Kevin Gray, Waterbury Priest, Stole $1.3 Million To Pay For Male Escorts, Say Police
JOHN CHRISTOFFERSEN | 07/ 6/10 05:18 PM | AP
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — The Rev. Kevin J. Gray was a popular priest who appeared to live humbly, forgoing a car and walking to Mass from another parish where he lived so that a Catholic charity could use his space at the rectory. Parishioners thought he had cancer and admired how he helped immigrants in his largely poor parish in Connecticut.
But after a routine audit of the church's finances turned up discrepancies, authorities began a criminal investigation that they say unraveled a secret double life of male escorts, strip bars and lavish spending on the finest restaurants, luxury hotels and expensive clothing, financed with money stolen from the parish.
"About a million," Gray told authorities without hesitation when asked how much he took from the church account, according to his arrest affidavit.
Gray, former pastor at Sacred Heart/Sagrado Corazon Parish in Waterbury, was arrested and charged with first-degree larceny, accused of stealing $1.3 million over seven years from the church, police said. He was arraigned Tuesday in Waterbury Superior Court and was being held on $750,000 bond, court officials said.
"Up until this investigation he had an excellent reputation," police Capt. Christopher Corbett said. "The life he was leading in New York City was much different than the life he was leading in Waterbury as a priest. He's certainly an example of someone who was leading a double life."
Gray told church officials and others that he had cancer, but police found no evidence of that, Corbett said. Saying he was undergoing treatments in New York may have been an excuse to explain his absense from the parish, he said.
Gray, 64, used the money to stay at such hotels as the Waldorf-Astoria, New York Palace Hotel and Copley Square in Boston, and on expensive clothing labels including Armani, Saks 5th Avenue and Brooks Brothers, police said. He dined at Tavern on the Green and Arturo's restaurants in New York, Union League Cafe in New Haven and Abe & Louie's Restaurant in Boston.
One man Gray met in New York's Central Park told police that Gray paid for him to attend Harvard University, bought a piano and dogs, and paid for his piano lessons and veterinarian bills. When the man asked why he always paid him with checks from Sacred Heart, Gray told him he had won big cases as an attorney and placed his life savings into the church account, according to the arrest affidavit.
As police interviewed the man, Gray arrived at his apartment. Gray admitted he was not an attorney and did not have colon cancer, police said.
Telephone messages left at Sacred Heart and the public defender's office were not immediately returned.
Police said Gray told them he grew to hate being a priest and was upset with the archdiocese, believing he received the worst church assignments. He said he made checks payable to himself in excess of his salary over the years and admitted to having a secret phone deal in which an antenna was placed in the church steeple to generate cash.
"We are deeply saddened by the events which have recently had such a profound affect on Sacred Heart/Sagrado Corazon parish," the Archdiocese of Hartford said in a statement.
Archdiocese officials said they are working with the parish to improve its financial controls and deal with its debts.
"At the spiritual level, we continue to pray for healing and consolation for the parish family as it moves forward and for guidance and reconciliation for Father Gray as he encounters the legal proceedings that await him," they said in the statement.
The archdiocese asked police to investigate after it discovered during a financial review that Gray may have taken more than $1 million dollars for personal use. It involved a combination of parish savings and money that should have been used to pay certain debts, such as insurance premiums, church officials have said.
When church officials announced those findings last month, Hispanic parishioners rallied to Gray's side.
"He is not what the superiors are saying about him," parishioner Juan Marrero told The Waterbury Republican-American. "This good friend of mine did not have a car, did not have good clothes to be parading around in. He was a very humble person."
Gray was Sacred Heart's pastor from 2003 until April 15, when he was granted a medical leave. He was later suspended.
David Clohessy, executive director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said he was skeptical a priest could steal so much money over many years without raising suspicions.
Gray, whose salary was less than $28,000 last year, was the only one with computer access to parish financial records, and there was no parish council or finance committee at the church, according to the arrest affidavit.
The Rev. John McCarthy, chancellor of the archdiocese, said when church officials arrived for reviews, Gray was absent. Church officials believed he was seriously ill.
"He had a terrific reputation," McCarthy said. "We probably cut him some slack."
The allegations came to light after Italian newspapers published transcripts of phone calls recorded by police, who had been conducting an unrelated corruption investigation.
The tapes appear to record Angelo Balducci, a Gentleman of His Holiness, negotiating with Thomas Chinedu Ehiem, a 29-year-old Nigerian Vatican chorister, about men he wanted brought to him for sexual purposes. Balducci was allegedly paying 2,000 euros ($2,714) for each man he met, according to the Irish Times [ http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/0304/1224265559432.html ].
