Former Virginia Detective Sentenced to 23 Years in Prison for Sexually Exploiting Minors

A former Virginia detective with the Madison County Sheriff’s Office, who was most recently assigned to the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, was sentenced in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia in Charlottesville for multiple charges of sexually exploiting minors, Acting Assistant Attorney General John P. Cronan of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Rick A. Mountcastle for the Western District of Virginia announced.

Bruce Arlie Harvey, 42, of Reva, Virginia, pleaded guilty on Aug. 14, 2017, and was sentenced on Jan. 25, to 276 months in prison for three counts of transporting a minor across state lines with the intent to engage in criminal sexual acts, three counts of interstate travel with minors with the intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct and one count of possession of child pornography.

According to the information presented during the guilty plea and during the sentencing hearing, Harvey, while a karate instructor at the Virginia Tong Leong School of Karate in Madison, Virginia, began making sexual advances toward the two minor female victims in this case while they were students at the karate school. Harvey engaged in illegal sexual acts with these children after he began giving them private karate lessons and began traveling with each of them to karate competitions and other events at various out-of-state locations, including California and Maryland. This conduct took place between 1998 and 2007.

Additional evidence presented during the guilty plea revealed that at the time of his arrest on May 3, 2017, investigators recovered a Sony microcassette in a bedroom closet that contained a film clip dated Feb. 14, 2007, that showed one of the victims performing a sexual act with Harvey in his Madison County home.

The FBI and the Virginia State Police investigated this case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Nancy S. Healey and Trial Attorney Lauren S. Kupersmith of the Criminal Division’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) prosecuted this case.

This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse, launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice. Led by U.S. Attorneys’ Offices and CEOS, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit http://www.justice.gov/psc.