The world's biggest convicted child pornographer

Thomas Reedy used to be a nurse. Then he found the Net and made a fortune. Now he faces 1,335 years in jail

Last week Pete Townshend lost his reputation and gained five years on the sex offenders register after accessing a child porn website. Should he ever feel the need to find out, his troubles began in a handsome but small red-brick building on the corner of Main Street in Fort Worth, Texas. That was where a geeky Texan called Thomas Reedy first set up an internet adult porn business. It was a business that mushroomed into something far more chilling. Reedy's desire for cash led him to galvanise an illegal but rampant desire for hard-core child pornography.

Within two years, the hard drives on the computers of Thomas Reedy's Landslide Productions were bulging with credit card details from 250,000 internet customers across the globe. Child porn consumers from 60 countries were being satisfied by Reedy's operation. One of those who entered their credit card details was Pete Townshend of The Who. In February, Reedy's building was demolished to make a car park. A global centre for child porn was in ruins – as Townshend's career also appears to be.

Reedy is now sitting in a Texan prison contemplating one of the world's longest ever sentences – 1,335 years, 15 years for each of the 89 charges, to run consecutively. His wife, Janice, who worked at the business, received 14 years.

Despite the "only in America"-style sentence, the woman who prosecuted Reedy, Assistant District Attorney Terri Moore, regards it as well-deserved. "He was making a tremendous amount of profit off the misery of children," she says. "He was feeding these perverts. He was feeding a beast. Granted, he wasn't hurting them himself. He wasn't in the photo committing the rape and he was not developing the photo, but he was feeding that. In my mind he just facilitated the rape of a child and should have a very harsh sentence." It is a pat speech from a woman used to dealing with nasty criminals in Texas. Yet, investigating the horrendous world of Landslide, it is hard not to agree with her.

Thomas Reedy, a former care nurse, was known in some quarters as "Greedy Reedy". His plan was to make a small fortune from some of the most sordid images conceivable, by putting them on the internet. While not the first to handle this kind of material – it's some years since paedophiles first used the net to swap the lurid collections that, previously, they had only been able to post to each other, or sell in back-street shops – he was the first to sell pay-per-view child porn on the net, and the first to succeed. His example has caused the net to be deluged by copycat sites.

"We're now receiving 80-85 new reports per week about pay-per-view child porn websites, nearly all of them housed in eastern Europe, Russia, the Ukraine and in different countries in South-east Asia," says John Carr from the Internet Watch Foundation. "I'm absolutely certain that one of the reasons we're seeing the growth is precisely because, following the Landslide case, criminals from all over the world realise how much money there is to be made in it."

Until recently, and on the Landslide site, the images were predominantly recycled child porn. But the huge amounts of money that web-based porn has injected into the industry is changing all that. "More and more children are being abused on a regular basis in order to provide new material for those websites," says Carr. "We know about certain individuals who are, on a regular basis, bringing children into a studio, a garage, photographing them and within 48 hours that material is up on the web."

Reedy grew up in Brownwood, a small town in central Texas. His father, a flea-market trader, provided a solid middle-class upbringing for his two boys. In his late teens, Reedy, the elder son, thought he might make it as a rock star. The family photo of him wearing black with an odd goatee beard makes him look like a heavy metal fan, although his taste was more country and western, true to his Texan roots. His future was to be more mundane, and he eventually headed off to nursing college, where his graduation shot reveals a smiling, ordinary man. However, between his long shifts at care homes, Thomas got going on the computer and quickly developed a talent for internet ideas. Some of the 54 different computer domain names that he registered were innocent enough – Harley Lovers.com, Payhere.net, Geekpay.com. There were some lurid sounding ones – net.sex.magazine and Pussies4U – but these were never activated by the canny Reedy. His most grotesque imagery was eventually marketed under the innocuous domain names of Landslide.com and Quayz.com.

Between 1996 and 1999, Landslide took nearly $10m, 85 per cent of which came from child porn. After paying handsome salaries and expenses that covered luxuries such as Mercedes sports cars for himself and Janice, investigators say, it still recorded profits of nearly $3m. Thomas and Janice, and her daughter from a previous marriage, moved into a sumptuous house on the prairies outside Fort Worth. Apart from throwing the occasional pool party at which he played loud classical music, Reedy kept a low profile.

