None of this bothers Xavier Von Erck, whose obsession launched the franchise. "Hey, the TV show could go away tomorrow, and it doesn't matter to me," he says. "Perverted Justice will still do what we do, roll how we roll."

Von Erck, whose nickname is X, is sitting in a bookstore cafe in Portland, dressed all in black. He looks a little like Philip Seymour Hoffman, five-eleven and round all over. He wears tinted eyeglasses and walks with a limp because he spends so much time at the computer that his eyes are now light-sensitive and his leg muscles have seized up. In a way, he's an odd doppelganger for Brannen, another guy who seems childlike but wants to be a gangster.

Though he wasn't molested himself, Von Erck felt robbed of his childhood by his father and legally changed his name from Phillip Eide to eradicate the last vestiges of his paternal namesake. "My dad was an alcoholic scumbag commercial fisherman who hit my mom," he says. "She left him when I was one, and he went on to impregnate ten more women up and down the West Coast. His name is garbage." As a teenager, the only thing that brought Von Erck back to a state of innocence and wonder was the computer -- until he decided that the online world was teeming with sex offenders. "I was so into the computer," he says. "I went into chat rooms thinking it was going to be utopia, and it was dystopia."

It's easy to see how Perverted Justice resembles a game to Von Erck. Intentionally enigmatic himself, he demands utter transparency from predators and Perverted Justice members, like a junior-high-school kid playing D&D who always wants to be the dungeon master so he can control every aspect of the game. He guards his power closely, requiring members to give him their entire Internet history (all screen names, all pages joined) and going to war with "stupid" people who dare to criticize Perverted Justice. He exacted a particularly sadistic form of revenge against Bruce Raisley, a software developer from Arkansas who launched an aggressive anti-PJ crusade. Posing as a woman named Holly, Von Erck began an online flirtation with Raisley, who was smitten enough to leave his wife and rent a new apartment. On the day Raisley went to pick up Holly at the airport, Von Erck sent a friend to snap his photo and posted it with a warning: "Tonight, Bruce Raisley stood around at an airport, flowers in hand, waiting for a woman that turned out to be a man. . . . He has no one. He has no more secrets. . . . Perverted-Justice.com will only tolerate so much in the way of threats and attacks upon us."

Here, after all, is the point of Perverted Justice: to destroy and vanquish, to re- establish utopia, both online and off. With or without To Catch a Predator, the man known as X is onto the next stage of the game, taking on even bigger prey than horny guys who stalk young girls. Von Erck's new obsession is what he calls "corporate sex offenders" ? online sites that don't do enough, in his view, to rein in the pedophiles who use their services. MySpace is exempt from the campaign -- since March, at the request of PJ, it has removed more than 3,000 predators from its site and forwarded their addresses and online profiles to the police. But Von Erck is mobilizing his thousands of followers to write letters to companies advertising on LiveJournal and YouTube, demanding they withdraw their support.

"Corporations have a choice about having the pedophile community use their service and upload videos on their sites," he says. "People want to know if you're responsible on this issue."

Von Erck looks out into the distance, imagining a world in which every predator has been ferreted o ut and cyberspace is his again. "When it comes to the Internet, pedophiles got there first," he says. "It's a check game, where they make one move and we try to check it. But slowly but surely, we're catching up."

But in 2004, Von Erck and Fencepost had a falling-out over tactics. "Xavier became much more oriented toward getting pedophiles arrested rather than just making them complete social pariahs in their neighborhood," says Fencepost. A Detroit broadcast on Von Erck caught the attention of Hansen, a smart reporter known for using hidden cameras, who took the idea to Dateline in 2004. All told, Perverted Justice has helped arrest about 250 men with the show, nabbed 200 more in other stings and scared straight hundreds of others. In a move that whitewashed the group's prior bullying and abusive tactics, Von Erck has wiped all traces of early chats, including Fencepost's, from the Perverted Justice Web site. Earlier this year, he deleted entries from his personal blog as well, upset that journalists had located them and quoted some of his writing: "I wish I could fucking kill 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Yes, kill. I'd like to kill them. . . . I want you to die. I wish you would die. Why don't you die? Just die." For a while clicking on his blog brought up a message addressed to "lazy idiots who aren't that bright." The subject line read, "You'll have to do some work now."