“Strange.”
The
Economist admitted
to perplexity earlier this year in its obituary of Charles Keating.
He was “Mr. Clean,” a “moral crusader,” a “knight
on a white charger—as he saw himself,” who waged war on obscenity
and pornography. He was, said The Economist,
“so doughty in this holy war that Richard Nixon appointed him in
1969 to the national commission on obscenity.” He was also a
generous donor to the Catholic Church (“Sundays saw him devoutly at
Mass”) and the University of Cincinnati and had given “at least
$1m to Mother Teresa, who in return praised his good character.”
But
here was the “strange” part (according to the magazine), he was
also “the man who bilked 23,000 investors out of their savings. The
total loss was $250m-288m, and the cost to the taxpayer $3.4
billion.”
He
was eventually convicted on 17 counts of fraud and sent to prison.
*
Is
the case of Robert Brennan also “strange”?
In 1973 he gave $10
million dollars to St. Benedict's Preparatory School in Newark, NJ
(as well as a shedload of moolah over the years to Seton Hall
University), only to find himself two decades later before a federal court
judge and fined $75
million for defrauding investors. His legal troubles didn't end
there. USA TODAY
summed up his downfall:
He was arrested in 2000 for failing to disclose all of his assets on his bankruptcy petition. He was found guilty a year later of bankruptcy fraud, money laundering and obstructing justice and sentenced to nine years in prison.
*
In
this week's New Yorker,
Rachel Aviv tells the story of Sam Kellner, an orthodox Jew, who
sought justice for his son. The boy was sexually molested by “a
prominent cantor,” who is a“descendant of a rabbinic dynasty.”
When the boy first revealed to his teacher what had happened to him,
“the teacher said that [Baruch] Lebovits [the accused] was a
'respected person' and instructed him not to think about the incident
again.”
Lebovits
was eventually brought to trial and found guilty on eight counts of sexual
abuse. He served eighteen months before the jury's verdict was
overturned on appeal on procedural grounds; later, however, Lebovits
copped a guilty plea and received a two-year sentence, but he served
only eighty-three days.
Aviv
points out that before the original sentencing (which came to “a
total of up to thirty-two years”),
nearly eighty people sent letters to the judge, requesting mercy for Lebovits. They described him as charitable, kind, blessed with a beautiful singing voice . . .
Is
this case “strange” as well? Another religious, charitable person
(of course it's real easy being charitable with other people's money)
who was a malignant blot on society?
*
As
was often the case, George Orwell got there first:
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
***
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