Teacher Sentenced In Sodomy
By Alvin E. Bessent
Staff Writer
May 14, 1988
A Long Island man who admitted sodomizing or sexually assaulting 13 boys
who came to his Great Neck home for computer courses was sentenced yesterday
to up to 30 years in prison.
"Never in my experience have I ever come across a case as wide-ranging and
as heinous as that perpetrated by this defendant," said Assistant District
Attorney Joseph Onorato, who has prosecuted sex crimes since 1973.
Arnold Friedman, who pleaded guilty March 25 to 42 sex-related charges
involving the 13 boys, stood meekly with his hands cuffed behind his back as
Nassau County Judge Abbey Boklan sentenced him to the 10to 30-year jail term
to which Friedman had agreed when he entered his plea.
The sentence is to run concurrently with a similar federal one that
Friedman received earlier for sending child pornography through the mails.
"Since I may not be on the bench in 10 years when you are eligible for
parole," Boklan told Friedman, "this court wants the record to show that you
are a menace to society and should not be released early."
Friedman said nothing when offered a chance to speak.
Fourteen of the victims' relatives, many of whom have come to court each
time Friedman appeared, sat together in three front rows of the courtroom.
Most sat impassively, but one woman bowed her head and sobbed quietly after at
first glaring in Friedman's direction.
In letters to the court, Boklan noted, some of the victims' parents had
asked whether she could order Friedman to pay for their children's therapy.
"Since restitution was not a part of the plea bargain I cannot impose it," she
said in court.
Friedman, 56, was brought from the Federal Correctional Institution in
Otisville, N.Y., for his court appearance. He has been in the prison since
March 28, when he was sentenced to 10 years for sending child pornography
through the mail. He pleaded guilty to that charge Feb. 8 and was sentenced by
U.S. District Court Judge Mark A. Costantino.
Elaine Friedman charges
Friedman's son, Jesse Friedman, who faces multiple counts of sodomy, sexual
abuse, endangering the welfare of a child and using a child in a sexual
performance, is awaiting trial. Arnold Friedman's wife,
Elaine, has been charged
with attempted second-degree assault and second-degree obstructing
governmental administration after taking a swing at a police officer Nov.
27 as he gathered evidence from the couple's home. She is free without bail
awaiting trial.
Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.
The Secret Life Of Arnold Friedman
Friends and parents knew him as a respected
teacher. What they didn't know was that he and his son were sexually abusing
pre-teen boys. See end of text for sidebar-Possible Telltale Signs
By ALVIN E. BESSENT
Staff Writer
May 28, 1989
Frustrated because no arrests had been made, a group of parents decided to
confront the teacher at his home. They met Nov. 24 at an office in Great
Neck in preparation for the siege. Police attended the meeting. They headed
off the confrontation by convincing the group that arrests were imminent.
The next day, Nov. 25, 1987, 12 Nassau police officers and an assistant
district attorney descended on the house and broke in the front door. They
took Arnold Friedman into custody.
Elaine Freidman arrested
Mrs. Friedman was out shopping for Thanksgiving dinner. Thirty minutes
after police arrived, she got home to find neighbors, reporters and camera
crews gathered out front and her husband inside in handcuffs. "It was a
horror," said Mrs. Friedman, who
frantically tried to stop the police searching her house.
"She pushed me,"
Galasso
said. "She threw a punch at my head."
Arnold Friedman was arrested on a variety of child-abuse charges, and his
wife was arrested for attempted
assault.
Jesse Friedman was with friends shopping in the East Village that day. He
bought a scarf and some records and then at 5 p.m., he called home. Galasso
answered. His father and mother had been arrested, she said. She advised him
to come home.
Telling his friends nothing of what was going on, he went to Pennsylvania
Station, stumbled onto a Long Island Rail Road train and began the long ride
home to arrest and jail.
It was a journey that had begun in his childhood.
* * *
According to the judge who would sentence him to prison for child abuse,
Jesse Friedman was "raised an unwanted child in a home devoid of love."
His mother, in tears as the judge spoke, didn't challenge that assessment.
"When I was married and had babies, I couldn't love those babies," she said
in an interview. "I asked Jesse, do you remember me hugging you at all? He
said no. He was so starved for love, for approval, for acceptance that he
would have done anything for this love.
"He came into the family sort of out of step. The family focus was on the
two older boys," said the mother, who declined to discuss her older sons,
neither of whom was involved in the sex abuse case. "He was always kind of .
. . dragged along and felt excluded."
Jesse Friedman was interviewed in March in a prison visiting room. As he
slouched on a plastic chair and sipped a cherry cola, Jesse said he is
"halfway between loving and hating" the man he holds responsible for landing
him in prison. "He let me down as a father."
When he was 8 or 9 years old, Jesse said, he stumbled upon his father's
cache of kiddie porn. Later, his father began to visit his bedroom at night
and fondle him. The abuse escalated into sodomy.
"In my family, everything got washed under the rug," Jesse said. "I never
told about the abuse. I didn't think anyone would understand. Trying to do
something about the problems in my family never seemed to get me anywhere."
Jesse said his parents fought a great deal. "I used to go to sleep listening
to them fighting, screaming at one another . . . I never saw them loving
each other. I would cry when they would fight. I would bang on the walls.
I've got all these holes in the walls from my banging." Jesse said his
parents argued about him and about such mundane issues as the color of a
carpet.
When he was 10, Jesse began psychiatric therapy. He insists he never told
his therapist about the incest.
Jesse increasingly had trouble in school. By ninth grade he rarely attended
classes and failed every subject. His academic record improved when he
enrolled in an alternative school in Great Neck.
But his emotional problems continued. At 15, Jesse said, he was diagnosed as
manic depressive. "I had no friends and no interests except M&Ms,
marshmallows and TV." He was 5 feet, 6 inches tall and he ballooned to 175
pounds. At 16 he began smoking marijuana and using LSD, and before long he
was stoned on a daily basis.
Jesse gave up drugs a year later after meeting his first girlfriend. "I
enjoyed friends and women more than smoking pot," he said.
Jesse's
Forum
Elaine's Day Care
Galasso also strongly rejected the idea that interviews with the children
were designed to coax preconceived answers. The first detective sent out to
interview one 10-year-old boy was
surprised when the boy -- upon meeting the detective -- immediately handed him a
flier that advertised Elaine Friedman's in-home day-care center.
According to Galasso, the boy told the detective he wanted him to have the
poster because "'I don't want any more
children to get touched.'"
"What that young man eventually revealed," Galasso continued, "was a
pretty complete account of how he was seduced and then raped by Arnold Friedman
and then Jesse Friedman." The 10-year-old's older brother, who also attended
classes with Arnold Friedman, "told the same story, by the way," Galasso said.
Second Raid
The next day,
Nov. 25, 1987, 12 Nassau
police officers and an assistant
district attorney descended on the house and broke in the front door.
They took Arnold Friedman into custody.
Mrs. Friedman was out shopping for Thanksgiving dinner. Thirty minutes after
police arrived, she got home to find neighbors, reporters and camera crews
gathered out front and her husband inside in handcuffs. "It was a horror," said
Mrs. Friedman, who frantically tried to stop the police searching her house.
"She pushed me," Galasso said. "She threw a punch at my head."
Arnold Friedman was arrested on a
variety of child-abuse charges, and his wife was arrested
for attempted assault.
Jesse Friedman was with friends shopping
in the East Village that day. He bought a scarf and some records and then at 5
p.m., he called home. Galasso answered. His father and
mother had been arrested, she said. She advised him to come home.
Telling his friends nothing of what was going on, he went to Pennsylvania
Station, stumbled onto a Long Island Rail Road train and began the long ride
home to arrest and jail.
Danamora Correctional
Prisoners have their own lawn and patio areas
Despite the attorney's plea for leniency, Boklan again recommended that the
defendant serve the full sentence.
Jesse is in the Clinton Correctional
Facility in Dannemora.
Because Clinton is built on the side of a mountain, the hillside accounted for
unique
skiing activity in winter.
It also
accounts for another unique Clinton tradition.
Small areas of the hillside are used as "courts,"
which groups of inmates call their own
and where they gather to socialize, cook and eat, play cards, chess and
checkers, and grow flower and vegetable gardens.
The 300 established courts range in size
from nine square feet to 25-by-50 feet and accommodate up to six men.
The hillside crowded with courts has often been likened to a hobo jungle. The
courts had their origins "in the rights of a few squatters," but their use has
for years been sanctioned by facility officials. The court system is seen as
playing a key role in the social structure of Clinton’s 2,900 inmates and the
manage ment of this large population.
Along with the creative programming based in the Annex, Clinton offers the
core programs of modern
corrections in New York state: academic education, vocational training, alcohol
and substance abuse treatment and work assignments in areas such as facility
maintenance, grounds keeping, food service, and industries.
Some
450 inmates
assigned to Clinton's Corcraft industrial program manufacture inmate clothing
for DOCS and the New York City Department of Corrections, and Class B uniforms
for DOCS Correction Officers. The Garment Shop also produces clothing for
residents of the facilities operated by the Office of Mental Health and the
Division for Youth. In 1989, Clinton was the 19th New York state correctional
facility to be accredited by the ACA and will soon undergo its fourth
reaccreditation audit.
Ski jumping, bobsledding, and ice
skating are practiced by some inmates.
The bobsled run
courses down a wide avenue between courts near the west wall. In summer the
avenue is not appropriated for court use; it has the appearance of a fire-break
running straight up the hill.
Body builders. Four platform type spaces, equipped with weight-lifting articles,
occupy a space close to the entrance to the yard. Football players.
Organized (tackle) football is a big thing at Clinton. An inmate player reported
that there are four teams, each numbering about 30 men. Basketball players. The
number of basketball (and handball) players is about the same as the football
contingency. Horseshoe players.
A relatively small group. Television
watchers. Several inmates occupy an area near the building where they watch two
hooded television sets. Unlike many prisons, Clinton has little access to
television. A two-channel radio station is piped into the cellblocks and
available to inmates by individual earphones.
One channel, I was told, carried sports programs; the other often carried the
soundtrack of a television program on the air at that time.
CASE CHRONOLOGY
For the Court’s convenience, this
chronology sets forth many of the most important events in this case.
July
1984 U.S. Customs agents at
JFK
Airport seize a child pornography magazine addressed to
Arnold Friedman.
They inform United States Postal Inspector John McDermott
November 23, 1984 -
February 6, 1986 For a
year and a half, an undercover postal inspector, posing as a collector of child
pornography, engages in a correspondence with
Arnold Friedman,
trying to persuade
Friedman to send a piece of child
pornography by mail.
February 8, 1986
Arnold Friedman
sends the undercover postal inspector a magazine that contains child
pornography.
November 3, 1987 After
continued correspondence with the postal inspector, over another year and a
half, in which
Arnold Friedman repeatedly
requests the return of the magazine, Postal Inspector John McDermott, posing as
a mailman, returns the magazine to
Arnold Friedman
at his home in Great Neck in a “controlled delivery.”
