A 56-year-old Hawaii island man admitted in federal court Thursday that he produced child pornography featuring himself and two children under 10 years old.

Pahoa bed-and-breakfast operator John Ridgely Tucker faces a statutory 15-year minimum and 30-year maximum prison term at sentencing in May.

Tucker told U.S. District Chief Judge Susan Oki Mollway that he took photographs of the children performing explicit sex acts with him. He said he knew the children were under 10. He told Mollway that if he had thought about their ages, he wouldn’t have done what he did.

His lawyer, Brian De Lima, said Tucker pleaded guilty to accept responsibility for his actions. De Lima said Tucker is remorseful and knows his punishment will be significant.

The FBI started investigating the case after it received digital images from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that had been circulating on child pornography Internet sites. The images depicted explicit sex between an adult male and two young children. 

Federal prosecutor Larry Tong said the FBI enhanced the background of one of the photographs and spotted a Hawaii island telephone directory. He said the photographs clearly show the faces of the children but not that of the adult male. However, he said, in a nonpornographic photograph recovered in an unrelated investigation in Arizona, one of the children is pictured with an adult male whose face does appear.

The FBI released to the public a portion of the photograph showing the man’s face last October.

Within hours callers identified the man in the photograph as Tucker.

Tong said the FBI searched Tucker’s home and found the same child pornography images on his computer.

The FBI also located the children, who identified themselves and Tucker in the photographs.