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Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
Ortloff: tough on offenders and on Carroll
Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.

    Why am I so worked up about Chris Ortloff being arrested for allegedly trying to arrange a sexual encounter with two underage girls? Not just because he is a former assemblyman, and not just because he worked to create the sex-offender registry for people who commit crimes like the one he is now accused of.
    No. It’s because as a member of the state Parole Board he is one of two people responsible for keeping my old friend Jack Carroll in prison. That’s what gets me pumped.
    You remember Jack Carroll of Troy. He was convicted — wrongly, in my view — of sexually fondling a young girl over a period of time and was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in state prison, meaning he would be eligible to apply for parole after 10 years. Well, the 10 years were completed earlier this year, and he was granted a hearing a few months before that, on Dec. 18, 2007, to be exact, in preparation for his possible release.
    Chris Ortloff was one of the three Parole Board members who interviewed him at Washington Correctional Facility. Their vote was 2 to 1 against release, and Ortloff, whom Jack remembers as sitting stony silent throughout the interview, was one of those who voted no, on the stated grounds that Carroll’s return to his family would be “incompatible with the welfare of society.”
    So you could say that Jack Carroll remains in prison today, on his conviction of molesting a 10-to-12-year-old girl, because of a man who has just been arrested for endeavoring to do the same thing and worse, the allegation against Ortloff being that he attempted to set up a meeting in a hotel for the purpose of sexual intercourse with two girls, ages 11 and 12.
    There were no such girls; the whole thing was a state police undercover operation, but of course Ortloff wouldn’t have known that.
    I hasten to add that I don’t know if the allegations are true, and I have learned with sex-abuse cases and government stings always to reserve a measure of skepticism, but still, isn’t the irony just too magnificent?
    To fully savor it, I hied myself over to the federal courthouse in Albany yesterday to see with my own eyes Mr. Ortloff brought in wearing a yellow jailhouse jumpsuit, his hands cuffed behind his back and his ankles shackled. I hadn’t seen him for a few years, since before he left the Assembly at the end of 2006, and I hardly recognized him, he was so gray and ashen-looking, not to mention unshaven.
    Well, I thought, here is one of the great campaigners against sex offenders, and I couldn’t help reminding myself always to be on the alert for hypocrisy when you deal with the righteous.
    In case you’re wondering why the state police targeted him in the first place, it was because on March 5 he had e-mailed a child pornography photograph from a hotel room in New Jersey, according to the assistant U.S. attorney in charge of prosecuting the case, Thomas Spina.
    America Online detected the offense, passed word to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which in turn passed word to the New York State Police, and thus was an operation launched to ensnare Mr. Ortloff.
    He was contacted though an online chat group where he had listed his sexual interests as “fam fun,” “yg,” “yng,” “yf,” and “preteen,” according to a motion filed by Spina in court yesterday, and little by little he was offered the sexual company of two young girls. This offer was made by a woman undercover police officer presenting herself as someone with access to the girls, presumably as their mother.
    In various online conversations over the course of several months, Ortloff told the undercover officer that he had his first sexual experiences when he was 9, with girls aged 7, 11 and 12, and he said, “I fi nd that the type of girl I spent my earliest sexual experiences with has always been the hottest thing for my brain.”
    He also said he had raised his own children to be “very open about sex and nudity from birth.” (He has two college-age sons, according to the Plattsburgh Press-Republican.)
    On a later occasion, when he supposedly was on the verge of an encounter with the two young girls, allegedly named Ali and Amber, he said to the undercover officer, “I always ask myself when I am doing something new … Is this right or wrong? Do I have a moral problem with this? And honestly I don’t have a moral problem with this, because I started when I was young …”
    In a face-to-face meeting with the undercover officer on July 30, he allegedly said that “a number of years ago, while he was an adult, he engaged in sexual acts with a 12-year-old girl and a 9-year-old girl.”
    He also noted that he preferred “Swiss Navy” lubricant, which I am not familiar with, but that’s what it says in the motion for pretrial detention.
    It is absolutely dizzying to read this when you reflect that until just the day before yesterday this character was being paid $101,600 a year to rule on whether inmates like Jack Carroll should be released on parole, and when you reflect further that he spent 20 years in the Assembly writing and voting on the laws of the state, including a law imposing severe restrictions on anyone convicted of a sex offense.
    A campaigner against sex offenders! Swiss Navy lubricant!
    There are plenty more salacious details in the prosecutor’s motion, details about him making videos of himself naked for the benefit of the supposed young girls and providing a webcam so they could do likewise for him before he met them in the Colonie hotel where he was finally taken down, but I won’t bore you, or titillate you, with them.
    “There is the need for taboo,” he allegedly wrote to the woman he thought was providing the girls. “The forbidden is exciting. My personal history has laid down some patterns in the sexual part of my brain that need fulfilling,” and that’s maybe as close as we’ll get to what went on in his mind.
    What I love is the fact that he was tough on sex offenders and that he voted to keep Jack Carroll locked up.
    His lawyer passed on the opportunity to request bail for him yesterday, saying he needed more time to digest the new information contained in the prosecutor’s motion, so Ortloff remains in the Albany County can, and now we’ll see how this one plays out.

interestinq very freakin' interestinq......how about the 'boys club' aqain folks.....or the qolf club.....qentlemen only ladies forbidden and then add to that
the hiltons' simpsons' pinks' madonnas' etc.....cheese cheese cheese......youth and power they seek......especially youth.....sh*t......qo visit a nursinq
you will appreciate your wife/qirlfriend...........DORK........where the heck did I put my taser?????