🇺🇸 Long Island couple hunts child predators, one sting at a time

When Mike Villiani approached a Shoreham-Wading River music teacher this week outside the school where he works, he wasn’t acting on a hunch. He was already armed with days of messages, screenshots and a recorded phone call. All evidence, he said, of explicit conversations with someone the educator believed was a 13-year-old girl.

“There’s not a doubt in my mind how guilty he is,” Villiani told Greater Long Island, hours after the Wading River School educator was removed from his position following the sting operation. “I know the stuff he was saying and the stuff he was asking for.” Villiani operates Predator Poachers Long Island, a vigilante-type group that video records and shares online stings aimed at exposing adults attempting to meet up with minors. The teacher — a married father from Islip — is the group’s latest “catch.”

Mark Verity, who has taught music and directed numerous school plays at Wading River School, was arrested Friday by Suffolk Police Islip for engaging in sexually explicit communications with a purported 13-year-old girl. The Wednesday confrontation, conducted alongside Predator Poachers founder Alex Rosen, resulted in swift admissions from Verity, who was recorded confessing to possessing and receiving child sexual abuse material.

Villiani, a 29-year-old Valley Stream native with a background in video production and journalism, launched Predator Poachers Long Island just eight months ago with Hoenscheid, also 29. The couple runs one of five branches of what’s become an international network that includes operations in Illinois, Washington state and Toronto. They said they’ve made 47 catches across nine states, with arrests in four states and Canada — with a boatload of videos posted online to prove it.
“We’ve got to the point where we can do this full time,” Villiani explained. The operation, funded by YouTube advertising and donations, maintains a roughly 50% arrest rate, with nearly 20 individuals either arrested or indicted based on their investigations, they said.