State shark expert Randy Honebrink pleaded guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court to possessing child pornography.
Honebrink, 58, faces a maximum 10-year prison term at sentencing in May.
The charge stems from a raid on his Makiki apartment last June. Federal investigators seized Honebrink’s laptop computer, an external computer hard drive, several thumb drives and numerous compact discs and digital video discs.
Honebrink pleaded guilty to possessing on his computer two images of two minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct and to possessing the same two images on his hard drive.
The U.S. Postal Inspection Service said it, along with a cooperating international police service, began an undercover investigation in October 2010 of a movie production company that operated a website offering for sale DVDs and streaming videos featuring young boys.
A Toronto Police Sex Crimes Unit official said at a news conference last November that the investigation, called Operation Spade, focused on a Canadian man who ran a clearinghouse for child pornography through an online website assigned to AZOF Films. The investigation netted the arrests of 348 people worldwide, 76 of them in the U.S., that included 40 schoolteachers, nine doctors and nurses, 32 who volunteered with children, six law enforcement personnel, nine pastors or priests and three foster parents, the Toronto official said.
The Postal Inspection Service said investigators raided the production company’s shipping facility in Niagara County, N.Y., in May 2011 and seized hundreds of DVD movies, photograph DVDs and computers. They also seized business records and customer order histories.
Postal investigators say Honebrink paid $617 for 23 DVDs and five video and photograph downloads between July 2006 and April 2011. Assistant U.S. Attorney Darren Ching said in court Thursday that Honebrink is not charged with purchasing child pornography because investigators did not recover any of the items listed in the AZOF customer records.
Honebrink is the information and education specialist for the state land department’s Division of Aquatic Resources and the spokesman and coordinator of the Hawaii Shark Task Force. He is also church council vice president of the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church of Honolulu.
He remains free on an unsecured $50,000 signature bond pending sentencing.
A state land department spokeswoman said Honebrink "remains employed by the Department of Land and Natural Resources until such time the court has adjudicated his case."