McDermott and other federal agents
execute a search of the
Friedman
home, pursuant to a warrant, for
“materials related to the manufacturing and distributing of child pornography.”
They find approximately twenty magazines, alleged to contain child pornography,
in Arnold Friedman’s
private office, but no evidence of self-produced pornography. They also find a
list of names of students who had attended
Arnold Friedman’s
after-school computer classes over the prior several years.
November 4, 1987
Informed of the search by federal agents, Detective Sergeant Fran
Galasso
of the Nassau County Police Department initiates an investigation into possible
child sexual abuse in
Arnold Friedman’s
computer classes. There have been no complaints of abuse from children and no
parent has reported physical or psychological symptoms of abuse.
Two-detective teams begin interviewing
students on the list
November 25, 1987 Nassau
County detectives execute a search of the
Friedman
house and arrest
Arnold
and Jesse Friedman
on charges of child sexual abuse.
December 9, 1987
Arnold
and Jesse Friedman
are arraigned on Indictment 67104, which contains fifty-two counts of child
sexual abuse against five children.
February 8, 1988
Arnold Friedman
pleads guilty in federal court to one count of mailing child pornography.
February 9, 1988
Arnold
and Jesse Friedman
are arraigned on Indictment 67430, which contains ninety-one counts of sexual
abuse against eight children. The arraignment is covered in court by television
cameras and photographers. This is the first time a judge has ever permitted
cameras inside a Nassau County courtroom. Judge
Boklan
will continue to routinely grant such requests throughout the proceedings.
March 25, 1988
Arnold Friedman
pleads guilty before Judge Boklan
to all felony counts in Indictments 67104 and 67430 in exchange for a promised
sentence of ten to thirty years, to run concurrently with any sentence imposed
in federal court. Faced with the prospect of being re-arrested and prosecuted
based on the allegations of other children, he provides a lengthy “closeout”
statement to detectives, confessing to acts of molestation against every child
whose name is raised by the police. Detectives will use this statement in
subsequent visits to children’s houses.
March 28,
1988
Arnold Friedman
is sentenced to ten years in
federal prison.
April 11,1988
Douglas Krieger, Esq., serves a demand for discovery, which includes a specific
Brady
request.
May 13, 1988
Arnold Friedman
is sentenced to ten to thirty years in
prison
on the state charges.
June 22, 1988
Ross Goldstein is arrested
based on a felony complaint alleging 18
counts of child sexual abuse committed in the
Friedmans’
computer classes. Detective
Galasso tells the press and
Jesse’s attorney, Peter Panaro,
that there might be as many as four additional suspects arrested.
June 23, 1988
Jesse Friedman,
who has surrendered at the demand of Nassau County police, is arraigned on a
felony complaint charging thirty-seven new counts of sexual abuse.
September 8, 1988 Ross
Goldstein signs a plea agreement in which he promises to testify against Jesse
Friedman.
Goldstein is promised a sentence of six months in the county jail, five years
probation, and a youthful offender adjudication.
In or about Summer/
Fall
1988 Attorney
Panaro,
having viewed and transcribed the tape of the Interview of Gary Meyers,
specifically requests Brady
evidence of similar suggestive and intimidating questioning of other children by
detectives. None is disclosed.
November 15, 1988 Jesse
Friedman
and Ross Goldstein are arraigned on Indictment 69783, which contains 302 counts
of child sexual abuse against seven children.
December 20, 1988 Jesse
Friedman
pleads guilty before Judge Boklan
to twenty-four counts in full satisfaction of the three indictments against him
in exchange for a promised sentence of six to eighteen years.
January 24, 1989
Jesse
Friedman
is sentenced by Judge Boklan
to six to eighteen years.
March 22, 1989 Ross
Goldstein pleads guilty to three counts of sodomy in the first degree, and one
count of use of a child in a sexual performance.
May 3, 1989
Ross Goldstein is sentenced to two to six years by Judge
Boklan,
contrary to Goldstein’s cooperation agreement. Thirteen months later, the
Second Department reverses Judge
Boklan and orders that she
re-sentences Goldstein to the originally promised term of six months.
Fall
2000 Andrew
Jarecki
begins production of a documentary about children’s birthday party entertainers,
which eventually becomes “Capturing the
Friedmans.”
He first contacts Jesse
Friedman
about the project in March 2001.
December 7, 2001 Jesse
Friedman
is released from
prison after serving thirteen
years of his sentence.
January 2002
Jesse Friedman
sits for on-camera interview with Andrew
Jarecki
for his film.
January 2003
Jesse Friedman
sees a rough-cut of “Capturing the
Friedmans”.
January 2004
Fulfilling 16 years of hope, Jesse
Friedman
files an appeal of his conviction in Nassau County.
Dragnet Is Out For Porn
Photos In Child Sex Case
Newsday
February 8, 1989
By Alvin E. Bessent
Police are searching for pornographic photos and videotapes that could be key
evidence in their continuing investigation of a Great Neck child
sex‑abuse case.
Many victims told police they were
photographed performing sexual acts in the home of computer teacher Arnold
Friedman, who has pleaded guilty to sex abuse. And many parents, who fear the
material is circulating in child pornography circles, say they were angered
because plea bargain negotiations by authorities with Friedman's son Jesse,
18, did not lead police to the material.
A teenage neighbor of the Friedman's has been indicted in the investigation,
but two other men that the victims and he said were also involved haven't been
charged. The missing pornographic materials could provide needed
evidence against the two suspects, officials said.
"Virtually every child who gave a
statement said they were extensively photographed and videotaped during these
sexual acts," said Det. Sgt. Frances Galasso, chief of the Nassau police sex
crimes unit. "Just about every class was videotaped. It had to be dozens [of
tapes]," she said.
Jesse Friedman's defense attorney,
Peter Panaro, said a video camera and a 35mm still camera were regularly
positioned on tripods in the ground
floor classroom where Arnold Friedman conducted computer classes. But
Panaro maintained that his client doesn't know what became of the photos and
tapes, or whether they still exist. "Jesse says he's never seen a picture
ever," Panaro said. "Arnold had 100 percent control over pictures." Arnold
Friedman's attorney, Jerry Bernstein, declined to comment.
None of the pictures or tapes were
found during two searches in late 1987 of the Friedman house at 17 Picadilly
Road. Nassau police have traveled around the region to view child pornography
seized in other jurisdictions, Galasso said. And federal postal inspectors
said they, too, are on the lookout for homemade pornography tied to those
involved in the case. Authorities said they have no firm leads to the
whereabouts of the materials.
Parents of many of the victims say
they fear that the materials featuring their children will be distributed in
the child pornography netherworld. That was one of the threats Arnold Friedman
used to keep the children quiet about what was going on during his classes,
parents and police have said.
Because of those concerns, and the
parents' desire that the two additional suspects described by victims be
charged in the case, questions about the missing photos and tapes
almost derailed the negotiations that resulted in Jesse Friedman's Dec. 20
guilty plea to 25 counts of sexual abuse in the case.
According to
parents of the victims, Jesse Friedman often had a camera around his neck when
he greeted their children outside his home before computer classes. When he
entered his guilty plea, he admitted taking photos, of at least one boy in a
sexual scene. In an interview, one victim said he was afraid the pictures and
tapes could ruin lives, but took solace in the hope that the pornography will
not surface for years. "People change so much as they grow older . . . If
these things surface 20 years later, they won't be recognizable," he said.
Threats to
release pictures
The mother of a victim said, “The kids
are afraid Jesse has those pictures and when he comes out of jail he's going
to be real angry and use those pictures to hurt them. It's a very powerful
hold to have on someone, to have those pictures.”
The Friedmans were arrested Nov. 26
1987, and charged with counts of child sexual abuse. Charges were later filed
against a third defendant, Ross [ ],
bringing the total number of counts to
465.
[I have deleted the surname of the state's
witness because he received a youthful adjudication and has a sealed criminal
record.]
Questions about the tapes and photos
were not raised during negotiations with Arnold Friedman that resulted in his
guilty plea to 42 felony child sexual abuse charges in exchange for a 10 to 30
year prison sentence. The children had not told police about being
photographed or the presence of additional adults during the classes before
March 25 when Arnold Friedman's plea was accepted, officials said. Arnold
Friedman is serving his state sentence concurrently with 10 to 30 years
imposed on the federal charge of distributing pornography through the mail.
Additional Men
[Ross], who was indicted last
November on 118 counts of sexual abuse, confirmed in grand jury testimony
that, in addition to the Friedmans,
two additional men participated in the abuse of the victims. But that
account from a co‑defendant such as [Ross] must be independently corroborated
to be of use during a trial, said Assistant District Attorney Joseph Onorato.
[Ross] has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is free on $25,000 bail.
[Ross'] attorney Michael Cornacchia declined comment
Based on [Ross'] testimony, police
said, two suspects were brought in for lineups. But only one of the twelve
victims who have been cooperating with the investigation made a positive
identification. Two others said they thought they recognized one of the men,
but weren't sure, Onorato said.
That left police with the missing
photos and tapes as their best remaining hope for making cases against the two
suspects, Galasso said.
Outraged relatives of seven of the
victims wanted a 10‑to‑30 year sentence for Jesse Friedman unless he led
police to the pornography. They said Onorato badgered them during Dec. 16 and
Dec. 20 meetings in his Mineola office when he advised them to accept a deal
for 6‑to‑18 years.
Onorato denied pressuring the
parents. Before accepting the plea, Onorato said, he pushed Jesse Friedman for
leads to the photos and tapes. But the defendant maintained he knew nothing
about the pornography.
Panaro confirmed that Onorato
pressured Jesse Friedman on the subject of the photos and tapes before
agreeing to the deal. "They wanted those pictures," Panaro said. "I thought
the whole deal was dead."
Police asked anyone with information
about the case to call the sex‑crimes unit at 535‑7816. All calls will be kept
confidential, they said.
The Secret Life Of Arnold Friedman
Friends and parents knew him as a respected
teacher. What they didn't know was that he and his son were sexually abusing
pre-teen boys. See end of text for sidebar-Possible Telltale Signs
By ALVIN E. BESSENT
Staff Writer
May 28, 1989
IN THE SPRING of 1986, about 100 people - most of them former students of
the guest of honor - crowded a hot, second-floor television studio at
Bayside High School in Queens to honor a science teacher named Arnold
Friedman.
The ex-students, who had come from places as far away as California,
greeted each other over sodas and sandwiches and talked about a man some
described as unforgettable and others called the best teacher they'd ever
had. One guest credited Friedman with turning his life around.
The occasion was Arnold Friedman's retirement after a 26-year career at
Bayside High. Friedman, who had the respect of his peers as well as his
students, had taught one of New York City's first high school classes in
nuclear physics and the first organic chemistry class ever offered at
Bayside. And he and his students had converted classroom 235 into WBAY-TV,
a simulated television station where they produced videotapes. In a speech
to the group, Lester Speiser, principal of the school during most of
Friedman's tenure, talked about the joy that Friedman got from
"communicating and teaching and seeing his students succeed."
