Black Collar Crime Catch-Up 2010, Part 4
Gerald Laneaux • Mark List • Douglas Perlitz
Isaias Rivera, Vivian Rivera, and Kizzella Rivera
Here we catch up with the Conservative Babylon Class of 2010 — some we covered previously, some Babylonians we missed entirely, but all of whom deserve recognition (read: exposure) as holier-than-thou right-wingers who can’t seem to live up to the impossible “family values” standards they demand of everyone else. (No, we don’t know how many parts there will be to our year-end catch-up.) In no particular order…
God, Guns… All We Need to Complete This Story Are Some Gays: No gays here (that we know of), but in January, Joe Colquitt, pastor of St. John Missionary Baptist Church in Alcoa, Tennessee, called his son Michael to meet him at the church so they could discuss Michael’s lack of church attendance. Next thing you know, there’s a police report that says “[Michael] Colquitt stated [Joe] Colquitt pulled out a handgun and stated he would kill him, his wife and family. [Michael] Colquitt stated [his father] was upset because he cussed him.” Guess Joe Colquitt isn’t quite the Bible believer he appears, or he would have killed the kid (“For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his blood shall be upon him.” — Leviticus 20:9). While a hearing was slated for February, the case seems to have dropped off the map. We do know Joe was served with a restraining order.
Maybe This is Our Sanctity of Marriage Story of the Year: We don’t know the name of the church, but church was where Minnesotan Clinton Danner met his future wife sometime in 2005, when he was (you guessed it) a 27-year-old church youth counselor, and she was but a mere lass of 17. They planned to marry — but didn’t, at least not before he knocked her up. They had a baby girl, and, while nobody knows exactly how long this went on (”for years,” say all the news sources), at some point Danner started pimping out his wife on Craigslist. Yep, just what it sounds like: He placed ads on Craigslist selling his wife for sex. She wasn’t happy about it but she was a lot less happy at the prospect of never seeing her baby daughter again: Danner kept her working by threatening to take the little girl away forever. By March of 2010, the wife reached her limit, and turned in her lousy husband — who, not so incidentally, had a long sordid criminal record already — and the scumbag was arrested and charged with felony pandering. In October, Danner pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to two years in prison. The judge also slapped him with a two-year restraining order, to start as soon as he’s out of the jug.
O Canada: We can barely keep track of the crimes of Frederick Douglas Hanson, the 61-year-old husband, father of two, and former pastor of Free Will Baptist Church in Plaster Rock, New Brunswick — and we’re having just as much trouble figuring out the Canadian legal system. In January, Hanson was convicted of “indecent assault and not guilty of sexual assault” (huh? how can “indecent assault” not be “sexual assault”?) and in February was sentenced to six months in jail and two years’ probation. At the time, reported CBC News, Hanson was still “facing four other charges: two counts of touching someone under 14 for a sexual purpose and two counts of touching for a sexual purpose while being in a position of trust.” On those charges (which were unrelated to the first case), he was convicted of “one count of sexual exploitation and one count of sexual interference” and was sentenced to another year and a half in the pound.
“Youth Minister” Was a Red Flag: In July, Gerald Laneaux, a 26-year-old husband, father of two and preschool teacher at the Goddard School near Austin, Texas, was arrested — twice — for sexually assaulting two different four-year-old girls, one during naptime at the school, and the other in Laneaux’s car, while he was free on bond after his first arrest. And here’s the kicker: “According to the owner [of the Goddard School], Paul Dunn, Laneaux had a clean record and had gone through a lengthy background check. ‘We verified his education credentials, he had been a youth minister,’ Dunn said. ‘There were no red flags.’” Last we heard, Laneaux was free on bond… again.
He Couldn’t Wait One Lousy Year? In February, Mark List, 34-year-old associate pastor at Danville Christian Academy in Danville, Illinois, was charged with sexually abusing a 17-year-old male student. We have no clue what happened after that — have you?
Scum Doesn’t Get Much Slimier Than This: “When I met Mr. Douglas, he appeared to us like Jesus Christ himself come to rescue us.” said one of the homeless Haitian boys Doug Perlitz was going to “help.” Instead of helping them, he used the desperate climate of poverty in Haiti to coerce them into letting him rape them.
“In or about 1991,” read his 2009 indictment, “Perlitz traveled to Haiti with others for a volunteer mission. Thereafter, Perlitz claimed that he was inspired to begin a school in Haiti to help the street children. In or about 1997, Perlitz was able to obtain a grant from the Order of Malta, a religious organization” — the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and of Malta, that is, “a Roman Catholic order based in Rome, Italy … widely considered a sovereign subject of international law”— “and founded Project Pierre Toussaint (”PPT”) which was established as a boys school in Cap-Haiten, Haiti… PPT continued to expand, and in or about 1999, a residential facility … was added…
“In or about 1999, the Haiti Fund, Inc. … which was incorporated as a charitable, religious and educational organization in Connecticut, operated as the fundraising arm of PPT. … Board Members of the Haiti Fund were chosen by a religious leader, who had met and befriended Perlitz while Perlitz attended college in Connecticut… The Haiti Fund raised large sums of money through the efforts of a religious leader who asked parishioners for contributions as well as Board Members who regularly attended dinners, cocktail parties, and other events to raise funds for PPT. …
“In order to entice and persuade the children to comply with the sex acts, Perlitz provided the promise of food and shelter and also provided monetary and other benefits, including… U.S. and foreign currency, cell phones, other electronics, shoes, clothes, and other items. … As part of his grooming process, Perlitz would take a minor to a restaurant where he would provide the minor with food and alcohol and then encourage the minor to spend the night in his bedroom… so that he could sexually abuse him. …Perlitz also showed one or more minors homosexual pornography or displayed homosexual pornography on his computer. …Perlitz would often tell them not to be ashamed or would admit to them that he was ‘crazy.’
“If minors refused to engage in sex acts, Perlitz would at times withhold benefits or threaten to expel them from the program. … Perlitz created a hierarchy among the minors with some being given money, clothing, shoes, electronics, and other items while others were denied basic items such as bed sheets. …”
In August of 2010, Perlitz pleaded guilty to a single count of traveling with the intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct — despite contesting the charge that he had sexually abused between eight and 13 different boys. He didn’t get off lightly, however; he receive the maximum sentence of 19 years and seven months in prison, including ten years’ supervised release.
We don’t think it’s enough — but it’s all the law can do.
Have the Presbyterians Never Heard of Something Called an “Internal Audit”? Somehow, the Presbytery of Northern New England overlooked the fact that a whole bunch of checks from the bank account of one of its congregations, Tabernaculo de Adoracion y Musica (Tabernacle of Praise and Music), had been cashed over a period of five years, resulting in a loss of nearly $137,000. Isaias Rivera, pastor of the Lawrence, Massachusetts, church and his wife, Vivian, were arrested for embezzlement in June, while the church’s secretary, Kizzella Rivera (no relation to the pastor), surrendered to police. In an interesting side note, Kizzella Rivera’s husband, Ricky Rivera, who also worked for the church in its youth programs, complained to church officials that Isaias Rivera “got fresh” with Kizzella Rivera, and accused the pastor of “trying to bring her into this” (the embezzlement issue).
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