United States Attorney David Metcalf announced that Donald Michael, aka ‘Baseball Fun’, 47, of Queen Creek, Arizona, entered a plea of guilty before United States District Court Judge Mark Kearney to multiple child pornography offenses.
Michael was charged by indictment in July of last year with one count of conspiracy to manufacture child pornography, one count of conspiracy to receive and distribute child pornography, one count of distribution and attempted distribution of child pornography, and two counts of receipt of child pornography.
He pleaded guilty to all the charges against him.
The defendant, who served as a baseball coach of minor boys for more than 20 years, engaged in an online child exploitation catfishing scheme for more than 18 months with co-conspirators Andrew Wolf, a former teacher at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy (SCH), and Kray Strange, of Carthage, New York, both of whom were previously convicted and sentenced.
Michael conspired with Wolf and Strange to target minor boys who were Wolf’s current and former students at SCH and to coerce and induce them to produce sexually explicit images and send them to the defendant and his co-conspirators over the internet.
They did so by creating multiple fake online profiles where they pretended to be teenage girls, engaging each of their victims in sexually explicit and graphic chats, and distributing child pornography to the minor boys to get them to reciprocate with their images.
When the boys refused to continue to engage, Michael and his co-conspirators used blackmail and extortion to manipulate them into continuing to produce images.
After Wolf and Strange were arrested and incarcerated, this defendant continued his catfishing scheme by targeting and victimising minor boys who were Little League World Series players.
The defendant is scheduled to be sentenced on August 14 and faces a mandatory minimum term of 15 years’ imprisonment and five years of supervised release, as well as a maximum possible term of 110 years’ imprisonment and lifetime supervised release.
He will also be required to register as a child sex offender under both state and federal law.
“Donald Michael and his co-conspirators strategized at length about how to ‘bait’ young boys into taking and sending explicit images of themselves,” said U.S. Attorney Metcalf. “They reveled in the anonymity that the internet provided them to target and catfish their young victims. Unmasking these predators is a priority for my office and the FBI, as we work to protect children everywhere from sexual exploitation.”
