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Guilty child porn plea for LI real estate broker

BY EDEN LAIKIN | eden.laikin@newsday.com

8:46 PM EST, January 11, 2008

A Southampton real estate broker pleaded guilty Friday in federal court to receiving child pornography.

Matthias von Wrede, 34, was charged last year with uploading hundreds of explicit photographs of children -- some young enough to be in diapers -- engaging in sex acts to a Yahoo online social group, federal officials said.

Von Wrede, who came here from Germany to broker multimillion-dollar homes for wealthy Europeans through the international real estate company of Engel & Völkers, could face 5 to 20 years in prison.

He remained in federal custody in the Nassau County Correctional Center in East Meadow Friday.

Von Wrede entered the guilty plea in Central Islip before U.S. District Judge Thomas Platt.

His defense attorney, Melinda Sarafa of Manhattan, said the true context in which the conduct in question took place has been absent from media coverage.

"As reflected today in court, Mr. Von Wrede participated in a variety of online role playing chats in which he adopted an adult female screen persona," Sarafa said.

"It was in that context that he received the images for which he accepted responsibility for today in court," she said.

Von Wrede was arrested in March 2007 after Suffolk police in conjunction with New York State Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force executed a search warrant at his Sag Harbor home and seized his laptop computer and multiple disks.

The authorities uncovered an extensive child pornography collection, including still and video images.

Suffolk Sgt. John Cowie of the computer crimes unit said the images portrayed "some particularly brutal graphic stuff with young babies, infants, including torture and bondage, rapes and sodomies. ... Probably some of the worst of the worst."

Members of the computer crimes unit were able to identify one of the girls as being from Long Island, through a national child porn database and their old files.

In August 2006, von Wrede posted 29 images to a Yahoo Web page, federal court papers said. Yahoo tipped off authorities.

Videos, including one depicting a girl between the age of 7 and 10 in a Cambodian child brothel, were downloaded to von Wrede's hard drive in January 2007.

When authorities first went to arrest him, von Wrede denied ever having seen the images.

Once agents found more images on his laptop, he admitted they were his and that he had photos of girls as young as 4 having sex.