The Darkest Web (2026) Movie Script
1
Oh, he's on.
- Good.
- Oh, that's convenient.
We're probably almost exactly 12 hours away
from meeting him for the first time.
It'll be really real tomorrow.
- I know.
- Knowing that, like,
what happens tomorrow is
essentially the end of his freedom,
his life.
All right. Good afternoon.
I'm Greg Squire from
Homeland Security in Portland.
And thank you in advance for
helping with this case.
Particularly, I'd like to thank our
teams who are here from Brazil,
Australia and Europe.
Just really appreciate you guys coming
all this way to help.
It's been a very long time coming -
five, six years that Cassie and I have
gone through it.
This is him today.
Kind of easy to spot.
But we have a couple other
pictures in the ops plan.
He's going to be charged with enterprise.
And what that does is basically
highlight what he's been doing
and what the 400,000 people on his
website are responsible for -
the distribution of millions
of images and videos
of child sexual abuse.
I've been doing undercover a long time
and, trust me, these aren't just
run-of-the-mill paedophiles.
They're some of the most advanced
criminals on the planet.
This is the target's apartment,
mostly relevant to the three who are
going to be inside.
We're going to take him
inside almost immediately.
If he has his backpack with him, we'll
take that into custody,
same with the phone,
but that's the exit there.
Our three eyes in there will be in
comms with Cassie.
Cassie's going to be online early.
And if he decides to get online
before he goes to his big appointment,
and Cassie will be able
to engage, confirm he's in the apartment,
confirm he's online.
So it's a big day for Quackers.
There's a lot of foot traffic
out of this door.
A lot of kids move in and out of here.
There's a lot of adults, families.
So it's not just college kids here,
it's a pretty good mix of people.
Our three interior people will cover
here, here and here.
He's going to have to walk past you.
It's up to the three of you
how you want to do it.
As soon as they see him and begin to
kind of get an indication
what door he's going out,
they're going to call us and we'll
hit it up over the radio.
The central location will be my vehicle
and the few people who are with me.
Getting into the building,
it's going to be just
the apprehension team and my car.
Team Five, check in, please.
So we're going to roll up in the building
with maybe six to eight total.
No more than that.
Let's get a quick radio check.
Like, get to where your vehicles are,
get your gear on,
whatever you're going to have for
tactical gear.
Again, just to reiterate,
the primary objective here
is server access.
Any questions?
Stand by. Target is moving.
Hey. How you doing?
How you doing, bud?
Hey, Greg Squire of Homeland Security.
- All right. How are you?
- Good, buddy.
Got to have a little chat with you,
all right?
INAUDIBLE
Step. I think he can do it.
ALARM RINGS
WOMAN SIGHS
ALARM STOPS
DOG WHINES
OK.
HE WHISTLES
Come on.
Good boy. Good boy.
Bit of a morning routine
for the dog and I.
Get out into the woods.
Come on, let's go.
There are no houses, no lights,
very little cellphone coverage,
which is kind of a bonus.
HE WHISTLES
You know, the problem that we work
with never goes away.
What do you see, huh? What do you see?
When I started my career,
I didn't really realise
how deep and dark things were going to get.
BABY SQUEALS
BABY LAUGHS
In 2007, I was working for the Postal
Service.
I had two kids at that point.
My kids are the most important thing to me.
But I had spent seven years delivering letters,
and I was pretty much at my wits' end
at that point.
I applied for Homeland Security.
Basically, they said, "Hey, you know,
"you're going to be assigned to the
cyber group."
And I said, "OK, great." I was just
ready to start working.
Crimes against children was the bulk
of what we did in that group.
And I didn't have...really have any
idea what world exactly
I was walking into.
Here! Good boy.
Good boy! Yeah!
Come here.
The first video that I saw that really
opened my eyes
to what child sexual abuse was,
was in 2008.
Yeah!
So we moved in here
when the kids were both pretty little,
like, maybe, five and two,
something to that effect.
And it was just such an amazing spot to get.
We had a swimming pool,
great big yard.
And, you know, we would spend our off time
just letting the kids run around out here.
It was just a really nice piece of
land to have.
I think it was a Sunday morning
and the kids had been playing up on
the deck there by the windows.
I got my work laptop
and I had recently gotten a whole folder,
a whole... Basically, of results from
an email search warrant.
That was when I saw the one email from
a suspect,
and I noticed there was an attachment.
So I saw the attachment was a video.
So once I clicked and opened the video,
I just saw a bedroom, basically.
The camera kind of panned around and
there was a little girl in bed,
like, in an adult bed, a large bed.
And she was laying there, there was a book,
a big picture book, kids' book, next to her.
And then I could see an adult male
coming into the...coming into focus.
He started to read the book to her.
And, like, for that, for that 30
seconds
it looked like something normal.
And then he undresses her
and then the abuse starts.
And the girl just...
It looked like her soul left, watching
it, watching it happen.
And him...
..I was ready to murder him.
You know, like, just watching him do
this and watching her, like...
..just endure it, you know?
Like, that's what it looked like to me.
And, yeah, for that to go on for so long,
you know, I think it was probably four
full minutes of him raping her,
um, it's a fucking long time.
I mean, I had never seen anything like
that before.
You know, now I have an unfortunate
library of that stuff in my head,
and so do all the other, you know,
folks that do it.
But that was definitely the first time.
In a while it, like, takes from you,
it also, it also gives.
Like, you're not going to find a
better fuel
to go hunt someone down than that.
It doesn't get any more passionate
than that.
Mm.
- Keep it small.
You can always go back for seconds.
- I don't really like diet-sensitive Peter.
- Yeah, I know.
- How about that?
- LAUGHTER
- I think that's even, don't you?
One, two, three, four, five. Yeah.
- Thank you.
Ooh-hoo!
- See? Small piece.
- When I first met Greg, I thought he
was very intense.
Super high energy.
Hilarious.
Obviously, very dedicated.
- We just became... We became friends.
Like, we really had the same passion
about the work.
- Why doesn't it want me to go that...
I don't understand what it wants me to
do. It's weird.
- Have you been here before? If I told
you to drive home right now,
you wouldn't be able to make it.
- No.
- Not without GPS.
- Just saying.
We were working all the time.
It seemed like we were jumping from
one case to the next,
focused on the trading of child sexual
abuse materials.
Good thing is that you come out, like,
right in midtown...
- We had been doing all the
conventional, you know,
email cases and Facebook leads and
things like that.
We would say, "Oh, here's this screen
name.
"Let's ask the company who it's
registered to."
Or, "Let's look at the IP addresses
"that it's been accessing this website."
- It was so easy for law enforcement
to go after open websites
that everybody was transitioning over
to the dark web.
- The first case that really took off
on the dark web
was the Lucy investigation.
In January of 2014,
we discovered this series of photos that,
you know, was named Lucy,
of the same girl being sexually abused.
In the images, we could see light sockets,
electrical outlets.
So we knew it was most likely a little
girl here in the US.
We had, you know, enough reason to believe
that she was actively being abused,
and her pictures were being
distributed across the dark web.
As we gathered more,
we learned that she had been abused
from a younger age.
You know, this girl was probably seven
years old in the beginning,
and we think she's almost 12 years old now.
She was being raped by this man, maybe
up to five years.
I mean, it really was...
It kind of took us back a breath.
- The dark web is built to hide your identity,
to anonymise your traffic.
There's no traces of any information that say,
well, this is where this person came from.
So, literally, all we had with this
Lucy case
was the images that we were staring at.
But this offender was very good at
covering their tracks.
You know, consciously cropping out or
altering images
to remove specific things and be able
to hinder our progress.
For, like, distribution or
definitely production,
we don't have that. We won't have that
until we get back to the lab
and do a deeper dive.
- We were working this every day for
six, seven, eight months.
We could communicate all through the morning,
all through the night.
DOG BARKS
In the photos, like all photos, you know,
there's things in the background.
You know, we were looking for clues.
- We watched Lucy grow up, basically,
in an environment of abuse.
Like, of systematic abuse.
- I mean, it really took us aback,
especially, you know, Pete and I, you
know, having kids that age.
About the eighth month of the investigation,
we were able to identify a piece of
furniture in the photos.
That piece of furniture had far more
limited sales
than other items that we had already identified.
- We were trying to make
contact with manufacturers
and distributors and say,
"Help us out with this.
"You know, this furniture set,
"can you give us a customer list?"
We got a list of about 40,000 people
that had purchased the set.
- At that point in the investigation
we're looking at 29 states here in the US.
I mean, you're talking about tens of
thousands of addresses,
and that's a very, very daunting task.
It was a tough time for the team.
Nine months is a long time to look for somebody.
And as we're doing an investigation,
she's still being abused.
- There's victims that we have never identified.
But you can't give up.
If we're not going to do it,
who's going to do it?
Eventually, you're going to get
something that will get you there.
- TRAFFIC DIN
I can remember clear as day,
we were talking about, you know,
he's been very careful
and he's taking things out of the
pictures that,
you know, he feels would help identify
the girl and locate her
and everything else.
But the question at that point was...
..like, what...what can't you change?
Clothing can change.
Bedding can change.
All these things can change.
But is there something that can't
change?
And that's how we came to look at the bricks.
How often do you see an exposed brick wall
inside of a child's bedroom?
