Roslyn man pleads guilty in federal court to receiving child sex abuse videos, smuggling Iranian nationals into U.S.

A Roslyn man pleaded guilty on Tuesday in Brooklyn federal court to possessing child sexual abuse material and attempting to smuggle Iranian migrants — including one with terrorism ties — into the United States.

Sharon Gohari, 48, a naturalized American citizen who traveled often to his native Iran, was arrested last May after the FBI found graphic sexual images of children on his electronic devices during their investigation of his smuggling operation.

Prosecutors charge that from 2020 to 2025, Gohari, received money for arranging travel papers for Iranians at the Mexican Consulate in Iran and then helping them go from Central America into the United States illegally.

Authorities said in a detention memo that in 2021, he smuggled three people into this country, one of whom had done work for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a designated terrorist group, in Malaysia and Iran.

Federal agents discovered child sex abuse videos on Gohari's electronic devices after he allowed agents to search them while being detained and questioned at Kennedy Airport on Jan. 24, 2025, according to the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

They found several explicit videos of prepubescent girls being sexually abused, prosecutors said. Additionally, they found hundreds of surreptitiously taken videos of several different women walking around New York City, some of them appeared to be angled to see up their garments. The videos showed the same women in various locations that investigators said indicated the women were being followed.

FBI agents said that he exchanged messages in Farsi with another man, indicating that he wanted to have sex with younger girls and Gohari suggested that they meet at a high school.

Investigators also point out that he lived less than a half a mile from a public high school, the detention memo said.

"The defendant exploited and endangered vulnerable individuals for profit, over and over again," U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District Joseph Nocella Jr., said in a statement. "In doing so, he also put our national security at risk and circumvented the vital procedures that are in place to vet those entering our country. Our office will continue to aggressively pursue transnational criminal schemes operating here in the United States, especially when they involve terrorist groups like the IRGC that seek to do us harm. And we will always prosecute the sexual exploitation of children to the fullest extent of the law."

Gohari faces a maximum of 20 years in prison for receiving child sexual abuse material and up to 10 years for alien smuggling.

His attorney, Samuel Jacobson, of the Federal Defenders, did not immediately return a message seeking comment.