a sexual performance by a child. As part of his plea, Edele agreed to surrender his teaching certificate and must register as a sex offender upon completion of his prison sentence.
Police had executed a court-authorized search warrant at Edele’s Woodhaven home on Oct. 15, 2012 and recovered his desktop computer. A forensic preview of the computer revealed videos and photos of boys and girls under the age of 12 depicted in a sexual manner, and the tutor admitted to downloading and sharing the files on a peer-to-peer network, according to Brown.
A peer-to-peer network is a group of personal computers that allows individuals to directly exchange files and emails with one another. Each computer can access any of the other computers on the network, although access can be restricted to those files that a computer’s user chooses to make available.
In the same announcement about Edele, the DA noted that a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer was sentenced to jail for attempting to meet for sexual relations with a person he had met online and believed to be a 14-year-old girl fro Queens. Instead, that girl turned out to be an undercover NYPD detective assigned to its Vice Enforcement Division.
“These two cases clearly illustrate the dark side of the Internet, which aids in fueling the deviant behavior of sexual predators trolling for underage victims,” Brown said in a prepared statement.
Robert Carle, 49, of Staten Island worked as a supervisory U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer and appeared last Thursday before Queens Acting Supreme Court Justice Barry Kron. He was sentenced to 60 days in jail and 10 years’ probation following his Ocdt. 15 guilty plea to second-degree attempted rape. A Sex Offender Registration Act hearing will be held prior to his release from jail, the DA said.
According to the charges in the Carle case, a NYPD Vice detective was operating in his undercover persona as a 14-year-old girl from Queens between July 29, 2011 and Aug. 10, 2011, during which time he received numerous instant messages – which were allegedly sexual in nature – from Carle, who was using the screen name ROBONS172, Brown said.
Carle was arrested on Aug. 10, 2011, when he appeared at a pre-arranged Queens location for what he allegedly believed would be a sexual encounter with the 14-year-old he had been instant messaging, according to the DA. He was taken into custody after a female undercover police officer waiting at the location approached Carle, who had previously emailed a photo of himself, and he identified himself as the person with whom she had been supposedly conversing online.
By Anna Gustafson
