A West Side man was talking to his imprisoned cousin in 2013 when he allegedly floated the idea of adding him to a string of bogus sexual abuse allegations filed against defrocked Chicago Catholic priest Daniel McCormack, court records show.
“I think I want to put you on these cases now,” the man told his cousin, who at the time was serving a three-year term for a gun conviction.
“Hell yeah,” the cousin, Ahmond Williams, allegedly responded. “I need some ass free money too. … As long as (McCormack) ain’t got to touch me for real, I don’t give a (expletive).”
That conversation recorded on a prison line 12 years ago was included in an unusual new lawsuit filed by the Archdiocese of Chicago on Monday alleging a group of mostly West Side residents, including a convicted murderer and others associated with violent street gangs, conspired for years to bring false allegations of sexual abuse by McCormack — often ranked among the most notorious child sexual abusers ever employed by the church — in order to win millions of dollars in legal settlements.
The co-schemers were caught on tape calling the false claims “licks,” a common street term for a robbery or ripoff, according to the suit. Once they got paid, many of the co-schemers burned through their settlement quickly, buying cars, taking trips to Las Vegas or Miami and even hosting street parties where videos posted on social media allegedly showed them throwing cash in the air.
The new legal push is not an attempt to clear McCormack’s name, and the accusations of false claims do not address his past victims. McCormack pleaded guilty to abusing a group of underage boys and served a lengthy prison term.
Instead, the suit was filed in the Law Division of Cook County Circuit Court as a counterclaim against several pending cases involving McCormack brought late last year. Attorneys for the archdiocese alleged at least 30 co-schemers counseled one another on how to embellish their claims with lurid details and friendly attorneys to contact who would do little to try to corroborate their stories.
Some of the conspirators were captured on calls from state prisons or Cook County Jail talking about “free money” and how “easy” it is to bring a claim, the lawsuit alleged. One past claimant — whose allegations against McCormack have since been dropped — admitted on a recorded call he was never even involved with McCormack’s church or basketball team.
“I wasn’t even in a program, and, you feel me, I got a lick on ’em,” he said, according to the suit.
The filing by the archdiocese is the first of its kind in Chicago and comes even as allegations continue to pile up against McCormack, a longtime priest at St. Agatha Church in North Lawndale and other locations who was the local incarnation of a national scandal involving abusive priests and a cover-up by the church.
Lawyers for the archdiocese said in a statement to the Tribune that the torrent of false claims against even a known abuser such as McCormack not only costs money but damages the church’s efforts to assist his many legitimate victims. The suit seeks monetary penalties against the defendants, but also injunctive relief from the court to stop the false claims from being filed in the first place.
“We trust and believe people when they come forward with abuse claims,” said James Geoly, general counsel for the archdiocese. “These individuals have violated that trust and have attempted to take advantage of it. We have a duty to oppose claims we know are false to protect and stand up for real survivors of abuse who ultimately are the ones harmed by fraud.”
All of the alleged co-conspirators are listed in the suit as John Does, in accordance with court orders. But Williams’ name has been made public in other court records after his claim against McCormack was found by a judge in 2017 to have been fabricated. A judge later sanctioned Williams more than $60,000 for the costs to the archdiocese to uncover the fraud, court records show.
A year after that case ended, Williams was arrested on a first-degree murder warrant from Texas alleging he fatally shot a man outside a nightclub in El Paso in July 2018, court records show. His trial is set to begin later this year.
The attorney representing the two main plaintiffs being countersued, Gregory Condon, sent a written statement late Monday saying it had never been brought to his attention that the archdiocese’s attorneys “believed I was an unwitting co-conspirator in a fraudulent scheme to defraud the church.”
“The filing appears to be a shameless hit piece apparently designed to intimidate me,” Condon wrote. “I am not intimidated. I believe in every sexually abused client that I have represented.”
Condon also said the therapists and experts who treated his clients found them “completely credible” and that the archdiocese would be better off spending its money to hire attorneys to “investigate its own priests.”
