Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [175]
The first survivors’ group, involving the Orange diocese, settled on December 3, 2004, with $100 million to eighty-seven victims. “We were up till two a.m. on December second, hashing it out on not settling for $99 million,” explained Steve Rubino. “Kathy Freberg, Ray Boucher, and I knew the $100 million mark was historical and it would drive up the value of the other cases. It took us four days to push the church and insurance lawyers to $1.2 million per case. It almost came to fisticuffs. We turned down $99,960,000 because it was $40,000 short. We wanted $100 million as a benchmark. We were in year three by then.”
“Mahony put huge pressure on [Orange bishop] Tod Brown not to settle,” Boucher told me at the time. “Mahony was trying to shut us down.”
But the Orange diocese, which had once been a part of the larger archdiocese of Los Angeles, had a $171 million investment portfolio and $23.4 million in cash to tap for the agreement. During the litigation Bishop Brown had suspended the fund-raising to build a new cathedral. A diocesan attorney announced that the sale of property, funds from cash reserves, and loans secured by church assets would raise the diocese’s portion of the settlement, shared with eight insurance companies. The Los Angeles archdiocese was still in negotiations with attorneys for 554 plaintiffs. Loyola of Los Angeles Law School professor Georgene Vairo remarked, “It’s like a market is being established for settlements and the price can go up or down.” Mahony’s lawyer, Hennigan, told the Los Angeles Times that some of the cases “will just break your heart,” and speculated that the fifty worst cases could reach jury verdicts of $5 million.41
Those words were like a signal flare to the insurance lawyers. The only way to get insurance companies to settle was by proving it would cost more not to settle—gambling on a trial. Insurance covered wrongful acts from early years of a given policy. Few carriers insured churches for clergy wrongdoing anymore. Catholic dioceses sank funds into self-insured risk pools, and prayed for no new perpetrators. Still, the Orange settlements left a key issue unresolved: disclosure of church files on the perpetrators. SNAP leaders were relentless in the media about demanding that the church post all of the relevant clergy documents.
In a complex agreement with the court, Mahony’s lawyers agreed to provide the plaintiffs with information summaries, called “proffers,” from the requested files. Soon afterward, the archdiocese filed a voluminous motion challenging the law under which the victims had sued. “We had a deal that they wouldn’t do that,” groused Boucher, sitting in his Beverly Hills office. “Hennigan is a consummate soldier. The guy will burn paper in his hands to show his loyalty. This is part of the appeasement of the insurance carriers.”
A GIFT FROM ROME
As Boucher locked horns with Hennigan in Los Angeles, Jeff Anderson was immersed in Bay Area preparations; the San Francisco archdiocese faced sixty cases. The strategy was to take the first few cases to trial, in hopes of inducing settlement negotiations. During the Easter week that Manny Vega protested at L.A.’s cathedral, SNAP members in San Francisco rallied outside Sts. Peter and Paul, the iconic church on Washington Square where Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe posed for photographs after their 1954 wedding at City Hall.
The North Beach parish was run by the Salesians of Don Bosco, an order founded in Italy in the nineteenth century with a special focus on the care of young people. The young DiMaggio played sports at the Salesian Boys’ Club. Now, as reporters gathered, the abuse survivors railed about the Salesians and their associate pastor, Father Stephen Whelan, who were defendants in a civil case Anderson and Rick Simmons had brought for Joey Piscitelli. As a fourteen-year-old at Salesian High in nearby Richmond, Piscitelli had drawn pictures of Jesus regurgitating on the cross and a priest leering at boys in the shower stall. Joey Piscitelli was fifty now: short, bearded, with sledgehammer