Devastated

Published by The National Herald, February 26, 2005

Chicago Parish Feeling Devastated

CHICAGO – 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, Archimandrite 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, The Very Rev. Giosakis served Sts. Athanasios & John Church 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 on February 4 in the Athens port of Piraeus has rocked a country where Orthodoxy is the state religion and almost everyone is baptized into the faith.

Now jailed in Athens, Rev. 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, Metropolitan Panteleimon of Attica, after a Greek television station aired a recording of a phone conversation between him and his male lover, and a 91-year-old bishop, Metropolitan Stefanos of Trifyllias & Olympias, allegedly appeared naked with a young woman in a published photo (Metropolitan Stefanos has initiated a lawsuit against the newspaper, Avriani).

As the scandals dominate the Greek media, the faithful in Chicago again regret having trusted Rev. Giosakis with plate offerings, cash from church fundraisers and loans for church construction.

"In the beginning, people couldn't even believe it," said Theodore 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."

Born to a pious Orthodox family, Rev. 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 Kythira, Rev. Giosakis resurfaced in the United States. Metropolitan Athenagoras, the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of 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," but now says he regrets it.

"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 plaguing Rev. Giosakis in Greece. Those problems also were unknown to the congregation of Sts. Athanasios & John when he arrived in 1999.

Sts. Athanasios & John is a small church where 50-60 people attend the Divine Liturgy every Sunday. The Irving Park church is distinct from the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, which oversees practically every other parish in the Chicago area, and instead operates under the oversight of the Patriarchal Monastery of St. Irene Chrysovalantou in Astoria, Queens.

The arrival of a new priest energized the parish, parishioner Alexander Facklis said. Rev. Giosakis was a charismatic man whose congregation came to admire him so much that some of them wanted to fly to Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) with him and urge the Ecumenical Patriarch – the church's supreme leader – to promote him to bishop.

But some parishioners quickly became suspicious of their new priest, according to parishioners, police and the search warrant used to raid the apartment.

Rev. 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, Mr. Mantas said, Rev. 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, Mr. Mantas added.

Church members accepted Rev. Giosakis' explanation that he must have lost the money. But some began to worry that the priest was in charge of the Sunday offering.

Rev. Giosakis 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 which did not permit him to work for a salary.

In April 2001, he called for a $240,000 remodeling project at the church, Mr. 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.

Rev. 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 Mr. Mantas, who was among the five.

Two signatures were required in order to move money from church accounts, but Rev. 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 Rev. Giosakis allegedly wrote out several checks for "cash."

Within one week in May, he withdrew a total of $18,500 in two transactions, Mr. 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 Mr. 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?"

Congregational leaders reported their suspicions to their church's supervisors at St. Irene Chrysovalantou Monastery in Astoria, New York. The monastery suspended Rev. 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 Rev. 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 Rev. Giosakis was left with no passport, he went to the Greek Consulate and obtained another, Sgt. Flores said.

The question of how Rev. Giosakis escaped and found a new ecclesiastical position in Greece has become a point of contention in the church. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew chastised Metropolitan Athenagoras for helping Rev. Giosakis land his assignment in Chicago. In a 2002 letter from the Patriarch to the Metropolitan, Bartholomew also criticized Athenagoras for accepting funds from Rev. Giosakis, defending the cleric before Chicago police and helping him flee Chicago.

But Athenagoras insists he did not hear from Rev. 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 still his bishop.

In the wake of the scandal, the Monastery has sought to distance itself from Rev. 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 & John asked the police to drop the case, Sgt. Flores said. Members said it was time to move on from the controversy, he added.

The impact of Rev. Giosakis' tenure in Chicago was devastating for believers, Mr. Facklis said. The church was shuttered for a couple months after Rev. 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," Mr. 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."

The Chicago Tribune published the above on February 20. The original headline is, "Priest Jailed in Greece Left Church Here Adrift; Scandal follows cleric on run from embezzlement charge."



Volume 7 Number 9 - Tuesday, March 1st, 2005	A Publication of the ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN LAITY