Troop 132 Palm Beach Gardens

PALM BEACH GARDENS — The two adult leaders of Boy Scout Troop 132 called it his "initiation." He said they coerced him into performing sex acts on both them and on older scouts. He said he later left the program, right after two older Scouts sodomized him.

But, he told The Palm Beach Post, he didn't say anything to police. Or the Scouts. Or his parents. Or anyone.

"No. Never," said the alleged victim, now a minister in Texas. He asked that he be identified only as Charles.

"There's such a stigma to that type of thing. Especially 50 years ago," he said. "It was just nothing that you would ever, ever talk about."

His allegation, dating to 1968, is one of 574 alleged cases nationwide included in a lawsuit filed this week. It claims that hundreds of trusted adults molested boys with impunity. And that national and local Scouting leaders were at best incompetent and at worst complicit.

The suit, filed Monday in state court in Philadelphia, alleges the Boy Scouts of America secretly removed Scoutmasters for child sexual abuse "at an alarming rate" that got as high as one every three days in the 1970s. But that it kept its actions secret.

"Its own records demonstrate that it has long known that Scouting attracts pedophiles in large numbers and that Scouts, far from being safe, are at the heightened risk of sexual abuse," the suit argues.

Terrence Hamilton is chief executive for two years at the Gulf Stream Council, which runs Scouting from Boca Raton to Sebastian and west to Lake Okeechobee. He said he was not familiar with the 1968 case.

But, he said Wednesday, "our hearts ache for the victims. It angers me to hear of predators using youth organizations to target youth."

Hamilton said the Gulf Stream Council has "no problem removing someone from our Scouting programs. We add people to our Volunteer Screening Database based on suspected or known violations of our policies. They don't need to have been arrested or convicted of a crime to be added to the database. This is because our priority is to protect kids, first and foremost, above all else."

And, Hamilton said, "many years ago, we adopted some of the strongest barriers to child abuse found in any youth-serving organization, and we take the responsibility to uphold those barriers seriously."

Of the 547 cases listed by the national lawsuit, just two are alleged to have occurred in Palm Beach County.

The entry for the 1968 case in Palm Beach Gardens identifies the two adult leaders by last name only. Charles said that's all he ever knew.

In 1968, he said, he was a shy 11-year-old who didn't know many people. His father had been part of Scouting. So he gave it a try.

"You wanted to fit in," he said. He said the older kids, ages 15 to 18, were called "senior patrol leaders" and helped out the younger boys. But he said, "within few months, it started to turn sexual."

At his first campout, he said, the older boy who was paired with him fondled him.

"It was the 'boys will be boys' mentality," he said. But in the year and a half he was in the troop, "it became more overtly sexual as time went on."

When he quit, he told his dad only that he just hadn't liked it. His dad did not press him. A Scout leader called. He told the leader the same thing.

"Part of me felt like I did something wrong. That's part of the mentality of sexual abuse," he said.

And that's how it stayed for decades.

"Male sex abuse survivors are the last talked-about group. It kind of questions your whole sexuality. I never intended to ever talk about it," he said. "It's something I didn't even tell my wife until the last 15 years."

He said he since has told his adult daughters. And when he saw a news report about the advocacy and legal group behind the lawsuit, he decided to make the phone call.

"Our whole culture and the whole understanding of sexual abuse has changed," Charles said. "There's a lot of boys that need that 'me-too' moment. The wave of our culture has freed up people to talk about it."

The other Palm Beach County incident listed in the lawsuit was in 1969 "near Palm Beach," and was at a campout, but involved a troop from Miami Springs.

Also listed in the lawsuit is a Miami-Dade case with a Palm Beach connection: that of Carmine Falco.

For Troop 165 in Wellington, in 1988, the former Eagle Scout seemed a great catch as a leader. But there was plenty the local Gulf Stream Council didn't know when they appointed Falco.

He had been on probation after a booby trap at his Miami home killed a 14-year-old neighbor who also was a member of his troop. And he had been accused as early as 1982 of assaulting boys, including Scouts, "hundreds of times" over several years in Miami-Dade County.

While authorities weren't able to get charges that would stick, he'd then served three years of a seven-year term for plotting in 1983 to kidnap a Scout.

Miami-Dade Scouting officials had sent their national counterparts a letter warning to keep Falco away from kids. By the time Gulf Stream Council got that letter, Falco already had been with the Wellington troop for four months and had been fired over complaints about his behavior during a campout.

In 1994, Falco was charged in Palm Beach County with sexually molesting several children, including an 11-year-old. None was identified as a Scout. He got six life terms plus 265 years and remains in state prison.

EK@pbpost.com

@eliotkpbp

Several local cases involving allegations of abuse and Boy Scout leaders have emerged over the years, many of them in 2012 after an advocacy group divulged what it called a collection of "perversion files." Some of the cases, according to Palm Beach Post archives:

— In 1963, the Scouts created a file showing William Gene Lomax, then 25, of Riviera Beach had pleaded guilty to molesting a child and had been placed on 18 months of probation. At least once, in 1974, Scouting executives barred him from volunteering as a local troop leader. But the group later let him run a Kansas City Scouts group "on probation."

— Scouts placed Stewart Ian Geller on their blacklist in 1983, the year he arrived in West Palm Beach from New York, where he had been charged with sexually assaulting boys at a home owned by a member of the North American Man-Boy Love Association. Geller still managed to become a leader of a West Palm Beach Cub Scouts pack. He later was charged with assaulting four Cub Scouts, aged 8 to 10. He fled the country to escape prosecution but eventually was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

— In 1970, Glen A. Van Kleeck of Juno Beach, an Army recruiting sergeant, also had asked to be allowed into the Scouts. He had been arrested by the military for child molestation and/or contributing to the delinquency of a minor. In 2008, a Glen A. Van Kleeck identified as a former Florida police officer and Scout leader was sentenced to 15 years in prison on six counts of molesting an 11-year-old Ohio boy. According to news reports, he had met the boy's family in Florida.

— Thomas R. Warren was identified as an assistant Scoutmaster who pleaded guilty to fondling two Scouts in West Palm Beach. He pleaded guilty and went to prison.

— In 1989, Michael J. Loch, then 24, pleaded guilty to molesting two boys, 11 and 13, whom he led at Lantana Troop 203. He got six years in prison. A local scout leader said he "seemed like any other uniform-wearing volunteer." Prosecutors called him "pure evil.'

LOCAL CASES

sessionsgreamen.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/local/2019/08/08/palm-beach-gardens-scouts-abuse-case-one-of-574-cited-nationwide/4509616007/

Share this post