So I started just googling bricks,
and it wasn't too many searches that I found
the Brick Industry Association.
So I called. There was a number on
there, in Virginia.
And I said, "Hey, my name's Greg Squire.
"I work for the Homeland Security and, you know,
"we're working a case of a missing girl."
And the woman on the phone was awesome.
She was like, "How can the brick industry help?"
I said, "Well, I have a picture.
"I want to know if somebody can tell
me something about these bricks."
She said, "We have brick experts all
over the country.
"We can share it with our distribution list."
And we were wrapping things up for the day,
and I don't think I was even at the car
before I started getting emails.
And I think we all kind of felt like
that rush of adrenaline
was that, all of a sudden,
maybe something could come of this.
- I work for the Acme Brick Company.
I've been in sales since '81.
Over the years, I would say I've sold
in excess of
300 specific colours and sizes and
styles of bricks.
That day, I was sitting at my desk
doing my normal, probably paperwork
or a report or something for corporate,
and it popped up in my inbox.
And I read the email and I knew
exactly what the brick was.
I noticed that the brick was a very
pink cast brick,
and it had a little bit of a charcoal
overlay on it.
It was a modular eight-inch brick and
it was square-edged.
Immediately made the brick pop out to me
that it was a Flaming Alamo.
We made that brick from the late '60s
through about the middle part of the '80s.
And I had sold millions of brick from
that plant.
So I emailed Agent Squire.
- And I'm thinking, this is great.
And so in my mind, I'm going,
well, you know, would you have sales
records of something like that?
He's like, we've been selling this
brick since the '70s,
and it's all just a pile of notes, and
stuff like that.
And I was like, shit!
And it kind of took the steam out of
me a little bit.
And he says, I think he called me son,
he says, "Hey, you know what bricks are?"
And I'm like,
"You got me, sir, I don't know."
He goes, "Bricks are heavy."
- What I explained to Greg was that
brick are heavy
and we can only haul about 10,000 to a truck,
so we're not transporting bricks
typically all the way
across the country.
So don't be looking way, way out.
You need to be looking within this
smaller area.
- He says that brick didn't travel 50
miles out of this plant.
What... Like, I was so excited at that point.
- They were looking in 29 different states,
and it was a needle in a haystack.
That narrowed it down to possibly one
state, one city.
- We have an extremely small area to
look in now.
We were able to take the list from the
furniture manufacturer
and just draw a radius around this
brick factory
and see who falls in that radius.
He whittled down this 10,000-plus list
to probably 40, 50 people.
So we thought we had a fairly good shot
if we looked through social media
that somebody on that list might have
a picture of Lucy
on their page.
And probably by 9am,
we were flipping through social media pages
and there was Lucy right in front of us.
Couldn't fucking believe it.
Nine months of looking
and we're sitting there staring at
her, and we all looked and said...
..100%, this is her.
100%.
- We literally started with a picture
that could have started anywhere in
the world,
and then we narrowed it down to one house.
That was a good feeling.
- They had also figured out that
living in the house was
the mother's boyfriend,
and that that was a convicted sex
offender living there.
I mean, at that point, it's 10am or 11am
and our first thought was,
how do we get there before she's home
from school
and eliminate the chance of him having
access to her
even one more time?
And by four o'clock, our whole team
was in that house,
safeguarded Lucy,
had started the interview process,
and by five o'clock,
the suspect was in custody.
- I got an email saying, "We found her.
"This little girl now is safe and out
of harm's way."
My wife and I have been foster parents
for over 20 years.
We've had over 150 different children
in our home.
We've adopted three.
So, doing that over those years, we
had a lot of children
in our home that were abused, that
were neglected,
both physical and sexually abused,
and it leaves a mark on you.
It leaves a mark on your psyche that,
that stays with you.
What they do day in and day out, and
what they see is a magnification
of hundreds of times of what I've seen
or had to deal with.
So I can't imagine what they have to
take home with them at night.
- After the Lucy investigation,
Pete and I really began to focus and
become dedicated
to dark web activity.
- The use of the dark web just
expanded, just exploded.
The number of users and the number of outlets
were just, dramatic increase.
- That was our first glimpse of them
creating forum-based websites.
Those sites just look like a regular
forum of people
who all have a shared interest.
People can belong to woodworking forums
and gun forums and car forums.
The structure is exactly the same,
but for the content.
They trade child abuse material
all through the day and all through
the night.
Each site kind of has their own niche.
So this might be only boys, this might
be only girls,
or only hardcore.
You build a community around it and
you quickly find out
that there aren't just ones and twos
of guys interested in this,
but there's thousands.
And it just becomes a breeding ground
for who can be the more shocking person.
Who can take things to the next level.
We saw the abuse of children getting
younger
and getting more violent.
Probably it was out there, you know,
ten years ago,
but now we saw it all in one place.
And with this anonymous network...
..they were hiding nothing.
They felt free to say whatever they wanted.
And that's frightening.
We needed to be in there.
We needed to try to find out how we
could infiltrate these networks,
how we could disrupt them.
What could be done to take on
a group of 100,000 guys
with the resources we had?
Which, you know, to this day,
remain very small.
This was really the beginning of
having dedicated
online undercover officers
that would function full-time,
being part of these communities.
- A lot of undercover work, which Greg
took the lion's share of,
being able to be accepted by such a
group is a pretty heavy task.
It's like going undercover with the
mob or something.
- Face-to-face undercover, there's a
lot written about that.
People going into gangs and
going into doing these
really deep undercover roles.
But this was brand-new.
You know, we were entering and working
in a borderless environment...
..that was operating 24 hours a day.
We realised the need for some help.
- I remember my first investigation.
My first role, my first task in this new job...
..was watching several hours
of a kid being raped in a hard way.
It was...really difficult for me.
And it changed me as a person,
as a man, as a father.
It changed me.
- Then that's when Jetboys, Bap and
Gap came online.
I think that's the first time we see
the Russian sort of...
- We establish a network with
different investigators.
And it's easy to send a message to
someone like Greg
and all the other Gregs that I know
around the world.
It takes a network to defeat another network.
- Globally, we were all trying to find our way,
trying to find a strategy
so that we were focusing on the most
violent offenders,
the most dangerous offenders.
In 2015, a dark website opened up
called Babyheart.
- Babyheart was a board on the darknet
dedicated to babies and toddlers,
pictures and movies of babies and
toddlers being abused.
Contents, the pictures with
the babies was terrible.
- A guy named Twinkle was the
self-professed operator of the site.
Naturally, he became a person
of great interest to all of us.
He was not just the administrator,
but a major contributor.
- Twinkle was the worst person on the darknet
regarding the crime of child abuse.
- There was times when he was contributing
almost an unbelievable amount of material.
I think it was somewhere between 12
and 15 children at that point
that we could attribute to this one guy.
And to watch somebody...
..abuse, rape...
..a baby, erm...
..there's nothing human about it.
That became an instant focus for our
online undercover work.
- We started to work with Interpol,
Homeland Security from the United
States,
Australia, England, Spain, France.
Everybody was chasing Twinkle.
- Babyheart went from a couple
thousand to 100,000 members.
But trying to work on the
identification of Twinkle
was difficult.
The paranoia in this community is ever present.
There really is no letting your guard down.
- Twinkle used several manoeuvres
to cover their tracks on the darknet.
He was writing in different languages
like French, Spanish, Portuguese, English.
In those chats that were written in English,
he used an expression, he said,
"It cost me the eyes of my face."
It's a Portuguese expression.
It's not an expression that you can
use in English.
It was the first clue about the
nationality of Twinkle.
- TANNOY ANNOUNCEMENOur Brazilian partners had arrested a guy
that had had a relationship
online with Twinkle.
- When this guy was arrested,
they seized a lot of evidence
during a house search.
- What they found was a link to a
Facebook page in Portugal.
That is what, in fact, broke open the case.
Some of the pictures that we had of
Twinkle abusing the children,
we could see his hand,
and his hand had a skin condition.
And once we started that deep dive on
that page,
we saw a few pictures of that
individual's hand.
- The pattern, the colour of the skin,
we had a match.
- We felt comfortable enough
to get a team together
to head down to Portugal.
- Greg was part of the team
that was supporting us with his knowledge,
his experience dealing with
these kind of offenders.
On our way to Twinkle's place...
..it was possible to feel the
tension inside the car.
It was six in the morning.
I remembered my heart, like, beating a lot.
My main concern, it was finding
and seizing his hard drives.
Because we are not talking about files.
We are not talking about digital evidence.
We are talking about victims.
- We approached his residence.
You know, pretty country road, farms
here and there.
And Twinkle's house was on the
right-hand side as we approached.
A place you would pass by in a heartbeat.
- We stopped the car.
Everybody jumped out of the car.
We saw the door and it was the
perfect time to enter.
In the second room on the
right we found Twinkle.
Twinkle was in his bed,
laying with two kids, around five
years, in the time.
We grabbed Twinkle.
He was taken away from the
kids to a different room.
I remember his face.
He was surprised.
You can imagine a skinny guy,
around 25, 26 years old,
scared.
And, you know, in a certain way,
fragile.
Like, these guys, they have a
perfect world in the darknet,
but in real life,
they are not that strong.
They are weak persons.
That's why they do this to the
victims, because they are weak.
- CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS
We started collecting evidence
inside the house.
