By Michael O'keeffe
New York Daily News
November 18, 2011
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/i-team/riverside-church-coach-ernest-lorch-competent-extradite-child-sex-abuse-charges-article-1.979269
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| Ernest Lorch was indicted by a western Massachusetts grand jury in October 2010 on attempted rape and indecent assault and battery of a person over 14 years old. |
Accused child molester Ernest Lorch, the founder of the prestigious Riverside Church basketball program, is not competent to be extradited to Massachusetts to stand trial for sexual abuse, a Westchester judge ruled in White Plains on Thursday.
State Supreme Court Judge Albert Lorenzo made the ruling after prosecutor Carrie Russell of Massachusetts' Northwestern District Attorney's office said at an extradition hearing that she would not contest three experts' claims that Lorch suffers from dementia.
But Lorch is not off the hook in Massachusetts just yet. Lorenzo said he could review the case in three months. Northwestern District Attorney David Sullivan said his office will review the case to determine if it should continue its efforts to bring Lorch to Massachusetts to stand trial.
"We want to look at the case and make sure his condition is permanent," Sullivan told the Daily News. "It is disheartening for an individual that we wanted to bring to justice to slip through the justice system because of his condition. We will make a decision in the next month."
Lorch, 79, was indicted by a western Massachusetts grand jury in October 2010 on attempted rape and indecent assault and battery of a person over 14 years old.
Like Jerry Sandusky, the Penn State defensive coordinator who has been charged with 40 counts of sexual abuse, Lorch is alleged to have taken advantage of his role as a coach to groom and molest children. "The greater tragedy in this is that there may have been other victims," Sullivan said. "As we saw in the Penn State case, when good people are silent, it perpetuates itself."
The indictment said Lorch assaulted the alleged victim sometime between March 1977 and April 1978 during a trip to Amherst for a basketball tournament. The indecent assault and battery charge was later dropped because it was not on the books until after the attack allegedly occurred.
Mitchell Garabedian, the victim's Boston attorney, said his client is "disappointed" that Lorch may not be prosecuted because of his failing health.
"He wanted the truth to come to light," Garabedian said. "My client should be proud for coming forward and reporting sex abuse. By doing so, he made the world a safer place."
Garabedian said he is trying to determine if Thursday's ruling will permit him to proceed with a civil suit against Lorch and Riverside Church.
Lorch's attorney, Frederick Cohn, has been battling extradition ever since his client - whose Riverside Church Hawks program was for decades one of the top AAU basketball organizations in the nation - was indicted.
Cohn, who has said that Lorch is not guilty of sex abuse, argued in court papers that his wheelchair-bound client is not fit for trial because he suffers from dementia and diabetes. Lorch, a longtime resident of the Upper East Side, now lives in a Westchester assisted-living facility.
Cohn did not return a call for comment.
Lorch has been hounded by sex abuse allegations for almost a decade. In 2002, the Daily News first reported that Lorch, a former Riverside Church deacon and an executive with the leveraged buyout firm Dyson-Kissner-Moran, was at the center of a sex-abuse investigation launched by the Manhattan District Attorney's office.
New York prosecutors could not charge Lorch, in part because of statute of limitations issues. But Northwestern District prosecutors could bring charges against the ex-coach because the clock on the statue of limitations in Massachusetts stops when a defendant leaves the state.
In addition to the Massachusetts victim, several New York men have also claimed that Lorch abused them when they were teens. The man whose allegations sparked the 2002 investigation, Robert Holmes, told the Daily News that Lorch had paid him millions of dollars to remain silent about the abuse he says took place in the 1980s, when Holmes was a teen-ager. The Daily News reported earlier this year that Sean McCray,
Holmes' cousin, says he also received $2 million to keep quiet about how Lorch abused him.
Another former Riverside player, Louis Garcia, described in detail in 2002 the abuse he said he endured as a player for the Hawks in the 1980s.
"It's been like hunting war criminals," Sullivan said. "Once you get them, they are not in condition to stand trial."
The wealthy Lorch was known for decades as the go-to guy for ballplayers who needed cash, and supporters say he was a benefactor for kids from New York's poorest neighborhoods, a father figure who paid for sneakers, coats and rent for scores of needy families.
Lorch helped launch the Riverside Church Hawks in 1961 as an outreach program for underprivileged kids. Lorch's program was known for decades as a high-class organization in an amateur basketball world filled with struggling community center teams and bandit street agents.
Lorch became known as the most powerful man in New York City basketball, a youth coach with deep ties to St. John's and other schools, a man who could get a player a college scholarship with a phone call or two.
Dozens of his players - including Mark Jackson, Chris Mullin and Ron Artest - became NBA stars; scores more played for top Division I program Lorch is the second New York coach who has been prosecuted by Bay State officials for sexually abusing a player in Massachusetts. Bob Oliva, the former boys' basketball coach at Christ the King Regional High School, pleaded guilty to sex abuse charges in a Boston courtroom in April.
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