Fugitive Clergyman Arrested : Simi Valley: Father David Piroli faces arraignment Thursday on an embezzlement charge. The priest was stopped as he re-entered the U.S. from Mexico.

A fugitive Simi Valley priest suspected of embezzling church funds appeared Tuesday in Ventura County Superior Court after U. S. immigration agents said they caught him smuggling two Mexicans into California in the trunk of a newly purchased Mercury.

Father David Piroli, 36, was ordered held in lieu of $100,000 bail on an arrest warrant and is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday on a charge of embezzlement. He also faces federal charges of smuggling illegal aliens, authorities said.

Piroli, whose legal troubles began with a Hollywood drug arrest in May, appeared calm and composed in blue jailhouse clothes as he agreed to postpone his arraignment until Thursday.

Officials at St. Peter Claver Church said they were relieved by news of Piroli’s arrest, which will let the congregation put the incident behind it and begin to heal.

“As far as we are concerned, this would not go away” until the missing Piroli surfaced, said Father James F. McKeon, the church’s pastor.

Although church officials said Piroli speaks Spanish fluently, counseled Latino parishioners and often vacationed in Mexico, his arrest at the Mexican border was a surprise. McKeon said, “This is kind of a bombshell.”

Several of the priest’s former catechism students also said they were surprised by the charges after attending Tuesday’s hearing.

“He was the kind of person who would go out of his way to help anyone,” said Bryan Garibay, 17, of Santa Paula, who fondly remembered restaurant outings and driving lessons with the priest in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.

But at a confirmation ceremony in April, the last time he saw him, “he seemed different, a lot more serious,” Garibay said. “He just didn’t seem himself.”

Piroli’s attorney, Richard Beada of Santa Monica, declined to comment on the state and federal charges, saying only, “He’s presumed innocent.”

The embezzlement charge stems from the discovery of $60,000 cash in Piroli’s church car and his apartment at St. Peter Claver on May 27, after Los Angeles police officers in Hollywood arrested him on suspicion of cocaine possession.

Police answered a complaint about loiterers outside a Sears store and found Piroli in his church car, along with small amounts of cocaine and $10,000 cash.

However, they did not arrest Piroli’s passenger, Israel Palacios, who on Thursday night turned up in the trunk of the car that Piroli drove over the Mexican border.

After the Hollywood arrest, St. Peter Claver Church employees who searched Piroli’s apartment found $50,000 more, and they used $5,000 of the money to bail him out of the Hollywood Division lockup.

Then Piroli disappeared on June 3, abandoning the church car in the parking lot of a Burbank medical center.

Los Angeles prosecutors eventually dropped the drug charge because not enough cocaine was found to support it. They also dismissed an embezzlement charge because they had no jurisdiction over the alleged victim, the Simi Valley church where Piroli had been assistant pastor.

But the Ventura County district attorney’s office pursued the embezzlement case, despite initial reluctance by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to press charges.

On July 10, prosecutors obtained an arrest warrant.

A week later, they searched archdiocesan property and seized some of Piroli’s belongings, including bank papers, collection envelopes, two stolen driver’s licenses, a switchblade, a supply of cherry bombs and a handwritten note saying “cocaine addiction”--all originally taken from his car and apartment.

But for two months, neither the church nor investigators could find Piroli, who had briefly telephoned them but refused to say where he was.

Then, late Thursday night, an agent for the U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service stopped a 1987 Mercury Sable as it drove through the Calexico border crossing from Mexico.

Piroli was at the wheel in civilian garb.

The priest’s papers were in order, showing that he had bought the car Thursday in Calexico in Imperial County, said Rudy Murillo, a spokesman for the INS.

“But the inspector knew there were some aliens in the trunk, and asked him to open the trunk,” said Murillo. “He’s a veteran inspector, and had reason to believe there were people in the trunk.”

The INS inspector told Piroli to drive to the U. S. Customs station. There, Piroli signed a declaration saying he had nothing illegal in the car.

Then a customs inspector pulled down the back seat and spotted a man’s leg and tennis shoe, Murillo said. The inspector asked Piroli to open the trunk, but the priest balked, claiming that he had no key, he said.

“They told him that they knew he had people in the trunk, and if anything happened to them, he could be held for manslaughter charges,” Murillo said. “Then he reached into his sock and found the key.”

Upon opening the trunk, inspectors discovered Palacios, 19, of Guadalajara and Julio Cesar Cruz-Mendez, 19, of Mexico City.

They ran a warrant check on Piroli, discovered the outstanding arrest warrant, and contacted the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, which dispatched a deputy and a district attorney’s investigator to bring him to Ventura for prosecution, Murillo said.

Palacios and Cruz-Mendez told the inspectors that it was their first attempt to enter the United States, Murillo said. INS agents escorted the two back to the Mexican side of the border.

In a separate interview, Piroli told inspectors that he had driven Palacios into Mexico to celebrate the man’s birthday and picked up Cruz-Mendez on the way back, Murillo said.

“It was his unlucky day,” Murillo said. “He ran into an experienced immigration inspector. If it had been a younger inspector, he might have made it.”

Ventura County authorities flew Piroli back to Ventura on a commercial airline Friday night and booked him into County Jail, where he is being held until his Thursday arraignment.

Times correspondent Maia Davis contributed to this story.