Afterwards, Friedman's youngest son, Jesse, pumped Speiser's hand. "It was
wonderful, the things you said about my father," Speiser remembers Jesse
telling him.
"In my whole career I don't remember students ever throwing a party like
this for someone," Speiser says. * * *
On the day of Arnold Friedman's retirement party, postal inspectors in New
York City were in the middle of an investigation that would shatter the
teacher's reputation, tear apart his family and horrify his suburban
community.
The investigation had been going on for two years. In July, 1984, U. S.
Customs officials at Kennedy airport had plucked a small parcel from the
stream of boxes and envelopes culled daily for contraband. They had
learned to be suspicious of small parcels in plain brown wrappers like the
one sent from Holland to Arnold Friedman, 17 Picadilly Rd., Great Neck,
Long Island.
Inside was a magazine called Boy Love. It featured low-budget color photos
of nude boys and graphic pictures of men having sex with children.
Postal authorities were alerted and the investigation was launched. Using
an undercover name and address, a postal inspector wrote to Arnold
Friedman and asked if he had "boy lover" material to sell. "I have none to
sell but am interested in obtaining," Friedman responded three days later.
"Do you know of any sources?"
The inspector, who called himself Stan, wrote back but heard nothing from
Friedman for more than a year. Then, the day after Christmas, 1985,
Friedman renewed the correspondence. "I have a great photo book from
Holland that might be copyable. Could you do it?" Other letters followed;
the correspondents became "Stan" and "Arnie." "The book is `Joe and his
Uncle,' " Arnie wrote. "I think I'd like you to send me something (sort of
good faith) and I will forward this rather precious book to you."
Stan sent two photos and on Feb. 8, 1986, Arnie mailed a large envelope
with a handwritten note. "Stan - Enjoy! Arnie." Inside was the magazine
"Joe and His Uncle" - kiddie-porn from a company in Denmark. It was the
breakthrough the postal inspectors had been waiting for. The
correspondence built up; Arnie even filled out a questionnaire from Stan
for an ostensible porn pen-pal club.
On Nov. 3, 1987, an inspector dressed as a postman returned "Joe and his
Uncle" to the house on Picadilly Road where Arnold Friedman gave computer
lessons to children. Fifteen minutes later, government officials and
Nassau police, armed with a warrant, raided the home. They found a
foot-high stack of child pornography secreted behind a piano in the living
room. And there were grimmer discoveries - child-sized dildoes in a
cabinet just outside a makeshift classroom.
They also found a list of 80 names and phone numbers handwritten in
Friedman's tortured, tiny scrawl.
Police realized that they had found something that went far beyond
pornographic magazines. They intensified the investigation. Before it was
over, the probe would uncover the largest child sex-abuse case ever on
Long Island and one of the largest in New York State - both in the number
of victims and the number of charges. The investigation would leave the
lives of the children and their families in shambles, and underline the
difficulty of gathering evidence in cases involving pedophiles - adults
who are sexually attracted to children.
And it would leave friends, relatives and colleagues of award-winning
teacher Arnold Friedman wondering how such a seemingly nice man could do
such horrible things. How it could have happened without anyone knowing it
was going on?
"I ask myself, looking back, if there were any clues I could have picked
up on and the answer is no," said Robert Sholiton, director of The Adult
Program for the Great Neck public schools, where Arnold Friedman taught
computer classes from 1981 to 1987. "I keep asking myself, is this the man
I knew?"
Along the way, the investigation into what went on in the house on
Picadilly Road would lay bare a lifetime of unspeakable secrets, and lead
to Friedman and his 19-year-old son, Jesse, being indicted on hundreds of
counts of sex abuse and sentenced to jail terms. THEY WERE secrets that
would make the brick-and-shingle high-ranch on a proverbial tree-lined,
suburban street in upscale Great Neck a chamber of horrors for dozens of
children.
140 Kids
Police said that 140
children - ranging in age from 7 to 12 - would finally admit what
they had been too shamed and afraid to tell their parents. Some of them
still wet their beds, take baseball bats to bed with them or are unable to
sleep. "If you murder someone, seconds later they're dead," says the
father of one of the young victims. "This was like a prolonged torture
they subjected the kids to." They were secrets of incest that Arnold
Friedman's now 19-year-old son Jesse kept hidden through years of therapy
and drug abuse. "I guess it mostly started out with my father trying to
love me." Jesse says.
They were also secrets that Arnold Friedman, a pudgy 58-year-old
pedophile, had not only managed to hide from colleagues but, according to
the woman to whom he had been married for 33 years, even concealed from
her. "It hit me like a bolt from the blue," she says.
* * *
Arnold Friedman was born in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, the
second of three children. Money was scarce for the family during the Great
Depression. Arnold's father hustled a living buying and selling auto
parts. According to Arnold Friedman's wife - who insisted that her first
name be withheld as a condition for consenting to an interview - her
father-in-law was emotionally distant. "Arnie's father was a strange man,"
Mrs. Friedman said. "He didn't talk. When he walked in he said `Hi.' When
he left he said `goodbye.' " But she said there was never any indication
that her father-in-law molested his son.
When Arnold was about 5 years old, his father left the family, plunging
them into even more desperate financial straits. The father kept in touch
with his relatives but would never again live with his wife and children.
"There was an older sister who died suddenly of what they called at the
time blood poisoning. This was a Shirley Temple look-alike. The mother was
devastated by this sudden death," Mrs. Friedman said. "The father left . .
. They were on welfare as a result."
After he graduated from Lincoln High School in Brighton Beach, Arnold went
to Brooklyn College and then
Columbia University, where he studied chemical engineering. He
worked for a short time as an engineer, his wife said, but quit because he
detested the odors.
Instead, Arnold, who played the piano, chose to spend his time working
Brooklyn clubs as "Arnito Ray," leader of a six-man rhumba band. "I was
very much in love with Arnold's music," said Mrs. Friedman. "He never
really spoke too much, but his feelings came out in his music and that's
what really attracted me."
The bride-to-be had also grown up in Brooklyn. Her father abandoned his
family when she was 18, and her mother, an unemployed bookkeeper, was
forced to move with her daughter into the home of relatives. There was no
hugging or touching in her family, she said. "They are very loving people.
They just don't know how to show their love."
In Arnold she found a man concealed within a similar emotional shroud.
"In fact, when Arnie and I were first going together, he said to me, and
probably only once said it, `I love you.' It made me feel uncomfortable."
They married in 1955, and eventually moved to Flushing, where they bought
their first house. Mrs. Friedman taught school. Arnold played club dates
at night but took education courses and did substitute teaching during the
day. In 1960, he relegated the band to weekends and became a full-time
science teacher at Bayside High School.
His colleagues saw an imaginative, productive teacher whose humor, even
temper and contagious enthusiasm made him respected and well liked. He had
a favorite response to suggestions, they said. "Dynamite."
"We never saw him really raise his voice or get angry," said a Great Neck
neighbor who also taught with him at Bayside but did not want her name
used.
Arnold displayed what Mark Yohalem, former head of the Bayside High School
science department, described as "a relaxed authoritativeness."
"He was always one of my best," said Speiser, who was principal at Bayside
from 1972 to 1985. "In all this time he was like a pied piper. He was
venerated by the boys and girls." Speiser and his family celebrated at the
Friedman house in 1983 when computer instructions written by Arnold were
released on records and cassette tapes. And Arnold played the piano at the
marriage of Speiser's daughter in 1984. "In the years I knew him there was
never a scintilla, not a breath of this kind of thing," Speiser said,
referring to the abuse case.
Speiser said he teased Friedman for being obsessed with technology. "I
would walk in and he'd be doing something technical. I would yell,
`Hamlet, Hamlet. Do something with that!' "
In 1981, Friedman was hired by the Great Neck School District to teach
personal computers in The Adult Program. By the next year, he was
appointed coordinator for the program's 20 or so computer classes, said
spokeswoman Ronna Telsey. He always had high enrollments and positive
ratings, officials said.
And in October, 1987, less than a month before authorities seized stacks
of kiddie-porn from his house, Arnold Friedman was cited by the state
Association for Computers and Technologies in Education for innovation and
excellence in computer education.
But at home, Friedman seemed a different person - his effervesence
disappeared.
He was a workaholic who talked little and demonstrated no affection for
either her or their three sons, Mrs. Friedman said. He never hugged the
boys. He would stay alone for hours in one of the two cluttered offices he
maintained in the Great Neck house and then spend the remainder of the
night slumped in front of the television set.
"A sentence that began `I feel' was never in his vocabulary," Mrs.
Friedman said. "The only conversations Arnold ever had with the children
were about work."
"I had an awfully peculiar family," says Jesse Friedman.
* * *
When word went out in Great Neck that Arnold Friedman was offering private
computer classes for children in his home - teaching general know-how and
basic programing - there was no shortage of takers.
Police said the classes took place for about eight years, starting around
1979.
Hundreds of largely college-educated, upper-middle-class professionals -
doctors, lawyers, business executives and entrepreneurs - enrolled their
children. Officials estimate that
about 500 youngsters, the great majority of them boys, participated in the
classes.
The parents of five of Arnold Friedman's victims have talked at length
about the case in recent months. All said they went inside the Friedman
house only once - when they dropped their children off for the first day
of class. They saw nothing to be suspicious about.
A small room to the right of a short corridor had been converted into a
classroom. Kid-size, Formica-topped tables held personal computers. Tiny
orange, yellow and blue molded plastic chairs were scattered about the
room, which was cluttered with books, computer manuals, magazines and
hundreds of computer discs. On one dark, wood-paneled wall, a printout
sign proclaimed: "Computer Class is Great."
"It had a real classroom feeling. A little shabby, a little seedy, but a
real classroom," said a woman who enrolled her two sons.
Across the hall was the entry to Arnold Friedman's office. Just beyond the
classroom, adjacent to a laundry room and bathroom, was the room where
Jesse slept. A sign on the wall called his domain "Paradise 7."
Arnold, his wife and sons stared from a framed photograph in the hall.
The parents left confident that all was as it seemed. An affable Arnold
Friedman had explained that there was no need to come into the house when
they left and picked up their children. He said neighbors had complained
about heavy traffic and parking congestion. The parents could simply pull
up out front and his son Jesse would escort the kids into and out of the
house.
The children came home with stacks of printouts and talked about what they
had learned about computers. But they were too shamed and fearful to talk
about everything that took up their after-school hours.
Police have given the following account of what happened in Arnold
Friedman's computer class:
Arnold's set up to new kids
What the parents did not see were the pornographic magazines interspersed
on shelves along with legitimate classroom materials. Some featured
pictures of nude women, others showed men posing with women, men with men
and men with young boys. Students sent in search of computer manuals would
stumble across the magazines.
Soon the children found that Arnold knew they'd discovered the racy
pictures. He told them he understood. Their parents would get uptight
about things like that, he said, but they could talk to him about
anything.
Next the children were introduced to the pornographic computer discs.