Pretty spartan living quarters,
despite the size of it all.
Twinkle was pretty agreeable
to talk to us.
He'd sit next to me showing me his site.
But the forensic team had
isolated one desktop computer
that they felt was the primary.
The problem was the hard drive was gone.
- I asked him,
"Where is the hard drive?"
And he told me, "It's not in here.
"Follow me."
He was entering deeper in the bushes.
I said to him, "Slowly, walk slowly,"
because we didn't know if someone was
hidden in here to support him,
or if there was something that
he can use against us.
I told him, "Don't try to escape
because we will chase you."
And then,
around here, we made a turn to the right.
He pointed.
He grab a plastic bag
with the hard drives inside.
I didn't believe that it was hidden...
..buried here in the middle of nothing
and really far away from his home.
It was buried a couple of hours
before we arrived.
He abused the kids that were in his
bed with him,
and he took some pictures, made some movies
and he stored everything on the hard drive.
And he came here in the middle of the night
and buried again, the hard drives.
- As the search continued
and questions were being asked of Twinkle,
we went out to look at his car.
And when we opened the trunk of the car,
looked like Twinkle was leaving for
the weekend.
There was some kids' toys,
like, some pool toys in the car,
cameras, there was handcuffs,
sex toys.
And what he ended up admitting was
that he had a weekend planned,
and that he was leaving that morning...
..to go meet another offender,
and that they had organised this weekend
to bring each other's children to this Airbnb,
to have a weekend of,
of abusing all the kids together.
Um...
No, this was completely,
completely new to me and everybody
that was there.
You know, there was a pretty
experienced group there
and this was certainly the first time
for all of us to go...
..you know...
They had a planned weekend to,
you know, sexually abuse babies, you
know.
So, the team sort of got a plan together.
I think it was about an hour away.
The guy showed up pretty much on time.
The primary police officers went and
removed him from the vehicle.
And when they looked in the back,
his two kids were in the back.
He decided to start confessing
shortly thereafter.
Told us he was the one that
they call The Forgotten.
THUNDER RUMBLES
- Humanity is changing.
You can see the sexuality is changing,
and the internet is increasing
this type of crime.
Because we always had sexual offenders...
..but now we have a specific part of society
that wants to share with the others
the abuses that they commit.
And sharing with the rest of the community
that you can see what I have
done to these kids.
And I cannot understand this.
- Twinkle's material was brutal to look at
and equally brutal to listen to.
Any video...
HE SIGHS
..especially with audio of the infant abuses,
is the hardest stuff to watch.
- Someone else from another country
dealing with this crime,
you know that that person have the
same issues that you have.
And Greg have that issues for sure.
Because it's too much.
It's too much every day, every day.
It's not a bad week
or a bad day at the office.
It's a bad life.
- Hi.
- The problem is the availability
of it, right?
If I'm an undercover gang guy,
like, I have to put on my ve...
Like, you have to, like,
kind of get ready, right?
- Yeah.
- Like, there's a, there's a...
- A ritual.
- A ritual to it, right?
I don't have that barrier.
So all I have to do is turn on my computer
and I'm that other person.
And...
..each time you flip open the laptop,
you're in that world
and you're having conversations with
people about just the most...
..horrible stuff.
And then, you can close the laptop...
..and, "Oh, shit, I got to get to the game."
- Come on! Use each other. Let's go!
- Nice.
- Oh, nice pass.
Oh, geez, this kid.
So in a matter of moments, you can go from
really, really evil human
to cheering for your kid at their game,
or going to their school,
or going to get ice cream,
and watch some guy hug his daughter
and be like...
You know, it's...
It certainly came with some collateral
that we didn't see in the beginning.
- I go to some special places.
When I come there, I can
switch off my mind from the daily job,
from the everything that I saw during the day.
And it's easy to be a different person,
or at least to try to be a different person.
Because in the end,
the ghosts, they will always be in our mind.
It's impossible to send them away.
The challenge...
..is living with them.
Oh, fuck.
Oh.
Sorry.
Oh, fuck.
Ah.
- OK?
- Yes.
Yeah.
Oh, fuck.
OK.
I'm back.
- After the arrest of Twinkle,
we thought maybe at least it would
give pause to Babyheart.
You know, that was the objective, right?
To take this kind of site offline.
But when we asked Twinkle,
"How do we take it down? How do we
shut it down?"
I mean, he was like, "I can't do that.
"You know, that's Lubasa."
And so we pressed him a little bit,
you know, "Who's Lubasa?"
And, you know, he just said,
"I just know him as Lubasa.
"He's not a guy who talks a lot.
"He just is the big boss."
Lubasa, his name had been around
for a number of years.
We knew Lubasa to have up
to six different sites
kind of under his overall control.
Maybe half a million users.
We had been compiling little bits
and pieces on him
to build kind of a dossier up.
Through that, we started to get
closer and closer to him.
The break came from another agency
and they came to the working group and said,
"Hey, listen, you know, we think we
know who it is."
We ended up going to Brazil.
We flew down there with maybe 10 or 12 people,
US law enforcement, folks from the UK.
I was there to offer an undercover's viewpoint
on how the sites were operated.
Lubasa was on a whole other level.
If we get to him, we would have access
to whatever's happening
for him as kind of overlord.
It would give us, for the first time,
a glance from the top down.
LOUD BANGING
POLICE RADIO CHATTER
INDISTINCT SPEECH
Lubasa was asleep when they went in.
They roused him,
and he was a little uncooperative in
the beginning.
He was a young guy, you know,
under 30 years old.
The type of person we are arresting
are now getting younger and younger,
you know?
They grew up with a phone, they grew
up with a laptop,
they grew up with a computer.
More often working in the IT field -
web developer, software engineer.
I mean, that's a total...
That's a skill set that we never saw
even ten years ago.
They spend 40, 50, 60 hours online.
This was life for this guy.
On the dark web. Lubasa was the master
puppeteer, sort of say.
But in reality, his day-to-day life,
somebody living in, basically, in squalor.
And yet, here's this couple
thousand dollar machine
running the abuse of...
..10,000 or more, you know, child victims.
- Move in now.
- Thousands of leads were sent out to
locate and arrest individuals
who had been part of Lubasa's network.
- Police with a warrant! Come to the door!
- You know, individuals on his sites
are viewing child abuse material.
And even if that person has not had
their hands on children,
they are the reason the sites exist.
They're causing the demand.
They're encouraging those who have access.
They are as big a part of the problem
by driving others
to commit offences on their own children.
These offenders know everything about security.
They are technically savvy.
And they're always going to be making
changes to try to elude
law enforcement.
But thanks to our online undercover work,
we were getting things done that years before
you wouldn't have thought possible.
Making arrests and, you know, just
making a huge difference.
You know, that's an adrenaline rush
that...it's hard to match.
You know, at that point,
my kids were a bit older
and, you know, very independent,
very successful young people.
And, you know, that almost enables you
to push harder.
Like, I worked ten hours today.
I bet I can work 12.
I bet if I get up at three this morning,
I can surprise somebody online and I
can get something else done.
You just push yourself, and push
yourself, and push yourself.
And you're rewarded because that shit works.
It is effective.
But meanwhile, personally,
you know, you're kind of losing...
..who was I?
Who's Greg?
I don't... I don't even know what he
likes to do.
All of your friends all during the day
are the criminals, you know?
They're paedophiles.
All they do is talk about...
..the most horrific things all day long.
And when that's over,
close the laptop and you look around...
..and it's just you.
It was easy at the time, you know,
to pick up a glass or bottle or
whatever it was.
And you don't think about you when
you're having some drinks,
you know? It's easy just to go,
"All right, the sooner tomorrow
starts, the better off I am,
"because tomorrow I get back to work."
You know, I definitely had a time when,
when alcohol was a bigger part of my
life than it should have been.
Numbing yourself for a number of hours
is not a solution.
- We had been running at a heavy pace.
There was no other focus than the job.
It's very easy to go to some dark
places, I think.
- Pete's my best friend, you know?
And your best friends can see things
that others can't.
And they can see those little changes.
And we had a talk or maybe a dozen
talks, I think.
- I noticed things that were obviously
affecting him.
Definitely unfocused anger at times
that seemed out of place.
Uncharacteristic.
It just turned into like...
Turned darker, I guess.
It's hard when the thing that brings
you so much energy and drive
is also the thing that's, like,
slowly destroying you.
- Not too long after, I got divorced,
and just a lot of things were happening,
you know, in my own head space.
I think the hardest part of that
was, I guess, admitting it.
And I remember calling up my sister Robin.
We went out into the back yard
where I was living,
and we sat there
and it took me a good four or five
minutes to say...
..you know, I think,
I think I'm suffering from pretty bad depression.
HE SIGHS
I think I was ashamed, you know?
I think I felt shame that I had kind
of succumbed to that.
You're supposed to be bulletproof, right?
You work in a space where horrible
things happen every day
and you need to stand resolute every day
and just be, you know,
be tough or whatever bullshit we tell ourselves.
And that was a big...a big step in, I
think, moving forward.
I stopped drinking at that point.
Mostly out of fear.
I think my birthday was the last day...
..I had a drink that year.
And I just...
I had actually opened a beer, and I remember...
..having a few sips of it and then
just putting it down.
And that was it for two full years.
