US officials today said they had dismantled "the largest known commercial child pornography enterprise" ever, with 100 arrests over two years after an undercover investigation of a Texas company that distributed child pornography over the Internet.
They said the two-year investigation, called "Operation Avalanche," began in early 1999 with the discovery of a company called "Landslide Productions Inc." in Fort Worth, Texas.
It took in as much as $1.4 million a month, with most of the money coming from subscriptions to child pornography sites on the World Wide Web, the authorities said.
The couple who owned and operated the company were sentenced in federal court on Monday, with the husband getting life in prison and the wife getting 14 years.
Investigators targeted subscribers in the United States who expressed a desire to get child pornography or to have sex with children, and then sent them videotapes, CD-ROMs or floppy disks containing the material, they said.
"Today's Internet has also become the new marketplace for child pornography," Attorney General John Ashcroft told a news conference at US Postal Service headquarters to announce the end of the investigation.
Most of the child pornography on the web sites came from overseas, officials said.
Five international webmasters, from Russia and Indonesia, also have been charged, but they have yet to be found and brought to trial in the United States, the officials said.
Chief Postal Inspector Kenneth Weaver said nearly $100,000 was transferred to one webmaster for just one month's business.
"It may be the tip of the iceberg," Weaver said, but he added the results send the message that child pornography will be "taken very seriously."
Authorities were unable to say how many children were involved or to identify most of the children. But they did learn from a British detective the identities of a six-year-old boy and his eight-year-old sister from Britain, with the pictures taken by their stepfather.
Asked why only 100 out of the approximately 250,000 subscribers had been arrested, officials said the vast majority of them were in foreign nations and beyond US jurisdiction.
They said they focused only on those interested in child, not adult, pornography.
The couple who ran the enterprise, Thomas and Janice Reedy, were charged and convicted last year. Of the 100 individuals arrested, one has committed suicide while a 36-year-old North Carolina computer consultant was found to have been videotaping young girls and was sentenced to 17-1/2 years in prison.
Asked whether authorities took over the web site after the arrest of the Reedys and operated it, making controlled sales of child pornography to subscribers, Mr Ray Smith of the Postal Service declined to comment on specifics of the operation, saying he did not want "to compromise future investigations."