Things like "Stroker," in which the player could make a graphic
representation of a man masturbate. And "Strip Poker," in which a prone
woman figure would shed clothing as the game progressed until she was
naked.
Or "Talking Sam" in which a male figure would expose his genitals and ask
the kids questions about sex.
Det. Sgt. Frances Galasso, head of the Nassau sex crimes unit, said the
Friedmans had the children mimic the actions of the computer figure in
"Talking Sam." "The Friedmans would demonstrate that on the kids, touch
them on their private parts and have the kids touch them."
As a reward for keeping quiet, children were allowed to take computer
discs home to copy. In a few cases, police found such discs in the homes
of Friedman's students. None of the parents knew what the discs contained,
police said. Experts said this added to the youngsters' feelings of
complicity. And the children were warned that if they told anyone what was
going on there would be no more computer classes in Great Neck, Arnold
Friedman would go to jail and it would be all their fault.
"I really wanted to take computer so I never told anyone about what was
going on except my dog," said one 8-year-old victim in his statement to
police.
Inexorably, police said, the Friedmans increased the abuse, touching and
fondling and performing sex acts. Boys were eventually told to drop their
pants. The Friedmans would sometimes expose themselves, walk around the
room and order their young charges to touch them. Children's games were
perverted. Nudity and fondling were demanded in "Simon Says."
Refusals to cooperate were punished by Arnold and Jesse.
"I remember once they banged some kid's head against the wall and said
this will happen to you," a 12-year-old boy who attended the classes two
years ago said in an interview. "Mr. Friedman would sneak up behind me and
take his hand and push it down into my pants," said an 8-year-old boy in
his statement to police. "Jesse used to sneak up from behind me and he
would slide his hands the same way his father did. First he would touch my
shoulders then down my chest and into my pants.
"Mr. Friedman pulled my pants half-way down and he made me hold onto one
of the computer table chairs . . . I screamed `Dad!' and Mr. Friedman said
to me to be quiet. Mr. Friedman put his hands over my mouth. During this
time the other kids were screaming and telling Mr. Friedman to get off me.
I was scared and the other kids were scared, too."
Then in March, 1986, friends of
Jesse joined in what police said escalated into orgies of sexual abuse.
Arnold and Jesse Friedman and three teens would sometimes attend classes
with five to 10 students. Victims recounted being held down by one
attacker and raped by another.
Threats to mail pictures
As the abuse escalated so did the threats. Police said the children were
extensively videotaped and photographed. No pictures of the children have
been recovered. But police said Arnold Friedman told the children he would
send pornographic pictures of them to magazines and tell the publishers to
print their names if they told what was going on.
He threatened to burn their houses down. He reportedly said he would kill
their parents.
"It was brainwashing," the mother of one victim said.
* * *
The Friedmans' wall of secrecy quickly disintegrated after police and
postal inspectors turned up the list of names in the Nov. 3 raid.
It was a wall that apparently had even hid Arnold Friedman's activities
from his wife. "When the federal officers came, Arnold told me he'd mailed
a magazine and that was the totality of his crime," Mrs. Friedman said.
"He was almost in tears because they took his books. Not because his
family was in jeopardy, but because they took his pictures. The family was
distraught and destroyed. We began to bicker a lot and work at cross
purposes with each other."
Although Friedman insisted he was guilty only of collecting pornography,
she said, he began to talk about suicide.
"He felt desperate," said Mark Yohalem, Friedman's former department
chairman. Yohalem talked to him shortly after he was hit with the federal
charges. "He saw his life in ruins regardless of how the trial would come
out."
Jesse, then a student at SUNY Purchase, said his mother called and told
him about the raid. He refused to accept later calls from home, and for
the next few weeks tried to forget developments in Great Neck.
Galasso and her 11-member squad of Nassau detectives and officers were
hard at work checking out names. The interviews started when detectives
chose a name at random from the handwritten list and visited that family.
They found three brothers who had all attended classes with the Friedmans.
"Two of the three boys gave indications they'd been sexually abused by Mr.
Friedman," Galasso said.
But the parents refused to cooperate with the investigation, a reaction
that police came to know well. About two dozen families flatly refused to
allow officers to talk to their children. "There were even kids who told
their parents they were involved in front of us and the parents didn't
believe it," Galasso said.
Working with the list of names, Galasso's squad divided into two-persons
teams and knocked on doors all over Great Neck as they followed the list.
Files were established for each child. Police officers canceled vacations
and switched to night shifts.
It was a week before Thanksgiving when two detectives knocked on the door
of a woman who would still look haunted more than a year later as she
recounted the scene.
The detectives - a man and woman team - said child pornography had been
found in Arnold Friedman's house. They wanted to speak to her son as a
precaution.
She said the boy "started out saying nothing happened. Then, `Maybe I saw
something.' Then about two hours later, `Well, maybe Arnold did expose
himself. Maybe Jesse did expose himself.' " Finally, the boy described
being fondled and sodomized.
"At that point I went nuts," the woman said, remembering the fury she felt
at Arnold Friedman. "I said if you don't arrest him after what I just
heard, I'm going to buy a gun and kill him."
One young boy, who revealed what happened only after numerous visits by
detectives, repeatedly pounded his head against a wall while describing
the sexual abuse. "He would literally beat himself, he was so guilty about
what had happened," Galasso said.
As more and more children confided in police, their parents began to talk
with one another. Arnold Friedman had phoned some and sent letters to
others saying he was innocent - that police were setting him up. He asked
for their support.
Frustrated because no arrests had been made, a group of parents decided to
confront the teacher at his home. They met Nov. 24 at an office in Great
Neck in preparation for the siege. Police attended the meeting. They
headed off the confrontation by convincing the group that arrests were
imminent.
The next day, Nov. 25, 1987, 12 Nassau police officers and an assistant
district attorney descended on the house and broke in the front door. They
took Arnold Friedman into custody.
Mrs. Friedman was out shopping for Thanksgiving dinner. Thirty minutes
after police arrived, she got home to find neighbors, reporters and camera
crews gathered out front and her husband inside in handcuffs. "It was a
horror," said Mrs. Friedman, who frantically tried to stop the police
searching her house.
"She pushed me," Galasso said. "She threw a punch at my head."
Arnold Friedman was arrested on a variety of child-abuse charges, and his
wife was arrested for attempted assault.
Jesse Friedman was with friends shopping in the East Village that day. He
bought a scarf and some records and then at 5 p.m., he called home.
Galasso answered. His father and mother had been arrested, she said. She
advised him to come home.
Telling his friends nothing of what was going on, he went to Pennsylvania
Station, stumbled onto a Long Island Rail Road train and began the long
ride home to arrest and jail.
It was a journey that had begun in his childhood.
* * *
According to the judge who would sentence him to prison for child abuse,
Jesse Friedman was "raised an unwanted child in a home devoid of love."
His mother, in tears as the judge spoke, didn't challenge that assessment.
"When I was married and had babies, I couldn't love those babies," she
said in an interview. "I asked Jesse, do you remember me hugging you at
all? He said no. He was so starved for love, for approval, for acceptance
that he would have done anything for this love.
"He came into the family sort of out of step. The family focus was on the
two older boys," said the mother, who declined to discuss her older sons,
neither of whom was involved in the sex abuse case. "He was always kind of
. . . dragged along and felt excluded."
Jesse Friedman was interviewed in March in a prison visiting room. As he
slouched on a plastic chair and sipped a cherry cola, Jesse said he is
"halfway between loving and hating" the man he holds responsible for
landing him in prison. "He let me down as a father."
When he was 8 or 9 years old, Jesse said, he stumbled upon his father's
cache of kiddie porn. Later, his father began to visit his bedroom at
night and fondle him. The abuse escalated into sodomy.
"In my family, everything got washed under the rug," Jesse said. "I never
told about the abuse. I didn't think anyone would understand. Trying to do
something about the problems in my family never seemed to get me
anywhere." Jesse said his parents fought a great deal. "I used to go to
sleep listening to them fighting, screaming at one another . . . I never
saw them loving each other. I would cry when they would fight. I would
bang on the walls. I've got all these holes in the walls from my banging."
Jesse said his parents argued about him and about such mundane issues as
the color of a carpet.
When he was 10, Jesse began psychiatric therapy. He insists he never told
his therapist about the incest.
Jesse increasingly had trouble in school. By ninth grade he rarely
attended classes and failed every subject. His academic record improved
when he enrolled in an alternative school in Great Neck.
But his emotional problems continued. At 15, Jesse said, he was diagnosed
as manic depressive. "I had no friends and no interests except M&Ms,
marshmallows and TV." He was 5 feet, 6 inches tall and he ballooned to 175
pounds. At 16 he began smoking marijuana and using LSD, and before long he
was stoned on a daily basis.
Jesse gave up drugs a year later after meeting his first girlfriend. "I
enjoyed friends and women more than smoking pot," he said.
As he sipped the soft drink and talked about his life, Jesse had been
glancing about the room. Now his close-set, ice-blue eyes stared straight
ahead. "I'm not a pedophile. I hate little kids," he declared without
blinking. He tugged an ear and stroked the close-cropped beard grown
during his first few weeks in prison. "I'm a perfectly healthy, adjusted
heterosexual."
It was during his teenage years that Jesse helped his father teach the
computer classes in their home. "Jesse was thrilled to do the computer
class with Arnie because it was something, it was an activity that gave
him a father," his mother said.
* * *
The crimes of Arnold and Jesse Friedman spread pain in a wide wake. Young
victims were left scared and unable to sleep. One boy is deathly afraid of
fire. Another's stutter has grown worse. Well-behaved children have become
difficult.
One 12-year-old questioned his faith. As the boy waited in a courthouse
corridor to be sworn to testify before one of three grand juries convened
in the case, a prosecutor asked if he believed in God. The boy's mother
remembered her son's reply. "No, because a good God wouldn't let this
happen to children."
Another mother had lunch with a friend whose son had also been a computer
student. She tried to convince her companion that something horrible had
indeed happened in the Friedman house. The woman flew into a huff.
"I thought she was going to throw the food in my face. She said she had
such a good relationship with her kid he would talk to her. I said, `What
am I - a bad mother?' "
Like other guilt-ridden parents, the woman wondered why she didn't see
what was happening. And she wrestled with an equally nagging question: Why
didn't my child confide in me?
"In the subculture of adolescent boys, the greatest taboo is being
homosexual," said FBI special agent Kenneth Lanning, a veteran of more
than 1,000 such cases. "That's a big incentive to keep your mouth shut."
According to the victims, fear was another answer.
Experts say silence in the face of abuse is commmon for childen whose
first response to the unthinkable is figuratively to pull the covers over
their heads and forget it ever happened. "It's almost like an amnesia,"
said Dr. Sandra Kaplan, chief of North Shore University Hospital's
division of child and adolescent psychology, who is treating some of the
Friedman victims.
