Priest Testifies He Kept Loose Financial Records for Simi Parish : Court: Father James McKeon admits at Piroli embezzlement trial that he could not tell receipts from the payments in his own worn ledger.

Father James McKeon kept financial records for his Simi Valley parish in a “little black book” full of question marks, scribbles, Latin notations and some numbers that even he could not explain while testifying Thursday in the embezzlement trial of his former assistant.

Under intense cross-examination by the defense attorney for Father David Dean Piroli, McKeon admitted he could not tell receipts apart from payments in the worn, red-trimmed Leatherette ledger he kept at St. Peter Claver Church.

Later, Deputy Dist. Atty. Mary Peace asked, “Do you feel sometimes you didn’t do such a good job handling money for the parish?”

“I cannot tell a lie, we’re under oath, right?” McKeon said, grinning and hanging his head. “Yes,” he answered.

Piroli is on trial for two counts of grand theft, accused of stealing $60,000 from St. Peter Claver and his previous posting, Sacred Heart Church in Saticoy.

But defense attorney Richard Beada focused for nearly five hours Thursday on McKeon’s sketchy financial records.

The dissection of the ledger was meant to bolster Beada’s contention that McKeon was actually the one skimming money and that he planted cash in Piroli’s rooms and car to frame the younger priest, whom he feared would expose him.

When Beada asked McKeon to name the year in which he wrote a certain page of the ledger, McKeon pored over the book, flipping pages and muttering to himself before exclaiming, “Ah, here it is. Yes, 1990.”

Beada asked about numbers that McKeon had written in the narrow columns of the ledger’s lined pages.

“These would not necessarily be money coming in, they could be going out,” McKeon testified.

Asked whether he could tell the difference by looking at his entries, McKeon admitted, “No, I could not.”

Beada pointed to a $10 entry labeled “dinner--ego.”

“It’s just myself, ‘ ego ,’ ” McKeon explained. “It’s a little Latin note--that is, ‘myself.’ ”

On Wednesday, McKeon told jurors he often took cash out of the collection money, sometimes logging it in his ledger, sometimes not.

McKeon also testified that the church’s volunteer money counters would separate donations for the building fund and the poor and give them to McKeon after depositing all other donations in the church’s general fund.

On Thursday, McKeon testified he sometimes asked counters to swap him cash for checks earmarked for the poor so that he could keep a ready supply of cash in his office to give to needy people.

At one point, it took Beada five minutes of questioning to get a clear explanation about a single ledger entry that McKeon had made on one of the checks he had cashed for the poor.

“Have you ever gone through the book and reconciled how much you took in with how much you paid out?” Beada asked.

“I don’t see why I’d need to do that,” McKeon answered.

Parishioners and non-parishioners listening to McKeon’s testimony in Ventura County Superior Court whispered to each other.

“I’d be behind bars if I handled money the way that pastor did,” one court spectator said during a break, referring to McKeon.

The spectator, a woman who identified herself only as a Catholic from Camarillo, said she believes the Piroli case is scandalous and should have been handled internally by the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

She added: “I think this is terrible.”

During a break in McKeon’s testimony, Bishop G. Patrick Ziemann briefly took the stand.

Ziemann, who oversaw St. Peter Claver Church, Sacred Heart Church and other parishes in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties during Piroli’s tenure, testified that he told parishioners to wait for orders from the Archdiocese after they found bundles of cash in Piroli’s bedroom and office on June 2 and 3, 1992.

Nine days later, Ziemann said, he ordered the cash locked in the trunk of a parish car for safekeeping until the police could pick it up.

Then on June 29, he cleaned out Piroli’s rooms and put the priest’s belongings into a Simi Valley storage locker to make way for a new priest after the associate pastor disappeared, Ziemann testified.

Testimony is to continue Monday at 9:30 a.m.