Fact, fantasy collide in trial

Associated Press

NEW YORK

A teenager posts a Twitter message saying he’s going to blow up a school. A husband grumbles that he’s looking for a hit man to kill his wife. A wannabe jihadist says in an Internet chat room that he is ready to become a martyr.

Are any of them serious? Or is it all bluster?

Separating real threats from idle talk is a workaday task for law enforcement. It is rarely easy, but it has taken on extreme complexity in the lurid case of Gilberto Valle, a New York City police officer charged with plotting to kidnap, cook and eat women he knew.

At a conspiracy trial in its second week, a jury has heard how Valle was part of an international community of fetishists who got their kicks trading wild fantasies online about violent acts against women.

By all accounts, he was into some unusual stuff. After fighting crime at his day job, Valle spent his free time logging in to websites such as Dark Fetish, where users posted accounts of rape, necrophilia and women being strangled and burned at the stake.

The site carried a disclaimer: “This place is about fantasies only.” But prosecutors claim Valle took steps to get into closer contact with some of the women he wrote about, including using a police-department database to look up personal information, emailing and texting them and meeting with at least one of them.

Jurors in what the tabloids have dubbed the “Cannibal Cop” case will have their hands full when they begin deliberations, possibly as early as today.

Valle’s lawyer has argued that it was all clearly fiction. The plans Valle gruesomely described never were carried out. He never purchased the torture implements he described in emails with his fetishist pen pals. He never met the men accused of being his co-conspirators. The women he wrote about learned of the plans only after his arrest, with the exception of his wife, who discovered her husband’s pastime after installing spyware on his computer.

As strange as the case is, experts said it touches on a common challenge in law enforcement: deciphering intent without running afoul of the First Amendment right to free speech.

“Simply thinking bad thoughts is not a crime anywhere,” said David Raskin, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted terrorism conspiracies.

Nor is spouting off about violence on the Internet. So when terrorist sympathizers go online and talk about wanting to blow up buildings, the FBI often will send in an operative to learn how far they’re willing to go.

“Obviously, they are very different types of offenses,” Raskin said. “But it’s the same challenge from the law-enforcement perspective, which is, ‘How do we get inside the guy’s head and figure out if he will act on the things he is saying?’”

Last year, the FBI ran that type of test on Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, a college student from Bangladesh who fell under scrutiny after he began using social media to seek support for a terror attack.

The sting ended with the 21-year-old sitting in a van in front of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, trying to detonate what he believed was a bomb. It was a fake, supplied by undercover agents. He pleaded guilty in February.

The FBI agents who investigated Valle never tried a similar sting. The case against him is based mostly on his email exchanges.

Valle’s attorney, Julia Gatto, opened her defense by arguing that the officer was being prosecuted purely for private speech.

“We don’t convict people for sharing their thoughts, no matter how scary and disgusting they may be,” she told the jury. “If we did, our prisons would be full with the directors of horror movies, with the producers of violent video games, with famous authors like Stephen King. We don’t convict people because we don’t like their thoughts. And you, ladies and gentlemen, are not deputy agents of the thought police.”

The catch in Valle’s case is that he and the men he corresponded with talked in great detail about the twisted things they wanted to do. Maybe that was just to make the fantasy seem more real and feel more exciting. But maybe not.

The Russian entrepreneur who created Dark Fetish said in a video deposition in February that he himself had trouble discerning fact from fiction in some postings, and had kicked users off for discussing things that sounded like real crimes.

“Let’s say that it seemed not to be fantasy anymore,” Sergey Merenkov said. “It could have led to something bad, yes.”