With enough clichés to fill a file cabinet labeled Boy’s Town, the Order of St. Duranty of the prefecture of 8th Avenue absolved another preening terrorist last week.  And, look!  It’s yet another radical chicklet involved in yet another Brinks Robbery.  I’m sorry, I mean Father Radical Chic, the Reverend Patrick Moloney, who still thinks it’s extremely funny that some poor innocent Brinks guards suffered the hell of guns held to their temples.  Moloney got to wallow in a big pile of money before getting caught and serving a few token years.

Yon Patrick: you don’t hold a gun to the temple of an innocent and then change the location of the money, you chase the money changers out of the  . . . oh, never mind.

Moloney was given a slap on the wrist.  Why, I wonder.  I guess “who” is actually the cogent question.  Dead . . . Kennedys?  The Reverend does not regret his involvement.  Rather, he gleefully admits he dines out on it.  Nor has it harmed his career.  Nice.  Then consider this blog post my contribution to Catholic Charities this year, ‘kay?

 Praying for Murdered Brinks’ Employees?

Before, during, and after Moloney served time, he was lavished with impressively selective Times profiles praising his commitment to “causes.”  He was thus given a platform to claim he was a political prisoner; to claim that the U.S. was using his faith to punish and essentially torture him, and to promote himself as a hero of conscience on the grounds that he wouldn’t cooperate in defending himself because he was protecting illegal immigrants.

Except, he had defended himself.  And none of the rest of it was even slightly believable.

I believe in believing people when they say they hate you and accuse you of wrongdoing.  The accusations Moloney levied against our justice system and Italians in particular and Americans in general should have banished him from decent society, not burnished his caché.  If such things matter, falsely accusing the American public of persecution for being a priest ought to mean something, not mean nothing.  And if false accusations matter so much, why is it that they don’t matter at all when they’re directed at certain people, like Italians, or Americans, or the prosecutors who did a fine job proving their case?

Instead of correcting the record, the Times buries it while swooning about Moloney in creepy fake brogue:

AH, now here comes Father Moloney, ambling down East Ninth Street in his priest’s outfit, a crucifix on a heavy chain around his neck.

This cuddly 80-year-old priest with the Limerick lilt doesn’t exactly look like “the underground general” of Irish Republican Army gun runners, as one British intelligence officer pronounced him in 1982.

“That’s what he called me,” said the Rev. Patrick Moloney, chuckling . . .

Har, har.  Funny stuff, written by the doubtlessly entirely objective Corey Kilgannon: after all, who couldn’t trust someone who calls a terrorist “cuddly”?  So why was Mr. Moloney — thugs do not deserve honorariums, especially when they use them to terrorize innocents — really arrested in Ireland, Corey?  Oh, never mind.  Let’s get on to the stateside sadism:

He sank into a sofa, leafed through his mail and launched into another story, this one about serving four years in federal prison in the 1990s in connection with a $7.4 million Brink’s armored car robbery in Rochester — at the time, called the fifth biggest Brink’s robbery in history — which authorities said he helped pull off to fill I.R.A. coffers.

Isn’t it weird how at the paper of record, killing or at least threatening to kill Brinks employees is sort of the equivalent of turning wine into water?  Judith Clark helped off a couple of cops and Brinks guards in 1981 and even though one of the cops turned out inconveniently to be black while dying, she still qualified for the Times’ beatification beat 3 months ago.  Now it’s Moloney’s turn:

Father Moloney, a slight man with a short gray beard and glasses, emigrated from Ireland in 1955 and, inspired by the Catholic activist and anarchist Dorothy Day, began his ministry for the poor in the blighted East Village. He battled the gang leaders and drug dealers as ferociously as he now fights the developer-gentrifiers.

Bla, bla, bla.  Moloney performs what he thinks are good deeds, so it’s OK to have all those gun-running, innocent-person-torturing incidents in his past.  By the way, why didn’t the Times ask Moloney about that very inconvenient unsolved murder tied to his crimes?  The one where the buddy of his buddy got hackled to pieces in upstate New York, and his remains just got identified in December?  December, 2011.