I just... That was, that was that.
And I needed to try to focus on
getting my head straight.
And a lot of that was for my kids, you know?
I didn't ever want to be...
..you know, someone,
I guess that, you know, they weren't proud of.
Yeah, that was a lot of my motivation
to get started, to get better.
INTERVIEWER:
- Um...
You said you were are fearful.
- Yeah.
- What do you mean?
- Suicide.
I just didn't want it.
I didn't want to have those thoughts
any more, you know?
I didn't want to hide from the pain.
I didn't want to run from the pain.
I just...
I didn't want to leave them behind,
you know? I didn't want to
end things that way.
Because I wasn't winning.
You know what I mean?
I wasn't winning by myself.
It just wasn't...it just wasn't
going to happen.
It wasn't going to be a...
..a fight that I was going to win.
And if I didn't, if I didn't lean, reach out
and talk to Robin, talk to Pete...
HE SIGHS
You know, maybe be in a bad place.
And I just didn't want to be there.
It is funny to think about,
like, kind of diving in
with the case of looking at the one image
and then getting it going...
Pete kind of stepped in where I needed him to.
You know, I thank him. I'll always thank him
for getting me away from a place that
was kind of dangerous.
And I feel very, very fortunate to
work with all my friends
across the globe and to have them to lean on
and say, "Hey, man, it's OK."
One of the worst guys that was not
captured after Lubasa's arrest
was a user that went by LBO, or Lover Boy Only.
And you know, he and I had had
interactions over the years.
He was a boy lover.
He always loved things more violent,
more on the rough side of things.
A lot of rape, bondage, things like that.
And even other users were going, you know,
"What's wrong with this guy?"
You know, he's talking about some
really, really violent
and extreme things.
LBO got the attention of the community
right around November 11th, 2020.
He was making a claim that
he had kidnapped a boy.
And I...was online that day
and had read some of the comments around it.
And, you know, we read those with a
grain of salt.
It's not uncommon for users to talk that way
and to get kind of... go down those
paths.
And LBO, you know, he was asked,
you know, like,
"Yeah, I'm sure you did this."
You know, "Bullshit. Stop fucking around."
You know, "It's not funny," or
whatever the reactions were.
But LBO took it upon himself
to provide a proof of life picture.
And this is a boy who's clearly in distress.
I can see his face clear as day - a
blond-haired boy.
That really made my heart start to race.
We knew LBO to speak English and Russian.
Probably more likely, you know,
somebody from Russia
or one of...maybe the Ukraine or
something to that effect.
There was no doubt in my mind who, you know,
who I was going to reach out to,
like, straight away.
I gave him a description of the boy.
I said, you know, maybe six, seven
years old, blond hair.
I would know who he is if he's in
fact, you know,
a kid that's missing.
There's a real boy missing.
The description lines up,
the timing lines up,
and you just go, "Holy shit.
"This boy is somewhere with this monster."
The boy that had been missing for over
50 days at that point.
It's a terrifying thought.
Ivan had told us that that they had
called off the search October 11th
and that they were just looking for
the boy's body.
And, you know, now, we had called,
you know, relatively out of the blue
and said, you know,
we think he's alive.
While we breathe life into the
investigation there,
we also knew just how dangerous LBO was.
And that was nerve-racking.
For me, and I think for everybody,
it was the incredible pressure
to try to find him as fast as possible.
You know, Ivan doesn't work dark web
cases, he's a street cop.
You know, he's boots on the ground
kind of guy.
We knew we were going to need some
serious resources to get this done
and, you know, those resources
certainly included large data sets,
large databases that Interpol holds.
And, you know, one of my favourite
people in the world is Gordana.
- I received a message from Greg
asking me for help.
I know Greg long time.
We work together.
Greg knows that I speak Russian.
- Gordana is an analyst and has
worked,
you know, many, many child abuse
cases in the past.
It was too easy to pick up the
phone and get her involved.
INTERVIEWER:
- Can you tell me what information you
had to start with?
- Lover Boy Only.
LBO.
Username. I have only username.
And information that this username
maybe kidnapped a boy.
I start working on this case
and nothing else except the work.
Everything disappeared
because I know that
probably life of this kid is in our hands.
I check our database in Interpol.
We have huge amount of digital files
shared by Brazilian police
when they arrest Lubasa.
And I found more than 13,000 digital files
connected with Lover Boy Only.
Photos, links, messages,
posts on forums.
So I was reading all the comments,
searching anything that can lead us to this guy.
- You know, from an undercover perspective,
a lot of our job was doing kind of
round the clock observation,
observe the community, see what occurred.
We were in literal constant contact
20-plus hours a day.
I'm not sure Gordana was even
sleeping, to be honest.
- All of us was in different time zones.
But even if it's night in the US and Russia
and I sent a message, I get reply immediately.
So because of that, I realised we are
all not sleeping.
We didn't even think about sleeping.
I just think we must find him.
We must find him...
..because he will kill him.
- We weren't under the illusion
that LBO would do anything
but kill this boy.
He'd been talking about that stuff for years -
kidnapping and killing a boy.
MACHINERY GRINDS
- These users, they very care about security.
Because of that, it was very difficult
to find him.
But they made a mistake.
And we are hunting for these mistakes
all the time.
- Gordana built a profile on this guy,
and there was three little
nuggets of information
that were really interesting.
The first one was that
LBO seemed to suffer from schizophrenia.
Now, in Russia,
people that have diagnosed schizophrenia
actually are entitled to a pension,
some compensation every month
from the government.
That would be something that Ivan
and their team could look into.
The other point that they found
was he talked quite a bit about his
brother's occupation,
and it was an occupation that probably
could be checked
in databases there in Russia.
And then the third point
was LBO had a conversation
with another person about his mother
being killed in a car accident.
And actually had a date, a year rather,
that that car accident had occurred.
GLASS SMASHES
BANGING
SMASHING, BANGING
DRILL WHIRS
OFFICERS SHOUIt's really easy to remember every
single piece of this,
because it was such a... such a wild...
..a wild minute in my life.
Ivan sent me a message and said...
.."We have the boy. He's safe."
Um...
Fucking awesome, you know?
It was just, just the...
..just the best news that I think I
had received, you know?
And just staring at my phone,
looking at that message
and I fucking, I looked at Pete
there, and I said,
"They fucking found him."
It almost took your breath away, you know?
That's how intense it was.
- It was maybe...
..three in the morning
and I just wake up in a little bit panic.
I grabbed my phone...
..take a look, and I see my
colleague holding the boy.
- SHE CLEARS HER THROA- Um...
No words to explain this moment.
- You know, and seeing that picture of
his parents hugging him.
Yeah. It's just...
Kind of makes you think of, like,
when you hug your own kids,
you know, and you...
It just brings a totally different
value to that, you know?
And to know that they're safe and to
know that they're in your arms,
I mean...
Those parents were told a month
earlier that their son was dead...
..and that, you know, there was no more hope,
and there they were, holding him on the train.
Maybe the most special moment,
you know, in my career.
I know I've come, like, a good
distance from where I was
at any given, like, dark moment.
You know, I spent years hiding how I
was feeling.
Like...
..I'm pretty decent at lying and
telling, you know,
wearing a different mask, and then,
"Hey, everything's fine.
Everything's cool. No big deal.
"Like, let's go do something."
I've kind of come to,
to terms with or peace with, like,
this isn't something you carry by
yourself.
This isn't something I carry about myself.
There might be some super soldier
out there that can do it.
It's just not me.
Ooh-hoo-hoo!
Today, I have a conscious
effort about recognising
what's going on that's good.
- So beautiful!
HE LAUGHS
- Like, every moment with my kids.
I'm truly thankful for that stuff.
I believe in this mission beyond 100%
and I believe in the people and I
believe in, you know,
we can make a difference.
But I want to be able to continue
making a difference.
What little sacrifices I feel like
I've made over the years,
I would do it again, over and over again.
I couldn't see myself doing anything else.
I feel honoured to be part of the team
that can make a difference.
Instead of watching it on TV or
hearing about it and going,
"Shit, that's fucking awful,"
I'd rather be right in there in the
fight trying to stop it.
I told you a little bit about the
bricks, the brick thing.
- I've known about the brick thing
since the beginning.
- You did, yeah.
- Yeah.
- Like, the whole idea of even being
able to have this conversation
someday is...still, like, feels super surreal.
- Yeah.
- Like, it feels like a miracle in a way.
- Yeah.
I am incredibly lucky to have a good
support system right now
while I'm dealing with this.
I have more stability.
I'm able to have the energy to talk to people,
which, I could not have done this
even, like, a couple of years ago.
- No, you just move on and
deserve to live, like,
a fucking awesome life.
- I would love to work on
being a functional person.
Memory loss is a big part of these things,
and I just don't remember a lot of it,
which is fine with me.
- Yeah, right.
- But, like, at that point,
I was praying,
praying actively for it to end.
I had been, at that point, for years.
But not to sound cliche, but
it was a prayer answered.
- Yeah.
Sounds weird, I'm sure, but you wish
there was some telepathy
and you could reach out and be like,
"Listen, we're coming."
- Yeah.
- Like, it does sound cheesy, but, like...
..that's the genuine feeling when
you're in the middle of those things
and you just want to, like, reach out and go,
"Well, fuck it, we're going to get there."