Balducci is recorded describing precise physical details of the men he wanted. The transcripts record that during five months in 2008, Ehiem procured for Balducci at least 10 contacts with, among others, "two black Cuban lads," a former male model from Naples, and a rugby player from Rome [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/04/vatican-gay-sex-scandal (the article pictured in the item next below)].
A report by the Italian Carabinieri on the case said: "In order to organize casual encounters of a sexual nature, he availed himself of the intercession of two individuals who, it is maintained, may form part of an organized network, especially active in [Rome], of exploiters or at least facilitators of male prostitution."
The police probe into corruption resulted in Balducci and 4 others being arrested. Allegations of prostitution were only revealed later, and have resulted in Ehiem's dismissal from the Vatican choir.
Balducci held a high position within the Vatican and carried the coffin of Pope John Paul at his 2005 funeral [same expired WaPo link]. He has now lost his position as a Gentleman of the Holiness. His trial for corruption is still pending.
The Catholic Church has weathered a storm of controversy in recent years over allegations of sexual abuse by its members. Whilst homosexuality is not outright condemned within the Church, it is taught that homosexual acts are "are intrinsically disordered."
Vatican Official Caught Soliciting Sex From Young Man On Hidden Camera 10-14-07 ... Monsignor Tommaso Stenico said he frequented online gay chat rooms and met with gay men as part of his work as a psychoanalyst. He said that he pretended to be gay in order to gather information about "those who damage the image of the Church with homosexual activity." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/10/14/vatican-official-caught-s_n_68373.html [with comments]
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Chief exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth says Devil is in the Vatican
Sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church are proof that that "the Devil is at work inside the Vatican", according to the Holy See's chief exorcist.
Father Gabriele Amorth, 85, who has been the Vatican's chief exorcist for 25 years and says he has dealt with 70,000 cases of demonic possession, said that the consequences of satanic infiltration included power struggles at the Vatican as well as "cardinals who do not believe in Jesus, and bishops who are linked to the Demon".
He added: "When one speaks of 'the smoke of Satan' [a phrase coined by Pope Paul VI in 1972] in the holy rooms, it is all true – including these latest stories of violence and paedophilia."
He claimed that another example of satanic behaviour was the Vatican "cover-up" over the deaths in 1998 of Alois Estermann, the then commander of the Swiss Guard, his wife and Corporal Cedric Tornay, a Swiss Guard, who were all found shot dead. "They covered up everything immediately," he said. "Here one sees the rot".
A remarkably swift Vatican investigation concluded that Corporal Tornay had shot the commander and his wife and then turned his gun on himself after being passed over for a medal. However Tornay's relatives have challenged this. There have been unconfirmed reports of a homosexual background to the tragedy and the involvement of a fourth person who was never identfied.
Father Amorth, who has just published Memoirs of an Exorcist, a series of interviews with the Vatican journalist Marco Tosatti, said that the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II in 1981 had been the work of the Devil, as had an incident last Christmas when a mentally disturbed woman threw herself at Pope Benedict XVI at the start of Midnight Mass, pulling him to the ground.
Father José Antonio Fortea Cucurull, a Rome-based exorcist, said that Father Amorth had "gone well beyond the evidence" in claiming that Satan had infiltrated the Vatican corridors.
"Cardinals might be better or worse, but all have upright intentions and seek the glory of God," he said. Some Vatican officials were more pious than others, "but from there to affirm that some cardinals are members of satanic sects is an unacceptable distance."
Father Amorth told La Repubblica that the devil was "pure spirit, invisible. But he manifests himself with blasphemies and afflictions in the person he possesses. He can remain hidden, or speak in different languages, transform himself or appear to be agreeable. At times he makes fun of me."
He said it sometimes took six or seven of his assistants to to hold down a possessed person. Those possessed often yelled and screamed and spat out nails or pieces of glass, which he kept in a bag. "Anything can come out of their mouths – finger-length pieces of iron, but also rose petals."
He said that hoped every diocese would eventually have a resident exorcist. Under Church Canon Law any priest can perform exorcisms, but in practice they are carried out by a chosen few trained in the rites.
Father Amorth was ordained in 1954 and became an official exorcist in 1986. In the past he has suggested that Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were possessed by the Devil. He was among Vatican officials who warned that J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels made a "false distinction between black and white magic".
He approves, however, of the 1973 film The Exorcist, which although "exaggerated" offered a "substantially exact" picture of possession.
In 2001 he objected to the introduction of a new version of the exorcism rite, complaining that it dropped centuries-old prayers and was "a blunt sword" about which exorcists themselves had not been consulted. The Vatican said later that he and other exorcists could continue to use the old ritual.
He is the president of honour of the Association of Exorcists.
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