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:nuts:[SIZE=+1]HIGH-FLYING SEX STING: Police pose as girl, 15, then arrest man after he flies into Marshfield airport for alleged sexual rendezvous[/SIZE]
Harold Spector, 67, of Peabody, arrives at Marshfield airport yesterday to meet who he thought was a 15-year-old girl he chatted with on the Internet. (GREG DERR/The Patriot Ledger)By JOHN ZAREMBA
The Patriot Ledger
MARSHFIELD - Harold Spector glided the Cessna smoothly onto the runway at the small airport in Marshfield. He had a Viagra pill, a condom, and according to police, every intention of picking up a 15-year-old girl he met on the Internet and having sex with her in flight.
As he taxied toward the terminal and parked, two undercover police officers were watching from the cockpit of another plane nearby. Two more were parked in a truck on the runway. Still more were waiting for him yesterday afternoon inside the terminal at George Harlow Field.
To avoid suspicion, police said, he’d concocted a story that the girl he had chatted with on the Internet was his niece, and he just wanted to take her for a plane ride on a nice day. An airport worker reeled him into the terminal by telling him he had to go inside to get her.
Spector, a 67-year-old flight instructor from Peabody, walked into the building cheerful and talkative, remarking at how nice the renovations looked.
‘‘I haven’t been here in years. It’s changed,’’ he said as officers moved in on him from behind.
Marshfield police Detective Steven Marcolini calmly approached him, flashed his badge and placed him under arrest.
‘‘Oh, come on,’’ Spector said as police handcuffed him and led him out into the parking lot. Asked by a reporter whether he’d planned to have sex with a 15-year-old girl, he replied: ‘‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’’
Spector is the latest of nearly a dozen accused online sexual predators who have been arrested through the work of the Hi-Tech Evidence Analysis Team, a joint task force of the Marshfield police and the Plymouth County Sheriff’s Department.
‘‘We set up a web and he flew into it,’’ Marshfield police Lt. Phil Tavares said.
Detectives said they began spinning that web about a month ago, when they met Spector online and convinced him that he was in contact with a promiscuous, fatherless teen who was interested in older men.
‘‘That 15-year-old girl you’ve been talking to for the last month is me,’’ Marcolini told Spector as the North Shore man sat cuffed on the curb.
Police first chatted with Spector on March 2; it took him only seven minutes to begin asking sexually explicit questions, according to a transcript of the chat.
‘‘Have you had oral sex?’’ he wrote.
‘‘Yeah,’’ the officer posing as a teenage girl replied.
Police kept chatting with Spector over the next few weeks, during which they say he sent a video of himself masturbating. He urged the girl to erase the chats from her computer, and asked several times whether she was alone in the room.
In a conversation March 13, he asked about the girl’s father; the officer replied that she did not have one and wanted to know why he was so curious about him.
‘‘I ask because I am scared to meet you,’’ he wrote, according to the transcript. ‘‘I can get into big trouble.
‘‘If your dad finds out I am dead,’’ he wrote later.
Spector insisted that she not tell anybody she was speaking to him.
He told her he worried about getting caught, and he made her promise she was not a police officer.
‘‘I’m not the police,’’ the officer wrote. ‘‘I promise. I promise over and over again.’’
Spector, who police say is married and has children, made reference to that conversation as Marcolini questioned him yesterday.
‘‘I asked (if) you were a police officer,’’ Spector said.
‘‘And I said no,’’ Marcolini said.
‘‘You lied,’’ Spector responded.
‘‘Well, you got me there,’’ Marcolini replied.
Police said Spector is a freelance flight instructor, and they plan to investigate whether he has had any inappropriate contact with young students.
‘‘You can actually teach children 14, 15 years old how to fly,’’ Marcolini said.
‘‘We’re definitely looking into it.’’
Spector has no criminal record, police said. He told detectives his only intention was to take the girl on a flight. Police then said the online conversations suggested otherwise.
‘‘I know I was chatting that way, but that’s all that was going to happen,’’ Spector said. ‘‘I wasn’t going to do anything to her.’’
Spector was charged with attempting to entice a minor younger than 16 for sex, attempting to disseminate harmful material to a minor, attempted statutory rape and attempted indecent assault and battery.
He was released last night from the Marshfield police lockup after posting $15,000 bail and was to enter a plea to the charges today in Plymouth District Court.