Oh, he's on.
- Good.
- Oh, that's convenient.
We're probably almost exactly 12 hours away
from meeting him for the first time.
It'll be really real tomorrow.
- I know.
- Knowing that, like,
what happens tomorrow is
essentially the end of his freedom,
his life.
All right. Good afternoon.
I'm Greg Squire from
Homeland Security in Portland.
And thank you in advance for
helping with this case.
Particularly, I'd like to thank our
teams who are here from Brazil,
Australia and Europe.
Just really appreciate you guys coming
all this way to help.
It's been a very long time coming -
five, six years that Cassie and I have
gone through it.
This is him today.
Kind of easy to spot.
But we have a couple other
pictures in the ops plan.
He's going to be charged with enterprise.
And what that does is basically
highlight what he's been doing
and what the 400,000 people on his
website are responsible for -
the distribution of millions
of images and videos
of child sexual abuse.
I've been doing undercover a long time
and, trust me, these aren't just
run-of-the-mill paedophiles.
They're some of the most advanced
criminals on the planet.
This is the target's apartment,
mostly relevant to the three who are
going to be inside.
We're going to take him
inside almost immediately.
If he has his backpack with him, we'll
take that into custody,
same with the phone,
but that's the exit there.
Our three eyes in there will be in
comms with Cassie.
Cassie's going to be online early.
And if he decides to get online
before he goes to his big appointment,
and Cassie will be able
to engage, confirm he's in the apartment,
confirm he's online.
So it's a big day for Quackers.
There's a lot of foot traffic
out of this door.
A lot of kids move in and out of here.
There's a lot of adults, families.
So it's not just college kids here,
it's a pretty good mix of people.
Our three interior people will cover
here, here and here.
He's going to have to walk past you.
It's up to the three of you
how you want to do it.
As soon as they see him and begin to
kind of get an indication
what door he's going out,
they're going to call us and we'll
hit it up over the radio.
The central location will be my vehicle
and the few people who are with me.
Getting into the building,
it's going to be just
the apprehension team and my car.
Team Five, check in, please.
So we're going to roll up in the building
with maybe six to eight total.
No more than that.
Let's get a quick radio check.
Like, get to where your vehicles are,
get your gear on,
whatever you're going to have for
tactical gear.
Again, just to reiterate,
the primary objective here
is server access.
Any questions?
Stand by. Target is moving.
Hey. How you doing?
How you doing, bud?
Hey, Greg Squire of Homeland Security.
- All right. How are you?
- Good, buddy.
Got to have a little chat with you,
all right?
INAUDIBLE
Step. I think he can do it.
ALARM RINGS
WOMAN SIGHS
ALARM STOPS
DOG WHINES
OK.
HE WHISTLES
Come on.
Good boy. Good boy.
Bit of a morning routine
for the dog and I.
Get out into the woods.
Come on, let's go.
There are no houses, no lights,
very little cellphone coverage,
which is kind of a bonus.
HE WHISTLES
You know, the problem that we work
with never goes away.
What do you see, huh? What do you see?
When I started my career,
I didn't really realise
how deep and dark things were going to get.
BABY SQUEALS
BABY LAUGHS
In 2007, I was working for the Postal
Service.
I had two kids at that point.
My kids are the most important thing to me.
But I had spent seven years delivering letters,
and I was pretty much at my wits' end
at that point.
I applied for Homeland Security.
Basically, they said, "Hey, you know,
"you're going to be assigned to the
cyber group."
And I said, "OK, great." I was just
ready to start working.
Crimes against children was the bulk
of what we did in that group.
And I didn't have...really have any
idea what world exactly
I was walking into.
Here! Good boy.
Good boy! Yeah!
Come here.
The first video that I saw that really
opened my eyes
to what child sexual abuse was,
was in 2008.
Yeah!
So we moved in here
when the kids were both pretty little,
like, maybe, five and two,
something to that effect.
And it was just such an amazing spot to get.
We had a swimming pool,
great big yard.
And, you know, we would spend our off time
just letting the kids run around out here.
It was just a really nice piece of
land to have.
I think it was a Sunday morning
and the kids had been playing up on
the deck there by the windows.
I got my work laptop
and I had recently gotten a whole folder,
a whole... Basically, of results from
an email search warrant.
That was when I saw the one email from
a suspect,
and I noticed there was an attachment.
So I saw the attachment was a video.
So once I clicked and opened the video,
I just saw a bedroom, basically.
The camera kind of panned around and
there was a little girl in bed,
like, in an adult bed, a large bed.
And she was laying there, there was a book,
a big picture book, kids' book, next to her.
And then I could see an adult male
coming into the...coming into focus.
He started to read the book to her.
And, like, for that, for that 30
seconds
it looked like something normal.
And then he undresses her
and then the abuse starts.
And the girl just...
It looked like her soul left, watching
it, watching it happen.
And him...
..I was ready to murder him.
You know, like, just watching him do
this and watching her, like...
..just endure it, you know?
Like, that's what it looked like to me.
And, yeah, for that to go on for so long,
you know, I think it was probably four
full minutes of him raping her,
um, it's a fucking long time.
I mean, I had never seen anything like
that before.
You know, now I have an unfortunate
library of that stuff in my head,
and so do all the other, you know,
folks that do it.
But that was definitely the first time.
In a while it, like, takes from you,
it also, it also gives.
Like, you're not going to find a
better fuel
to go hunt someone down than that.
It doesn't get any more passionate
than that.
Mm.
- Keep it small.
You can always go back for seconds.
- I don't really like diet-sensitive Peter.
- Yeah, I know.
- How about that?
- LAUGHTER
- I think that's even, don't you?
One, two, three, four, five. Yeah.
- Thank you.
Ooh-hoo!
- See? Small piece.
- When I first met Greg, I thought he
was very intense.
Super high energy.
Hilarious.
Obviously, very dedicated.
- We just became... We became friends.
Like, we really had the same passion
about the work.
- Why doesn't it want me to go that...
I don't understand what it wants me to
do. It's weird.
- Have you been here before? If I told
you to drive home right now,
you wouldn't be able to make it.
- No.
- Not without GPS.
- Just saying.
We were working all the time.
It seemed like we were jumping from
one case to the next,
focused on the trading of child sexual
abuse materials.
Good thing is that you come out, like,
right in midtown...
- We had been doing all the
conventional, you know,
email cases and Facebook leads and
things like that.
We would say, "Oh, here's this screen
name.
"Let's ask the company who it's
registered to."
Or, "Let's look at the IP addresses
"that it's been accessing this website."
- It was so easy for law enforcement
to go after open websites
that everybody was transitioning over
to the dark web.
- The first case that really took off
on the dark web
was the Lucy investigation.
In January of 2014,
we discovered this series of photos that,
you know, was named Lucy,
of the same girl being sexually abused.
In the images, we could see light sockets,
electrical outlets.
So we knew it was most likely a little
girl here in the US.
We had, you know, enough reason to believe
that she was actively being abused,
and her pictures were being
distributed across the dark web.
As we gathered more,
we learned that she had been abused
from a younger age.
You know, this girl was probably seven
years old in the beginning,
and we think she's almost 12 years old now.
She was being raped by this man, maybe
up to five years.
I mean, it really was...
It kind of took us back a breath.
- The dark web is built to hide your identity,
to anonymise your traffic.
There's no traces of any information that say,
well, this is where this person came from.
So, literally, all we had with this
Lucy case
was the images that we were staring at.
But this offender was very good at
covering their tracks.
You know, consciously cropping out or
altering images
to remove specific things and be able
to hinder our progress.
For, like, distribution or
definitely production,
we don't have that. We won't have that
until we get back to the lab
and do a deeper dive.
- We were working this every day for
six, seven, eight months.
We could communicate all through the morning,
all through the night.
DOG BARKS
In the photos, like all photos, you know,
there's things in the background.
You know, we were looking for clues.
- We watched Lucy grow up, basically,
in an environment of abuse.
Like, of systematic abuse.
- I mean, it really took us aback,
especially, you know, Pete and I, you
know, having kids that age.
About the eighth month of the investigation,
we were able to identify a piece of
furniture in the photos.
That piece of furniture had far more
limited sales
than other items that we had already identified.
- We were trying to make
contact with manufacturers
and distributors and say,
"Help us out with this.
"You know, this furniture set,
"can you give us a customer list?"
We got a list of about 40,000 people
that had purchased the set.
- At that point in the investigation
we're looking at 29 states here in the US.
I mean, you're talking about tens of
thousands of addresses,
and that's a very, very daunting task.
It was a tough time for the team.
Nine months is a long time to look for somebody.
And as we're doing an investigation,
she's still being abused.
- There's victims that we have never identified.
But you can't give up.
If we're not going to do it,
who's going to do it?
Eventually, you're going to get
something that will get you there.
- TRAFFIC DIN
I can remember clear as day,
we were talking about, you know,
he's been very careful
and he's taking things out of the
pictures that,
you know, he feels would help identify
the girl and locate her
and everything else.
But the question at that point was...
..like, what...what can't you change?
Clothing can change.
Bedding can change.
All these things can change.
But is there something that can't
change?
And that's how we came to look at the bricks.
How often do you see an exposed brick wall
inside of a child's bedroom?
