A Holloway sex shop owner who stockpiled more than 20,000 indecent images and videos of children has been jailed for 15 months.
Michael Geraghty, from Worcester, is the company director of Fettered Pleasures, an adult fetish shop on Holloway Road.
The sex shop, which sells fetish accessories including rubber puppy masks, human cages and a range of PVC clothing, is still open for business.
Geraghty, who appeared at Southwark Crown Court last Thursday, was sentenced to 15 months in prison for 12 counts of making and possessing child pornography.
The discovery was made after hundreds of officers swooped on safety deposit storage units across west London as part of a Metropolitan Police operation, codenamed Rize.
Safety deposit boxes in Park Lane, later linked to 50-year-old Geraghty, were found to contain more than 21,000 indecent pictures of children. The boxes also contained more than 50 films involving children. The children featured in the photographs and films were between 3 and 15 years old.
Subsequent raids were made at Geraghty’s Worcester home where 200 more indecent images were found on a computer.
Geraghty was sentenced to nine months in jail for possession of indecent images and 15 months for making them. The sentences will run concurrently so he will serve a total of 15 months in prison.
In addition to his jail sentence, Geraghty, who pleaded guilty on January 22, will also be placed on the sex offenders register for 10 years.
Detective Constable David Ball, for the Metropolitan Police’s paedophile unit, said: “Geraghty made and possessed indecent photographs and videos of children. His activities by storing such material in a safety deposit box demonstrates his clear intent to hide his sexual interest in children.
“This investigation sends a clear message that the Metropolitan Police are determined to bring to justice those persons who seek to sexually abuse children or possess such material.”
Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/quitepeculiar/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Absolutely appalling..this place should be shut down!
Yes its appaling but what exactly has closing the shop down got to do with the crimes he committed?
The shop had nothing to do with his appalling crimes sowhy shut it ?
Yes, paedophilia is appalling, but let’s confine ourselves to the known facts, and avoid condemning the business as a whole before we know them. In UK law, a Company (which has a Director or Directors) functions as a completely separate entity to the individual persons who make it up. The personal matters of the Director are not those of his Company. As Darkwind said, were Fettered Pleasures itself to be involved in any way, it would have been shut down long ago in the course of the Police investigation.
For sexy