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         Epiphany in Boston In fact, the investigative staff of the Boston Globe has done the Catholic Church an enormous favor. . . . They were the good guys, the guys in the white hats as opposed to the bad guys in the red hats. —Father Andrew M. Greeley Uy the end of October , work on the Catholic Church story—shelved while Boston Globe Spotlight Team members threw themselves into projects stemming from the September  terrorist attacks—could wait no longer. Team leader Walter Robinson was burning to follow up on the meeting he had had with two secret sources less than a week before /. The session had yielded thirty-five or so names of priests, and his sources suggested that the Church had been making widespread use of private settlements to avoid the embarrassment of lawsuits filed by victims. Robinson talked with Ben Bradlee Jr. The decision was made to resume. Just as suddenly as the work had stopped five weeks before, Spotlight Team members Matt Carroll, Mike Rezendes, and Sacha Pfeiffer rejoined Robinson on the case. They refreshed the suspect-priest database and picked up the pieces of interviews abruptly interrupted a month earlier. When they broke off the reporting they had been investigating the Church story along two tracks. The first involved developing the already long list of priests who were objects of abuse allegations, and learning how and why the Church allowed accused priests to stay in parish work while often paying parents of victims to keep them from pursuing lawsuits. The second track followed John Geoghan, the defrocked priest whose trial for sexually abusing children was approaching in January. The Church directories, a major contributor to Matt Carroll’s database, con-  tinued to provide good leads. A priest listed as having been placed on sick leave “became a person of interest to us and we went through every directory for every year to chart his entire career,” says Robinson. “We did it with every priest, and it was extremely time-consuming. It took us several weeks, and at the end of that we had a list of well over a hundred priests, including almost all of the thirty-some for whom we knew there had been secret settlements.” The database got another boost when Robinson checked out his own backyard. A Church facility that he knew of in suburban Milton—a Google satellite map showed it was three hundred yards from Robinson’s home as the crow flies—had long been known as a place to warehouse priests with alcohol problems. But that was only half the story. “Some of these priests who were in residence at this facility had been kind enough to fill in residency cards for the town of Milton,” he says. And sure enough, nearly a dozen were already in the Spotlight computer, suspected of sexually abusing young parishioners. Bradlee was encouraged about the interviews and the backlog of data coming together along the two tracks. He had been Metropolitan editor in , when the last big Church sexual-abuse case had broken, involving Fall River’s Father James Porter. Bradlee had felt that there was a lot more to the Porter story than the Globe had been able to report. He wanted the Geoghan story to say more about the prevalence of pedophilia in the Church, if possible, and how the hierarchy was dealing with it. The Porter story “hit the wall” because there was little evidence to support the claims of victims, Bradlee felt. In that case, too, the lawsuits had been sealed at the Church’s request. “What was missing there was the paper,” Bradlee says. “There were a bunch of plaintiffs who had gotten together and threatened to sue, but no suits.” Lack of documentation would not handicap the Geoghan story for long. “He Knew!” While Massachusetts Judge Constance Sweeney was considering the Globe’s request to unseal the Geoghan records, attorney Mitchell Garabedian found a way to make public—seal or no seal—some damning information about how the Church had protected the priest. And Mike Rezendes, once again absorbed in his self-described obsession with finding Church documents, quickly got a payoff for the close bond he had built with Garabedian and his clients. The lawyer reminded the Globe reporter of the slovenly Paul Newman character in the movie The Verdict. “You would go into his crappy little office and there’d be no receptionist, and cardboard boxes overflowing with documents and empty Styrofoam coffee cups. The place was a...

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