LOS ANGELES
A federal judge today sentenced an accountant to 20 years in prison for using social media to solicit girls in the Philippines and Vietnam to send him sexually explicit images of themselves, officials said.
Ronald Carey Shirley, 64, of Simi Valley, Ventura County was the CPA who served as the chief financial officer for the California Angels baseball team in the 1990s, according to authorities.
During today’s hearing, U.S. District Court Judge John Walter quoted from a prosecutor’s sentencing memorandum when he said Shirley is “a modern-day parent’s worst nightmare” who is “a sexual predator who indiscriminately uses the Internet to target his victims.”
As today’s sentencing hearing, Judge Walter found that Shirley travelled to Philippines last November for the purpose of having sex with minors, that he was leaving for Vietnam for the same purpose when he was arrested, and that he had planned to return to the Philippines the coming November for the purpose of having sex with minor girls, according to authorities.
According to court documents, Shirley had online exchanges of a sexual nature with at least three girls over the course of at least seven months.
In an exchange with a 16-year-old victim in the Philippines, Shirley told her he wanted to have sex with her and wired her money in exchange for sending him sexually explicit images of herself, according to officials.
“This sentence should serve as a sobering warning to every sexual predator who thinks they can hide from the law by violating the innocence of children overseas,” said Claude Arnold, special agent in charge of HSI Los Angeles. “There can be no place for the abuse of foreign children by our citizens, and HSI will seek to vindicate the rights of those victims no matter how far they live from our shores.”
Shirley pleaded guilty in April to two counts of attempted receipt of child pornography.
Officials said he was arrested in February by special agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations at Los Angeles International Airport as he prepared to depart for Vietnam to visit minor girls he had communicated with on social media.