Chat Rooms, Decoys & Questioning Techniques: How Predator Poachers Long Island Confronted a Wading River Teacher

They simply couldn’t wait on this one.

When Mike Villani, Alex Rosen, Emily Hoenscheid, and the rest of the team at Predator Poachers Long Island (PPLI) – a local chapter of a nationwide watchdog group dedicated to catching child predators founded by Rosen – realized an alleged predator, Mark Verity, was a teacher at a Wading River elementary school, they knew they had to move quicker than usual to approach him.

“Because of the severity, because of how close he is to kids, we just had to jump the gun the other day,” Hoenscheid said. “Normally, if you want to get guys to meet up, it takes a little while for them to feel really comfortable.” 

Verity, 37, was arrested by Suffolk County police and charged on Oct. 18 with attempted dissemination of indecent material to a minor, sexually motivated attempted use of a child less than 17 years of age in a sexual performance, and attempted use of a child less than 17 years of age in a sexual performance.

The Shoreham-Wading River School District is cooperating with the authorities and sent out a message from Superintendent Gerard Poole on Thursday, after Verity and PPLI’s confrontation was livestreamed on YouTube. 

“The individual has been removed from the classroom and will not be permitted on school grounds pending the results of the investigation,” Poole said. 

Verity is being represented by Sayville attorney Matthew J. Martinez, who did not immediately return a request for comment.

The Decoy and the Chat Room

According to Villani, Predator Poachers pose as minors in chat room apps such as Kik, and wait for potential predators to reach out.

“I have my decoy posing as a 13-year-old girl on the Kik messenger app, and he messaged me on October 5 from the group chat on there, like the chat room called Long Island Fet Life, which I guess is Long Island fetish life,” Villani added. “So I just checked this past Monday, Columbus Day, and I saw he sent a direct message to my decoy account, and I hit him up, and we started talking back and forth. I immediately told him how old I was, 13, and he didn’t care. And the conversation was pretty flirty. And then it moved to Snapchat, and I still didn’t know who he was, because on Kik, it’s pretty anonymous, but Snapchat, I was trying to get him to send a picture of his face, because we have some research tools with facial recognition to determine who these individuals are, and it works almost 99% of the time. So finally, after a group of us kind of were able to convince him that I’m a real 13-year-old girl. He felt comfortable enough to take a picture of his face and sent it to us.”

The alleged conversation quickly turned inappropriate, and Predator Poachers knew they had to act. Verity allegedly solicited sexual pictures from and discussed sexual acts with an individual he believed to be a minor – all things that would show up later on in the charges. 

The Confrontation and the Questioning

Verity’s daily proximity to children forced PPLI to bypass their standard procedure of arranging a meetup between the alleged predator and a potential victim, like what was often shown on Dateline NBC’s To Catch A Predator with Chris Hansen, and instead forced them to confront Verity in Wading River.

Rosen and Villani confronted Verity and sat down with him at a picnic table next to a gas station. They spoke very cordially with him while discussing his alleged messages and intentions, often referring to him as a “family man” or as a “good man.”

“[Rosen] has perfected the method of interviewing these guys to get as much information out of them as possible,” Villani said. “If you just lambast and criticize them, they’re going to cage up.”

It’s a minimization technique known by law enforcement to get suspects to talk. In a 2012 lecture by the Regent University School of Law entitled “Don’t Talk to the Police,” veteran police detective George Bruch discusses such techniques.

“I have to get in their own skin, as the word is, and try and get them to talk to me,” Bruch said in the lecture. “I had a sexual assault case. I had to talk to the guy [about] how hot the woman was and I understood where he was coming from. And when I said that, we were buds, and he started talking to me. And he’s still sitting in prison.”

PPLI does not coordinate with police until after they have gotten alleged predators to confess to enough to charge. Rather, when they feel they’ve gathered enough information, the group uses code words to get filming members of the team to then call the police. Riverhead police removed Verity from the scene, and he was later arrested in Mattituck by Suffolk police. 

“If we coordinate with law enforcement in advance, then we would be acting as an agent of the police, so we would have the same red tape as they do,” Villani said. “But since we’re just private citizens, we could just say and handle it how we want. There’s still things we have to do to make sure that when it gets to jury trial, that the defense attorney can’t crush us on certain things. So there is stuff to be mindful of, but we still have way less red tape than law enforcement does.”

When Verity was arraigned, the prosecutor signalled that they intended to use in court what Verity allegedly said to PPLI on camera.

“The defendant admitted to his conduct on video,” a prosecutor said in the courtroom. 

PPLI started as a local chapter of the national organization in December, and started posing as decoys in February, but Villani said that Rosen’s past work has resulted in arrests in all 50 states and has secured up to 300 convictions.

“We’re happy to be of service,” Villani said.