'To Catch a Predator': The New American Witch Hunt for Dangerous Pedophiles

No one is home at this house on the Jersey Shore -- no one, that is, except a very cute and horny fourteen-year-old. Her parents went to Atlantic City for the weekend, she is telling guys online, and she wants to get laid. Dozens of men are now making their way to the house, hoping to get lucky with an underage kid. One hopped on a motorcycle for the six-hour drive from Pennsylvania; another grabbed a train from New York in a SpongeBob SquarePants jacket, armed with a bottle of K-Y Jelly. One by one, they pull up to this white-shingled, weather-beaten house at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, with no cars in the driveway and the window shades drawn. A mailman stuffs some bills into the shark-shaped mailbox next door, pulling open its door of tiny white teeth.

This, as the men will soon discover, isn't just a house: It's the set of the Dateline NBC show To Catch a Predator, the ratings phenomenon that zooms into America's living rooms to humiliate sexual perverts. The program's gotcha! moments are like those on any reality show; who can forget the time they made a bespectacled twenty-year-old come over naked for sex play with some Cool Whip? Except Dateline sends people to jail and claims a high-minded purpose: warning the American public about what it calls a "growing national epidemic."

To transform a house into a giant flytrap for sexual predators, it takes more than forty people, many of whom are hanging out in the living room on this Friday afternoon. There's the face of the operation: host Chris Hansen, a blond Dateline correspondent, discussing helicopter trips to more glamorous assignments with his producer. There's the eyes of the operation: Mitchell Wagenberg, a spy for hire wearing a long, skinny braid down to his butt, presiding over seventeen cameras hidden in dried-flower wreaths and the toaster. And there's the body of the operation: Casey, a sexpot college student and aspiring dancer in tight jeans who is playing jailbait decoy today because her landlord dad owns this house. (Added bonus: Local prosecutors wrote her college a note so she could get out of a chemistry test.)

Casey gabs to potential predators on the phone. "Come on over, we're not going to get caught," she says. "If we got caught, I would get into trouble, and everybody would call me a slut, and I don't want that, either. I'll pay for your gas. It's no big deal, trust me. My dad gave me plenty of money for the weekend." When the guy fails to take the bait, her voice rises in pitch. "OK, fine, whatever, lame. L-A-M-E. You're being a baby. I told you I've done it a million times!"