Suit Against Bishop Will Use Racketeering Outline
By Mary McLachlin, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Originally published in The Palm Beach Post, March 22, 2002
WEST PALM BEACH — Lawyers said Thursday they will file a RICO sex-abuse lawsuit today against former Bishop Anthony O'Connell, targeting the three dioceses he served—Palm Beach, Knoxville and Jefferson City, Mo.—and naming all 300 American bishops as co-conspirators in covering up his sexual misconduct.
The unnamed plaintiff would be the third former student at St. Thomas Aquinas Preparatory Seminary to officially claim O'Connell had inappropriate sexual contact with him during his 25 years as teacher and rector at the Hannibal, Mo., school.
O'Connell resigned March 8 as head of the Palm Beach Diocese, after disclosure that the Jefferson City Diocese had paid $125,000 to ex-seminarian Chris Dixon of St. Louis to settle a sexual abuse claim in 1996. O'Connell said the allegation was true and that one other possible claimant had never come forward.
Attorneys Jeff Anderson and Pat Noaker, of St. Paul, Minn., said Thursday the RICO lawsuit will be filed in Hannibal, where they filed a separate suit Monday on behalf of another alleged victim, a 47-year-old man in Minnesota.
Suing under the federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act puts tremendous pressure on a Catholic Church already staggered by scandal. It allows triple damage awards, it isn't subject to the statute of limitations and it "essentially labels the church as a criminal organization," one legal expert said.
"The stakes go up geometrically," said attorney Bob Sherman of the Boston office of Greenberg Traurig, which has handled hundreds of sex-abuse cases involving priests.
Spokesman Sam Barbaro of the Palm Beach Diocese said Thursday night he hadn't heard about the RICO suit.
"Until we have the facts before us, really, there's nothing for us comment on," he said.
The federal racketeering law, passed in 1970, was designed to fight organized crime, but in the 1980s it turned into a powerful tool for civil actions to recover damages from businesses and institutions.
It allows civil suits when people have been harmed by a pattern of illegal activity—critics say the church engaged in such a pattern by suppressing knowledge of sex abuse by priests of children and teenagers.
In the 1990s, RICO was used in massive suits against tobacco companies, and in 1999 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that people could invoke it to sue health insurers.
At least three previous lawsuits have used the RICO act against the Catholic Church, but none has reached the point of a definitive ruling or creating case law.
New Jersey attorney Stephen Rubino filed the first known RICO church case in Camden, N.J., in 1993 on behalf of a parish priest, the Rev. Gary Hayes, and two other men who said they were sexually abused by two priests when they were children. The suit also represented the first time a priest had sued church officials for childhood sexual abuse.
The Diocese of Camden settled the suit under confidential terms before it got to trial.
Rubino, who has another RICO action pending against the church, said he decided to invoke the racketeering law because "it was clear to me that the bishops and cardinals were involved in obstruction of justice, in the coverup of crimes against minors."
He said the church's suppression of scandal and awareness of the sex-abuse problem resulted in people waiting too long to make a civil or criminal complaint under the normal statute of limitations—four years for adults or five years after turning 18 for minors.
The Archdiocese of Boston has revealed claims of sexual abuse against nearly 90 priests and paid millions of dollars in settlements while continuing to move abusive priests from parish to parish. Prosecutors there are talking about using the RICO act against officials for harboring pedophiles, said Sherman, of Greenberg Traurig's Boston office.
"To date, no one here has filed," Sherman said. "I think the reason is that there's still hesitation to label an institution like the Catholic Church a racketeering organization.
"But that doesn't mean the frustration that exists elsewhere hasn't reached a boiling point where others are willing to do so."