One 12-year-old boy was interviewed for this story in his own room. The
room - crammed with schoolwork, electronic equipment, personal computers
and two dogs - bespoke comfort and security. But the boy squirmed as he
struggled to come to terms with his silence about what had happened during
the computer classes in the Friedman house. "The threats made a pretty
good impression," he said, glasses askew and eyes darting. He recalled the
incident in which a boy's head was banged against the wall. " `Tell and
this will happen to you,' " he quoted the Friedmans as saying. He said
they also threatened to kill his parents and burn his house if he told.
It was almost two years after his last computer class but the strain of
remembering soon showed. A lost calculator, a misplaced page of algebra
problems and a screaming bout with a younger brother left the boy on the
verge of tears. Then his nose began to bleed. The nosebleeds predated his
enrollment in computer classes. But they too were triggered by stress.
He's always agitated like that after talking about the Friedmans, his
parents said later across their dining-room table.
It has also been difficult for parents to talk about their children's
ordeals. "We used to have lunches when we sat around and cried on each
other's shoulders. I don't think it will ever end," one mother said.
Eventually, about 14 families banded together and, over countless hours,
helped police and prosecutors build cases against the men charged with
abusing their kids. Twenty children testified before grand juries that
ultimately returned three indictments in the case.
"It helps them a great deal," Kaplan said, referring generally to victims
of child abuse. "This enhances their selfesteem, to see themselves as
heroes because they helped stop sex abuse." * * *
On March 29, 1988, Arnold Friedman appeared in Federal Court in Brooklyn
and was sentenced to 10 to 30 years in prison for distributing child
pornography through the mail. Meanwhile, Arnold, Jesse, and Ross
Goldstein, 18, a friend of Jesse's, would be indicted in Nassau County on
a total of 464 counts of sodomy, sexual abuse, using a child in a sexual
performance and endangering the welfare of a child.
Arnold, indicted on 107 counts,
would later plead guilty to 42 sex crimes, including eight counts of
sodomy and 28 counts of first-degree sexual abuse. Jesse, charged with 239
counts, pleaded guilty to 25 charges, including 17 counts of sodomy and
four counts of first-degree sexual abuse.
Both Arnold and Jesse would admit molesting 13 boys. On May 13, 1988,
Arnold was sentenced by Nassau County Court Judge Abbey Boklan to a
concurrent 10 to 30 years in prison for sodomy, sexual abuse and
endangering the welfare of a child. Boklan recommended that he serve the
full 30 years. Arnold, who will be
eligible for parole in 10 years, is imprisoned in the Federal Correctional
Institute in Oxford, Wis. In a letter to Newsday, in which he
refused requests for interviews, he referred to his case as "the Great
Neck Horror" and said it was the story of a town that "conducted a
modern-day witch hunt."
"The fact that my son and I pleaded guilty was not an admission of
culpability," Friedman wrote, "but an attempt to salvage whatever little
remained of our lives."
On Jan. 24, 1989, Jesse Friedman was sentenced to six to 18 years in
prison. At the sentencing, Jesse revealed through his attorney, Peter
Panaro, that he had been abused by his father. Despite the attorney's plea
for leniency, Boklan again recommended that the defendant serve the full
sentence. Jesse is in the Clinton
Correctional Facility in Dannemora.
"I don't long to be free," Jesse said in the prison interview. "I don't
miss my old life."
Ross Goldstein, who was indicted on 118 counts of various sexual abuses,
cooperated with authorities and implicated Jesse Friedman before a grand
jury. He pleaded guilty March 22 to three counts of first-degree sodomy
and one count of using a child in a sexual performance. He was sentenced
May 3 to two to six years in prison.
Mrs. Friedman pleaded guilty to attempted assault, second degree, and
obstructing governmental administration. She was sentenced Oct. 20, 1988,
to three years probation and a $1,000 fine.
Two additional suspects - teens referred to by the children and named by
Goldstein - remain at large. The children were unable to identify the two
positively in police line-ups.
Police said they believe the two suspects were photographed and videotaped
with the children. They said the children claim to have been extensively
photographed. Nassau detectives have viewed pictures seized in other
jurisdictions but have not yet turned up anything.
Bitterness resulted among parents of the some of the victims who felt that
prosecutors had failed to force Jesse Friedman to lead police to the
photos before allowing him to plead guilty. The parents fear the pictures
will be circulated among pedophiles and will one day surface and embarrass
the children.
Some parents attended a series of tense meetings with Assistant District
Attorney Joseph Onorato while he negotiated Jesse Friedman's plea. They
said he told them their children would have to testify in open court if
the case went to trial. Onorato also raised the spectre of appeals based
on defense attempts to suppress the list police used to locate the
victims. The parents said they were told that all of the evidence their
children provided could be suppressed by an adverse ruling.
Onorato said he just wanted parents to know all the things that could
possibly go wrong if they proceeded to trial.
The parents reluctantly accepted the deal that sent Jesse Friedman to
prison. "It seemed like Jesse was calling the shots," the mother of one
victim said. "Jesse could accept or reject the plea bargain. Jesse could
appeal."
Both federal and state prosecutors said as a rule they always prefer to
avoid taking child molesters to trial. "We don't want to put these
children on the stand if we can avoid it," said Andrew Maloney, U.S.
Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.
* * *
Discussing sexual-abuse therapy, Kaplan said that one objective is to help
such victims learn to deal with shame and confusion about their sexuality.
"A boy who has been sodomized may feel that he's destined to be a
homosexual. We help them to understand they're victims. That sex abuse is
the fault of the adult perpetrator, not the child."
The children whose parents deny what has happened and force them to
suppress it often suffer the most, Kaplan said. "Parents who encourage
their children to deny are telling their kids they can't trust them to
help."
For some parents and children, the ordeal was exacerbated by accidental
meetings with Mrs. Friedman and Jesse, who was free on bail for a long
time after his indictment. One woman and her two sons - both victims - saw
Mrs. Friedman and Jesse in a local poultry market. The boys ran for cover.
"My kids were deathly afraid. They asked for the keys and ran out and
locked themselves in the car," the woman said.
Some of the children who testified
before the grand juries received threatening telephone calls warning them
not to cooperate with police. Now they worry that videotapes will come
back to haunt them. They want to forget the lessons in the house on
Picadilly Road.
"I've been trying to put it behind me and go on," one 12-year-old victim
said of the experience that scarred his childhood. He tries not to think
about the respected teacher who lived a secret life.
By virtue of his own admissions in court, Arnold Friedman is a pedophile.
According to Kaplan, he fits much of the classic pattern. Pedophiles, she
said, are often intelligent, talented and respected in their communities.
They often manage to find jobs such as teachers, police officers, doctors
or nurses, or activities like scout leader or coach that bring them into
regular contact with children. In many cases, they were abused as children
and pick out victims in that age group. They come from all social classes
and all walks of life.
It is common for them to live behind facades so respectable that even the
parents of their victims are shocked by the disclosures of abuse. It was
that way with Arnold Friedman, whose persona was his protection.
"These kind of offenders are the most prolific child molesters known to
mankind," says FBI agent Kenneth Lanning. But he adds: "One of the
difficulties is the stereotype of the offender as totally bad, the dirty
old man in the wrinkled raincoat. Society has a problem when the offender
is not totally bad." Possible Telltale Signs EXPERTS say that it is
difficult but not impossible for parents to protect children from
pedophiles, who often hide behind a cloak of respectability while their
victims rarely talk about being attacked and sometimes exhibit no
symptoms.
Police and experts on the subject say several of the following symptoms of
behavior, while not necessarily proof that sexual abuse is taking place,
may become evident:
Many young victims become irritable, depressed, can't sleep, or become
afraid of men in general, said Dr. Sandra Kaplan, director of North Shore
University Hospital's Division of Child and Adolescent Psychology.
They may also display "hypersexuality," a sudden concern with sex that is
inappropriate for their age. Compulsive masturbation and fear of going to
a specific place can also occur. Other children display what Kaplan calls
a "frozen watchfulness," suspiciously eyeing people around them. Abused
children may begin to dress in inappropriately heavy clothes, said Alane
Fagin, executive director of Child Abuse Prevention Services of Roslyn.
"They're ashamed of their bodies. They think people can see they've been
sexually abused." Fagin also said that some victims may want to bathe
continually.
But about one in four abused children will show no symptoms at all, Kaplan
said. Boys, in particular, are less likely to confide what's happening to
them, she said. The bottom line, said postal inspector John McDermott,
whose unit conducted the Friedman child pornography investigation, is
never trust your child completely to anyone.
When a child is with a babysitter, teacher or anyone, McDermott said, "one
of the things you should do is drop in unannounced and uninvited."
|
Arnold
Trial
Teacher Guilty of Sex Crimes
In plea bargain, admits sodomizing boys in Great Neck home
By Alvin E. Bessent
Staff Writer
Originally published March 26, 1988
Computer teacher Arnold Friedman admitted yesterday that he sodomized
or otherwise sexually assaulted numerous young boys who were students
in his Great Neck home and pleaded guilty to 42 counts of various
forms of sexual abuse.
The plea was made during a tense, one-hour appearance before Nassau
County Court Judge Abbey Boklan in Mineola and followed 2 1/2 hours of
closed-door negotiations between attorneys in the case. Friedman sat
with his wife at his side as the plea and details of the agreement -
which will send him to jail for 10 to 30 years - were read into the
court record. Sentencing before Boklan was set for July 6.
Boklan allowed Friedman to remain free on $250,000 bail after defense
attorney Jerry Bernstein said his client will be sent to a federal,
in-patient psychiatric facility in Springfield, Mo., Monday after
sentencing on another charge in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.
Friedman pleaded last month to the federal charge of distributing
child pornography through the mail.
Beating kids
Ten people identified as relatives of the victims clustered in two
front rows of the heavily
guarded courtroom. Some perched on the edge of the benches and
others shared tissues and wiped their eyes as Friedman, 56, in a
barely audible voice, admitted sodomizing, sexually touching and
forcing the boys, all under age 11, to look at sexually ex-plicit
videotapes and magazines for his own sexual gratification.
Friedman also admitted ramming
one young boy's head into a wall while other students watched.
He answered with the single word, "Yes," when asked by Boklan if he
then threatened to do the same to the other boys if they told
anyone about the sexual abuse.
The father of a 9-year-old victim said the parents have become very
close to one another throughout the ordeal of the investigation and
prosecution.
"We've spent hundreds and hundreds of hours together over the last
months," he said. "These children have been brutalized."
But he and a second father both ex- pressed satisfaction with the plea
and sentence.
Friedman and his son Jesse, 18, of 17 Picadilly Rd., Great Neck, were
charged in December in a 54-count indictment in which they were
accused of sexually abusing five boys aged 8 to 11 and endangering the
welfare of a child. An additional 91-count indictment charging the two
with similar acts involving eight other young boys was added in
February.
Jesse Friedman did not take part in the plea bargaining. According to
his attorney, Douglas Krieger, he will probably stand trial.
Jesse Friedman sat in a front-row seat in the courtroom as his father
pleaded, and showed little emotion. At one point about 50 minutes into
the proceeding he tried unsucessfully to stifle a yawn.
