Sussex County, NJ, man loses 6 years of freedom and $50,000 for child porn

A North Jersey man is headed to prison in connection to a child porn conviction.

67-year-old Gaetano Lapegna of Franklin, Sussex County, had previously pleaded guilty in Newark federal court to one count of distribution of child pornography.

On Friday, he was sentenced to 80 months, or about 6 ⅔ years, in prison.

Federal authorities say from December 2022 to March 2023, Lapegna distributed child porn pictures and videos using a publicly available online file-sharing program.

During the course of an investigation, an undercover law enforcement officer used that program, during which a user shared hundreds of child porn files from an IP address that was traced to Lapegna's address.

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When officials executed a search warrant on March 30th, 2023, they found over 100 child porn files on a thumb drive owned by Lapegna. They also found that his computer was running the same version of that file-sharing program from which cops downloaded those illicit files from Lapegna.

In addition to the prison term, Lapegna was also sentenced to five years of supervised release and ordered to pay $50,000 in restitution.

U.S. Attorney Alina Habba thanked special agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the United States Postal Inspection Service, the Sussex County Prosecutor’s Office, and the Franklin Borough Police Department for their work in this case.