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“Make out with him,” Scott Lane, 37, urged the abuser, court documents show.
“Get [the victim] naked,” he reportedly said, as well as “nice,” “hot, man” and “show more face” – and, near the end, “no f***ing?”
Lane, who lives near Central Park in Manhattan, was the executive director of donor relations and fundraising programs at Pace when federal authorities charged him and 14 other defendants with a host of child-exploitation offenses tied to a video-conferencing site in 2016.
Twelve of them, including Lane, took deals from the government, pleading guilty to related charges. One died after being charged. Another pleaded guilty but died before sentencing.
Sentences have ranged from 6½ to 60 years in federal prison. Just about all of that time must be served because there’s no parole in the federal prison system – which means Lane won’t be eligible for release until he’s in his 70s.
The sentences “reflect our office’s commitment to protecting vulnerable victims and punishing individuals who engage in this type of abhorrent behavior,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Bruce D. Brandler of the Middle District of Pennsylvania.
Lane and others were on a video conference in July 2015 when William Augusta, of North Middletown, began sexually abusing a 6-year-old boy, according to a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) complaint on file in Scranton, PA.
Lane and others “encouraged Augusta to sexually abuse the boy for everyone to watch live,” the complaint says.
Using the alias “NYC Perv,” Lane instructed Augusta to “make out with him," among other things, federal authorities said.
The child was rescued and Augusta arrested after an undercover Toronto police detective constable saw what was happening.
Augusta, it turned out, had been abusing the child for nearly two years, authorities said.
He was 20 years old when a state judge in Cumberland County sentenced him to 2019 to 45 to 90 years in state prison.
HSI agents arrested Lane in April 2016 at his West 56th Street apartment, where he lived with a male roommate.
The Illinois native was “terminated, permanently barred from university property and facilities and is no longer employed by the university,” a Pace spokesman said soon after.
Lane eventually pleaded guilty to six counts of child pornography-related offenses, including conspiracy to produce and producing child pornography, in January 2018.
In addition to the prison sentence, he was sentenced Thursday to 15 years of supervised release and ordered to pay $50,000 of restitution to the then-6-year-old victim, as well as $476.95 to another victim.
HSI Philadelphia, the Toronto Police Service, the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office and North Middleton police worked the case, with assistance from Brandler’s Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section’s (CEOS) High Technology Investigative Unit.
CEOS Trial Attorney Austin M. Berry and Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott Ford of the Middle District of Pennsylvania prosecuted the case.
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