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To the small group of men who convened monthly at the Potrero Hill Public Library, James Hankins seemed like their kind of guy.
He'd seen their phone number in a gay newspaper and said he was thrilled to discover an organization of men who so proudly shared his taboo longings. Come to our next meeting, Hankins was told. It would be held at the usual place.
And so, as unknowing parents picked out storybooks with their children downstairs, the hefty, talkative Texan joined the circle of avowed pedophiles meeting upstairs at the library.
They didn't know that Hankins was a spy-that he was, in fact, an iconoclastic crusader, book author and fugitive from justice named Mike Echols. He had a tape recorder in his pocket and an agenda all his own.
So began a journalistic sting that in recent weeks has pushed the live-and-let-live sensibilities of San Francisco to their limits. When KRON-TV, with no small help from Echols, aired a series of exposes on an organization called the North American Man-Boy Love Assn., much of the city was shocked to learn that such a group existed, let alone met in a neighborhood library.
Outraged parents demanded to know how city officials could allow the group to meet in a place that is a haven for children. Meanwhile, much of the large, mostly liberal gay community rushed to ostracize the shadowy group that has long been a small but very controversial presence in the city's gay pride parade. As public relations problems go, nothing quite compares with NAMBLA, an organization whose very existence reinforces the stereotype that homosexuals recruit children into their way of life.
People who have long hoped the pedophile group would just go away seem to have gotten their wish-at least temporarily. A spokesman at NAMBLA's New York headquarters says the cause will survive what he portrays as just the latest dose of society's persecution. But in San Francisco, the furor led to the arrest of one man and seems to have driven other members into hiding.
And all of it started with Echols, a 47-year-old former social worker-turned-journalist who approaches his task with the relentlessness of a Nazi hunter and the duplicity of a con man. His undercover exploits not...