Delaware Man Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison for Production and Transportation of Child Pornography

WASHINGTON – A Wilmington, Del., man was sentenced yesterday to 30 years in prison for production and transportation of child pornography, announced Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney Charles M. Oberly III for the District of Delaware and John P. Kelleghan, Special Agent in Charge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) in Philadelphia.

Leonard Wasylyk, 49, was also sentenced to lifetime supervised release and will be required to register as a sex offender in any jurisdiction in which he lives, works or attends school. Wasylyk pleaded guilty in September 2011.

According to statements made and documents filed in court, an undercover agent from the Wilmington office of the Department of Homeland Security identified Wasylyk during an online undercover investigation into a private peer-to-peer network being used to trade images of child pornography. After downloading computer files containing child pornography from Wasylyk’s home computer, federal agents arrested him and executed a search warrant at his residence on Dec. 9, 2010. Law enforcement agents recovered a computer from Wasylyk’s bedroom that contained more than 60,000 images and more than 700 movies of child pornography, mostly featuring prepubescent and teenage boys engaged in sexual acts with each other or with adult males. Data recovered from Wasylyk’s computer revealed that he established an elaborate private online network of more than 150 child sex offenders with whom he traded images of child pornography and bragged about his multiple molestations of victims.

During the forensic review of Wasylyk’s computer, agents discovered more than 60 images of a young boy engaged in sexually explicit conduct with Wasylyk in the bedroom of his Wilmington residence. Agents subsequently identified the child and located him. The child reported that when the child was 12 and 13 years old, Wasylyk sexually abused him and produced the sexually explicit images while babysitting him. The forensic analysis also revealed that Wasylyk distributed the sexually explicit images of the child that he produced to other child sex offenders while bragging about having molested the boy.

The investigation revealed that Wasylyk also sexually abused, or assisted another sex offender in abusing, at least three other young boys. In March of 2009, Wasylyk was placed on the Pennsylvania Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse stemming from his abuse of two young boys he babysat in January 2009. Forensic data from Wasylyk’s seized computer revealed that a digital camera seized from Wasylyk’s bedroom had been used, in May 2004, to photograph another prepubescent child engaged in sexually explicit conduct with another child sex offender.

This case is being investigated by the ICE-HSI. This case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Edward J. McAndrew of the District of Delaware and Trial Attorney Thomas Franzinger of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.