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Authors: Linda Fairstein
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worried on your behalf. I expressed that poorly.”
“Thank the cardinal for his concern, Paul. Hope you can both keep the faith.”
SEVEN
“THE boss said that to you?” Donner asked. He’d overheard my short conversation with Mercer before the elevator doors closed to take us up to Part 67 of the Supreme Court, Criminal Term, of the state of New York, on the fifteenth floor of the monolithic and dreadfully outdated WPA-designed courthouse.
“Why? Can you see steam coming out of my nose and ears? Blood oath, Barry—you never heard what I said about Battaglia or the cardinal. I just needed to vent to a friend so I can calm down and focus on what we’ve got to do today.”
“I didn’t think I’d be making enemies in this job.”
“Nothing to get paranoid about. You won’t. This is a tough issue for Battaglia. He’s one of the city’s most visible Catholics in public office, and the church has been notoriously ineffective in acknowledging the problem of sexual abuse in its ranks.”
“Have you prosecuted other priests?” Donner asked as the doors opened and we made our way past paroled perps and bedraggled relatives waiting for short visits with imprisoned sons and husbands and brothers whose cases were also on the court calendars.
“I was a rookie when I handled my first complaint, a dozen years ago. A Dominican woman from Inwood had an eleven-year-old kid. The local parish priest took an interest in him when he started struggling in school.”
“That must happen all the time.”
“It does. So Mrs. Caceres was fine with it. In fact, she thought it was the best of all possible worlds. Father Leopold offered to tutor the boy in his apartment the evenings that Mrs. Caceres was working late. She was saying more novenas for Leopold’s well-being than anyone on the planet. What better? In a neighborhood where gangs roughed up or recruited all the kids, this boy had a guardian angel keeping him off the streets.”
“Till the kid complained?” Barry asked.
“He couldn’t bring himself to tell his mother, which is common with most adolescents. He just became very withdrawn and wanted to stop going to see Father Leopold. His mother insisted otherwise, telling him he’d better cooperate and do everything the priest wanted him to do. Everything. Listen to him, she kept insisting, and obey him. No disrespect.”
“And he did, right?”
“Yes, he did. For several weeks, until he had a breakdown in school, after Leopold had moved from touching the boy to sodomizing him. It was a doctor at Columbia-Presbyterian who notified child welfare and the police. That’s how I got the case.”
“Did you have Leopold arrested?”
The court officer unlocked the door and let us into the empty courtroom. We walked down the aisle and I pushed the gate that admitted us to the well, taking our assigned table closest to the jury box.
“It was my rude awakening to how the church operated. At the first whiff of a complaint, the priests were moved to another archdiocese. Another state, thousands of miles away. Beyond the subpoena power of the state of New York. Leopold had come from some town in Wisconsin, where he’d run the youth group. Before the ink on the Caceres complaint was dry, he was relocated to a really poor parish south of Austin, Texas. The church leaders just shuffled their problems around, hoping no one would notice.”
“But you’re usually a pit bull about this stuff, Alex. Didn’t you go after Leopold? Didn’t you bring the boy in?”
“Once. I had one shot at an interview with a painfully shy adolescent who would rather have had a root canal than talk to me about Leopold’s sexual advances. I had a whole plan for gaining his trust over time and building the case. But the church lawyers moved faster than I did. They offered Mrs. Caceres a settlement she couldn’t refuse.”
“Money? She took money to kill the case?”
“You bet she did. She didn’t want to start a scandal, publicly
“Thank the cardinal for his concern, Paul. Hope you can both keep the faith.”
SEVEN
“THE boss said that to you?” Donner asked. He’d overheard my short conversation with Mercer before the elevator doors closed to take us up to Part 67 of the Supreme Court, Criminal Term, of the state of New York, on the fifteenth floor of the monolithic and dreadfully outdated WPA-designed courthouse.
“Why? Can you see steam coming out of my nose and ears? Blood oath, Barry—you never heard what I said about Battaglia or the cardinal. I just needed to vent to a friend so I can calm down and focus on what we’ve got to do today.”
“I didn’t think I’d be making enemies in this job.”
“Nothing to get paranoid about. You won’t. This is a tough issue for Battaglia. He’s one of the city’s most visible Catholics in public office, and the church has been notoriously ineffective in acknowledging the problem of sexual abuse in its ranks.”
“Have you prosecuted other priests?” Donner asked as the doors opened and we made our way past paroled perps and bedraggled relatives waiting for short visits with imprisoned sons and husbands and brothers whose cases were also on the court calendars.
“I was a rookie when I handled my first complaint, a dozen years ago. A Dominican woman from Inwood had an eleven-year-old kid. The local parish priest took an interest in him when he started struggling in school.”
“That must happen all the time.”
“It does. So Mrs. Caceres was fine with it. In fact, she thought it was the best of all possible worlds. Father Leopold offered to tutor the boy in his apartment the evenings that Mrs. Caceres was working late. She was saying more novenas for Leopold’s well-being than anyone on the planet. What better? In a neighborhood where gangs roughed up or recruited all the kids, this boy had a guardian angel keeping him off the streets.”
“Till the kid complained?” Barry asked.
“He couldn’t bring himself to tell his mother, which is common with most adolescents. He just became very withdrawn and wanted to stop going to see Father Leopold. His mother insisted otherwise, telling him he’d better cooperate and do everything the priest wanted him to do. Everything. Listen to him, she kept insisting, and obey him. No disrespect.”
“And he did, right?”
“Yes, he did. For several weeks, until he had a breakdown in school, after Leopold had moved from touching the boy to sodomizing him. It was a doctor at Columbia-Presbyterian who notified child welfare and the police. That’s how I got the case.”
“Did you have Leopold arrested?”
The court officer unlocked the door and let us into the empty courtroom. We walked down the aisle and I pushed the gate that admitted us to the well, taking our assigned table closest to the jury box.
“It was my rude awakening to how the church operated. At the first whiff of a complaint, the priests were moved to another archdiocese. Another state, thousands of miles away. Beyond the subpoena power of the state of New York. Leopold had come from some town in Wisconsin, where he’d run the youth group. Before the ink on the Caceres complaint was dry, he was relocated to a really poor parish south of Austin, Texas. The church leaders just shuffled their problems around, hoping no one would notice.”
“But you’re usually a pit bull about this stuff, Alex. Didn’t you go after Leopold? Didn’t you bring the boy in?”
“Once. I had one shot at an interview with a painfully shy adolescent who would rather have had a root canal than talk to me about Leopold’s sexual advances. I had a whole plan for gaining his trust over time and building the case. But the church lawyers moved faster than I did. They offered Mrs. Caceres a settlement she couldn’t refuse.”
“Money? She took money to kill the case?”
“You bet she did. She didn’t want to start a scandal, publicly
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