More than 70 Louisiana cases are listed among the "perversion files" -- a vast,?long-secret collection of documents chronicling?men cast out of the Boy Scouts of America?over the past six decades because, in many cases,?they were suspected of being child molesters. Nearly 20 of the cases have a connection to New Orleans -- a city particularly salient in the history of the Scouts as the site of the organization's first well-known?sex-abuse scandal 36 years ago.
The confidential files, kept secret for?decades in the Boy Scouts' Texas headquarters, were compiled in a database released Thursday by the Los Angeles Times.
That newspaper's investigation found that, across the country, the Scouts sometimes "failed to report abuse to authorities and many times apparently covered up allegations to protect the organization's reputation." The Scouts issued an apology Thursday for past actions.
In New Orleans, the documents available in the database do not indicate that the local Scouts actively attempted to hide abuse. Rather, they suggest that the organization?reacted to criminal charges already filed against Scoutmasters and volunteers, and looked to minimize media coverage of the events.
But dozens of cases on the list do not include names or documents, so they do not indicate what the allegations entailed and what the Scouts did or did not do to protect the children involved. Those cases are listed in the database only by an identification number, the city and the troop number.
At least 19 cases, dating from between 1962 and 1999, are connected to the New Orleans metropolitan area, with another 51 cases in other parts of the state.
Only five men from the New Orleans area are listed by name. One, an example?of a small percentage who were?expelled for suspicion of homosexuality and not child molestation, was booted?out in 1972 after a police report surfaced from five years earlier, accusing him of crime against nature for attempting to have oral sex with an undercover police officer.
Three others on the list became familiar names in media reports?in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Raymond Woodall, Richard Stanley Halvorsen and Harry Cramer were among 17 people arrested in 1976 in the "Boy Scout sex case" that shook the city and tarnished the Scouts' local reputation for years?to come.
The men, along with?Lewis Sialle, who was not named in the Scouts' files, decided in 1974 to found a Boy Scout unit, Troop 137 in eastern New Orleans, in order to "provide them with boys ... for their sexual pleasure," Sialle later testified.?
In September 1976, an employee at a commercial photo developer processed a roll of film containing 18 pictures of a 15-year-old boy being raped by his Scoutmaster and his adult friends.
Police said they learned that the group had recruited poor children from broken homes -- a tactic consistent with the Los Angeles Times' analysis of the Scouts' files from across the country. They bought the boys' affection with bicycles and uniforms and invited them?to? "sleepovers" and naked pool parties, another nationwide trend the California newspaper discovered.
Troop 137, authorities learned, "was the nucleus of a nationwide sex and pornography ring, with boys recruited into the troop sent to other states for the pleasure of the men there," according to a Times-Picayune report on?the trials.
Seventeen adults were arrested, including the four New Orleans Scout leaders, a Tennessee minister who ran a home for wayward boys, an official from a Florida school for children with learning disabilities, a prominent New Orleans landscape painter and a Boston millionaire.
The media dubbed it the "Boy Scout sex case."
In November 1976, two months after the case first?made headlines,?a local Scouting official wrote to the national?office, according to documents?in the Los Angeles Times' database. "Proof of immoral acts against Woodall and Cramer were shown to me by the New Orleans Police Department with pictures. I have not seen any pictures on Halvorsen, however he seemed to be one of the ringleaders," the local executive wrote.
The national office responded the following month, requesting letters from those involved, newspaper clippings and court records. "This information is important for future reference purposes and would certainly strengthen our position of refusing to accept any future applications for registration we might receive from these men," an official wrote. "Unless we receive the above-requested material, it will be difficult to place these men on the Confidential File."
Woodall, an assistant Scoutmaster, was sentenced to 75 years; Halvorsen, the Scoutmaster,?to 30 years; Cramer, an assistant Scoutmaster,?to 45 years; and Sialle, an official on the troop committee,?to seven years.
The local Scouts were still struggling for recruits?a decade later, in 1987, when a 33-year-old Boy Scout camp employee named Steve Allen Adams told a 15-year-old Scout that he needed an "attitude adjustment." They were at a camp near Kiln, Miss., that was run by?the New Orleans Council.
Adams allegedly rubbed the boy down, then lured him to a remote area "for additional fun." He fondled the boy and forced him to perform oral sex on him. He was arrested in the summer of 1987.
