Smuggling Arrest Adds to Priest’s Legal Woes : Courts: Long-sought cleric is accused of stealing church offerings, transporting illegal immigrants.

A fugitive Simi Valley priest suspected of embezzling church offerings appeared Tuesday in Ventura County Superior Court after U.S. immigration officials 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 an arrest for cocaine possession in Hollywood in late May, appeared calm and composed in jailhouse clothes as he agreed to postpone arraignment while prosecutors prepare a formal complaint.

Piroli’s attorney, Richard Beada of Santa Monica, declined to comment on the charges later, saying, “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 Church on May 27 after LAPD officers arrested him in Hollywood on allegations of cocaine possession.

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

A passenger in the car with Piroli, Israel Palacios, was one of the two Mexican nationals who turned up Thursday night in the trunk of the car that Piroli allegedly drove over the Mexican border.

After the Hollywood arrest, St. Peter Claver Church employees who searched Piroli’s church apartment found an additional $50,000. Piroli disappeared June 3, abandoning his church car in the parking lot of a Burbank medical center.

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office eventually dropped the drug charges, saying that there was not enough cocaine to support the case. The Ventura County district attorney’s office pursued the embezzlement case.

But for two months, neither the Catholic 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 Piroli as he was driving a 1987 Mercury Sable through the Calexico border crossing from Mexico.

On opening the trunk, inspectors discovered Palacios, 19, of Guadalajara and Julio Cesar Cruz-Mendez, 19, of Mexico City, said Rudy Murillo, an INS spokesman.

Agents ran a warrant check on Piroli, discovered the outstanding embezzlement warrant and contacted the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.