35°
An FBI complaint charges 42-year-old Clifford W. Wares with one count of the production of child pornography and one count of interstate travel to engage in illicit sexual conduct.
Wares communicated with a 13-year-old Passaic County girl through email, telephone and Facebook while pretending to be a young teen from August to November 2011, the complaint filed in U.S. District Court alleges.
Authorities said he was able to reach her and another girl after hacking the teens’ Facebook accounts, copying their friends’ profile photos and establishing bogus accounts.
He then “regularly sent [the 13 year old] pornographic images and engaged in sexually explicit communications, ultimately asking that she send him images and videos of herself nude or engaging in sex acts, which she did,” it says.
Whenever she refused, the government says, Wares “threatened to distribute nude images of [her] to her parents and friends.”
A couple of months before they connected, Wares met a 14-year-old Passaic County girl online, “regularly engaged in sexually explicit communications with [her] sent her pornographic images and told her that he was interested in ‘hanging out’ with her,” the federal complaint says.
He then drove from his home in Warwick to Passaic County, where he picked her up, “had sexual intercourse with [her] in a nearby park and had her perform a sex act on him,” it says.
After a second encounter, Wares “threatened to kidnap and kill [her] when she refused to meet him again.”
A search by land and helicopter led to Wares’s arrest at a campsite in Smith Clove Park in Orange County, N.Y. in November 2011.
He was carrying a roll of duct tape, a pair of handcuffs, a f folding knife, latex gloves and “a handwritten list of the names of other minors who were known to Victims 1 and 2,” the complaint alleges.
Although Passaic County authorities originally brought the charges, it was taken to the federal criminal justice system, which doesn’t have parole.
Wares current is serving 9 to 18 years in a New York State prison for sending sexual explicit photos of himself and acts of bestiality to a 14-year-old girl. That sentence also includes time for injuring a New York State Police trooper in an assault.
U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman credited special agents with the FBI, the New Jersey Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory, the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office and New York State Police for their roles in the new case.
Representing the government is Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Alfonzo Walsman of the U.S. Attorney’s Office Criminal Division in Newark.
Click here to follow Daily Voice Paterson and receive free news updates.