Arnold Friedman, an award-winning teacher who taught for 20 years at
Bayside High School in Queens, pleaded yesterday to eight counts of
sodomy, 28 counts of sexual abuse, four counts of attempted sexual
abuse and two misdemeanor counts of endangering the welfare of a
child. He faced a maximum of 50 years in prison. But Boklan said she
would impose only 10 to 30 years to run concurrently with any prison
time imposed by the federal court.
Jesse Friedman, a student at the State University at Purchase, is
charged with multiple counts of sodomy, sexual abuse, endangering the
welfare of a child and using a child in a sexual performance. He will
return to court April 22.
|
|
By Alvin E. Bessent
Staff Writer
Originally published May 14, 1988
A Long Island man who admitted sodomizing or sexually assaulting 13 boys who
came to his Great Neck home for computer courses was sentenced yesterday to up
to 30 years in prison.
"Never in my experience have I ever come across a case as wide-ranging and as
heinous as that perpetrated by this defendant," said Assistant District
Attorney Joseph Onorato, who has prosecuted sex crimes since 1973.
Arnold Friedman, who pleaded guilty March 25 to 42 sex-related charges
involving the 13 boys, stood meekly with his hands cuffed behind his back as
Nassau County Judge Abbey Boklan sentenced him to the 10to 30-year jail term
to which Friedman had agreed when he entered his plea.
The sentence is to run concurrently with a similar federal one that Friedman
received earlier for sending child pornography through the mails.
"Since I may not be on the bench in 10 years when you are eligible for
parole," Boklan told Friedman, "this court wants the record to show that you
are a menace to society and should not be released early."
Friedman said nothing when offered a chance to speak.
Fourteen of the victims' relatives, many of whom have come to court each time
Friedman appeared, sat together in three front rows of the courtroom. Most sat
impassively, but one woman bowed her head and sobbed quietly after at first
glaring in Friedman's direction.
In letters to the court, Boklan noted, some of the victims' parents had asked
whether she could order Friedman to pay for their children's therapy. "Since
restitution was not a part of the plea bargain I cannot impose it," she said
in court.
Friedman, 56, was brought from the Federal Correctional Institution in
Otisville, N.Y., for his court appearance. He has been in the prison since
March 28, when he was sentenced to 10 years for sending child pornography
through the mail. He pleaded guilty to that charge Feb. 8 and was sentenced by
U.S. District Court Judge Mark A. Costantino.
Elaine Charged
Friedman's son, Jesse Friedman, who faces multiple counts of sodomy, sexual
abuse, endangering the welfare of a child and using a child in a sexual
performance, is awaiting trial. Arnold Friedman's wife,
Elaine, has been charged with
attempted second-degree assault and second-degree obstructing governmental
administration after taking a swing at a police officer Nov. 27 as he gathered
evidence from the couple's home. She is free without bail awaiting trial.
Copyright © 2003,
Newsday, Inc
Teen Faces 37 New Sex Charges
By Alvin E. Bessent
Staff Writer
Originally published June 24, 1988
A Great Neck teenager already charged with molesting young male
students at his father's private computer school was
rearrested yesterday on 37 new counts of sodomy and other forms of
sexual abuse, Nassau police said.
Jesse Friedman, 18, surrendered to police at about 4 p.m. and was
charged with 20 counts of first-degree sodomy, 11 counts of
first-degree attempted sodomy, four counts of first-degree sexual
abuse and two counts of using
a child in a sexual performance, police said.
Police said they expect to
arrest as many as four acquaintances of Jesse Friedman in the
burgeoning case.
With yesterday's arrest, the case has yielded a total of 200 charges
against Arnold Friedman, 56, his son, Jesse, and a neighbor, Ross
Goldstein, 17, who was arrested Wednesday.
Jesse Friedman will plead not guilty on the new charges when arraigned
today, said his attorney, Peter Panaro. "Jesse informs me he never
committed any of these acts," Panaro said yesterday. "My client is
distraught and he's asserting his innocence completely."
Arnold sodomized jesse
The charges stem from alleged abuses during the past eight years of
7to 11-year-old boys attending weekly computer classes at the Friedman
home at 17 Picadilly Rd. And, prosecutor Joseph Onorato said
yesterday, "There are
allegations that, in the view of these classes, Arnold and Jesse were
sodomizing one another."
The investigation into the Friedmans' activities intensified in March
after Arnold Friedman pleaded guilty to sexually abusing 13 boys,
Onorato said. At the same time, Jesse Friedman rejected a deal that
would have brought him about 5 to 15 years in prison, Onorato said.
"Jesse's indication [that] he wanted to go to trial forced a greater
effort to solidify what we had and to build on what we had," Onorato
said.
The investigation got a boost when, as part of a plea bargain,
Arnold Friedman identified
about 80 boys he had sexually abused, sources have said. The
plea netted Friedman 10 to 30 years in prison.
The eight-member police task force handling the cases then began
contacting newly identified victims and their families while
continuing interviews in already-surfaced cases. The numerous sessions
with the children brought out information that has led to the latest
arrests, police said.
"As we went back the second time, we began to hear statements such as,
`You know, sometimes Jesse had
his friends there,' " said
Det.
Sgt. Fran Galasso,
head of the sex crimes squad. "On further questioning, we began to
hear that the friends were involved."
Arnold Friedman had established the computer school in his home eight
years ago. He first acted alone in abusing the students, police said,
but his son became involved three or four years ago.
Goldstein, a former schoolmate of Jesse Friedman, was being held
yesterday in lieu of $100,000 bail set by District Court Judge Murray
Pudalev. He is scheduled to return to court Monday. Jesse Friedman had
been free on $250,000 bail until yesterday.
|
|
By Desson Howe
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 13, 2003; Page WE33
IF YOU and your family found yourselves in hell, would you pull out the
camcorder and film your misery? Would you goof around for the camera in the face
of doom and disaster? The Friedmans did, even though Arnold Friedman, the
father, and Jesse, the youngest of his three sons, were facing jail sentences
for multiple counts of child molestation.
Why they did this is just one of several striking mysteries in "Capturing the
Friedmans," a jarring, mesmerizing documentary that chronicles the emotional and
moral disintegration of a seemingly respectable middle-class family from Great
Neck, N.Y.
Their trauma began the day before Thanksgiving 1987 with Arnold and Jesse's
arrest for the sexual molestation of young boys. Arnold Friedman, an
award-winning music and computer teacher, and also an admitted pedophile, had
been caught weeks earlier in a sting operation after ordering and distributing
child pornography through the mail.
Upon learning that an admitted pedophile had tutored hundreds of preteens in
the privacy of his home, the Nassau County police conducted interviews with
alleged victims and their parents. In very short order, they obtained often
lurid complaints accusing the middle-aged Arnold and the 18-year-old Jesse (who
was his father's classroom assistant) of activities ranging from showing
pornographic computer games to brutal, even gleeful acts of sodomy.
During the years of Arnold's computer classes, not one student had come
forward or even mentioned anything to his parents at the time. And no physical
evidence of sexual molestation (not a requirement under New York State law) was
requested by Nassau County police. According to the police, however, the boys
claimed to have been threatened with violence if they told their parents. Arnold
and Jesse were arrested, indicted and found guilty.
Within two years of their arrest, both men were jailed. Arnold died in prison
in 1995. Jesse, convicted separately of sexual molestation, spent 13 years in
jail. A family and a community were devastated, and the book of justice was
closed in Nassau County. Or was it? Writer-director Andrew Jarecki's film, three
years in the making, covers the arrest, hysteria and guilty pleas of the late
1980s. He conducts present-day interviews with many of the significant players,
including the Friedmans, family friends and associates, purported sexual victims
and a long line of Nassau County law enforcement and justice figures. He also
records such recent events as Jesse's release from prison in 2001 and reunion
with his estranged mother.
But most significantly, there are staggering excerpts from some 50 hours of
Friedman home movies, which the family permitted Jarecki to use. Those private
films include scenes dating back to Arnold's childhood, footage shot years
before the arrest and in the months immediately after, and personal videos made
by Arnold's eldest son, David, which were his attempts to deal with the
unfolding saga.
These family films are the documentary's most explosive sections. Arnold and
his three sons, David, Seth (who declined to be interviewed for the movie) and
Jesse, had a longstanding tradition of making hammy films about themselves that
were full of corny jokes and commentary. Their involuntary target of humor in
happier times was wife and mother Elaine, hardly the most spontaneous resident
of Great Neck, who did not share their sense of frivolity nor feel part of their
camaraderie. When the sexual charges hit the household, Elaine's separation from
her husband and sons became more pronounced. Although the sons rallied around
the father, she refused to join the cause. She simply did not believe Arnold was
innocent and told them so. You can see this surreal dynamic in the home footage
that David shot during the family's darkest moments.
In another moment of home movie Friedmania, David turns the camera on himself
and begins a diary-like soliloquy about the innocence of his father. This film,
he says, is "between me and me now, and me in the future." It is private, he
insists, and anyone watching it should "turn it off." He also directs an
unequivocal insult to any police investigators who might be watching. What is
the result? An incredibly provocative, fascinating film that is about the way
one eccentric family faced an intolerable crisis and the confounding wheels of
justice.
In terms of the two cases, Jarecki avoids overt declarations about his
beliefs, but it's easy to imagine he believes Jesse Friedman, if not also
Arnold, to be innocent. He gives everyone some screen time, including Sgt.
Frances Galasso, who led the police effort to arrest and indict the Friedmans.
She stressed how careful she was in preparing the case because "charging someone
with this kind of a crime is enough to ruin their lives."
He also makes it clear Arnold was no innocent. There are some staggering
revelations about his pedophilia (including his possible molestation of his own
brother, Howard, and Jesse -- which both men say they don't recall) that make it
hard to feel much sympathy for him. This makes Elaine's justification for
disbelieving and leaving a man who had already kept dark secrets completely
understandable.
But there are declarations like these, which don't reflect well on Nassau
County:
"There was never a doubt in my mind as to their guilt," declares Abbey Boklan,
the judge in both cases.
"Children want to please very often," says Detective Lloyd Doppman, who was
part of the police team that conducted the interviews of the student children.
"They want to give you the answers that you want."
We hear from one student who says he was sexually abused, but we also hear
from another who says he was not -- nor can he imagine the "nebbish" Arnold
being the "brutal sadist" characterized by complaints. And we hear from a close
friend of Jesse who spent much of his time at the Friedmans' house, and also
claims to have witnessed nothing.
Arnold's apparent accomplice was the soft-spoken Jesse. Was he really the
"molesting tyrant" some accused him of being? Could a community, in the
sanctimonious heyday of the "family values" era, have irresponsibly destroyed a
family? These are some of the many questions Jarecki wants you to mull over.
They are compelling questions indeed, giving you the sense that "Capturing the
Friedmans" is a Chinese-box conundrum.
Were these convictions a modern-day case of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery,"
the short story in which a group of citizens gather amiably for the ritual of
stoning someone, or was justice served to two sleazy child molesters? It's
testament to Jarecki's superbly wrought film that everyone seems to be,
simultaneously, morally suspect and strikingly innocent as they relate their
stories and assertions. Each one of them -- whether sex unit detectives, former
computer students or members of the Friedman family -- seems confident they're
telling the truth, despite contradicting other people's testimony. This is a
film about the quagmire of mystery in every human soul.
CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS (Unrated, 107 minutes) -- Contains graphic
descriptions of child pornography and other sexual themes and obscenity. At the
Cineplex Odeon Dupont Circle and Landmark's Bethesda Row.
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multipage/documents/03006984.htm
http://freejesse.net/
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-friedman012589,0,6768783.story?coll=ny-linews-utility
http://www.judgegalasso.com/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A63104-2003Jun15¬Found=true
FRANCES M GALASSO
EAST NORWICH
NY age =
57
JOHN M GALASSO
EAST NORWICH
NY 58
http://www4.law.com/ny/judges_profiles/county_court/nassau/bios_index.shtml
Name is John M Galasso
http://www.capturingthefriedmans.com/main.html
http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/ny-friedmangallery,0,5040748.storygallery?coll=bal-features-headlines
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/multipage/documents/03006983.htm
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/other_stories/documents/03006986.htm
http://www.magpictures.com/distribution/data/press/capturingthefriedmans_production_notes
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-friedman062488,0,341657.story?coll=ny-linews-utility
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/ny-lifman293355703jul02,0,1486672.story?coll=ny-linews-utility
http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/ny-friedman052889,0,2607517.story?coll=bal-features-headlines
Most complete
California, meanwhile, saw the equally infamous McMartin Preschool case, in
which children claimed to have endured sadistic, ritual sexual abuse. Although
no one was ever convicted, the case took more than six years to wend its
way through the courts and cost the state of California more than $10 million.
In New Jersey, Kelly Michaels, a 23-year-old day-care teacher at the Wee Care
Nursery School, stood trial for, among other things, making children lick peanut
butter off her genitals. She was found guilty of 115 counts of child abuse and
sentenced in 1988 to 47 years in prison. In 1993, however, she successfully
appealed her prosecution and was released from prison. And Washington state saw
the notorious Wenatchee cases, in which prosecutors went after alleged child
"sex rings" run, in part, from a local Pentecostal church.
Police thought David had gun
Party Clowns Packing
Pistols? |
Thu, 24 July 2003 11:18 |
|
I think
one of the strange comments in the film that shows the hysteria was the
woman detective saying all eyes were
on David when he pulled out the underwear to cover his face from the cameras
because they assumed he was pulling out a gun. Why would they assume
David visiting his family for Thanksgiving would be prepare for a shoot-out
with the police? |
The Friedman's apparent normalcy comes to an end when postal inspector John
McDermott intercepts an envelope from the Netherlands containing child
pornography. The envelope is addressed to Arnold. Two search warrants and a
broken-down door later, Arnold and the
youngest son Jesse, now eighteen, are taken away in handcuffs while eldest son
David throws a fit as he walks around wearing
underwear
on his head to avoid being filmed by television cameras. The charges are,
in addition to possession of a large stash of pornography depicting men with
underage boys, ninety-one counts of orally and anally sodomizing boys from the
computer class. Jesse, who assisted Arnold, was linked by the students in police
interviews, some of whom are interviewed again by director Andrew Jarecki for
the movie. One even describes naked leapfrog games in the classroom that
involved acts of sodomy.
The events that occurred on the night of his
arrest, thoroughly covered by the media at the time, were sad, grotesque, and
darkly humorous. They included David
putting underwear
over his head and berating the local TV cameras. But things got worse.
Not only did the police haul away Friedman; they also arrested the youngest son,
Jesse, as an accomplish.
Jesse Level 3
Current Reported
Offender Details
County of New York
Anyone who uses this information to
injure, harass, or commit a criminal act
against any person may be subject to criminal prosecution.
Offender Id: |
13996 |
Race: |
White |
|
Last Name: |
FRIEDMAN |
Ethnicity: |
Not Hispanic |
First Name: |
JESSE |
Height: |
5'08" |
Middle Name: |
|
Weight: |
158 |
DOB: |
Jun 5, 1969 |
Hair: |
Brown |
Sex: |
Male |
Eyes: |
Blue |
Risk Level: |
3 |
Corr. Lens: |
YES |
Reported Address: |
305
EAST 105TH ST
APT 3B |
City: |
NEW YORK |
State: |
NY |
Zip Code: |
10029 |
View map The view map feature is currently not supported on
browser versions lower than version 4.0.7 in IE or version 6.01 in Netscape
|
Sex Offender Type |
Designation:
Lifetime Registration-Subject to Petition for Relief |
Other Address Info
or Status: |
|
Conviction: |
Date |
Arrest
Agency |
Suprv.
Agency |
Victim
Sex/Age |
Jan 24,
1989 |
Nassau
County PD |
NYS
Division of Parole- Quality Control |
Male,
Younger than 17 years
Male, Younger than 17 years
|
Conviction Charges:
(Please note: a
conviction for an attempt is generally punishable at one grade below the
classification of the crime attempted, i.e., a rape 2nd degree is punishable
as a class D felony while an attempted rape 2nd degree is punishable as a
class E felony.)
|
Title |
Section |
Subsection |
Class |
Category |
Degree |
Description |
PL |
130.50 |
|
B |
F |
1 |
Sodomy-1st Degree |
PL |
130.65 |
|
D |
F |
1 |
Attempted Sexual
Abuse-1st Degree |
Sentence: |
Incarceration Sentence: 6 Year(s)
to 18 Year(s), State Prison.
|
Maximum Expiration
Date/post Release Supervision Date of Sentence:
The legal dates
posted on this site are the dates which were reported at the time of
registration and are subject to change. The conditions of supervision are
subject to change during the supervision period. The special conditions of
release do not apply past the maximum expiration date of sentence because
the offender is no longer under supervision by the listed supervising agency
for this crime.
|
Dec 9, 2006 |
Scars, Marks &
Tattoos: |
Description |
Additional Names/Aliases: |
Last Name |
First
Name |
Middle
Name |
College Info: |
Employed/Attend |
Name |
Street |
City |
State |
Zip |
Currently Attend |
CUNY HUNTER COLLEGE |
695 PARK AVE |
NEW YORK CITY |
NY |
10021 |
Employer Info: |
Status |
Street |
City |
State |
Zip |
Current |
KINGS BRIDGE STREET |
BRONX |
NY |
10463 |
Current |
35 WEST 36TH ST 8TH
FLR |
NEW YORK CITY |
NY |
10001 |
Vehicles: |
Lic.
Plate No. |
State |
Vehicle
Year |
Make/Model |
Color |
Special
Conditions: |
Special Conditions: Seek, Obtain,
Maintain Employment, Abide by case specific sex offender conditions, Mental
Health referral, No alcohol, No contact with victim or victim's family, No
contact with children under 18 years of age unless in the company of an
adult who is at least 21 years of age and with permission of supervisor,
Participate in an academic or vocational program, Residence must be approved
by a PO, Curfew. |
Offense Description & Modus Operandi: |
Offense Description:
Actual, MoreThanOnce Deviate Sexual Intercourse
Actual, MoreThanOnce Sexual Contact
Relationship to victim: Unknown
Weapon used: Unknown
Force used:
Threat
Computer used: Unknown
Pornography involved: Yes
|
Author:
Ralph Michael Stein (lawprof@pipeline.com) from New York, N.Y.
Documentaries that focus on the lives
of their subjects are intrinsically voyeuristic. The
documentarian
must be objective while often prone to being seductively enmeshed in his/her
subjects' views of their lives.
"Capturing the Friedmans"
takes this reality to a much deeper and excruciatingly raw level. Long before
Arnold
Friedman, a deeply respected and retired high school teacher who moved on to
teaching computer skills when PCs were rare, and one of his son's,
Jesse,
became defendants in a widely reported and still remembered pedophile case,
filming and taping each other was a family staple. What starts as a not uncommon
family avocation turns infinitely darker as several of the family members seem
compelled to record disturbing intra-family encounters that both enthrall and
repel.
Based on a U.S. Post Office investigation leading to a search of the Friedman's
Great Neck, N.Y. home it is immediately clear that the
pater
familias
at the least was a dedicated, devoted collector of sickening homosexual
kiddie
porn. On that charge at the least he was fully eligible for and deserved a long
prison sentence.
But the initial investigation yielded verbal complaints by boys that they were
sexually abused during the computer training sessions in the Friedman home by
both Arnold
and his son, Jesse.
Also living in the house were his wife, Elaine, and two other boys, David and
Seth.
The police investigation led to myriad charges lodged against both
Arnold
and Jesse
and the legal proceedings drew national media attention (which I well remember).
No forensic evidence existed to link either Friedman to the crimes let alone
establish that they had occurred. All the evidence, which was never tested in
court, came from kids questioned by police and, apparently in many instances,
the kids were seriously encouraged by outraged parents who, themselves, had no
factual basis on which to proceed.
Jesse $ 250,000
Both
Friedmans
eventually and separately pleaded guilty to reduced charges.
Arnold
went to prison and subsequently committed suicide, leaving
Jesse
$250,000 in insurance proceeds.
Jesse,
who maintains his innocence to this day, served thirteen years of a six to
eighteen year sentence.
One son, Seth, refused to participate in this project. The other son, David, is
a high society children's birthday party clown in New York City known as "Silly
Billy." He worries in the film if his career will be affected. How could it not
be, especially as he is the angriest speaker on the screen. And not the most
rational either.
On many levels this is a deeply disturbing film. First, the family members who
cooperated by giving film to the director and allowing very free-wheeling
interviews reflect the reality of a hopelessly dysfunctional family, people who
had deep troubles long before the postal police showed up with a search warrant.
Elaine is alternately revealing
and guarded but it's clear that her union with the popular
Arnold
was disturbed, emotionally, sexually
and even in terms of practical matters like childrearing.
The family films show the deterioration of the sons' relationship with their
mother whom they hotly blame for supposedly not standing behind their father.
She is savagely abused verbally in scene after scene.
Arnold
remains a very passive, almost detached witness of his family's self-immolation
as he and Jesse
await possible trials and almost certain imprisonment. At one point
Arnold
appears to be nothing more than an onlooker as his sons tear into his wife who
gives back a spirited defense.
The most sympathetic character is
Arnold's
brother who can not recall
Arnold's
admitted and hardly self-serving statement that he engaged in sex with him when
they were little kids. The brother's anguish about the dissolution of the family
is heartfelt and affecting. He truly is a victim.
Beyond all the family sturm
und drang
is the legal story and it's troubling. This case took place while
accustations
of child abuse in daycare facilities flew through the headlines. An expert
debunker of many such cases is on screen to offer her views. She resolves
nothing but plants a kernel of doubt as to the state's case. It is clear,
however, that there were more than a few instances when the rule of law
succumbed to a miasmic hysteria.
A greater injection of skepticism comes from the back-to-back explanations by
two involved detectives as to how to question juveniles who might have been
victimized by sexual predators. One has the right answer, the other a technique
proven to lead to false accusations.
