We at Horowitz Law did an experiment. We don't like the result.
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody and her staff spent two years investigating Catholic staffers in our state who committed or concealed child sex crimes. Their report listed roughly 170 child molesting priests.
But we asked ourselves "Did AG Moody and her staff miss some predator priests?"
So we went to the most thorough and well-respected source of information on the church's abuse and cover up crisis: BishopAccountability.org
And within literally 30 minutes, using their search box and the two letter abbreviation for Florida (FL), we found five priests who are proven, admitted or credibly accused predators who were left out of Moody's report.
Again, the AG's staff found 170 pedophile priests in two years. And we at Horowitz Law found five more in just half an hour.
They are:
-Fr. Anthony Thomas Jablonowski, who was a registered sex offender in Florida as of 2010. In 2004, he pled no contest to charges of abuse and was sentenced to prison. (He got out in 2005).
How bad is he? He was accused of conducting rituals of penance that involved hanging young men upside down - bound, gagged and blindfolded - and flogging them.
At least seven Catholic jurisdictions list Fr. Jablonowski on their websites as being a 'credibly accused' child molester (the dioceses of Steubenville, Cheyenne, Tucson, Charlotte, Covington and Lexington and a religious order known as the Glenmary Home Missioners). He also worked in Utah and Georgia.
http://www.bishopaccountability.org/assign/Jablonowski_James_N.htm
-Fr. Nicholas V. Cudemo, who was described as "one of the sickest people I ever knew" by a top Philadelphia church official. He "raped an 11-year-old girl, molested a fifth grader in the confessional, invoked God to seduce and shame his victims, and maintained sexually abusive relationships simultaneously with several girls from a Catholic school," concluded a Pennsylvania grand jury.
Nine years ago, he lived in Orlando.
https://www.bishop-accountability.org/reports/2005_09_21_Philly_GrandJury/Philly_05_04_Cudemo.pdf
http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2007/07_08/2007_08_13_Pinsky_PriestsTroubled.htm
-Fr. Timothy Sugrue, originally from Little Rock AR and who also worked in Ohio, Georgia, Louisiana, Alaska and the Philippines.
Accused in a civil suit of abusing two girls, Fr. Sugrue did not testify, instead taking the Fifth Amendment. Another civil case, roughly ten years later, resulted in a $1.5 million judgment against him.
Ousted from the priesthood in 2005, Fr. Sugrue is on the 'credibly accused' lists in the Baton Rouge and Little Rock dioceses
As of 2019, he was living in Florida.
https://www.diobr.org/phocadownload/Bishop/CurrentAccusedClergyList.pdf
-Fr. John Maurice Giandelone of Phoenix who pled guilty to attempted abuse in the 1980s and was convicted of abuse in 2003. He was on the national sex offender registry. He's on the Phoenix diocese's 'credibly accused' list.
As of 2010, he lived in Ft. Myers.
-Fr. Joseph C. Gill, who worked in towns across Alabama (Birmingham, Mobile, Grove Hill, Dothan, Bessemer, Guntersville, Chickasaw and Whistler) and one Florida town: Warrington (in the Pensacola-Tallahassee diocese).
As we said shortly after the AG's report was published, we at Horowitz Law are very disappointed.
If you saw, suspected or suffered abuse in Florida or elsewhere by Florida clerics, we hope you'll reach out to us.
For more on this report:
/new-report-confirms-clergy-abuse-cover-up-in-florida/
/florida-attorney-general-report-on-clergy-abuse-cover-up-disappoints/