So I started just googling bricks,
and it wasn't too many searches that I found
the Brick Industry Association.
So I called. There was a number on
there, in Virginia.
And I said, "Hey, my name's Greg Squire.
"I work for the Homeland Security and, you know,
"we're working a case of a missing girl."
And the woman on the phone was awesome.
She was like, "How can the brick industry help?"
I said, "Well, I have a picture.
"I want to know if somebody can tell
me something about these bricks."
She said, "We have brick experts all
over the country.
"We can share it with our distribution list."
And we were wrapping things up for the day,
and I don't think I was even at the car
before I started getting emails.
And I think we all kind of felt like
that rush of adrenaline
was that, all of a sudden,
maybe something could come of this.
- I work for the Acme Brick Company.
I've been in sales since '81.
Over the years, I would say I've sold
in excess of
300 specific colours and sizes and
styles of bricks.
That day, I was sitting at my desk
doing my normal, probably paperwork
or a report or something for corporate,
and it popped up in my inbox.
And I read the email and I knew
exactly what the brick was.
I noticed that the brick was a very
pink cast brick,
and it had a little bit of a charcoal
overlay on it.
It was a modular eight-inch brick and
it was square-edged.
Immediately made the brick pop out to me
that it was a Flaming Alamo.
We made that brick from the late '60s
through about the middle part of the '80s.
And I had sold millions of brick from
that plant.
So I emailed Agent Squire.
- And I'm thinking, this is great.
And so in my mind, I'm going,
well, you know, would you have sales
records of something like that?
He's like, we've been selling this
brick since the '70s,
and it's all just a pile of notes, and
stuff like that.
And I was like, shit!
And it kind of took the steam out of
me a little bit.
And he says, I think he called me son,
he says, "Hey, you know what bricks are?"
And I'm like,
"You got me, sir, I don't know."
He goes, "Bricks are heavy."
- What I explained to Greg was that
brick are heavy
and we can only haul about 10,000 to a truck,
so we're not transporting bricks
typically all the way
across the country.
So don't be looking way, way out.
You need to be looking within this
smaller area.
- He says that brick didn't travel 50
miles out of this plant.
What... Like, I was so excited at that point.
- They were looking in 29 different states,
and it was a needle in a haystack.
That narrowed it down to possibly one
state, one city.
- We have an extremely small area to
look in now.
We were able to take the list from the
furniture manufacturer
and just draw a radius around this
brick factory
and see who falls in that radius.
He whittled down this 10,000-plus list
to probably 40, 50 people.
So we thought we had a fairly good shot
if we looked through social media
that somebody on that list might have
a picture of Lucy
on their page.
And probably by 9am,
we were flipping through social media pages
and there was Lucy right in front of us.
Couldn't fucking believe it.
Nine months of looking
and we're sitting there staring at
her, and we all looked and said...
..100%, this is her.
100%.
- We literally started with a picture
that could have started anywhere in
the world,
and then we narrowed it down to one house.
That was a good feeling.
- They had also figured out that
living in the house was
the mother's boyfriend,
and that that was a convicted sex
offender living there.
I mean, at that point, it's 10am or 11am
and our first thought was,
how do we get there before she's home
from school
and eliminate the chance of him having
access to her
even one more time?
And by four o'clock, our whole team
was in that house,
safeguarded Lucy,
had started the interview process,
and by five o'clock,
the suspect was in custody.
- I got an email saying, "We found her.
"This little girl now is safe and out
of harm's way."
My wife and I have been foster parents
for over 20 years.
We've had over 150 different children
in our home.
We've adopted three.
So, doing that over those years, we
had a lot of children
in our home that were abused, that
were neglected,
both physical and sexually abused,
and it leaves a mark on you.
It leaves a mark on your psyche that,
that stays with you.
What they do day in and day out, and
what they see is a magnification
of hundreds of times of what I've seen
or had to deal with.
So I can't imagine what they have to
take home with them at night.
- After the Lucy investigation,
Pete and I really began to focus and
become dedicated
to dark web activity.
- The use of the dark web just
expanded, just exploded.
The number of users and the number of outlets
were just, dramatic increase.
- That was our first glimpse of them
creating forum-based websites.
Those sites just look like a regular
forum of people
who all have a shared interest.
People can belong to woodworking forums
and gun forums and car forums.
The structure is exactly the same,
but for the content.
They trade child abuse material
all through the day and all through
the night.
Each site kind of has their own niche.
So this might be only boys, this might
be only girls,
or only hardcore.
You build a community around it and
you quickly find out
that there aren't just ones and twos
of guys interested in this,
but there's thousands.
And it just becomes a breeding ground
for who can be the more shocking person.
Who can take things to the next level.
We saw the abuse of children getting
younger
and getting more violent.
Probably it was out there, you know,
ten years ago,
but now we saw it all in one place.
And with this anonymous network...
..they were hiding nothing.
They felt free to say whatever they wanted.
And that's frightening.
We needed to be in there.
We needed to try to find out how we
could infiltrate these networks,
how we could disrupt them.
What could be done to take on
a group of 100,000 guys
with the resources we had?
Which, you know, to this day,
remain very small.
This was really the beginning of
having dedicated
online undercover officers
that would function full-time,
being part of these communities.
- A lot of undercover work, which Greg
took the lion's share of,
being able to be accepted by such a
group is a pretty heavy task.
It's like going undercover with the
mob or something.
- Face-to-face undercover, there's a
lot written about that.
People going into gangs and
going into doing these
really deep undercover roles.
But this was brand-new.
You know, we were entering and working
in a borderless environment...
..that was operating 24 hours a day.
We realised the need for some help.
- I remember my first investigation.
My first role, my first task in this new job...
..was watching several hours
of a kid being raped in a hard way.
It was...really difficult for me.
And it changed me as a person,
as a man, as a father.
It changed me.
- Then that's when Jetboys, Bap and
Gap came online.
I think that's the first time we see
the Russian sort of...
- We establish a network with
different investigators.
And it's easy to send a message to
someone like Greg
and all the other Gregs that I know
around the world.
It takes a network to defeat another network.
- Globally, we were all trying to find our way,
trying to find a strategy
so that we were focusing on the most
violent offenders,
the most dangerous offenders.
In 2015, a dark website opened up
called Babyheart.
- Babyheart was a board on the darknet
dedicated to babies and toddlers,
pictures and movies of babies and
toddlers being abused.
Contents, the pictures with
the babies was terrible.
- A guy named Twinkle was the
self-professed operator of the site.
Naturally, he became a person
of great interest to all of us.
He was not just the administrator,
but a major contributor.
- Twinkle was the worst person on the darknet
regarding the crime of child abuse.
- There was times when he was contributing
almost an unbelievable amount of material.
I think it was somewhere between 12
and 15 children at that point
that we could attribute to this one guy.
And to watch somebody...
..abuse, rape...
..a baby, erm...
..there's nothing human about it.
That became an instant focus for our
online undercover work.
- We started to work with Interpol,
Homeland Security from the United
States,
Australia, England, Spain, France.
Everybody was chasing Twinkle.
- Babyheart went from a couple
thousand to 100,000 members.
But trying to work on the
identification of Twinkle
was difficult.
The paranoia in this community is ever present.
There really is no letting your guard down.
- Twinkle used several manoeuvres
to cover their tracks on the darknet.
He was writing in different languages
like French, Spanish, Portuguese, English.
In those chats that were written in English,
he used an expression, he said,
"It cost me the eyes of my face."
It's a Portuguese expression.
It's not an expression that you can
use in English.
It was the first clue about the
nationality of Twinkle.
- TANNOY ANNOUNCEMENOur Brazilian partners had arrested a guy
that had had a relationship
online with Twinkle.
- When this guy was arrested,
they seized a lot of evidence
during a house search.
- What they found was a link to a
Facebook page in Portugal.
That is what, in fact, broke open the case.
Some of the pictures that we had of
Twinkle abusing the children,
we could see his hand,
and his hand had a skin condition.
And once we started that deep dive on
that page,
we saw a few pictures of that
individual's hand.
- The pattern, the colour of the skin,
we had a match.
- We felt comfortable enough
to get a team together
to head down to Portugal.
- Greg was part of the team
that was supporting us with his knowledge,
his experience dealing with
these kind of offenders.
On our way to Twinkle's place...
..it was possible to feel the
tension inside the car.
It was six in the morning.
I remembered my heart, like, beating a lot.
My main concern, it was finding
and seizing his hard drives.
Because we are not talking about files.
We are not talking about digital evidence.
We are talking about victims.
- We approached his residence.
You know, pretty country road, farms
here and there.
And Twinkle's house was on the
right-hand side as we approached.
A place you would pass by in a heartbeat.
- We stopped the car.
Everybody jumped out of the car.
We saw the door and it was the
perfect time to enter.
In the second room on the
right we found Twinkle.
Twinkle was in his bed,
laying with two kids, around five
years, in the time.
We grabbed Twinkle.
He was taken away from the
kids to a different room.
I remember his face.
He was surprised.
You can imagine a skinny guy,
around 25, 26 years old,
scared.
And, you know, in a certain way,
fragile.
Like, these guys, they have a
perfect world in the darknet,
but in real life,
they are not that strong.
They are weak persons.
That's why they do this to the
victims, because they are weak.
- CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS
We started collecting evidence
inside the house.
