Defense Says Wrong Priest Is Accused in Embezzlement Case

The attorney for a Simi Valley priest accused of embezzling $60,000 in church collection money won permission Tuesday to fight the charges with a new allegation: Another priest did it.

As jury selection began in the trial of Father David Dean Piroli, the attorney told Superior Court Judge Allan Steele that the money actually was embezzled from St. Peter Claver Church by its head pastor at the time.

The Ventura County Grand Jury indicted Piroli in 1992 on two counts of theft, alleging that he had taken the collection money from St. Peter Claver in Simi Valley while he was assistant pastor there and from the church where he worked previously, Sacred Heart in Saticoy.

Defense attorney Richard Beada said he has evidence that Father James McKeon took cash and checks from parishioners’ donations, then planted the money in Piroli’s car and bedroom because the younger priest threatened to blow the whistle on him.

Steele agreed to let Piroli use the defense, but the judge refused to admit other new allegations: a prosecution claim that Piroli kept company with and spent money on a male prostitute, and a defense contention that McKeon frequented a gay bathhouse in Los Angeles. Steele ruled that neither of the issues have direct bearing on whether Piroli took church funds.

McKeon, who was Piroli’s supervisor and has since moved on to become a pastor in a Westlake Village parish, declined through a church employee to comment on Beada’s statements. And Father Gregory Coiro, a spokesman for the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which oversees the priests, said he had no knowledge of the allegations and could not comment.

The case against Piroli came to light in May, 1992, when Hollywood police were called to roust loiterers outside a Sears store and found Piroli sitting in his church car with a young man, a small amount of cocaine and $10,000 in small bills.

Church employees later found $50,000 more in Piroli’s rooms at the rectory, along with parishioners’ donation checks and St. Peter Claver collection envelopes, some of them torn open, prosecutors said. Donations were ordinarily taken to a safe place in the church offices before they were deposited in a bank.

On June 3, as prosecutors and church officials pondered possible criminal charges against him, Piroli disappeared. He resurfaced July 30, 1992, at the U.S.-Mexico border, trying to re-enter California with two illegal immigrants in his trunk. One of them, Israel Palacios, was the same man who was with Piroli in Hollywood when he was initially arrested, prosecutors said.

On Tuesday, Deputy Dist. Atty. Mary Peace sought permission to have a Hollywood police officer testify about the cocaine and to identify Palacios as a prostitute.

Peace argued that such evidence would back her theory that Piroli was embezzling church funds to support a cocaine habit and a boyfriend. She also sought permission to show jurors pornographic pictures found in Piroli’s rooms.

Steele said he would allow jurors to hear evidence about the drugs and see a photograph of Palacios in swimming trunks that was found in Piroli’s possession--to support Peace’s contention that Piroli was spending money on the man and had a close relationship with him.

But the judge said he would not allow jurors to hear the prostitution allegation unless Palacios had been convicted as a prostitute. The judge also refused to allow the prosecution, without such proof, to show the jury the pornography or to inform it of Palacios’ presence in the car trunk.