Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Guilty in child sex, porn trial
US contractor had underage ‘wives’ in Honduras; ‘Miley Cyrus’ defense fails
There was practically nothing normal about the monthlong South Florida trial of Christopher Glenn, which unfolded like a strange blend of daytime soap opera, The People’s Court and The Bourne Conspiracy.
But Glenn, a 36-year-old computer genius who spent most of his life working for the federal government, was not your average defendant.
Glenn insisted on acting as his own lawyer in his trial on multiple child sex charges in federal court in Miami.
The former government contractor, who is already serving 10 years in prison for stealing military secrets, was back in court — this time defending himself against charges he sexually exploited underage girls while employed as a private contractor for the Department of Defense on a U.S. military base in Honduras.
Glenn was arrested three years ago at his mother’s condo in Century Village, a 55-and-over community in West Palm Beach. After he pleaded guilty, in 2015, to stealing the classified information, prosecutors filed the sex charges against him.
On Wednesday, after deliberating for nearly 28 hours over five days, jurors in Miami delivered a mixed verdict: They found Glenn guilty of eight federal sex
crimes and not guilty of two offenses. He faces a maximum of life in federal prison when he is sentenced in May.
Glenn initially looked pleased when he heard the jury’s not-guilty finding on the first charge. He seemed surprised and shrugged, but remained calm, when he heard the string of guilty findings that followed.
The jury found him guilty of trafficking in minors for sex, traveling to Honduras to have sex with minors, sexually assaulting a minor and possessing child pornography. Jurors found him not guilty of one sex-trafficking conspiracy charge and one sex-trafficking charge involving a 15-year-old.
All 12 jurors declined to comment as they left the courthouse. The prosecutors and Glenn’s standby lawyer also refused to comment.
The crimes mostly involved girls, between the ages of 13 and 16, he met while he worked as a computer specialist at the U.S. military base in Soto Cano, in Honduras. He worked there and lived nearby for nearly two years between 2009 and 2012.
It’s unclear how Glenn, who had a troubled history as a government contractor in Iraq, got the position in Honduras. Military officials and his former employer, Harris Corp., declined to comment.
Prosecutors said he recruited several underage girls to work as housekeepers for him and then tried, and sometimes succeeded, to make them his so-called wives. Glenn, who said he converted to Islam, claimed he “married” some of the girls, and evidence in the case showed he had more than one “wife” at a time.
Prosecutors said Glenn lured girls with promises of well-paid housekeeping jobs and then tricked or persuaded some of them to enter into what he knew were sham marriages. The ceremonies were performed by his friends, prosecutors said, and Glenn offered dowries and cash to help the families obtain electricity, clean water and other basics they lacked. Many of the families involved were illiterate and lived in mud huts in isolated regions of the impoverished country, according to the FBI.
Glenn was twice as old as the nine or more girls he was accused of exploiting and some were drugged, authorities said.
His performance defending himself in court left veteran lawyers shaking their heads.
He talked to jurors about celebrities R. Kelly and Miley Cyrus as potential justifications for having relationships with younger people. He mentioned former CIA director and wartime Gen. David Petraeus as an excuse for mishandling classified information.
Though the prosecution said the charges were simple, Glenn took the jury down twists and turns of his unusual life.
Some people knew Glenn by his own name, but others knew him under a variety of assumed names, including Fernando Albergue, Derek John Michael, Yusef and “El Gringo,” according to trial testimony. Each identity had its own strange back story that seemed to make complete sense only to Glenn.
The convoluted stories Glenn offered the jury included stating that he was born during a trip to Cuba, days after his older brother drowned there, and that he was raised under his brother’s name.
“I’m not sure, 100 percent, if I’m Christopher Glenn and that’s true,” Glenn told the jury.
It wasn’t, according to prosecutors, who showed jurors evidence that suggested Glenn was really Glenn and that he was born in Buffalo, in upstate New York.
At other times, he told jurors his father’s real name was Fernando Albergue and said he sometimes used that name. He hinted at family links to communism and Fidel Castro.
Glenn also said that his dad’s CIA connections gave Glenn the assumed identity of an older person, Derek John Michael, so he could begin working overseas at age 14, gathering information for various shadowy government projects.
Prosecutors said the Michael identity came from a friend of the Glenn family in Buffalo who died as a child.
At yet another point, Glenn told the jurors he and his dad believed that Glenn’s biological dad was an Iraqi man. And he questioned his mother about his paternity after calling her as a witness.
Jurors laughed in what sounded like empathy when Glenn’s mother testified, under cross-examination by the prosecution: “I just tell him a lot of things to shut him up.”
Despite the seriousness of the allegations, there were lighter moments during the lengthy trial. U.S. District Judge Robert Scola Jr. joked twice in court, while jurors were not present, that driving into oncoming traffic would have been preferable to presiding over the trial.
Despite that joke, the judge went out of his way to give Glenn the opportunity to defend himself and allowed him to question witnesses and make arguments to jurors in a way that no trained lawyer would be permitted to do.
At one point during Glenn’s own testimony, which spanned several hours over three days, he told the jury that someone had accused him of having links to an Islamic State terrorist group — an allegation that they would not normally have been allowed to hear. When the jury left the courtroom, the judge buried his head in his hands and asked: “Why would you tell the jurors that?”
Glenn shrugged and plowed on.
“This is an abuse of power and a waste of your [taxpayer] money,” Glenn told the jury in his closing argument. “I’m not a deviant evil person.”
He argued that the laws he was being prosecuted under were intended to protect girls from being forced into prostitution, not to prevent people like him from “marrying.”
“Do not be distracted and do not be fooled by any of his tactics,” prosecutor Vanessa Johannes told the jurors. She said he was continuing with a lifelong practice of manipulation and deceit to try to “make his illogical story make sense.”
Glenn clearly gave the seven female and five male jurors plenty to think about, as evidenced by their unusually lengthy deliberations and their verdict.
He claimed the sex charges were filed by the government because they wanted him to tell them who he had planned to share the stolen military secrets with and retaliated when he didn’t give them any valuable information. Prosecutors in that case said they never uncovered his motive and had no evidence he shared the stolen information before he was caught.
Glenn also accused officials in Honduras and the U.S. of bribing the girls to testify against him.
Prosecutors reminded the jury that most of the evidence against Glenn — including photos, emails and bogus marriage contracts — were items he had saved for years on his own computers and electronic storage hard drives.