“There are people like me who like to touch and have sex with children.”
That’s how Anthony Antosz of the North Side, a 46-year-old father of three adult daughters and grandfather to two, described himself in sex texts with a 12-year-old girl he was trying to lure into his bed.
But the 12-year-old was an undercover FBI agent and now Antosz will spend a decade behind bars.
U.S. District Judge Cathy Bissoon imposed that term on him Wednesday, along with five years of probation. There is no parole in the federal system, so Antosz will be 56 when he gets out and over 60 when his court supervision ends.
Antosz is the latest local predator to be punished in federal court following stings set up by a Pittsburgh FBI sex crimes team designed to catch men trolling for underage victims.
His case was even worse than most, because he also admitted to the FBI that he is HIV-positive after deliberately injecting himself with his ex-boyfriend’s HIV-infected blood. He has hepatitis C, too. Had the child been real, he could have infected her.
“He’s mentally unstable, purposely giving himself HIV and then risking exposing a child to HIV during sex acts,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Benjamin Risacher said at an earlier court proceeding.
Risacher said Antosz, who has spent most of his adult life as a restaurant worker, most recently at the Tamarind in Oakland, is a pedophile by his own admission and a repeat felon.
The case against him began in January 2022 after agents had set up a fake profile of a 12-year-old Pittsburgh girl. Antosz, who called himself “Tony northside,” took the bait and made contact on social media. Like nearly a dozen other men caught in similar operations by the FBI here in recent years, he initiated sexual talk and then groomed the child over months with the goal of arranging a tryst.
He sent the girl pictures of himself in his underwear, promised to buy her Victoria’s Secret items, said he would teach her about masturbation and oral sex and warned her to hide their conversations. He initially said he was 34 but later admitted he was 45 and told her he knew that what he was doing was illegal. If he got caught, he said, he would be “in jail” and “on the news.”
He proved correct on both counts.
In May, he bought a Lyft ticket for the girl to come visit him for sex at his apartment on Perrysville Avenue. The FBI showed up instead and he did indeed end up in jail and in the news.
Inside the house, agents found candles lining the staircase. Prosecutors said the candles were for the girl, although Antosz’s adult daughter said in court in the spring that her dad always kept the candles there.
But the daughter also revealed that she didn’t know everything her father was up to.
Antosz, for example, kept a Barbie Dream House in his basement for his granddaughter. But he’d sent a picture of it to the undercover agent as part of his effort to entice her to agree to sex. When Risacher asked the adult daughter if she knew that, she admitted that she did not. Antosz had also sent the girl a picture of the granddaughter, although for what purpose remains unclear.
Antosz’s lawyer, Michael DeMatt, did not dispute his client’s culpability in the sex crime. The federal guidelines called for a mandatory sentence of at least 10 years, but he asked that Antosz not receive any more time than that.
“Mr. Antosz has made no efforts to deny that he did what he was accused of doing,” he said in sentencing papers. “He immediately confessed to the police, and admitted to his wrongdoing.”
Torsten covers the courts for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Reach him at jtorsteno@gmail.com.
