Man pleads guilty in child sex abuse case

A former federal air marshal from Hicksville, already serving a 20-year sentence for child pornography, pleaded guilty Tuesday in a separate case to photographing three young boys while he was molesting them, according to officials.

Michael McGowan, who now faces up to an additional 90 years in prison when he is sentenced, made the new admissions at the federal district court in Central Islip as he pleaded guilty to three counts of exploitation of children, according to officials.

McGowan, 39, was initially arrested in 2004 when he was caught in a federal sting operation in which he attempted to buy child pornography.

A search of his Hicksville home at that time uncovered more than 1,300 images of child pornography in photographs and movie clips on his computer but not its hard drive, officials said at the time.

In 2008, while serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison on the initial pornography conviction, McGowan sent a letter to an unidentified person asking him to "take care of something," according to court papers.

"I hope you took care of that. . . . I'm in here long enough. I don't need to worry about it being found by someone," McGowan wrote.

When a guard, who was screening prisoners' mail, asked McGowan what he was referring to, he told him that it involved a hard drive he had hidden in his home, officials have said.

Investigators then questioned the recipient of the letter, who said it referred to a hard drive that had been concealed behind drywall in the basement apartment.

That hard drive, which the recipient had moved to a nearby Hicksville storage facility, contained the pictures McGowan took while molesting the three boys, officials said.

The photography and molestation occurred in 2003, according to court documents.

When he was arrested in 2004, McGowan had been an air marshal since 2002, and before that he was an agent with the U.S. Border Patrol, according to officials.

McGowan faces an additional 10 to 30 years in prison on each of the exploitation counts.

McGowan's defense attorney, Randi Chavis, declined to comment after the plea, as did federal prosecutor Allen Bode.