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

What Perverted Justice leaves in its wake are a lot of disturbed men with deep psychosexual problems, whose national humiliation robs them of any real chance of re-entering society. Wesley Brannen, a twenty-five-year-old carpenter from San Bernardino, California, who was busted by the group, was released in January after eighteen months in prison. At six-one and 265 pounds, he looks like a white-boy gangster: shaved head, Vandyke beard, red plaid shirt. His parole officer is making him wear a GPS bracelet, but Brannen looks on the bright side. "The good thing is that not only child molesters wear these things, but gang members too," he says. "So I figure people will think I'm in a gang."

At first, Brannen speaks softly, talking about how he has slept with only four women in his life. He says he even wrote Perverted Justice an apologetic letter. But soon he's bursting with a toxic mix of anger and bravado. "These thirteen-year-old girls don't look like thirteen-year-olds no more!" he says. "Man, when I'm off parole, maybe I'll get a woman from Peru -- one who doesn't speak English, so she won't ask about my past."

As he talks, Brannen drives aimlessly around San Bernardino in his Lexus. His dad and mom both live too close to schools, so Brannen is staying at a halfway house in the hills. Though he's clean now, he used to be a meth addict who made his living scamming credit cards. He hit on Perverted Justice's thirteen-year-old decoy, he says, only because he had just returned home from a weekend smoking meth with some girls at a roadside motel and was still hot and bothered when he got on Yahoo! chat. "I was thinking to myself, 'This ain't right,' but I was so spun everything was off-kilter," he says.

After a while, Brannen reveals that he was molested by an older man when he was seven. "For so long I carried that around," he says, "like it was my fault that he did that to me." Deep down, he wanted revenge and became obsessed with searching for registered sex offenders online. "If a guy did something serious, like molest a young kid, I'd try to get the homeboys to go over there and clean out the guy's house," Brannen says, stroking his beard. "Now I'm in the same situation myself, and I'm worried about who is going to come get me."

In recent weeks, it has started to seem like Perverted Justice may have overstayed its welcome on the national stage. For the first time, its tactics are starting to backfire. A district attorney in Texas recently refused to prosecute twenty-four men busted by Dateline, citing insufficient evidence, and the city manager who put together the sting was forced to resign in disgrace. NBC also got rid of the show's producer, who retaliated with a suit alleging that she became a target when she expressed reservations about the ethics of the show. NBC denies that claim, but a source within the network says that the days of To Catch a Predator, unpopular with advertisers, are numbered: NBC plans to phase out the show after four more stings.

None of this bothers Xavier Von Erck, whose obsession launched the franchise. "Hey, the TV show could go away tomorrow, and it doesn't matter to me," he says. "Perverted Justice will still do what we do, roll how we roll."

Von Erck, whose nickname is X, is sitting in a bookstore cafe in Portland, dressed all in black. He looks a little like Philip Seymour Hoffman, five-eleven and round all over. He wears tinted eyeglasses and walks with a limp because he spends so much time at the computer that his eyes are now light-sensitive and his leg muscles have seized up. In a way, he's an odd doppelganger for Brannen, another guy who seems childlike but wants to be a gangster.

Though he wasn't molested himself, Von Erck felt robbed of his childhood by his father and legally changed his name from Phillip Eide to eradicate the last vestiges of his paternal namesake. "My dad was an alcoholic scumbag commercial fisherman who hit my mom," he says. "She left him when I was one, and he went on to impregnate ten more women up and down the West Coast. His name is garbage." As a teenager, the only thing that brought Von Erck back to a state of innocence and wonder was the computer -- until he decided that the online world was teeming with sex offenders. "I was so into the computer," he says. "I went into chat rooms thinking it was going to be utopia, and it was dystopia."

It's easy to see how Perverted Justice resembles a game to Von Erck. Intentionally enigmatic himself, he demands utter transparency from predators and Perverted Justice members, like a junior-high-school kid playing D&D who always wants to be the dungeon master so he can control every aspect of the game. He guards his power closely, requiring members to give him their entire Internet history (all screen names, all pages joined) and going to war with "stupid" people who dare to criticize Perverted Justice. He exacted a particularly sadistic form of revenge against Bruce Raisley, a software developer from Arkansas who launched an aggressive anti-PJ crusade. Posing as a woman named Holly, Von Erck began an online flirtation with Raisley, who was smitten enough to leave his wife and rent a new apartment. On the day Raisley went to pick up Holly at the airport, Von Erck sent a friend to snap his photo and posted it with a warning: "Tonight, Bruce Raisley stood around at an airport, flowers in hand, waiting for a woman that turned out to be a man. . . . He has no one. He has no more secrets. . . . Perverted-Justice.com will only tolerate so much in the way of threats and attacks upon us."

Here, after all, is the point of Perverted Justice: to destroy and vanquish, to re- establish utopia, both online and off. With or without To Catch a Predator, the man known as X is onto the next stage of the game, taking on even bigger prey than horny guys who stalk young girls. Von Erck's new obsession is what he calls "corporate sex offenders" ? online sites that don't do enough, in his view, to rein in the pedophiles who use their services. MySpace is exempt from the campaign -- since March, at the request of PJ, it has removed more than 3,000 predators from its site and forwarded their addresses and online profiles to the police. But Von Erck is mobilizing his thousands of followers to write letters to companies advertising on LiveJournal and YouTube, demanding they withdraw their support.

"Corporations have a choice about having the pedophile community use their service and upload videos on their sites," he says. "People want to know if you're responsible on this issue."

Von Erck looks out into the distance, imagining a world in which every predator has been ferreted o ut and cyberspace is his again. "When it comes to the Internet, pedophiles got there first," he says. "It's a check game, where they make one move and we try to check it. But slowly but surely, we're catching up."