Pretty spartan living quarters,
despite the size of it all.
Twinkle was pretty agreeable
to talk to us.
He'd sit next to me showing me his site.
But the forensic team had
isolated one desktop computer
that they felt was the primary.
The problem was the hard drive was gone.
- I asked him,
"Where is the hard drive?"
And he told me, "It's not in here.
"Follow me."
He was entering deeper in the bushes.
I said to him, "Slowly, walk slowly,"
because we didn't know if someone was
hidden in here to support him,
or if there was something that
he can use against us.
I told him, "Don't try to escape
because we will chase you."
And then,
around here, we made a turn to the right.
He pointed.
He grab a plastic bag
with the hard drives inside.
I didn't believe that it was hidden...
..buried here in the middle of nothing
and really far away from his home.
It was buried a couple of hours
before we arrived.
He abused the kids that were in his
bed with him,
and he took some pictures, made some movies
and he stored everything on the hard drive.
And he came here in the middle of the night
and buried again, the hard drives.
- As the search continued
and questions were being asked of Twinkle,
we went out to look at his car.
And when we opened the trunk of the car,
looked like Twinkle was leaving for
the weekend.
There was some kids' toys,
like, some pool toys in the car,
cameras, there was handcuffs,
sex toys.
And what he ended up admitting was
that he had a weekend planned,
and that he was leaving that morning...
..to go meet another offender,
and that they had organised this weekend
to bring each other's children to this Airbnb,
to have a weekend of,
of abusing all the kids together.
Um...
No, this was completely,
completely new to me and everybody
that was there.
You know, there was a pretty
experienced group there
and this was certainly the first time
for all of us to go...
..you know...
They had a planned weekend to,
you know, sexually abuse babies, you
know.
So, the team sort of got a plan together.
I think it was about an hour away.
The guy showed up pretty much on time.
The primary police officers went and
removed him from the vehicle.
And when they looked in the back,
his two kids were in the back.
He decided to start confessing
shortly thereafter.
Told us he was the one that
they call The Forgotten.
THUNDER RUMBLES
- Humanity is changing.
You can see the sexuality is changing,
and the internet is increasing
this type of crime.
Because we always had sexual offenders...
..but now we have a specific part of society
that wants to share with the others
the abuses that they commit.
And sharing with the rest of the community
that you can see what I have
done to these kids.
And I cannot understand this.
- Twinkle's material was brutal to look at
and equally brutal to listen to.
Any video...
HE SIGHS
..especially with audio of the infant abuses,
is the hardest stuff to watch.
- Someone else from another country
dealing with this crime,
you know that that person have the
same issues that you have.
And Greg have that issues for sure.
Because it's too much.
It's too much every day, every day.
It's not a bad week
or a bad day at the office.
It's a bad life.
- Hi.
- The problem is the availability
of it, right?
If I'm an undercover gang guy,
like, I have to put on my ve...
Like, you have to, like,
kind of get ready, right?
- Yeah.
- Like, there's a, there's a...
- A ritual.
- A ritual to it, right?
I don't have that barrier.
So all I have to do is turn on my computer
and I'm that other person.
And...
..each time you flip open the laptop,
you're in that world
and you're having conversations with
people about just the most...
..horrible stuff.
And then, you can close the laptop...
..and, "Oh, shit, I got to get to the game."
- Come on! Use each other. Let's go!
- Nice.
- Oh, nice pass.
Oh, geez, this kid.
So in a matter of moments, you can go from
really, really evil human
to cheering for your kid at their game,
or going to their school,
or going to get ice cream,
and watch some guy hug his daughter
and be like...
You know, it's...
It certainly came with some collateral
that we didn't see in the beginning.
- I go to some special places.
When I come there, I can
switch off my mind from the daily job,
from the everything that I saw during the day.
And it's easy to be a different person,
or at least to try to be a different person.
Because in the end,
the ghosts, they will always be in our mind.
It's impossible to send them away.
The challenge...
..is living with them.
Oh, fuck.
Oh.
Sorry.
Oh, fuck.
Ah.
- OK?
- Yes.
Yeah.
Oh, fuck.
OK.
I'm back.
- After the arrest of Twinkle,
we thought maybe at least it would
give pause to Babyheart.
You know, that was the objective, right?
To take this kind of site offline.
But when we asked Twinkle,
"How do we take it down? How do we
shut it down?"
I mean, he was like, "I can't do that.
"You know, that's Lubasa."
And so we pressed him a little bit,
you know, "Who's Lubasa?"
And, you know, he just said,
"I just know him as Lubasa.
"He's not a guy who talks a lot.
"He just is the big boss."
Lubasa, his name had been around
for a number of years.
We knew Lubasa to have up
to six different sites
kind of under his overall control.
Maybe half a million users.
We had been compiling little bits
and pieces on him
to build kind of a dossier up.
Through that, we started to get
closer and closer to him.
The break came from another agency
and they came to the working group and said,
"Hey, listen, you know, we think we
know who it is."
We ended up going to Brazil.
We flew down there with maybe 10 or 12 people,
US law enforcement, folks from the UK.
I was there to offer an undercover's viewpoint
on how the sites were operated.
Lubasa was on a whole other level.
If we get to him, we would have access
to whatever's happening
for him as kind of overlord.
It would give us, for the first time,
a glance from the top down.
LOUD BANGING
POLICE RADIO CHATTER
INDISTINCT SPEECH
Lubasa was asleep when they went in.
They roused him,
and he was a little uncooperative in
the beginning.
He was a young guy, you know,
under 30 years old.
The type of person we are arresting
are now getting younger and younger,
you know?
They grew up with a phone, they grew
up with a laptop,
they grew up with a computer.
More often working in the IT field -
web developer, software engineer.
I mean, that's a total...
That's a skill set that we never saw
even ten years ago.
They spend 40, 50, 60 hours online.
This was life for this guy.
On the dark web. Lubasa was the master
puppeteer, sort of say.
But in reality, his day-to-day life,
somebody living in, basically, in squalor.
And yet, here's this couple
thousand dollar machine
running the abuse of...
..10,000 or more, you know, child victims.
- Move in now.
- Thousands of leads were sent out to
locate and arrest individuals
who had been part of Lubasa's network.
- Police with a warrant! Come to the door!
- You know, individuals on his sites
are viewing child abuse material.
And even if that person has not had
their hands on children,
they are the reason the sites exist.
They're causing the demand.
They're encouraging those who have access.
They are as big a part of the problem
by driving others
to commit offences on their own children.
These offenders know everything about security.
They are technically savvy.
And they're always going to be making
changes to try to elude
law enforcement.
But thanks to our online undercover work,
we were getting things done that years before
you wouldn't have thought possible.
Making arrests and, you know, just
making a huge difference.
You know, that's an adrenaline rush
that...it's hard to match.
You know, at that point,
my kids were a bit older
and, you know, very independent,
very successful young people.
And, you know, that almost enables you
to push harder.
Like, I worked ten hours today.
I bet I can work 12.
I bet if I get up at three this morning,
I can surprise somebody online and I
can get something else done.
You just push yourself, and push
yourself, and push yourself.
And you're rewarded because that shit works.
It is effective.
But meanwhile, personally,
you know, you're kind of losing...
..who was I?
Who's Greg?
I don't... I don't even know what he
likes to do.
All of your friends all during the day
are the criminals, you know?
They're paedophiles.
All they do is talk about...
..the most horrific things all day long.
And when that's over,
close the laptop and you look around...
..and it's just you.
It was easy at the time, you know,
to pick up a glass or bottle or
whatever it was.
And you don't think about you when
you're having some drinks,
you know? It's easy just to go,
"All right, the sooner tomorrow
starts, the better off I am,
"because tomorrow I get back to work."
You know, I definitely had a time when,
when alcohol was a bigger part of my
life than it should have been.
Numbing yourself for a number of hours
is not a solution.
- We had been running at a heavy pace.
There was no other focus than the job.
It's very easy to go to some dark
places, I think.
- Pete's my best friend, you know?
And your best friends can see things
that others can't.
And they can see those little changes.
And we had a talk or maybe a dozen
talks, I think.
- I noticed things that were obviously
affecting him.
Definitely unfocused anger at times
that seemed out of place.
Uncharacteristic.
It just turned into like...
Turned darker, I guess.
It's hard when the thing that brings
you so much energy and drive
is also the thing that's, like,
slowly destroying you.
- Not too long after, I got divorced,
and just a lot of things were happening,
you know, in my own head space.
I think the hardest part of that
was, I guess, admitting it.
And I remember calling up my sister Robin.
We went out into the back yard
where I was living,
and we sat there
and it took me a good four or five
minutes to say...
..you know, I think,
I think I'm suffering from pretty bad depression.
HE SIGHS
I think I was ashamed, you know?
I think I felt shame that I had kind
of succumbed to that.
You're supposed to be bulletproof, right?
You work in a space where horrible
things happen every day
and you need to stand resolute every day
and just be, you know,
be tough or whatever bullshit we tell ourselves.
And that was a big...a big step in, I
think, moving forward.
I stopped drinking at that point.
Mostly out of fear.
I think my birthday was the last day...
..I had a drink that year.
And I just...
I had actually opened a beer, and I remember...
..having a few sips of it and then
just putting it down.
And that was it for two full years.
