Dictators, Priests -- Catch Them if You Can, and Then Cash In
That’s it -- I’m going to stop playing the lottery and start playing my hunches.
A lottery ticket is a dollar. Dropping a dime on somebody only costs four bits. And look what it can get you these days.
Saddam Hussein: You don’t even have to lay a hand on him. Just point him out, dead or alive, whole or in DNA-sized nuggets, and a $25-million reward could be yours.
Finger either one of his thug sons, and there’s $15 million in it. Suss them all out at a family reunion, and that’s $55 million for all three, unless the government tries to cheap out and settle for the family rate -- find two Husseins, get one free. (Why haven’t we thought of this tactic to find those weapons of mass destruction?)
Andrew Luster, the fugitive rapist, great-grandson of Max Factor, who built a fortune on false eyelashes and pancake makeup: Duane “Dog” Chapman, the bounty hunter and future movie-of-the-week subject, nailed Luster at a Puerto Vallarta taco stand. Chapman was hauled off to the hoosegow himself because Mexico doesn’t think much of bounty hunters, but it thinks even less of rapists, so Chapman might eventually be in for a bounty hunter premium after all.
And now comes my favorite: the priest premium. A price on less-than-holy heads.
Over the weekend, the group that calls itself SNAP, which is the maladroit acronym for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (what, think you could come up with something better?) sent to Cardinal Roger Mahony a letter bearing this idea: California’s bishops should begin offering rewards to those who blow the whistle on abuser priests.
Understand that SNAP is already one disappointed bunch of folks, feeling mightily thwarted in doing its own version of the Lord’s work.
Not two weeks ago, the Supreme Court tossed out a California law that had allowed the prosecution of hundreds of child sex-offense cases past the standard statute-of-limitations date. Within hours, you could hear jail doors up and down California clanging open for ex-priests who stood accused of molesting boys and girls.
Just yesterday morning, 29 criminal counts were dropped against George Neville Rucker, a retired priest who was accused of molesting a dozen girls over 30 years. Thirty years -- from the time Harry Truman sat in the Oval Office to the election of Jimmy Carter. Rucker is 82 now, and uses a cane. When they arrested him last year, he was on a cruise of Alaskan waters.
Now I find SNAP’s to be a very interesting proposal, mostly in the particulars of executing it.
Would these rewards be on a sliding scale, with the dollar figure proportionate to the alleged offense -- say, $500 for turning in a one-time cop-a-feel molester, versus $10,000 for naming a full-on, felonious repeat offender?
Would there be a hotline to prosecutors, something like 1-800-GOD-FINK?
Would the church really be able to pass the collection plate to reward people for naming the names of men who should be ‘fessing up in the first place, if anyone should?
SNAP’s national director says a reward would mean it’s OK, “even Christian, to break the silence” about abuse. So, would a whistle-blower not have to confess to being a whistle-blower?
D.A. Steve Cooley says he hasn’t really sat down and studied SNAP’s idea, but cash money, he acknowledged, can be “an arrow in the quiver” of law enforcement -- or in his case a crowbar, to try to get into church file cabinets that Mahony has been defending like Nixon and the Watergate tapes. Maybe there’s a smoking censer in there after all.
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The whistle-blower reward thing has a spotty history.
The maximum price the United States could put on anybody’s noggin used to be $5 million. But then came Sept. 11, and the face of Osama bin Laden appeared on leaflets scattered across the Hindu Kush -- the Terrorists’ Clearing House award. Turn him in and get up to $25 million, which is about 100,000 years’ income for your average Afghan.
It got nada. The closest Osama-spotting was a film about five poor African schoolboys who think they’ve seem Osama in their hometown and try to catch him to collect the reward.
Local governments routinely offer five, ten, twenty thousand for information about unsolved murders. Most of it goes unclaimed. There’s a million federal bucks still waiting out there for whoever fingers the killer of Arab American activist Alex Odeh, who died in a bombing in Santa Ana 18 years ago.
The biggest bounty I ever heard of was the minimum $50 million dangled before anyone who could rat out the oil-and-gas industry fraudsters who took California for billions. Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer still has no takers for his millions, as far as I know, which may mean there was no fraud or that someone who does have a secret to tell also realizes there’s only so much to spend $50 million on in prison.
I’m convinced Linda Lay must not have gotten wind of Lockyer’s offer, or she might have been tempted to leave Kenny-Boy in the Texas dust to tell tales in Sacramento. And if she had the goods to deal, then she wouldn’t have had to peddle her bibelots and knick-knacks -- ceramic rabbits, a Jesus painting, a canopy bed -- to make a good showing of po’-but-honest for y’all out there in the Houston jury pool.
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Well, it’s been nice flirting with the notion of a career move -- the bold, double-o-seven run-and-gun life of a bounty hunter -- but I’d never prosper at that game. All the offenders I know to finger don’t come with a price on their heads, and anyway, anybody can find them just about anytime they choose to. Just turn on C-SPAN.
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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.