On the net, however, he was brazen. In retrospect, it is surprising that he was able to trade unhindered for so long. One of the pages of Landslide, discovered by law enforcers, brags about its illegality. "I warn you, you are entering the most controversial site on the web. In this you will find adult explicit pictures, no legal content. All sick, all sex maniacs. We are frequently banned everywhere."

The upfront websites did encourage several visits from the police but Reedy avoided investigation, promising to report any illegal child porn. This early success appears to have made him over-confident about his ability to get out of a tight situation. His own email address was in honour of a man he would have liked to emulate: Houdini.

Reedy's big idea was to take money on behalf of adult and child pornography sites that had been developed and published by other people, the so-called webmasters. He would eventually be linked up with 5,700 such sites. Reedy was the middle man, taking a 33 per cent cut. Customers were asked to pay about $30 a go – and some were paying every day. The webmasters advertised their sites with eye-catching (or rather, stomach-churning) slogans and banners on Reedy's homepages. Bizarrely, Reedy claimed he was doing children a service by allowing access to the sites only through credit cards. This theory was based on the premise that in the US only over-18s are allowed to apply for a credit card. It did not account for the fact that nobody, whatever their age, was allowed to supply or view child porn.

The names of the sites pulled no punches in describing what the punters were about to experience: "Fucking Little Kids", "Child Rape", "Children Forced To Porn", "Children Of God", "Lolita Hard Core", "Blackcat Lolita Series".

A further glance at Reedy's 89-count criminal charge sheet reveals that the images contained shots of children and adults in any and every sexual position. Count One talks of "visual depictions of minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct"; Count Two refers to the "Lascivious Exhibition of minor female genitals and pubic area in a playpool". The long charge list shows still further degeneracy. Some charges refer to the abuse of babies, some of the acts reportedly taking place while the victims were still attached to their umbilical cords.

The jury in Reedy's trial was evidently appalled, taking just a few hours to convict. The only person who seems to have been surprised was Thomas Reedy, who to this day professes his innocence and says that he has been the victim of an appalling injustice.

When his business was closed down, Reedy wrote an on-line diary for six months which he thought that his customers might pay to access. It's the diary of somebody who refuses to face reality. An entry, dated October 1999 reads, "The main thought running through my head is that I will finally be able to defend my company as we have done nothing wrong. I have learned a lot of valuable lessons and that just makes me stronger." Later that month he adds, "Carrying on usual daily activities and my family has started to settle down somewhat." A month later he is back online with a new adult porn site which he describes as "way Kewl". Bizarrely he devotes another entry to a Lennox Lewis world heavyweight fight.

In letters from jail, Reedy bemoans his fate. "To my eyes the facts are crystal clear and believe me," he laments, "I have wept over them a thousand times. Each night I lay in my cell forced to replay each minute of testimony in my head, watching as if it's a movie on a tape. Knowing every line, every mistake, every lie. Seeing the facts that prove my innocence." The seven-page letter is the defence speech that Reedy never made, refusing to take the stand at his trial. At first glance it is a persuasive and detailed rebuttal of the charges, focusing on the claim that webmasters, not Reedy, published the offensive material.

The US police would dearly love to catch the webmasters, too. The names of three of Reedy's most prolific porn suppliers still lie on the charge sheet. However they were pumping their grotesque pictures out of countries such as Poland, Russia and Indonesia. Complex internet technology is on their side. The police fear that as soon as they shut one site, another will pop up somewhere else on the net.

But Reedy was sitting in one of America's most hard-line states and would not be allowed off so easily. As they pursued him, Dallas Police and the US postal service uncovered a few anecdotes about his sexual behaviour, but could not isolate him as a paedophile. They decided that he was self-deluded and greedy, corrupted by his transformation from struggling nurse to millionaire computer baron. And there will be more like him. Lieutenant Bill Walsh of the Dallas Police suggests that Thomas Reedy was a prototype. "I think some people are quick to pat themselves on the back for the largest internet case in the world," Walsh says. "I've got news for you. The next will be the largest. And the next after that will be the largest. These people are not going to go away."

In Britain, the Pete Townshend affair has shone a light on the dark side of the worldwide web. As John Carr says, "We are in the middle of a technological arms race. As soon as the police crack one approach the criminals come up with another. The police have stopped counting because the numbers of child porn images available on the net are overwhelming. Four years ago a dozen, 20 would have been considered a large number. Today the British police have got a database with five million."

'Crash Of An Internet Porn King: Operation Landslide', produced and directed by Pip Clothier, is on BBC2 at 9pm on Tuesday, 20 May