Mattias von Wrede - Child Porn - Guilty

"I have a lot of child pornography on my computer, including pictures of girls as young as 4 years old having sex," he said.

A former Hamptons real estate agent pleaded guilty Friday to child pornography charges, admitting he downloaded images of children _ some younger than 10 _ engaging in sex acts.

Mattias von Wrede faces five to 20 years in prison when he is sentenced in U.S. District Court; a date for the sentencing has not been set.

A one-time manager at the Engel & Volkers Southampton real estate office _ which serves high-end clients willing to plunk down millions for Hamptons estates or hundreds of thousands for summer rentals _ was arrested in March 2007 by Suffolk County police following a search of his home.

Local detectives obtained a warrant after receiving an alert from the state's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, which had information that 15 to 20 images of children engaging in sexual performances had been uploaded to a Yahoo users group linked to von Wrede, a German citizen.

When Yahoo officials made the discovery, they first contacted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which referred the case to state task force in Albany, police said.

The confiscated images included a video of girls younger than 10 engaging in sexual intercourse, prosecutors said. A seven-page complaint also said authorities found images and video of "sado-masochistic torture and sexual abuse of children, and images of sexual abuse of children as young as babies."

In a statement von Wrede gave to investigators, the complaint said, he admitted owning the images on his home computer.

"I have a lot of child pornography on my computer, including pictures of girls as young as 4 years old having sex," he said.

"Last summer, I was getting drunk a lot and used to be home alone a lot and got kind of addicted to the Internet," von Wrede added. "That is when I started downloading and sharing child pornography."

Defense attorney Melinda Sarafa said that von Wrede participated in a "variety of online role-playing chats in which he adopted a female screen persona. It was in that context that he received the images for which he accepted responsibility today in court."