BOOTED: Jack McClellan outside a Los Angeles courthouse on Aug. 24, 2007, when a judge ordered him to stay at least 10 yards away from places where kids congregate. IMAGE: AP Photo/Nick Ut

After Portland pedophile Jack McClellan took a recent turn through the children’s section at Powell’s City of Books on West Burnside Street, the company officially booted him from all six of its area stores.

“It’s pretty obvious why we would want him excluded—for the safety of customers, of children,” says Ann Smith, CEO of operations at the Portland-based book giant. The exclusion took effect March 17.

Officials at the Grotto, the 62-acre Catholic shrine and botanical garden in Northeast Portland, also are on alert after McClellan showed up there March 11. Grotto officials gave staff and volunteers photos of McClellan and told them to call police if he shows up again, says Grotto spokeswoman Sara Patinkin.

McClellan, 46, takes a perverse pride in keeping a website (stegl.info) that rates the best places in Portland to hang around young girls. But he tells WW he wasn’t scoping out kids at either Powell’s or the Grotto. “It bothers me, but it doesn’t surprise me,” he says of getting booted.

There are about 12 people blacklisted at Powell’s each month, Smith says. Mostly they’re visitors with terrible hygiene or those suspected of trying to sell stolen books.

A self-described pedophile, McClellan has given interviews to nationally syndicated talk shows in which he’s unapologetic about his attraction to underage girls. He moved to Portland last September after concerned parents ran him out of California and Washington state.

McClellan has no criminal record. But when he showed up at Powell’s on the evening of March 5, Smith says a security guard recognized him and tailed him through the store, from the magazine racks to the children’s section in the Rose Room.

McClellan says he was just wandering for his 10-minute visit. “I turned into the children’s section and figured I’d better get out of here as quickly as possible,” he says.

At the Grotto, McClellan says he was in the neighborhood to go to the Gregory Heights branch of the Multnomah County Library. It was closed, so he went instead to the Grotto’s garden at about 11 am. He was keeping a low profile in the bushes, he says, where a police officer confronted him and he soon left.

Oregon has proved more welcoming to McClellan than neighboring states, but it’s not the first time he’s been blackballed. After TriMet excluded him from public transit for 60 days starting Nov. 18, McClellan left to visit Los Angeles but returned in early December.

Now, he says, he’s homeless and spends his nights on the street rather than in shelters, where he fears he’ll be attacked.

Though McClellan has gone public with his predilections, he insists most anonymous pedophiles are harmless. “We probably live right under most people’s noses,” he says. “And you wouldn’t know it.”