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Disreputable notions of respectability

by Eric Jackson

These past few days I have been tracking down the most lurid of stories, the tale of a serial pervert ex-priest who looted a Canadian labor union's pension fund, engaged in a $3 million fraud in the course of a Bahamian bank collapse, then came down here and bought a vast estate on the road to El Valle.

The man should have never been let into this country, but it's still too early to say if Migracion was at fault. The truth is that Ronald Hubert Kelly is an outstanding symbol of Canadian corruption visited upon Panama.

Immigration authorities here would not have access to the record of his 1979 conviction on 10 counts of sexually abusing teenage boys. That's because in 1985 the Progressive Conservative of then-Prime Minister Brian Mulroney pardoned Kelly and sealed his criminal record, blocking access by such interested parties as Panamanian immigration officials.

Of course, it can be argued that ten counts of a grown man having sexual relations with teenage boys is no big deal. Catholic Bishop Richard McGrath and Judge Gordon Seabright believed that. Two days after Kelly's arrest, in absolute breach of judicial ethics, Seabright and McGrath met ex parte at the former's home to discuss the case, and two days after that Seabright gave Kelly a suspended sentence. When prosecutors appealed, a three-judge panel turned them down, holding that just because he molested boys between the ages of 13 and 17 made Kelly "no criminal in the common sense of the word." And the archbishop of Toronto, Cardinal G. Emmett Carter, didn't think it was such a big deal either. He made Kelly the main manager of the archdiocese's financial affairs.

After being the beneficiary of the conservatives' pardon granting largesse, and after he quit the priesthood in 1990, Kelly's now crashed career as a real estate tycoon was given a boost by Ontario's premier of the time, Bob Rae, a right wing member of Canada's left wing New Democratic Party. Then Kelly was all buddy buddy with the former Liberal Prime Minister of Canada, Jean Chretien, hosting a benefit for him at one of his Toronto hotels.

Then in the Bahamas, Kelly used other people's money to buy and renovate the historic Colonial Hotel, turning it into the hot spot for the rich, famous and powerful --- with whom he hobnobbed before the hotel went bust and he moved on to Panama.

Kelly then got into Panama during the years of the Moscoso kleptocracy. The other day I noticed the tattered Arnulfista flag still flying in front of his place.

He also started to hang out around the Canadian Association here. Sadly, I am told that certain members of the group were most impressed by the man's displays of wealth.

Let me not bad-mouth Canada or Canadians by alleging that there is something especially wrong with them. When now incarcerated "offshore asset protection guru" Marc Harris and his circle of thugs hung out around various institutions of the American community here, purported community leaders were ever so impressed by the money these hoodlums flashed around. The same thing happened when now incarcerated Georgia swindler Tom McMurrain and his entourage came to town.

And what can I say about the Panamanian public officials who were impressed by Harris, McMurrain or now Kelly? The old hippie in me brings a Frank Zappa tune immediately to mind --- "Plastic People."

But really, it reminds me more than anything of the circumstances surrounding the last several times I was tear gassed, in the course of covering the recent Seguro Social protests.

To most Panamanian politicians, the person who steals millions from somebody's pension fund or life's savings is a big hero, somebody to look up to and respect. That's why the only labor leaders willing to trust the government when it plans to invest a half-billion dollars from the Social Security Fund in private businesses are the racketeers. That's why the government and the labor movement are so far apart in the talks on what to do about Seguro.

The bottom line is that there are far too many people in this world --- in Panama, in the United States, in the Bahamas, in Canada and elsewhere --- who cling to disreputable notions of what and whom they should respect. It becomes truly disastrous when people who think like that gain control over governments, as they frequently do.