Former Montgomery County teacher who traveled to Philippines for sex with minors sentenced to 35 years

A former Lower Merion high school teacher who lured several teenagers in the Philippines into sexual encounters with gifts of money, medicine, candy, and cake was sentenced Tuesday to more than three decades in federal prison.

Craig Alex Levin, 67, admitted he’d spent much of the last two decades traveling to the Southeast Asian country for liaisons with girls he met over Facebook. He kept detailed notes on dozens of minors, ranging in age from 12 to 17, rating them numerically on characteristics including age, personality, and their sexual performance.

But as the retired educator stood before U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle III, he insisted he’d done nothing wrong except for failing to recognize that what he described as typical Filipino sexual mores would be misunderstood in the United States.

“It’s not unusual for adult males in the Philippines to spend time with teenagers,” he told the judge. “The sex I had with teenage girls was always consensual.”

Bartle had another word for it: “Deplorable.” The 35-year sentence he handed down all but ensures Levin will spend the rest of his life behind bars.

“The number of girls you preyed upon in the Philippines is staggering,” the judge said. “You took advantage of poor and desperate young girls.”

Advocacy groups describe the Philippines as the epicenter of a global sex abuse trade and estimated that anywhere from 60,000 to 100,000 Filipino children have been forced into child labor or sex work.

Contributing to the problem was that the country’s age of consent was 12 years old, until it was raised to 16 last year amid efforts by the island nation to crack down on the exploitation of children.

Still, it is illegal in the United States for citizens to travel abroad for the purpose of having sex with minors — a crime punishable by as much as 30 years. Levin pleaded guilty to that charge as well as counts including attempted sex trafficking and distribution of child pornography last year.

His sentencing Tuesday came four years after he was arrested by the Philippine National Police while trying to sneak a pregnant 15-year-old girl into a hotel room he’d stocked with handcuffs, condoms, and women’s underwear.

The girl later told authorities Levin had paid her for sex on three occasions, offering her everything from $20 a session to chocolate and a bar of soap. She also said that he’d helped her obtain a fake ID to get past hotel security guards tasked with stopping sex tourists by screening minors entering the building.

Further investigation revealed his contact with dozens of other Filipino teenagers online, including another 15-year-old girl who told officials she’d had sex with Levin several times after a teenage friend put her in touch with him on Facebook.

Levin’s sentence was based on his interactions with six Filipino girls, but the true number of his victims is almost certainly much larger, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Rotella said. Many of them, she added, did not have food to eat, electricity in their homes, or necessary medicine and looked to Levin as a source of financial support.

“His victims were poor and desperate, frequently writing to Levin that they were willing to meet for commercial sex acts because they were hungry or needed medicine for family members,” she wrote in court filings in the lead-up to Tuesday’s hearings. “Of the already most vulnerable humans on the planet [children], he chose ones that were in the weakest position to resist him … and then used their bodies to sexually gratify himself.”

Levin, dressed in a green prison jumpsuit and slumped in a chair next to his lawyer, bristled as the prosecutor reiterated that point Tuesday in the Philadelphia courtroom.

His lawyer, Jack McMahon, noted that in Levin’s nearly 30 years as a special-education teacher in the United States — including two decades teaching at Lower Merion and Harriton High Schools on the Main Line — no students ever accused him of anything inappropriate.

He described the Philippines trips as Levin’s outlet and noted that some of the girls Levin admitted abusing would invite him to their homes for meals with their parents and wrote letters to the judge describing him as respectful, generous, and kind.

“He’s been a dedicated public servant, excellent father, excellent person,” McMahon said. “He obviously has some sort of sexual issues, but only acted on them when the sexual norms and sexual mores were different from ours.”

But Rotella, the prosecutor, balked as Levin and McMahon suggested that he should receive a lighter sentence due to the 14 months he spent in a Filipino penal colony infested with rats and with next to no food or health care while awaiting extradition to the United States.

Levin should not get credit, she said, for having “to suffer what those children suffer [every day] — what made them vulnerable to his predatory behavior.”

Ultimately, the judge agreed. In addition to his prison term, Bartle ordered Levin to pay $30,000 in restitution — $5,000 to each of the six children he was convicted of victimizing — and spend the rest of his life under court supervision should he be released.

“It goes without saying that the crimes you committed are not only serious but horrific and deplorable,” he said. “What you have done is likely harm [the victims] psychologically and emotionally for a lifetime.”

In a statement upon his arrest, the Lower Merion School District said that it was not aware of any reports that Levin had victimized any of its students during his tenure with the district.