THE VERY HUMBLE LIFE OF THE FBI’S NO.1 TARGET
The American agency alleges this man is one of the world’s biggest facilitators of child porn – and that he did it all from a non-descript f lat in inner city Dublin
AT THE time he was arrested in the late summer of 2013 at his apartment in Dublin’s inner city, few of Eric Marques’ neighbours even knew he existed. A somewhat jowly and pasty 28-year-old with a receding hairline, he was hardly ever seen going in and out of his home on the ground floor of a large Georgian house on Mountjoy Square. And whenever he did bump into anyone, he rarely spoke to them, the most they might get was a small nod of acknowledgement. Those who did meet him properly, described him as ‘bland’ and exceedingly quiet.
So when gardaí dramatically burst into his building that August, it must have come as a huge shock to anyone living in any of the other 15 apartments in the complex. Police stationed at the house after Marques was driven away, refused to say why he had been arrested.
It was not until later that neighbours learned through news reports that Eric Marques, who was born in America but had lived in Ireland since he was five years old, was wanted by the FBI who believed him to be ‘the largest facilitator of child porn on the planet’.
In other words, they alleged that he was the biggest dealer in images of child abuse in the world. And he was doing it from his highceilinged flat, just north of Dublin city centre. Eric Eoin Marques was no longer anonymous, something which, if the allegations are true, he had undoubtedly revelled in as it helped him build up his shadowy online empire.
Instead, he was now notorious. A man whose business, the FBI would allege, hosted at least 130 child abuse websites, which featured millions of horrific images of infants and children being molested and raped, and which were viewed by thousands of sick perverts across the world.
He and his family claim he had no idea that some of the websites he was hosting through his internet business were sharing images of children being sexually abused.
The FBI, however, insist he was a technological whizz who enabled others to buy, sell and distribute child pornography on a massive scale. And they want him flown to America to face prosecution.
They have four charges to bring against the now 33-year-old: distributing child pornography, conspiring to distribute, advertising child pornography, and conspiring to advertise. But for almost five years, ever since he was arrested at the beginning of August 2013, Marques has been kept in an Irish prison as his legal team has done everything it can to thwart his extradition.
His lawyers told the Court of Appeal yesterday morning that they plan to seek permission to lodge an appeal to the Supreme Court. They now have seven days to officially lodge that appeal. The process will take at least another few months, so he’ll be staying put for the foreseeable.
It’s little wonder he has fought so hard against being shipped out to the US. If found guilty there, each of the charges carry prison terms of up to 30 years. Or life, if there are aggravating circumstances.
And unlike Ireland, there is a much bigger chance of the sentences running consecutively, rather than concurrently. It’s estimated that he faces up to, if not more than, 100 years behind bars.
It’s an extraordinary case, which has already delved into the grimmest recesses of the ‘Darknet’, a place where illegal activity, some of the most depraved on the planet, has, before now, often gone undetected.
Indeed, those who have made millions from selling drugs and guns online, or indulged in their sickest fantasies, have undoubtedly followed Marques’ case closely, wondering if their own activity on the Darknet, a place inaccessible to normal search engines, is also set to be revealed.
The case has shown too the power and tenacity of the FBI, who investigated Marques’ online activity for the guts of a year before securing an extradition order for him.
And, of course, it has trialled and tested to the limit, the workings of extradition agreements between Ireland and the US. At first glance, Eric Marques is an unlikely figure to be in the centre of what will possibly be one of the biggest internet crime breakthroughs of all time, not to mention this almost five-year long courtroom saga.
He was born in New York in 1985, where his Brazilian father, Antonio Marques, was working for a high-end interior decorating company as an architectural draughtsman.
Antonio had lived in Ireland from at least the mid-1970s to 1982, where he studied architecture in UCD. It was around this time he presumably met his Irish wife.
There has never been any mention of her name, or their daughter’s name, since Eric’s arrest.
After Antonio graduated college, the couple moved to New York for eight years and on their return to Dublin in 1991, Antonio got a job as an architect with a south county Dublin-based firm before joining Irish Rail in 1995, where he stayed for the next 15 years.
Somewhere along the line, the Marques were divorced and Eric continued to live with his mother and sister while regularly visiting his father at his new home, the ground-floor apartment on Mountjoy Square. It would appear that Eric did not finish school and his father sometimes mentioned to his Irish Rail colleagues how worried he was about how withdrawn his son appeared to be.
‘He was concerned about Eric because he didn’t finish school,’ one former workmate has explained. ‘He was concerned about his future, he was saying he was in his own world and quiet, not talking about much, even what he was doing at home.’
The same workmate met Eric once or twice while out having drinks with Antonio.
‘He seemed like a nice guy,’ he said. ‘He was, as his father said, not keen on mixing with a lot of people. He was just a quiet kind of guy, doing his own thing. I wouldn’t say he even had too many friends. Maybe he had a few, but that’s what I got from his father.’
While Eric may have struggled at school, it’s clear he excelled at computers. When he was 19 years old, he set up a business with his father, Host Ultra. Both were listed as directors and the headquarters were recorded as being the apartment on Mountjoy Square. Host Ultra listed web hosting, domain registration, design, marketing and consultancy services as its main areas of business. But this legitimate company is not the firm that made Eric a millionaire — the last accounts were lodged in November 2011 and showed no signs of economic activity.
