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Published by the
Chicago Tribune,
February 20, 2005
Priest
jailed in Greece left church here adrift |
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Scandal follows cleric on run from embezzlement
charge
By
Russell Working and Dan Mihalopoulos
Tribune staff reporters
Watching satellite TV news reports from the old
country at their homes in Chicago, members of a
Greek Orthodox parish on the Northwest Side were
shocked to recognize the young, bearded priest in
police custody.
It was their former pastor, Iakovos Giosakis, who
disappeared almost four years ago after they
accused him of embezzling tens of thousands of
dollars from the parish.
Before finding himself at the center of a growing
scandal involving sex, drugs, trial-fixing and
trafficking in precious icons, Giosakis served
Sts. Athanasios and John Church in Chicago for
about two years. He fled the country days after
Chicago police seized a computer, church financial
records and personal documents in a raid of the
apartment where he lived as the guest of an
elderly parishioner.
The priest's arrest Feb. 4 in the Athens port of
Piraeus rocked a country where Orthodoxy is the
state religion and almost everyone is baptized
into the faith.
Now jailed in Athens, Giosakis is charged with
stealing Byzantine icons from a monastery on a
Greek island. He is also under investigation in a
corruption case in which judges are accused of
fixing trials involving drug dealers and church
elections.
The church suspended a high-ranking cleric after a
Greek TV station aired a recording of a phone
conversation between him and his male lover, and a
91-year-old bishop allegedly appeared naked with a
young woman in a published photo.
On Friday, the church's leader in Greece,
Metropolitan Christodoulos of Athens, apologized
to the nation for the scandal as senior clerics
opened an emergency conclave to impose reforms.
As the scandals dominate the Greek media, the
faithful in Chicago again regret having trusted
Giosakis with offering plates, cash from church
fundraisers and loans for church construction.
"In the beginning, people couldn't even believe
it," said Theodoros Mantas, the lay president of
the church. "But after we saw the [bank]
statements, then we started to believe that Father
Giosakis wasn't very good."
Early disputes
Born to a pious Orthodox family, Giosakis served
as an altar boy in Piraeus before becoming a
priest. He served a string of churches in his
Mediterranean homeland, twice leaving his posts
after disputes with parishioners, according to
Vima, a leading newspaper in Athens.
After being accused of stealing icons on the
island of Kythera, Giosakis resurfaced in the
United States. Metropolitan Athenagoras, the Greek
Orthodox archbishop for Central America and the
Caribbean, agreed to take responsibility for him
in 1999. Athenagoras, who grew up in Chicago, said
he did so "out of the goodness of my heart."
"I made a mistake in judgment to help someone who
was not worthy of my help," Athenagoras said in a
telephone interview from Mexico City. "All I
wanted was to do some good."
At that time, Athenagoras said, he did not know
the extent of the problems that plagued Giosakis
in Greece.
Those problems also were unknown to the
congregation of Sts. Athanasios and John when he
arrived in 1999. Sts. Athanasios and John is a
small church where 50 to 60 people attend the
Divine Liturgy every Sunday. The Irving Park
church is separate from the Greek Orthodox
Archdiocese of America, which oversees practically
every other parish in the Chicago area, and
instead operates under the oversight of a
monastery in New York.
Only Greek is heard in liturgies at the church,
unlike many Greek Orthodox churches in the United
States, where English is becoming as common as
Greek. Many of the parishioners are elderly
immigrants.
"The church is a very small, humble, modest place
of worship," parishioner Alexander Facklis said.
"It's wonderful for those who are seeking a more
personal, spiritual experience."
The arrival of a new priest energized the parish,
Facklis said. Bearded, 5-foot-8 and about 250
pounds, he was a charismatic man whose
congregation came to admire him so much that some
of them wanted to fly to Istanbul with him and
urge the Patriarch--the church's supreme
leader--to promote him to bishop.
"He's very intelligent and likable," Facklis said.
"We all fell for that charisma. Clergy in the
Greek community are given a large dose of
automatic respect, and he was very eloquent in
stating big plans."
Suspicions grew
But some parishioners quickly became suspicious of
their new priest, according to parishioners,
police and the search warrant used to raid the
apartment.
Giosakis immediately took control of the church.
He dismissed the church officers and appointed his
own. And he took possession of the church bank
ledgers, computer and printer, which were used for
fundraising and bill payments.
Personal money problems seemed to dog the priest
in Chicago. On two occasions, Mantas said,
Giosakis claimed sums of at least $10,000 had been
stolen from him. Parishioners made up for the
money.
