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Michael A. Ruggiero, 38, of Lacey Township, was nabbed by federal Homeland Security agents after an online contact of his was arrested in Canada, authorities said.
Members of the Saskatchewan Police Service contacted them after finding online exchanges between a man they took into custody for downloading and sharing images of child sexual abuse off a mobile app and a user in the U.S.
IP addresses led the agents to Ruggiero, who was living in Berkeley at the time, a complaint on file in the U.S. District Courthouse in Trenton says.
Ruggiero was working then a senior corrections officer at the Albert C. Wagner Youth Correctional Facility in Chesterfield (Burlington County), records show.
Over the course of three days in 2016, Ruggiero used a mobile chat app “to distribute and share over the Internet images and videos of child sexual abuse,” U.S. Attorney Craig Carpenito said. “Some of the images and videos were of prepubescent children or children who had not attained the age of 12."
Ruggiero also collected other images and videos of child sexual abuse using the same app and had “additional depictions” of the same when he was taken into custody in June 2017.
Ruggiero took a plea deal and admitted his guilt last June, two years after his arrest, in exchange for leniency. He’ll have to serve all of his term because there’s no parole in the federal prison system.
In addition to the prison time, U.S. District Judge Peter G. Sheridan Judge Sheridan sentenced Ruggiero on Wednesday to five years of supervised release.
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