Da Adriano
1198 First Avenue

646-371-9412

By John Mariani

      At the same time Katie was doing her research, David was busy phoning up old colleagues—not just policemen he’d worked with but guys he’d kept in touch with from high school, old neighborhood friends he used to have beers with at the Irish bars in Woodlawn. Sometimes he’d meet them at an old hang-out to talk and drink pints of Guinness, which he hated. Most of the time, when he brought up the subject of child molestation, David’s old friends looked at him as if he’d broached a subject that made them very uncomfortable. Several shook their heads and said something like, “What do you want to bring that stuff up for? Let the Church take care of those bastards.” Others joked about a priest or brother who seemed a little too affectionate with the students back in high school, and more than one confessed to having fantasies about some of the pretty, young nuns.  The joke back then was, “You can kiss a nun, but you can’t get into the habit!”
             Others said that whatever went on it wasn’t just the Catholic priests and asked why David seemed to be singling them out. None of them said they’d seen instances of sexual molestation by priests firsthand, much less experienced it. Yet every one of his cop friends said they knew of reports that would come into their precincts accusing priests, brothers and nuns of molestation and how those complaints never went any further. One guy remembered a priest who actually turned himself in and was told to take his confession to his Church superiors. 
         Same story again and again. David was becoming increasingly enraged by the idea that the Church would cover up these crimes and that there weren’t more good priests like Joey Evangelista demanding action. The more he thought about the hypocrisy of it all, the more he swore he’d help Katie to go as high up, or deep down, with her research as it took to find out just how widespread the corruption was within the Church, and he’d be with her every step of the way.

