Photographer Sentenced to More Than Five Years in Prison for Transporting Child Pornography

BIRMINGHAM—A federal judge today sentenced a former photographer from Brookwood to more than five years in prison on child pornography charges related to photographs he shot and sold to a “child modeling” website that has since been convicted on child pornography charges, announced U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance.

U.S. District Judge L. Scott Coogler sentenced JEFF PIERSON, 47, to 67 months in prison and ordered him to serve 10 years’ supervised release after completing his prison term. Among the terms of his supervised release, PIERSON will be prohibited from photographing children under age 18 or having any unsupervised contact with children under that age.

PIERSON pleaded guilty in January 2007 to conspiracy to transport child pornography and transportation of child pornography. PIERSON had promoted himself as a child modeling photographer.

His convictions come in connection to photographs he shot of 16 children, all girls aged 8 to 15, that he sold to a Florida company, Webe Web Corporation. Webe Web owned the website “www.childsupermodels.com.” That website linked to sites containing photographs of individual “child super models,” featuring young girls wearing underwear, lingerie, bathing suits, and other revealing outfits and posed in provocative positions that constituted child pornography.

PIERSON’S plea agreement states he was a major supplier of photographs of "child models" and grossed about $270,000 from those photos on the “child super models” website.

Jeffrey Robert Libman, 43, of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., and the vice president and co-director of Webe Web, pleaded guilty to 16 counts of transporting child pornography and was sentenced in December 2010 to nine years in prison. Libman admitted that the websites pertaining to 16 different girls contained images of child pornography. Those were the images photographed by PIERSON, according to court documents.

In April 2010, Webe Web pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to produce child pornography and 16 counts of transporting child pornography. The president and co-director of Webe Web, Marc Evan Greenberg, also pleaded guilty in April 2010 to one count of money laundering based on his processing of the proceeds generated by Webe Web through its distribution of images of child pornography. A federal judge sentenced Greenberg in January to more than two and one-half years in prison.

The Pierson case was investigated by the FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. It was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jim Phillips and Daniel Fortune.