Another time, a bishop visited from New York, and
the church held a fundraising dinner and dance,
selling 300 tickets for $100 apiece. But the
receipts came in somewhere between $4,000-$6,000
short, Mantas said.
Church members accepted Giosakis' explanation that
he must have lost the money. But some began to
worry that the priest was in charge of the Sunday
offering.
"There were some members of the church that were
arguing," Mantas said. "They had questions: `The
priest shouldn't get the money.' But most of us,
including myself, were saying, `Everything's just
fine. I trust him. And when everything gets ready,
the money will be there.'"
He also allegedly told church members that he was
supposed to be paid $500 a week for his work,
although police would later state that he entered
the country as a volunteer on a visa that did not
permit him to work for a salary.
In April 2001, Giosakis called for a $240,000
remodeling project at the church, Mantas said. He
proposed using fine oak to refurbish the interior
and extending a fountain out in front. And he
wanted to add a Jacuzzi in a basement under the
altar. This struck Mantas as odd, but he shrugged
it off.
"I have a Jacuzzi in my house," Mantas said. "I
said, `What the hell.'"
Giosakis allegedly talked one elderly parishioner
into giving him $57,000, saying it was needed for
the poor, his sick mother and a friend in
financial trouble, according to the search
warrant. He wired most of the money to Greece, the
warrant stated.
"Usually they were elderly people who put their
trust in him," said Chicago Police Sgt. Diego
Flores, who investigated the case.
In addition, five members of the church agreed to
put up $12,000 apiece to guarantee $60,000 the
church borrowed. The money was placed in a
construction checking account at Plaza Bank, said
Mantas, who was among the five.
Two signatures were required in order to move
money from church accounts, but Giosakis allegedly
talked a bank official into allowing him to
control the money with his signature alone,
according to the warrant. Funds were transferred
to his personal account, and Giosakis allegedly
wrote out several checks for "cash."
Within one week in May he withdrew a total of
$18,500 in two transactions, Mantas said.
Officials at Plaza Bank declined to comment,
saying disclosure restrictions prevent them from
even confirming that the church or the priest had
accounts there.
But Mantas said he eventually became suspicious,
examined the ledgers and confronted the priest at
a meeting in late May.
"When I asked him why the money wasn't there, he
told me he took the money out because his mother
was sick," Mantas said. "I asked him when his
mother got sick. He told me his mother got sick on
the 22nd of May. And then the other question for
me was, how did he know his mother would be sick
on the 22nd, when he got the money out on the 10th
and the 16th?"
Leader flees
Congregational leaders reported their suspicions
to their church's supervisors at St. Irene
Chrysovalantou monastery, in Astoria, N.Y. The
monastery suspended Giosakis from his duties and
told the parishioners to call the Chicago police.
On June 28, 2001, investigators--tipped off by a
church officer that Giosakis planned to flee the
country the next day--raided the apartment where
he lived in the 8500 block of West Rascher Avenue.
Police took computer parts, printers, bank
records, raffle tickets, a plane ticket, two
passports and $2,500 in cash.
Although Giosakis was left with no passport, he
went to the Greek Consulate and obtained another,
Flores said.
The question of how Giosakis fled and found a new
ecclesiastical position in Greece has become a
point of contention in the church. Patriarch
Bartholomew, the supreme leader of all Orthodox
Christians, chastised Athenagoras, the Central
American archbishop, for helping Giosakis land his
assignment in Chicago. In a 2002 letter from the
patriarch to Athenagoras, Bartholomew also
criticized the archbishop for accepting funds from
Giosakis, defending the cleric before Chicago
police and helping him flee Chicago.
But Athenagoras insists he did not hear from
Giosakis until he was in Greece again. Athenagoras
acknowledged traveling to Chicago to discuss the
case with police, but he said he accepted only a
single $3,000 donation from the priest while he
was his bishop.
Devastating tenure
In the wake of the scandal, the monastery has
sought to distance itself from Giosakis.
"When he was in Chicago he was also on loan to
us," said John Kotsaridis, secretary and
administrator of St. Irene Chrysovalantou. "He
wasn't a priest of the monastery."
About a year ago, Sts. Athanasios and John asked
the police to drop the case, Flores said. Members
said it was time to move on from the controversy,
he said.
The impact of Giosakis' tenure in Chicago was
devastating for believers, Facklis said. The
church was shuttered for a couple months after
Giosakis left, but it revived with the help of a
temporary priest from the St. Louis area.
"I don't want to call it a death blow, but it was
close to it," Facklis said. "He created some
serious divisions. Some who supported him have
never set foot in the church again. I don't think
that the community deserved it or could do
anything about it."
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