In 2012 his father got a job as facilitates lead architect with Etihad Rail and moved to the UAE. It’s believed Eric then moved into Antonio’s apartment full-time. And it’s from here that he continued to build up the business that is estimated to have earned him well in excess of €1million — Freedom Hosting.
It’s also this business, which traded on the Darknet, that brought him to the attention of the FBI. Set up in
If found guilty he faces up to 100 years behind bars ‘He wasn’t keen on mixing with a lot of people’
2008, Freedom Hosting was to become one of the world’s biggest providers of website services protected by Tor, which is an acronym for The Onion Router. It’s a software that enables anonymous online communication.
It directs internet traffic through a worldwide, complex computer network, that can conceal a user’s location and usage. So using services protected by Tor makes it much more difficult to trace internet activity to the user.
Hailed by freedom of speech activists and those at risk of being oppressed for their religious or political beliefs, it has also, however, been open to abuse.
The FBI began investing Eric Marques and his online dealings in 2012 and about a year later, by July 29, 2013, they had enough evidence to secure a warrant for his arrest from the state of Maryland.
A couple of days later, gardaí arrived at Mountjoy Square and seized him and his computers. His father seems to have been completely oblivious to his online activities. He told neighbours, if they asked, that Eric was doing work for the banks.
‘His father’s an admirable, decent and respectable man,’ said one former neighbour and friend.
And when approached by media, Antonio protested his son’s innocence ferociously.
‘All I can say is that my son is completely innocent,’ he said shortly after Eric’s arrest. ‘All he was doing was renting web space... If I rent [out] an apartment and somebody does a crime in it, am I to be [prosecuted]?’
Later that month Antonio left his job with Etihad Rail and returned to Ireland for good where he began paying his son’s mounting legal costs.
Eric was refused bail by the High Court. His computer revealed he had been looking at how to secure a visa for Russia. It was also claimed that if he was released, he could wipe crucial evidence by accessing the internet systems he had been working on.
The court heard too that he had been travelling regularly to Romania, where he had earlier sent large sums of money. Eric claimed he had an ex-girlfriend and a friend living in Romania who he was helping out financially. He was sent to the Midlands Prison.
At another court appearance in 2013 where he tried to secure bail, the court was told by FBI agents that they believed he knew exactly what kind of sites he was hosting.
His computer, they alleged, showed he had been visiting the sites, had administrator access to at least one of them, and had ‘some element of control over it’.
Court documents detail how he ‘personally visited a particular site, dedicated to the exploitation of child pornography, some 412 times, that he had accessed a second, hidden service hosted on his server, which he could only have done if distributing child pornography, and that he had also accessed another service (not on Freedom Hosting), called the Onion Pedo Video Archive, and that he had visited this service some 1,534 times’.
In the years since then, more details about Eric’s solitary life began to emerge during his various court appearances. One significant finding was his diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome in 2015.
Records revealed he had seen a psychiatrist in the Mater Hospital in 2000, but no diagnosis was made. A psychiatrist who assessed him in prison, however, in consultation with a neurologist, had come to the professional conclusion that he has Asperger’s.
It was put forward as another reason for him not to be extradited to the US as, his legal team argued, he would not get appropriate care there. He has tried everything to prevent being handed over to the FBI. At one point he offered to plead guilty to the offences, if he was prosecuted in Ireland. The charges here would carry a maximum penalty of 14 years in jail. He’d probably just serve ten.
The Director of Public Prosecutions said they had been informed of his offer but had decided not to bring proceedings against him. And, as they are entitled to do, no reason was given for the decision.
His legal team applied for a judicial review of the DPP’s decision. In the meantime, a hearing into his application for legal aid was heard, which revealed details of how much money he earned through his online dealings. And where he claimed it had gone since.
He made €1.15 million between 2007 and 2013 but claimed the FBI had frozen any money left in his accounts. He also said he gave €250,000 to his ex-girlfriend to build a house in Romania, where they had planned to live together. But he told the court that he discovered his former lover had built the house on lands owned by another boyfriend of hers. He’d no plans to ask for the money back.
The only outwardly expensive object he bought was a BMW jeep for €21,000, which he later gave to his sister, who then sold it to help pay off legal debts their father incurred on Eric’s behalf. There was €5,000 spent on a computer, €1,000 on a television and €700 on a phone. He claimed to have eaten in McDonald’s every day and his only other major outgoing was several hundred euro he spent each week on escorts. He said he didn’t know what had happened to the rest.
Initially he was refused free legal aid. But it was later granted.
On Monday a challenge aimed at halting his extradition was dismissed by the Court of Appeal. It was the latest in a number of separate but related actions his legal team have taken against his proposed extradition. Given what’s at stake, it is unlikely to be the last.
His parents are undoubtedly heartbroken and bewildered in equal measure, it’s believed Antonio has moved out of Dublin and now lives somewhere in the southeast of Ireland.
But it’s not like Eric wasn’t warned about the dangers of his business. In an internet chat room in 2012, he moaned about how one of his servers had been shut down by a German internet service provider, over what he called a ‘fake child-porn complaint’.
Others in the chat room that day, some of them Americans, advised him to check the accounts he was hosting, ‘before you end up finding yourself in jail over kiddie porn’.
He replied: ‘I think the fed have better things to do...’
It’s difficult to know whether his reply was based in naivety, stupidity or arrogance. But you can be sure, as he sits in his cell wondering if he will soon face the full rigours of the US law system, that he wishes he had listened to that sound advice.
He made €1.15m between 2007 and 2013