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         Tuesday morning David received a call from Tommy Sullivan.
         “Y’know who I forgot to mention when you were up here?”
         “Who?”
         “Do you remember a cop named Maria Colón? Pretty Puerto Rican, very earnest, was on the force about eight years when you retired."
         David said, “Vaguely. I saw her around. Never worked with her.”
         “Well, she worked in the Special Victims Division, so she probably has more knowledge about sexual predators than anyone else you and I know.”
          Special Victims Division was in charge of investigating crimes against children under 13, or any victim of rape at any age. David had heard there was a recent TV series centered on that Division but he’d never watched it. 
         “You know where I can reach her?” asked David.
         “Far as I know, she’s still with the Division. Call Bobby Valentine. I think he still heads the unit. He’ll know.”
         David thanked his friend and got on the phone immediately, finding out that Sgt. Maria Colón was indeed with the Division. Although she had at first had to work harder than every male cop to prove a woman could cut it in the force, she was considered a rising star at NYPD, bucking for Detective grade. David left a message for her to call him as soon as she could.
         Maria Colón returned the call within the hour. David explained what he was doing, helping Katie Cavuto, with whom Colón was familiar, and arranged to meet her that evening for dinner, her choice.
         “I’ve got two young kids at home, so I gotta make it a local place,” she said. “You know the Lobster Box on City Island? I live there, so it’s just two blocks from my house.”
         She was still in uniform when she met David at five o’clock, and she received a warm welcome from the Greek-American owner, who took her to a favorite table overlooking the Long Island Sound.
         Reached over a blue-green iron bridge, City Island was a maritime community that looked pretty much the same as it had since the 1950s, a mile-long finger of land with a Main Street flanked by clapboard houses, many of them sea captain’s  residences dating back to the 19th century. Main Street was lined with marinas, antique stores, bait-and-tackle shops and restaurants, most Italian-American. The Lobster Box, down at the end, was somewhat more upscale than the rest, adjacent to Johnny’s Reef, a cafeteria whose main draw was fried seafood and cold beer.
         David was already at the table, nursing a beer, and he greeted Maria as a colleague, calling her “Sergeant,” she addressing him as “Detective.” Then, using their first names, they spoke of what they knew of each other’s reputations, Maria noting David’s adventures with Katie Cavuto. “You’re something of a celebrity among ex-cops,” she said, “traveling around the world. Most of us never leave the precinct.”
         Maria Colón was about five-foot-five, dark eyes and hair, her skin the color of café au lait. She had strong Latino features and carried some weight on her torso and hips; her face showed her to be in her early forties.
         “So, you spoke to Tommy Sullivan?” she began.
         “Yeah, he said you’re the one cop he knows who might be able to help in what I’m looking into.”
         “Mind if we order first, then talk? I’m starving and I wanna take something home for the kids. By the way, you buying?”
         “Of course,” said David. “Order whatever you want.”
         Maria merely raised her chin and a waiter bounded over. She asked him how his family was doing.
         “So, O.K.,” she said, not looking at the menu. “Think I’ll start with the clams casino, then a steamed lobster. Green salad on the side.”        
        David had already perused the menu and said, “I’ll go with the clam chowder and the shrimp scampi. Don’t skimp on the garlic.”
         “To drink?” asked the waiter.
         “I’m good with this beer,” said David.” Maria?”
         “Glass of Chardonnay, the one I usually get. And I’m going to take home an order of fried shrimp, OK?”
         The waiter nodded and walked away.
         “So, you wanna talk about all the pedophile priests and nuns, huh?”
         “Tommy said you worked on those cases.”
         “Did he also tell you that most of the time they went nowhere?”
         “Yeah, he did,” said David. “Even in your unit?”
         “We nailed a few of the bastards,” said Maria, “but only because they were so blatant that these pervs really needed to be put behind bars, rather than sent to a shrink, or moved to another parish. The complaints piled up, the parish tried to cover it up, but when it threatened to get into the papers, the diocese turned them over to the court to prosecute, usually for a lesser crime with some bullshit misdemeanor like ‘inappropriate touching.’”
         “And they got put away?”
         “Six months, tops. Probation. I think some of them enjoyed prison life, either because they could get a lot of sex or because getting screwed in the shower was a form of penance. They needed lots of penance.”
         David smiled. “They really are scum, aren’t they?”
         “Not really any better or worse than any of the scum that abuses a child or his wife or girlfriend. Parents who chain their kids to a radiator, starve them to death. All cut from the same cloth. Freakin’ animals.”
         “Yeah,” said David, “but most of those non-religious criminals you were able to put away.”
         The glass of wine arrived at the table, Maria sipped, nodded it was alright and said, “Yeah, a lot of my collars went to jail because their crimes were abhorrent to the people in the neighborhood, and it’s like the one crime they’d talk to the cops about. But with the priests, rarely, except for the family making the accusation, the Church just covered everything up most of the time.”
         David shook his head and said, “That’s what really gets to me. That there could be this total wall of silence on the part of the entire diocese. It’s so goddamn corrupt.”
         Maria widened her eyes and leaned in towards her colleague.
         “You’ve gotta be bullshitting me, Detective. You know as well as I do that cops cover for cops all the time, every time. No matter what they’re accused of, that long blue line stands firm, the police union flies into an indignant rage and the guy goes on desk duty for a month. C’mon, David, you’re a cop, I’m a cop, and cops don’t break that blue line. Ever.”
         The appetizers arrived and Maria dug in.
         “You’re right, Maria,” said David, almost wanting to tap his chest and say Mea culpa. “And I know it drives the good cops crazy not to be able to do anything without being shunned by the rest of the precinct. It sucks.”
         “Well, that’s the way it is, and I don’t know who created the rule of silence first—the Church or the police—but they both stick to it, every time they think they can get away with it. Always have, probably always will.”
         “So, you don’t think you can provide me and Katie any way to get closer into the swamp?”
      “No,” said Maria, wiping her mouth. “I didn’t say that. I’m just reminding you that this shit goes on in a lot of institutions, and the kids are always the one who suffer for years and years afterwards. I’ve got stuff I can tell you, people you should see. Some good people, others you’ll want to punch through a wall. It’s a dirty story, David. I’m not sure how much more I can take of it. If I make Detective, I can retire in two, three, years with a good pension, good record, get a job in security. Thinking of maybe even going to law school, when my kids are out of high school. One way or the other, I’m washing my hands of it all.”
         David loved talking to this woman. She was tough enough to get where she was, yet he could see that her maternal instincts played an enormous part in her coping with the job. Bobby Valentine told David she brought her suspects to tears before confessing their crimes.  David didn’t see much of that interrogating mob guys.
         The evening went on, faster than David would have liked—Maria mentioned two or three times about getting home to her kids and kept checking her watch—and his mind even briefly wandered into a ridiculous fantasy of marrying her after she retired, move down to City Island and fish off the piers whenever he liked. Maria wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask if she was married. With women, David had a wide streak of shyness.
         He was hesitant to ask the last question. “Maria, you don’t have to answer me, but can I ask if you personally ever had an encounter with one of these pedophiles?”
         Maria drank the last sip of wine, wiped her lips, took off the lobster bib and said, “Not anything physical. But all the girls in my school talked about how, when we were in the confessional, this old priest named Father O’Keefe loved to ask us about our sex life—such as it was when you were a sixteen-year-old Catholic Latina. You’d go, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,’ then how you went out with a boy who felt you up, and O’Keefe would ask, ‘Above or below the waist?’ He’d want details, and you had to give them because he was the one who was going to forgive you your sins. I know that some girls made stuff up just to get him to stop. You didn’t want to be in the confessional too long because the people on line would start to think you were a real bad sinner or a slut. That never happened with you?”
         David shook his head. “Not with me personally, but guys would never talk about something like that with each other.”
         Maria signaled for the waiter to give the check to David, said she had to leave and told him she’d get him some names and contact numbers the next day.
      “I’ll put you in touch with the good, the bad and the really ugly,” she said. “Some priests who will talk with you, probably off the record, some pricks who’ll give you the official Church line, some family attorneys who tried and failed to help. And a couple of pedophile priests still in the diocese who probably got away with five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys.”
         “You think I should speak to any of the kids?” asked David.
          “Some of those kids are now in their thirties, forties. This ain’t a new game, y’know. I know a couple—really screwed up by what they went through—who will probably want to tell their story.”
         “Enough to bring charges?”
         “Statute of limitations used to be three years, then they changed it to five, except for sex crimes against children. Then the SOL doesn’t begin until the child turns eighteen. But, if he’s above the age of twenty-three, it gets extremely difficult to bring charges. Cases twenty years old, feh’get about it.”
         Throughout the evening Maria had been cordial but not overly friendly, but David had to ask, “So, if Katie and I turn up some new evidence, can we call on you for advice?”
         Maria got up from the table, grabbing the take-out bag. “Here’s my cell phone number,” she said. “Call me if you need me. And, David, I hope you and your girlfriend have better luck than I did.”
         David didn’t like the crack about his “girlfriend,” sensing it was Maria’s way of putting him off socially, but he watched her walk away anyway in the hopes that he’d see her again. Probably he’d make an excuse to do so.

Announcement from the Dorchester Grill in London: "Dress code: Although London forever strides ahead, elegance never goes out of style. So whilst there’s no strict rule book for our dress code, The Dorchester is very keen on the habit of dressing brilliantly. We kindly suggest no sportswear and wearing smart shorts only by day, not by night. Guests: Children of all ages are welcome."