A Coral Gables attorney asked to be disbarred while facing child pornography charges

David J. Neal
·3 min read
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Even as a Coral Gables attorney entered a not guilty plea to federal child sex abuse material charges, he asked the state Supreme Court for a disciplinary move the court calls “tantamount to disbarment.”

The court granted William McCaughan, Jr.’s request for disciplinary revocation, so, as of Jan. 13, the former attorney for Coral Gables’ The Morgan Group will be disbarred for at least five years. McCaughan, 41, can apply for Bar readmission on Jan. 14, 2028. In return, the Florida Bar’s professional discipline case against McCaughan stemming from the criminal case goes away.

This doesn’t affect the criminal charges, receipt of child pornography and attempted receipt of child pornography. A criminal complaint authored by FBI Special Agent Timothy Augustyniak said the trail to the door of McCaughan’s one-bedroom Key Biscayne apartment building started in Texas.

READ MORE: He was a U.S. Army Lt. Colonel when he was into child sex abuse material

Conversations on Kik about kids

The criminal complaint says an FBI “Online Covert Employee” (OCE) began messaging with “caseyporter18” on Kik, a messaging app without parental controls that shows up regularly in child pornography cases. After that Kik user sent the OCE an explicit video of his 11-year-old niece, the complaint says, the FBI tracked the username to a “C.L.” in Texas. The complaint says C.L. told investigators he also sent that video to Kik user “wmccaugh.”

A check of C.L.’s phone, the complaint said, turned up conversations between C.L. and “wmccaugh” from Dec. 19, 2022 to Jan. 20, 2023 and indications C.L. had sent “wmccaugh” child sex abuse material.

The complaint said “wmccaugh” told C.L., “I liked that video of that girl grinding on the edge of the bathtub. How old do you think she was?...She looked like she was 11-13” and “I delete everything after a day or two. I get paranoid about my phone getting lost and someone looking through it or something like that.”

The complaint also said “wmccaugh’ “listed a variety of sexual acts he wanted to perform on C.L.’s niece.”

Later, in online conversation with another OCE on Kik, the complaint says “wmccaugh” accepted an offer of “mega links” to “yung naked pics and vids.” The OCE sent a link to filenames that indicate child sex abuse of 3-year-olds, but give error messages when clicked upon by a user.

The complaint says “wmccaugh” said the links didn’t work and they were out of his age range, which he later clarified as “8 and up.” He later told the OCE, the complaint says, that he’d be happy with an invitation to one of the Kik groups with people who exchange child sex abuse material and “if you get any 8-14, I’d appreciate any of it.”

Finding “wmccaugh”

A subpoena served on MediaLab, Kik’s owner, turned up records that said “wmccaugh” was registered to user “L S” and email address kbnddc@yahoo.com. Another subpoena, the complaint said, found records saying “John Smith” was that account’s registered user.

’‘The subpoena results also provided several IP addresses associated with the “wmccaugh’‘ Kik account,” the complaint said.

Subpoening AT&T for subscriber information on the accounts, the complaint said, turned up subscriber information for one of the IP addresses. The address was used “almost daily” by the “wmccaugh” Kik account during the conversations with C.L. and during the conversations with the two OCEs until May 23.

The AT&T subscriber information said the service address was an apartment in a Key Biscayne condominium building, the same address that had been on McCaughan’s driver’s license since at least April 2018. Investigators say they saw McCaughan answer the door there on June 1 and, when they hit the place with search warrants on July 28, he said he was the lone resident.