I just... That was, that was that.
And I needed to try to focus on
getting my head straight.
And a lot of that was for my kids, you know?
I didn't ever want to be...
..you know, someone,
I guess that, you know, they weren't proud of.
Yeah, that was a lot of my motivation
to get started, to get better.
INTERVIEWER:
- Um...
You said you were are fearful.
- Yeah.
- What do you mean?
- Suicide.
I just didn't want it.
I didn't want to have those thoughts
any more, you know?
I didn't want to hide from the pain.
I didn't want to run from the pain.
I just...
I didn't want to leave them behind,
you know? I didn't want to
end things that way.
Because I wasn't winning.
You know what I mean?
I wasn't winning by myself.
It just wasn't...it just wasn't
going to happen.
It wasn't going to be a...
..a fight that I was going to win.
And if I didn't, if I didn't lean, reach out
and talk to Robin, talk to Pete...
HE SIGHS
You know, maybe be in a bad place.
And I just didn't want to be there.
It is funny to think about,
like, kind of diving in
with the case of looking at the one image
and then getting it going...
Pete kind of stepped in where I needed him to.
You know, I thank him. I'll always thank him
for getting me away from a place that
was kind of dangerous.
And I feel very, very fortunate to
work with all my friends
across the globe and to have them to lean on
and say, "Hey, man, it's OK."
One of the worst guys that was not
captured after Lubasa's arrest
was a user that went by LBO, or Lover Boy Only.
And you know, he and I had had
interactions over the years.
He was a boy lover.
He always loved things more violent,
more on the rough side of things.
A lot of rape, bondage, things like that.
And even other users were going, you know,
"What's wrong with this guy?"
You know, he's talking about some
really, really violent
and extreme things.
LBO got the attention of the community
right around November 11th, 2020.
He was making a claim that
he had kidnapped a boy.
And I...was online that day
and had read some of the comments around it.
And, you know, we read those with a
grain of salt.
It's not uncommon for users to talk that way
and to get kind of... go down those
paths.
And LBO, you know, he was asked,
you know, like,
"Yeah, I'm sure you did this."
You know, "Bullshit. Stop fucking around."
You know, "It's not funny," or
whatever the reactions were.
But LBO took it upon himself
to provide a proof of life picture.
And this is a boy who's clearly in distress.
I can see his face clear as day - a
blond-haired boy.
That really made my heart start to race.
We knew LBO to speak English and Russian.
Probably more likely, you know,
somebody from Russia
or one of...maybe the Ukraine or
something to that effect.
There was no doubt in my mind who, you know,
who I was going to reach out to,
like, straight away.
I gave him a description of the boy.
I said, you know, maybe six, seven
years old, blond hair.
I would know who he is if he's in
fact, you know,
a kid that's missing.
There's a real boy missing.
The description lines up,
the timing lines up,
and you just go, "Holy shit.
"This boy is somewhere with this monster."
The boy that had been missing for over
50 days at that point.
It's a terrifying thought.
Ivan had told us that that they had
called off the search October 11th
and that they were just looking for
the boy's body.
And, you know, now, we had called,
you know, relatively out of the blue
and said, you know,
we think he's alive.
While we breathe life into the
investigation there,
we also knew just how dangerous LBO was.
And that was nerve-racking.
For me, and I think for everybody,
it was the incredible pressure
to try to find him as fast as possible.
You know, Ivan doesn't work dark web
cases, he's a street cop.
You know, he's boots on the ground
kind of guy.
We knew we were going to need some
serious resources to get this done
and, you know, those resources
certainly included large data sets,
large databases that Interpol holds.
And, you know, one of my favourite
people in the world is Gordana.
- I received a message from Greg
asking me for help.
I know Greg long time.
We work together.
Greg knows that I speak Russian.
- Gordana is an analyst and has
worked,
you know, many, many child abuse
cases in the past.
It was too easy to pick up the
phone and get her involved.
INTERVIEWER:
- Can you tell me what information you
had to start with?
- Lover Boy Only.
LBO.
Username. I have only username.
And information that this username
maybe kidnapped a boy.
I start working on this case
and nothing else except the work.
Everything disappeared
because I know that
probably life of this kid is in our hands.
I check our database in Interpol.
We have huge amount of digital files
shared by Brazilian police
when they arrest Lubasa.
And I found more than 13,000 digital files
connected with Lover Boy Only.
Photos, links, messages,
posts on forums.
So I was reading all the comments,
searching anything that can lead us to this guy.
- You know, from an undercover perspective,
a lot of our job was doing kind of
round the clock observation,
observe the community, see what occurred.
We were in literal constant contact
20-plus hours a day.
I'm not sure Gordana was even
sleeping, to be honest.
- All of us was in different time zones.
But even if it's night in the US and Russia
and I sent a message, I get reply immediately.
So because of that, I realised we are
all not sleeping.
We didn't even think about sleeping.
I just think we must find him.
We must find him...
..because he will kill him.
- We weren't under the illusion
that LBO would do anything
but kill this boy.
He'd been talking about that stuff for years -
kidnapping and killing a boy.
MACHINERY GRINDS
- These users, they very care about security.
Because of that, it was very difficult
to find him.
But they made a mistake.
And we are hunting for these mistakes
all the time.
- Gordana built a profile on this guy,
and there was three little
nuggets of information
that were really interesting.
The first one was that
LBO seemed to suffer from schizophrenia.
Now, in Russia,
people that have diagnosed schizophrenia
actually are entitled to a pension,
some compensation every month
from the government.
That would be something that Ivan
and their team could look into.
The other point that they found
was he talked quite a bit about his
brother's occupation,
and it was an occupation that probably
could be checked
in databases there in Russia.
And then the third point
was LBO had a conversation
with another person about his mother
being killed in a car accident.
And actually had a date, a year rather,
that that car accident had occurred.
GLASS SMASHES
BANGING
SMASHING, BANGING
DRILL WHIRS
OFFICERS SHOUIt's really easy to remember every
single piece of this,
because it was such a... such a wild...
..a wild minute in my life.
Ivan sent me a message and said...
.."We have the boy. He's safe."
Um...
Fucking awesome, you know?
It was just, just the...
..just the best news that I think I
had received, you know?
And just staring at my phone,
looking at that message
and I fucking, I looked at Pete
there, and I said,
"They fucking found him."
It almost took your breath away, you know?
That's how intense it was.
- It was maybe...
..three in the morning
and I just wake up in a little bit panic.
I grabbed my phone...
..take a look, and I see my
colleague holding the boy.
- SHE CLEARS HER THROA- Um...
No words to explain this moment.
- You know, and seeing that picture of
his parents hugging him.
Yeah. It's just...
Kind of makes you think of, like,
when you hug your own kids,
you know, and you...
It just brings a totally different
value to that, you know?
And to know that they're safe and to
know that they're in your arms,
I mean...
Those parents were told a month
earlier that their son was dead...
..and that, you know, there was no more hope,
and there they were, holding him on the train.
Maybe the most special moment,
you know, in my career.
I know I've come, like, a good
distance from where I was
at any given, like, dark moment.
You know, I spent years hiding how I
was feeling.
Like...
..I'm pretty decent at lying and
telling, you know,
wearing a different mask, and then,
"Hey, everything's fine.
Everything's cool. No big deal.
"Like, let's go do something."
I've kind of come to,
to terms with or peace with, like,
this isn't something you carry by
yourself.
This isn't something I carry about myself.
There might be some super soldier
out there that can do it.
It's just not me.
Ooh-hoo-hoo!
Today, I have a conscious
effort about recognising
what's going on that's good.
- So beautiful!
HE LAUGHS
- Like, every moment with my kids.
I'm truly thankful for that stuff.
I believe in this mission beyond 100%
and I believe in the people and I
believe in, you know,
we can make a difference.
But I want to be able to continue
making a difference.
What little sacrifices I feel like
I've made over the years,
I would do it again, over and over again.
I couldn't see myself doing anything else.
I feel honoured to be part of the team
that can make a difference.
Instead of watching it on TV or
hearing about it and going,
"Shit, that's fucking awful,"
I'd rather be right in there in the
fight trying to stop it.
I told you a little bit about the
bricks, the brick thing.
- I've known about the brick thing
since the beginning.
- You did, yeah.
- Yeah.
- Like, the whole idea of even being
able to have this conversation
someday is...still, like, feels super surreal.
- Yeah.
- Like, it feels like a miracle in a way.
- Yeah.
I am incredibly lucky to have a good
support system right now
while I'm dealing with this.
I have more stability.
I'm able to have the energy to talk to people,
which, I could not have done this
even, like, a couple of years ago.
- No, you just move on and
deserve to live, like,
a fucking awesome life.
- I would love to work on
being a functional person.
Memory loss is a big part of these things,
and I just don't remember a lot of it,
which is fine with me.
- Yeah, right.
- But, like, at that point,
I was praying,
praying actively for it to end.
I had been, at that point, for years.
But not to sound cliche, but
it was a prayer answered.
- Yeah.
Sounds weird, I'm sure, but you wish
there was some telepathy
and you could reach out and be like,
"Listen, we're coming."
- Yeah.
- Like, it does sound cheesy, but, like...
..that's the genuine feeling when
you're in the middle of those things
and you just want to, like, reach out and go,
"Well, fuck it, we're going to get there."