A South Jersey millionaire charged with traveling to Transylvania to have sex with boys has emerged as a suspect in one of Romania's most sensational unsolved murders: the rape and strangulation of a 10-year-old boy.
According to U.S. government sources, the Romanian government has requested a DNA sample from Anthony Mark Bianchi, a Wildwood man in federal custody in Philadelphia on sex-crime charges.
Bianchi was indicted Jan. 12 by a federal grand jury in Philadelphia, becoming one of about a dozen people nationally who have been charged with a 2003 law that makes it a crime to travel overseas to have sex with minors. Bianchi is accused of traveling to Romania, Cuba, and the former Soviet republic of Moldova to have sex with victims aged 12 to 15.
If convicted of the American sex-crime charges, Bianchi, 43, likely faces 20 years in prison. Bianchi co-owns the 32-room Ivanhoe Motel with his parents in Wildwood, and authorities say he has cash assets in excess of $1 million.
Bianchi has no criminal record in the United States, but he has a sexual-molestation conviction in Russia. According to a Russian court document, Bianchi was convicted in 2000 of having illicit sex with boys aged 10, 12 and 13.
Bianchi's arrest here last month made national headlines in Romania. The U.S. indictment places Bianchi in neighboring Moldova in January 2004, just before the boy was murdered in Romania. At the time, Bianchi was traveling with a Romanian-based translator, officials said.
The murdered boy, Gabriel Dragomirescu, disappeared from his home in Bucharest on Feb. 1, 2004. His body was discovered three days later near a forest about 25 miles away. He had been raped.
Romanian officials didn't respond to inquiries. The prosecutors in the case based in Philadelphia, Michael Levy and Kenya Mann, declined to comment on the Romanian murder investigation.
During a bail hearing Thursday, the prosecutors conducted a sealed, 10-minute conversation at the bench with Peruto and U.S. District Judge Bruce Kauffman.
In open court, Levy and Mann argued that Bianchi should be held in jail until trial because he has spent much of the last five years traveling to Third World countries to befriend and then prey upon poor children. He is a threat to children in New Jersey, Mann said.
The indictment, filed in Philadelphia because the overseas trips began at the airport here, alleged that Bianchi met Moldovan boys in that country and arranged for them to travel to Cuba and Romania to have sex with them. One boy was molested on his 15th birthday, after Bianchi plied him with wine, U.S. authorities said.
"Bianchi used Gusin to help him meet poor families with young boys," the U.S. prosecutors said in a court filing. "He then groomed both the boys and their families to make his sexual advance less likely to be reported."
After he returned to New Jersey, Bianchi allegedly called the boys often and shipped them gifts that included sneakers, a color television, and a red motor scooter, prosecutors said. Bianchi bought airplane tickets to take Gusin and a boy to Thailand late last year, but cancelled at the last minute. Shortly afterward, officials said, he used a computer at a Cape May County public library to access a Web site called www.escapeartist.com , suggesting he was preparing to flee the country.
According to a translation of an explicit 18-page judgment by the Moscow court, Bianchi traveled to Russia 10 times between 1996 and March 2000, seducing boys he met at train stations and video-game parlors, often paying them for sex.
Although Bianchi was sentenced to three years in prison, he was soon freed under a general amnesty in honor of the 55th anniversary of the end of World War II. Russia subsequently deported him.
In court in Philadelphia last week, Peruto said that his client disputes the Russian conviction. He referred to another Russian document, dated after the conviction, which said: "Bianchi is recognized as not having previous convictions in the territory of the Russian Federation."
Although the judge said he is satisfied that Bianchi will not flee, he said he was not sure whether pretrial house arrest - at the hotel - is enough to protect children who may visit the hotel and the Wildwood community.
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