Suspected molester will stand in trial

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Oct 17, 2007 | by John Simerman

SANTA ROSA -- However loose police may have played it, however hard the leader of an anti-pedophile group prodded Dr. Maurice Wolin online, whatever six-figure bounty NBC pays the group to troll the Internet for its televised stings, none of it swayed a Sonoma County judge to spare the Piedmont cancer doctor from a jury.

Judge Raima Ballinger held Wolin for trial Tuesday on a charge of attempted child molestation after a preliminary hearing that ran an improbable eight days, stretched two months.

Wolin, 49, an oncologist and cancer researcher, went by "talldreamydoc" for days of sexually explicit chats with "willowfilipino," an online decoy posing as a 13-year-old girl.

He drove 40 miles north to a Petaluma sting house Aug. 26, 2006, and became one of 29 suspects whose arrests were taped for two episodes of the network's popular "To Catch a Predator" series.

Nearly 10 million people watched Wolin hurl his sunglasses to the ground as police swarmed in and forced him to the garage floor.

Like almost every suspect from the 11 "Predator" stings, most of the Petaluma suspects have pleaded guilty and none of the 29 has reached trial. But Wolin has chosen to fight. And his celebrity attorney, Blair Berk, has mounted perhaps the most vigorous legal attack anywhere against the unusual arrangement among police, NBC and Perverted Justice, the private online group that orchestrates stings for the show.

Elsewhere, the tactics used for "Predator" have come under increasing attack. Some sex crime prosecutors and law enforcement officials say police cross ethical and possibly legal lines in ceding major parts of the sting operations to NBC and Perverted Justice.

Berk, whose celebrity clientele includes Mel Gibson, Lindsay Lohan and, most recently, Kiefer Sutherland, argued that the online decoy entrapped Wolin by bullying him to meet "her" at a Petaluma sting house after he ditched an earlier meeting time and wrote that if they met, "we can't do anything."

The decoy was Xavier Von Erck, the round, black-clad founder of Perverted Justice. Von Erck, 28, said he works out of his home in Portland and spends every waking hour of every day working to expose pedophiles. His $120,000 salary, he testified, stems from the group's deal with NBC, which pays the group $70,000 for each hour of the show.

Berk suggested that Von Erck had a financial incentive to illegally badger Wolin. In the chats, Von Erck chides Wolin for his reticence, calling him "a chicken and a liar and a ditcher and a player."

"This is not a game of 'Gotcha!' This is supposedly a sting operation trying to ferret out sex predators, not a game of trying to seduce someone to meet a child," Berk argued.

"Xavier Von Erck had a problem. He had a television show to get on and a fancy cancer doctor to ensnare in his web, and he wouldn't let it go."

Driving to the sting house, Berk added, did not amount to a crime attempt.

Berk also attacked three separate versions of the Instant Messaging chats between Wolin and Von Erck that Perverted Justice provided to police, arguing that none of the online chats could be counted on as reliable because of differences in their content.

But on Monday, Judge Ballinger ruled that there was no "material" difference among the chats, and she allowed them admitted into evidence.

Prosecutor Brian Staebell on Thursday read out the explicit contents of what he called "disgusting" chats, aiming to show that Wolin had a clear plan, even as Staebell acknowledged that Petaluma police did not run the sting by the book.

"The whole business of this preliminary hearing has been an attack on the Petaluma police department and Perverted Justice. But every time I go back to the chats and I look at how he was grooming this 13-year-old girl," Staebell said.

"Did he come all the way to Petaluma to meet a 13-year-old girl to sit down and have a conversation with her? That is completely unrealistic."

The judge ruled that there was sufficient cause to believe Wolin committed the crime.

"Dr. Wolin didn't just drive to Petaluma. He followed the plan to not be seen. ... He walked into the open garage. That was the plan," she said. "He walked into the backyard."

She did not set a trial date. Wolin remains free in lieu of $30,000 bail.

Reach John Simerman at 925-943-8072 or at jsimerman@bayareanewsgroup.com.