A New Orleans Area Council executive "is well aware of the very serious morals situation in New Orleans Council a decade ago, which he says still is a handicapping stigma to the council there,"?national Scout officials wrote in their secret files, which were part of the collection made public Thursday. "He says things are 'very fragile' and fears any media exposure will be a disaster to Scouting locally. He is hoping if and when charges are filed that they may not come to the media's attention."
The case did come to the media's attention?and was widely reported.
The "perversion files" are?one of the more comprehensive collections of child sexual-abuse cases ever compiled. They were meant to permanently ban suspected child abusers from the organization.
But the Los Angeles Times' investigation found that the collection also chronicled patterns the Scouts shared with the?Roman Catholic Church and Penn State abuse scandals of recent years, including the organization's failure to report hundreds of cases of alleged abuse to police, and often hiding of allegations from parents.
In 80 percent of 500 cases across the nation where the Scouts were the first to learn of suspected abuse, the Los Angles Times reported, there is no record that the information?was ever forwarded to police.
Since the newspaper's initial story in September, the Scouts pledged to review around 5,000 files and alert law enforcement to any cases that had not been previously reported.
The Times compiled the database from court files and dossiers provided by Oregon attorney Timothy Kosnoff, who has sued the Boy Scouts more than 100 times. It includes about 5,000 cases, the entirety of the Scouts' surviving files, though an unknown number have been destroyed.
The latest batch of 1,200 cases was released Thursday by Oregon attorney Kelly Clark, who represented a victim in a 2010 case and won a $20 million judgment against the Scouts. The Oregon Supreme Court, urged by several media organizations, ordered the files released.
The unnamed New Orleans area cases include:
1962, in Bogalusa's Troop 188.
1966, in New Orleans' Troop 377.
1966, in New Orleans' Troop 7.
1987, in Gramercy's Troop 81 in St. James Parish.
1988, in New Orleans Troop 150.
1989, in Westwego's Troop 18.
1992, in New Orleans' Troop 83.
1994, in Chalmette's Troop 84.
1994, in New Orleans' Troop 113.
1994, in New Orleans' Troop 472.
1994, in New Orleans' Troop 484.
1995, in New Orleans' Troop 23.
1996, in Slidell's Troop 348.
1999, again in Westwego's Troop 18.
Elsewhere in Louisiana:
1964, in Gonzales' Troop 67.
1965, in West Monroe's Troop 10.
1965, in Springhill's Troop 54.
1966, in Longville's Troop 52
1967, in Lake Charles' Troop 133.
1967, in Lafayette's Troop 550.
1968, in Shreveport's Troop 2.
1973, in Vidalia's Troop 331.
1975, in Baton Rouge's Troop 3.
1979, in Alexandria's Troop 9.
1979, in Alexandria's Troop 4.
1983, in Lake Charles' Troop 107.
1983, in Lake Charles' Troop 29.
1986, in Donaldsonville's Troop 211.
1987, in Bossier's Troop 216.
1987, in Bossier's Troop 46.
1987, in an unnamed Monroe troop.
1987, in an unnamed Lake Charles troop.
1987, in Ruston's Troop 133.
1987, in St. Louis' Troop 2317.
1988, in Monroe's Troop 127.
1988, in West Monroe's Troop 181.
1988, in Alexandria's Troop 9.
1988, in Haughton's Troop 227.
1988, in Berwick's Troop 12.
1988, in Morgan City's Troop 438.
1989, in Shreveport's Troop 123.
1989, in Shreveport's Troop 15.
1989, in Alexandria's Troop 124.
1989, in an unnamed Clinton troop.
1992, in Sulphur's Troop 33.
1992, in Winnsboro's Troop 53.
1995, in Cut Off's Troop 390.
1995, in Alexandria's Troop 9.
1995, in Alexandria's Troop 12.
1995, in Lake Charles' Troop 5.
1995, in Bastrop's Troop 13.
1996, in Shreveport's Troop 9.
1996, in Lake Charles' Troop 107.
1997, in Fort Polk's Troop 124.
1997, in Church Point's Troop 63.
1999, in Lafayette's Troop 266.
1999, in Lafayette's Troop 224.
2000, in Leesville's Troop 39.
Source: http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/10/boy_scout_files_show_nearly_20.html
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