'Swiss Cheese Pervert' pleads guilty, gets 8 years' probation

A NORRISTOWN man who rose to infamy earlier this year as the "Swiss Cheese Pervert" was sentenced to probation yesterday after he pleaded guilty.

Dressed in a rumpled white dress shirt, black slacks and a tie, Christopher Pagano, 42, said "guilty" to four counts of harassment and two counts of indecent exposure before Municipal Judge James DeLeon.

Under terms of a guilty plea negotiated with the District Attorney's Office, DeLeon then sentenced Pagano to eight years of sex-offender probation. The judge also ordered him to stay away from his four victims and to attend a treatment program.

"He acknowledged his activities and he acknowledged that he needed help," defense attorney Mark D. Hauser said after leaving the courtroom.

Pagano, a married father of a 12-year-old daughter, is already receiving general counseling. Under the plea deal, he will begin therapy at the Joseph J. Peters Institute, a nonprofit mental-health agency on South Broad Street that provides outpatient assessment and treatment services in the area of sexual abuse, Hauser said.

"It was clear the defendant needed treatment," Assistant District Attorney Susan Cho said when asked why a plea deal was offered to Pagano.

Pagano was arrested Jan. 16 after a weeklong manhunt and charged with indecent exposure, stalking, harassment and open lewdness.

During October and January, he drove around Mayfair and flashed his penis and Swiss cheese at four women, offering some of them money to wrap cheese around his penis, Cho told DeLeon.

He followed one victim and her 2-year-old daughter in their car on Frankford Avenue and masturbated with cheese wrapped around his penis, she said.

If Pagano had gone to trial and been convicted on all counts, she said, he could have been sentenced to a maximum of 25 years in state prison.