Church Probing Priest’s Link to Cocaine, Cash

The Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles is auditing the books of a Simi Valley church after its assistant pastor was arrested in Hollywood with cocaine and more than $10,000 cash in his parish-owned car and another $45,000 in small bills was discovered in the priest’s rooms at the rectory.

The drug charges against Father David Piroli were dropped, but church officials removed him from his post and are trying to learn whether he took the money from church funds, Auxiliary Bishop G. Patrick Ziemann said Monday.

The May 29 arrest of the Catholic priest and his subsequent disappearance a few days later have stunned the community of St. Peter Claver Church, where he was assistant pastor for two years, Ziemann said.

“We are certainly very concerned for him,” said Ziemann, who oversees the archdiocese’s churches in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. “We want to help him in whatever way possible. And we’re also very concerned for the parish.”

“It came as a shock to us,” said Father James McKeon, the church’s pastor. Piroli, 36, was “well liked by the people and missed very much,” McKeon said.

Piroli said Mass four or five times a week, baptized babies on Sunday afternoons, heard confessions on Saturdays and led prayer meetings on Wednesday nights for church youths.

He never hinted he had any troubles, McKeon said.

Piroli was arrested outside a Sears store in Hollywood, Ziemann said. Employees there, nervous after looting during the riots, reported a man loitering in a car near the entrance, he said.

Police arrived and searched the car Piroli was driving, finding a small amount of cocaine scattered throughout it, said Los Angeles Deputy Dist. Atty. Norman Shapiro.

Shapiro said the amount of cocaine was too small to warrant pressing charges, which were dropped on June 24, two days before Piroli was to be arraigned.

Police also found about $10,000 in cash in small bills in boxes and paper bags, Shapiro said. He added that a young man was with Piroli at the time of his arrest, but he was not held.

Police seized the money but later released it to the archdiocese, Ziemann said. “We have to determine whether that belongs to the parish or whether that’s his personal money.”

McKeon posted $500 of Piroli’s $5,000 bail and drove him back to his small suite at St. Peter Claver’s rectory, where Piroli stayed for several days, Ziemann said.

On June 3, Piroli left in the same white 1990 Chevrolet Lumina in which he had been arrested, saying he needed “wheels to get where he was going” and promising to return it, McKeon said.

But Piroli never returned. The church filed a missing-vehicle report with Simi Valley police, who recovered the car two weeks later from the parking lot of a Burbank medical facility, McKeon said.

The archdiocese has filed a legal claim for the money with the Ventura County district attorney’s office, Ziemann said.

Simi Valley police also are investigating the case for possible theft charges, a Simi Valley police spokesman said.