Blankenship allegedly used the online alias "14yrsmax."
Attorney General Eric Holder listens at left as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano speaks at the Justice in Washington, Wednesday, Aug. 3, 2011, to discuss the results of the largest U.S. prosecution of an international criminal network organized to sexually exploit children. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)WESTFIELD - A city man is among 72 suspects charged with participating in an international online child pornography ring whose members traded tens of thousands of images and videos of sexually abused children ages 12 and under, federal authorities say.
Rush Frank Blankenship, 26, of Westfield, David Whitten, of Lynn, and Daniel Deschenes, of Terryville, Conn., were among those arrested by special agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations, according to a press release issued by the agency.
Addresses for the three were not immediately available from federal authorities.
Prosecutors say those charged used an online bulletin board called "Dreamboard" to trade violent sexual images. To date, 52 of the 72 charged defendants have been arrested in the United States and abroad.
Blankenship is scheduled to plead guilty to federal child pornography charges on Sept. 1 in U.S. District Court in Shreveport, Louisiana, according to a court document. The document, labeled "Minute Entry" and filed July 8, 2011, reads, "At the request of counsel, this matter is hereby set for entry of guilty plea on September 1, 2011 at 2:00 p.m."
The Federal Bureau of Prisons inmate locator website, which lists Blankenship’s age as 26, stated Thursday that he is currently “in transit.”
U.S. attorney general Eric Holder and Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano announced on Wednesday that a 20-month law enforcement effort, called Operation Delego, targeted more than 600 Dreamboard members around the world for allegedly participating in the private, members-only Internet club created to promote pedophilia.
Numerous participants in the network sexually abused children ages 12 and under, produced images and video of the abuse and then shared it with other club members, according to court papers released in the case.
To conceal their conduct, members used screen names rather than actual names and accessed the bulletin board via proxy servers, with Internet traffic routed through other computers to disguise a user’s location, according to the court papers.
Participants were required to continually upload images of child sexual abuse to maintain their membership.
Blankenship is one of 21 suspects listed in federal indictments filed on June 15 in Shreveport, La. The indictments were unsealed Wednesday.
According to the indictment, Blankenship published three separate advertisements in April and May 2010 on Dreamboard in which he offered to distribute files containing child pornography. Blankenship allegedly used the online alias “14yrsmax.” and posted video and image files to the site labeled “Girl with Dog," "Nice small sets” and “Candle.”
Blankenship’s lawyer, John Nathaniel Bokenfohr, could not be reached for comment Thursday morning.
According to documents filed with the Massachusetts secretary of state’s office, Rush F. Blankenship and Rush G. Blankenship are signatories with Neighborhood Lawn Care LLC, which is based in Monson. The 52-year-old Rush G. Blankenship, reached at that business on Thursday, declined to comment; he faces no allegations in the federal case.
Of the 72 charged in the United States in the pornography case, 43 have been arrested in this country and nine abroad. Another 20 are known to authorities only by their Internet names and remain at large.
Authorities have arrested people in 13 other countries — Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Germany, Hungary, Kenya, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Qatar, Serbia, Sweden and Switzerland, but some of those were arrested on local rather than the U.S. charges.
Operation Delego represents the largest prosecution to date in the United States of individuals who participated in an online bulletin board conceived and operated for the sole purpose of promoting child sexual abuse, disseminating child pornography, and evading law enforcement.
All 72 of the defendants are charged with conspiring to advertise and distribute child pornography, and 50 of them are also charged with engaging in a child pornography enterprise. The charges and arrests were conducted in three separate phases over the course of the operation. Twenty-eight defendants were charged and 19 were arrested during phase one of the operation; 22 defendants were charged and 17 were arrested during phase two of the operation; and 22 defendants were charged and 16 arrested during phase three of the operation.
Thirteen of the 52 individuals arrested have pleaded guilty. To date, 20 of the 72 charged individuals remain at large and are known only by their online identities. Efforts to identify and apprehend these individuals continue.
Four of the 13 individuals who have pleaded guilty for their roles in the conspiracy have been sentenced to prison. Their sentences range from 22 to 30 years and each has also received a lifetime of supervised release following his release from prison as part of their sentence.