New York Man Pleads Guilty to Failure to Register as a Sex Offender

Contact: Halsey B. Frank
Assistant United States Attorney
Tel: (207) 780-3257

Portland, Maine:  United States Attorney Thomas E. Delahanty II announced that Thomas P. Cortez, of College Point, New York and Portland, Maine, pleaded guilty today in U.S. District Court to failing to register as a sex offender. 

According to court documents, Cortez was convicted in Maine in 1989 of unlawful sexual contact with a minor under 14 years old.  As a result, Cortez is required to register as a sex offender for life.  In 1996, Cortez was living in New York when it instituted a sex offender registry. Between about 1996 and about March of 2003, Cortez was registered in New York.  In 2003, Cortez gave New York notice that he was moving back to Maine.  Between 2006 and 2015, Cortez registered in Maine.  After March 2015, Cortez moved to College Point, New York, where he lived with his father and stepmother.  He did not inform Maine that he had moved to New York and he did not register in New York.  In December of 2015, Cortez was arrested in New York and told arresting officers, among other things, that he had been living in New York for about eight months.

Cortez faces up to 10 years in jail and a $250,000 fine.  He will be sentenced after the completion of a presentence investigation report by the U.S. Probation Office.

The investigation was conducted by U.S. Marshals Service, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, the Maine and New York Sex Offender Registries, and the Portland Police Department.