What followed the investigation was the
loding
of so many charges against each defendant as to constitute an extraordinary
episode of overcharging. Overcharging - hitting a defendant with every
conceivable charge and instance of its commission - is common. It gives police
much credit for clearing cases and prosecutors leverage in getting a plea deal.
In the case of the Friedmans
the plethora of charges, as opposed to whether each or both committed heinous
offenses, is simply unbelievable. As even the prosecutor admits, not one child
was injured or crying when picked up by parents at the home/computer school yet
some claimed to have been anally
sodomized
dozens of times. That's just not possible.
What "Capturing the Friedmans"
shows is that when a defendant like
Jesse
recants after pleading to so many counts it's impossible to ever be sure whether
the allocution required at the guilty plea hearing was genuine or, as
Jesse
later claims, the inevitable needed confession for the best deal he could get to
avoid life in prison.
My view as an experienced lawyer is that both were guilty of SOME offenses
against young boys.
Jesse's
protestations of innocence have the scent of the eternally unrepentant
malefactor. But I can't prove it and neither could the
documentarian.
Arnold's
starting point as a fervid consumer of
kiddie
porn magazines makes it easier to believe he graduated to the next step. But,
again, whether a jury could have so concluded beyond a reasonable doubt is
something we can never know.
David's defense of his dad and brother is so emotional and projected with the
weight of many repetitions over the years as to be worthless.
We will never know what actually happened. This glimpse into the lives of an
affluent family whose home life was rocky before the accusations is haunting,
troubling. It demands that we think about what we do in the vital and right but
sometimes off-kilter attempts to protect the young and punish their violators.
Teen Gets 6-18 Years For Child Sex Abuse
By Alvin E. Bessent
Staff Writer
Originally published January 25, 1989
Jesse Friedman, who admitted sexually abusing children during computer classes
taught by his father in their Great Neck home, was sentenced yesterday to 6 to
18 years in prison, despite an impassioned defense plea that he was a victim
of his father's abuse.
Nassau County Court Judge Abbey Boklan recommended that, despite Friedman's
abused childhood in a family "devoid of love," he should serve the full
18-year maximum sentence behind bars.
With his hands cuffed behind his back,
Friedman, 19, tearfully expressed
sorrow for the children he has admitted sodomizing, fondling and photographing
in sexual scenes, and for their families and the Great Neck community.
All were victims, the defendant said, of his father, Arnold Friedman.
"But I, too, am a victim," Jesse Friedman said haltingly. "My father raised me
confused about what was right and what was wrong and I realize now how
terribly wrong it all was."
Arnold fondled Jesse
In his bid for lenience, defense attorney
Peter
Panaro
said Arnold Friedman began entering his son's bedroom when Jesse was 9 years
old, fondling him while reading bedtime stories.
"The real culprit here is Arnold Friedman. The man is a monster," Panaro said.
The defendant's mother, Elaine Friedman, buried her face in her hands and wept
quietly as Boklan recounted a psychiatrist's report of her son's joy when his
father's unwanted sexual attention was shifted to children in the class. She
later left the Mineola courtroom without commenting.
Boklan said that, based on a pre-sentencing report from the county probation
department, it appeared that Jesse Friedman was indeed sexually abused and
"raised an unwanted child in a home devoid of love."
Jesse invited friends
But Jesse Friedman most often
physically brutalized the boys in his father's classes, and invited friends to
participate in orgies of child sexual abuse,
Boklan
pointed out. "The fact that you were a victim does not absolve you from
responsibility," Boklan said.
Before Friedman's sentence was pronounced, Panaro urged Boklan to make no
recommendation on how much of the sentence actually should be served. After
Friedman serves the minimum sentence of 6 years, a parole board - taking the
judge's recommendation into consideration - will determine when he would be
released.
Panaro also asked the judge to grant youthful offender status to Friedman,
which would seal the record of his conviction.
Boklan rejected both requests.
Arnold and Jesse Friedman were arrested Nov. 26, 1987, after Nassau police and
federal agents executed a search warrant at their house at 17 Picadilly Rd.
and found child pornography, pornographic computer discs and lists of children
enrolled in computer classes in the home.
The Friedmans and a neighbor, Ross Goldstein, who was arrested in June, were
charged in a series of indictments with more than 400 counts of various forms
of sexual abuse involving 7to 11-year-olds who were students in Arnold
Friedman's computer classes. Jesse Friedman was accused in more than 200 of
those counts.
Arnold Friedman, 57, was also charged by federal officials with distributing
child pornography through the mail. He pleaded guilty in March and was
sentenced to 10 to 30 years in prison. He pleaded guilty that same month
before Boklan to 42 counts of sexually abuse involving 13 boys and was
sentenced to 10 to 30 years in prison to run concurrently with the federal
time.
Jesse Friedman pleaded guilty Dec. 20 to 17 counts of first-degree sodomy;
four counts of first-degree sexual abuse; one count of first-degree attempted
sexual abuse; one count of using a child in a sexual performance and two
counts of endangering the welfare of a child. In the plea bargain, Jesse
Friedman gave up the option of appealing the case and was promised the
sentence imposed yesterday. Goldstein, 18, has pleaded not guilty to 118
similar counts and is free on bail.
Boys' Sex Abuse Admitted
Great Neck teen to get 6-18 years in plea bargain
By Alvin E. Bessent
Staff Writer
Originally published December 21, 1988
A Great Neck teenager accused of sexually abusing boys who attended computer
classes given by his father in their home pleaded guilty yesterday to 25
counts of sexual abuse in exchange for a promise of 6 to 18 years in prison.
Jesse Friedman, 19, during an appearance before Nassau County Court Judge
Abbey Boklan, admitted he fondled and sodomized 13 youths, and photographed
one of them in a sexual scene. After conferring briefly with his lawyer, Peter
Panaro, Friedman assured Boklan, "Your honor, all the things I said were the
truth."
Friedman did not look back at spectators as he was handcuffed and escorted
from the heavily guarded courtroom where relatives of his victims sat, many of
them in tears. His mother, Elaine Friedman, sat with her eyes closed or her
gaze averted during most of the proceeding.
Boklan ordered Friedman immediately jailed without bail pending sentencing
Jan. 24.
Friedman had maintained his innocence from Nov. 26, 1987, when he and his
father, Arnold, were arrested, until about three weeks ago when he went to the
district attorney in search of a deal, Panaro said.
In an interview, Panaro said several factors were involved in his client's
decision, namely Arnold Friedman's guilty plea in the case in March and his
subsequent 10-to-30-year prison sentence; the filing of additional charges
against Jesse Friedman in the case last month; and an agreement by Ross
Goldstein, a teenaged neighbor of the Friedmans also charged in the case, to
cooperate with authorities.
On the charge of first-degree sodomy alone, Jesse Friedman could have received
a maximum sentence of 8 1/3 to 25 years on each of the 17 counts pending
against him.
"Faced with the enormity of the evidence in this case, my client felt it was
in his interest to take a plea of 6 to 18 rather than gamble," Panaro said.
The deal was struck yesterday after daylong meetings between the victims'
parents and prosecutor Joseph Onorato. All but one of the families agreed that
the plea bargain was the best way to resolve the case, Onorato said. The final
piece fell into place yesterday when Jesse Friedman agreed to drop attempts to
have evidence in the case suppressed, Onorato said.
The group of parents left the Mineola courtroom without comment after the
40-minute proceeding. But, in a later interview, one man whose son had been
victimized said he was not pleased with the deal.
"It's a shame with all this public attention on child abuse the system does
not adequately punish it. I would have liked a stronger sentence," he said.
Jesse charged 200 counts
Jesse Friedman had been charged in
three indictments with more than 200 counts. Yesterday's plea to the
multiple counts of first-degree sodomy, four counts of sexual abuse first
degree, two counts of endangering the welfare of a minor, one count of using a
child in a sexual performance and one count of attempted sexual abuse first
degree, will satisfy all those charges, Onorato said.
By Alvin E. Bessent
Staff Writer
Originally published May 14, 1988
A Long Island man who admitted sodomizing or sexually assaulting 13 boys who
came to his Great Neck home for computer courses was sentenced yesterday to up
to 30 years in prison.
"Never in my experience have I ever
come across a case as wide-ranging and as heinous as that perpetrated by this
defendant," said Assistant District Attorney Joseph
Onorato,
who has prosecuted sex crimes since 1973.
Arnold Friedman, who pleaded guilty March 25 to 42 sex-related
charges involving the 13 boys, stood meekly with his hands cuffed behind his
back as Nassau County Judge Abbey Boklan sentenced him to the 10to 30-year
jail term to which Friedman had agreed when he entered his plea.
The sentence is to run concurrently with a similar federal one that Friedman
received earlier for sending child pornography through the mails.
"Since I may not be on the bench in 10 years when you are eligible for
parole," Boklan told Friedman, "this court wants the record to show that you
are a menace to society and should not be released early."
Friedman said nothing when offered a chance to speak.
Fourteen of the victims' relatives, many of whom have come to court each time
Friedman appeared, sat together in three front rows of the courtroom. Most sat
impassively, but one woman bowed her head and sobbed quietly after at first
glaring in Friedman's direction.
In letters to the court, Boklan noted, some of the victims' parents had asked
whether she could order Friedman to pay for their children's therapy. "Since
restitution was not a part of the plea bargain I cannot impose it," she said
in court.
Friedman, 56, was brought from the Federal Correctional Institution in
Otisville, N.Y., for his court appearance. He has been in the prison since
March 28, when he was sentenced to 10 years for sending child pornography
through the mail. He pleaded guilty to that charge Feb. 8 and was sentenced by
U.S. District Court Judge Mark A. Costantino.
Friedman's son, Jesse Friedman, who faces multiple counts of sodomy, sexual
abuse, endangering the welfare of a child and using a child in a sexual
performance, is awaiting trial. Arnold
Friedman's wife, Elaine, has been charged with attempted second-degree assault
and second-degree obstructing governmental administration after taking a swing
at a police officer Nov. 27 as he gathered evidence from the couple's home.
She is free without bail awaiting trial.
Arnold's Toys
State of New York v. Arnold Friedman.
Motion for order requiring return of property seized from 17 Picadilly Road,
Great Neck, Nassau County, New York, seized pursuant to search warrant of
November 25, 1987. Motion #C-427, Indictment #67104 & 67430.
September 14, 1990.
http://www.theawarenesscenter.org/arnoldandjessefriedman.html#United
Judge
Abbey L. Boklan
approved Arnold Friedmans'
request for the return of all property seized at the Friedman home with the
exception of pornographic materials listed in this document.
Materials include such items as: 5
pornographic movies, assorted order forms for pornography, assorted pornographic
magazine cutouts, 2 partially nude photos of children, 3 sheets advertising
homosexuality with boys, 6 photos of naked people, 3 battery operated sex aids,
1 hypodermic needle, 9 pornographic computer games (with descriptions),
list of names and phone numbers of 9 victims, 2 registration sheets with names
of victims.