Gibbons went missing in August of 1995 after he told a friend he was driving to Rochester to get his cut of the [Brinks robbery] millions.  Greece [N.Y.] Police say while this began as a missing persons case, that changed after body parts were found in Jefferson County in 1999 and 2000.  Those remains were just recently identified using DNA.  The Medical Examiner in Onondaga County found that the remains were those of Gibbons and that this was a homicide.

You see, after the Brinks robbery, the money not found in Father Pat’s pockets went missing.  And then this guy decides he wants his cut of it, and he goes to get it in 1995 and ends up hacked to pieces like some extra in the Sopranos.  But you can’t blame this one on my people (though Moloney tried to do so): this is the IRA and its sleazy apologists at the Times, who somehow never manage to get around to mentioning Moloney’s very recently identified, long-missing pal, or the December I.D.’ing of the body parts scattered all over upstate New York, what with all the column inches they have to dedicate to smiling Irish eyes and cups o’ tea and pretending that sheltering terrorists isn’t a federal offense.

Here’s the Times’ entire statement on the missing millions.  They calls this reporting.  In Gaelic, though, it is colorfully known as a lieae:

While Father Moloney was in federal prison — he called himself a political prisoner — “Free Father Pat” graffiti was scrawled around the East Village [of course it was].  The remaining $5.2 million in Brinks money was never found. Certainly Father Moloney never showed signs of getting richer. He has lived like a monk, sleeping in a closet-size room on a cot stretched over his filing cabinets.

Meanwhile, Ronnie Gibbons sleeps with the potatoes.  Can’t the people at the Times at least pretend to stop stroking terrorists?  Didn’t they watch the towers fall?  Has anyone they love ever had a pistol held to their skull?

Is this stuff really just an opportunity to mock normal people?

It is to Moloney:

 Father Moloney . . . used the Brinks publicity for his causes and never missed a chance to gleefully snub the authorities about it.  “I rubbed the government’s nose in it,” he said, and he poured himself a cup of Irish tea.

Of course.  Of course the whole hacked-up bodies, gun-to-temples, supporting terrorists, blarney clap-trap parade gets ignored by the people who are supposed to offer moral guidance or enforce immigration rules . . . so what does the Church do to stop this blight on their honor from continuing to spit in the face of the cops and security guards kneeling in the pews?  What does immigration do about what they haven’t ever done about this treasonous thug, who admits to other crimes, which he calls not-crimes, which doesn’t mean they weren’t, just that the Times won’t ask for anyone else to weigh in for, like, accuracy:

He has defended and hidden fugitives, the undocumented and I.R.A. members on the lam. The list includes relatives of both Gerry Adams and Malcolm X, he said. They have stayed in the secret apartments he has kept around the city for this purpose, some of them in public housing. “I have never broken a law, but I have circumvented most of them,” he said, fingering his ever-present prayer beads, a mischievous glint in his eye.

In a YouTube video, Moloney’s got some strange stories about living posh and the usual vague claims about racists burning down his stuff, which drew him approbation and likely big funding –funny, how unsolved fires and unsubstantiated accusations so frequently turn into cha-ching for America-hating faux humanists.

I also wonder how many of the people who gave him cash knew about the $2 million in extracurricular Brinks fundraising found in his safe, or the “foot found on Lake Ontario,” the “partially clad torso” in Cape Vincent, or the gym shorts of said torso tied to the New York Athletic Club and now confirmed to be associated with the disappearance of the robbery money not found in Molony’s possession.

Moloney ”[s]ays proudly that he worked with Robert Collier and other Black Panthers, and that he met with Yasser Arafat,” though the Times plays a bit coy with that last bit.  I wonder if he’s won any awards from PEN yet.  Probably has to raise his body count first.

Or, start rhyming.