After a pedophilia world tour that got him arrested in Thailand in 2006, former Miami gym teacher Charles Todd Stokes has been sentenced in U.S. federal court to 15 years in prison after being found guilty of molesting 70 boys, according to media reports.
The Thai town he was arrested in, of course, is called Phuket.
The Phuket Gazette -- "Phuket's English-language newspaper since 1993" -- tells the whole sordid tale: Stokes was a gym teacher in Miami from 1985 to 1998 before he was fired for "inappropriate contact with children," the article says. Then he moved to Bangkok and opened a school "to continue his depredations."
When the Royal Thai Police raided Stokes's Pattaya, Thailand apartment, they found about 100 photographs of young boys wearing either school uniforms or nothing at all. He was arrested in Phuket and flown to the States, where his lawyers tried to exclude the evidence on the grounds that the raid was illegal.
It didn't work -- he was convicted last month after it was revealed that a "significant purpose" of his move to Asia was to have sex with underage boys and that he had thousands of photographs of himself in very compromising situations with minors, according to Fox Chicago, and last week he was hit with the maximum 15-year sentence.
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