The detectives who applied their high-tech expertise to crack the case had received their training, in part, from the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), a little-known but remarkably effective nonprofit membership organization headquartered on Nuckols Road in Glen Allen. The BTK Strangler is only one in a long and growing list of miscreants that sleuths who learned their skills through NW3C instruction have arrested and sent to prison. (Rader received 10 consecutive life sentences—one for each of the murders for which he was convicted.)
NW3C’s importance will only grow, it seems clear, during the recession. “We’ve definitely seen a link between the downturn in the economy and cyber crime,” says NW3C spokesman Craig Butterworth. “In the last six to eight months, there’s been a spike in computer crime.” There has also been an apparent increase in work-at-home scams, “in which otherwise law-abiding citizens have been involved, innocently or otherwise, in other people’s money-laundering schemes.”
At a time, too, in which trust in many major financial institutions has collapsed, NW3C can rightly be regarded as part of the solution to a very worrisome problem. Law enforcement is hot on the heels of sophisticated crooks who have done so much to destroy the credibility, for example, of Wall Street. Butterworth says NW3C can’t claim to have helped bring Bernie Madoff to justice, “but since we’ve worked with thousands of investigators, it is a good bet someone working on that case was trained by us.”
Although most of the training takes place at NW3C’s Fairmont, West Va., offices, or at other locations, its headquarters has been in Henrico since 2005. Founded in 1979 as the Leviticus Project, which focused on crime in the coal industry, NW3C in 1992 broadened its focus to include white-collar crime of all kinds and, in recent years, terrorism.
The organization has long been interested in how computer technology provided the opportunity for crimes to be committed and also how this technology might offer new methods for criminal investigation. “We were thinking about this stuff long before anybody else was,” Butterworth says. “We were interested in how to extract evidence from hard drives, for example, without compromising that evidence.”
Understanding how to meet such challenges explains why some of NW3C’s 100 or so employees, about a third of whom work out of the Nuckols Road office, have no law-enforcement backgrounds at all. “A lot of our people have worked for state and federal law enforcement, but others are just techies with an expertise in forensic analysis,” Butterworth says.
Funded solely by grants, with the law-enforcement agencies that belong to it paying nothing, NW3C does more than train law-enforcement officers. It also offers investigative services of its own and analysis, for example, of economic crime data. “We assist member agencies in developing criminal cases,” Butterworth says. “We can even transport witnesses from one state to another when the member doesn’t have the resources to do so.” NW3C also works closely with tribal law enforcement on Indian reservations where casinos operate.
NW3C also enjoys a close working relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Established in 2000, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), for example, is a joint project of the FBI and NW3C to receive, research and refer complaints of cyber crime to the appropriate law-enforcement or regulatory agencies. In 2008 alone, Butterworth says, IC3 fielded 270,000 complaints.
Such huge numbers, although troubling, hardly shock NW3C investigators. “The general public doesn’t have a clear sense of the magnitude of Internet crime today,” says Marcia Williams, the organization’s manager of marketing and communications, who has also worked for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Arthur Andersen Business Consulting. “The criminals are always one step ahead, though law enforcement is always closing the gap.”
Williams says Henrico is an ideal location for helping close that gap more rapidly. “We have quick access to our West Virginia location,” she says, “but also to Washington, D.C. That, in our line of work, is crucial.”
