Video released Sunday night gave more insight into the arrest of an Atlantic City man for luring a child.
Robert Catalano Jr., 58, was one of four men charged after three groups that hunt child sexual predators online came together in the area last month.
Catalano is the only one who remains jailed, after a judge denied his release during a detention hearing last week.
“You reached out to a 14-year-old, you talked dirty, you gave him your address, you brought him over for a massage,” Tommy Fellows tells Catalano in the video.
Fellows runs Colorado Ped Patrol, a YouTube channel dedicated to catching pedophiles.
Catalano insisted he did not believe the boy he was talking to was real, and that he never had an interaction with a minor on Grindr before.
“I think I have a problem with sexual addictions,” Catalano says. “But I don’t have a fetish for children.”
When Fellows later scrolls through Catalano’s interactions on the app, he notes that “there’s several young kids on here.”
“It looks like you talked to every single one of ‘em, Bud,” he tells Catalano.
“I’m thinking about it now, I don’t know that I’m in control of myself when it comes to that … when it comes to sexual addiction,” Catalano tells him at one point.
He says that he has been treated for impulse control and kleptomania.
Fellows then pushes for Catalano to call for help. It winds up being a 911 call in which Fellows tells the police that “it’s been a couple felonies committed.”
“I’m a 14-year-old decoy. He lured us to his house,” Fellows adds. “We’re trying to get him some mental health help because he doesn’t want to hurt a child.”
While Catalano continues to insist he did not believe a juvenile was really coming to his home, Fellows points out that he gave an address near his home in a gated community on Formica Way, then was “peeking over the fence the whole time looking for him. We’ve got it all recorded.”
“I was trying to figure out how to get the person where they need to be,” said Catalano, who works as a drug counselor for Recovery Force of Atlantic County, a group he started.
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Catalano had his father’s garage converted to an office, Bob Sr. told Fellows later.
“Sometimes he works late,” the elder Catalano said. “He has addicts that he counsels.”
Some of those he has taken into his garage office appear to be teens, neighbors told Ped Patrol.
But the neighbors already had issues with Catalano Jr.
“We’ve been trying to get him out of here,” a woman off-camera is heard saying.
She then says that Catalano goes to the bathroom in a bucket and “dumps it out back.”
A man identifying himself as the condo association’s vice president then approaches the group, saying he gets constant complaints about Catalano.
“We want to get involved in this because this dude’s a problem for us too,” he tells Fellows. “He’s got many problems. This is the last straw.”
Fellows tells his viewers he is waiting for police, but the video stops before they arrive.
“I don’t feel comfortable leaving here unless I talk to the police,” he says. “He’s a sick dude.”