According to the countersuit, one of Condon’s clients, referred to as John U. Doe, is the younger brother of the alleged ringleader — John Doe 101 — and is currently in prison for a murder conviction.
Melanie Sakoda, survivor support director for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said false accusations against priests are “extremely rare,” but cause harm by making it harder for real abuse survivors to be believed.
“If people are trying to make up false claims and saying it’s easy money, I would hope they could be prosecuted for that,” she said. “It makes it hard for survivors to come forward and it calls everyone else’s testimony into question.”
Abuse history
The new litigation adds to the continuing legal saga surrounding McCormack, 56, who was ordained in 1994 and served as a teacher, basketball coach and priest for more than a decade despite early evidence he was unfit to work with children and mounting allegations of abuse.
Allegations against McCormack became public in 2006, four years after then-Cardinal Francis George urged Catholic bishops to remove any priest from ministry for a single act of sexual abuse. But the cardinal, when notified that McCormack had been taken into custody by Chicago police in August 2005 for allegedly abusing a boy, did not remove him from ministry at St. Agatha Catholic Church, where he served as pastor until a second arrest in January 2006.
McCormack pleaded guilty in 2007 to fondling five boys, ages 8 to 12, at the church and was permanently removed from the priesthood.
When McCormack came up for parole in 2010, the Cook County state’s attorney and the Illinois attorney general petitioned the court to have him committed under the Sexually Violent Persons Commitment Act.
McCormack remained in a state mental health facility until his release in 2021, following an appellate court ruling that prosecutors had failed to explain why McCormack had a substantial likelihood of reoffending.
His most recent sex offender registration showed he’s living in an apartment in Chicago’s Gold Coast. He could not be reached for comment Monday.
Meanwhile, McCormack alone has cost the archdiocese tens of millions of dollars in settlements, and there are additional cases pending.
Though the archdiocese has maintained a pledge by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin that no money from the collection plate would be used to cover sex abuse settlements, insurance no longer covers any claims involving clergy, and the scandal has had an impact on the long-term financial stability of the church. So far, proceeds from the sale of unused real estate and investment income have covered the costs.
None of the McCormack-related lawsuits has ever gone to trial. Most have been settled with an eye toward both compensation and emotional support, with components including an initial payout, additional structured “annuity” payments, as well as funds placed in a trust to be used for education, therapy, and child care expenses.
The lawsuit filed by the church on Monday alleged that in some cases, the co-conspirators who filed false claims took advantage of litigation-funding loans facilitated by their lawyers to get money before reaching a settlement. Others accessed the settlement funds placed in escrow by filing false invoices or cashed in their annuity payments for “pennies on the dollar,” the lawsuit alleged.
In addition to Williams, another litigant, Devin Little, was found by a different Cook County judge in 2023 to have filed a fraudulent claim and was fined more than $90,000, court records show. A handful of other cases have been dropped as the plaintiffs’ lawyers abandoned the claims, records show.
Records from Little’s case show he was serving a six-year prison term as an armed habitual criminal when he bragged to a relative in a recorded call he was able to “make myself cry and all that,” and admitted he’d never attended McCormack’s after-school program called S.A.F.E. at Our Lady of the Westside Catholic School.
“Everybody get their turn,” Little allegedly said.
Little’s attorney did not return a call seeking comment Monday.
Seeking the phone calls
The litigation illustrates the difficulty in separating legitimate claims of sexual abuse from possible fabrications, particularly when it comes to allegations against a priest from long ago.
Without the investigatory powers of law enforcement, one of the only ways the archdiocese has to cross-check sworn depositions of purported victims and witnesses is by subpoenaing jail calls, which provided the backbone for many of the allegations in the 36-page countersuit.
The suit alleges the pattern of racketeering goes back to at least 2012. Court records from Williams’ case show the church became aware of jail calls from 2013 where Williams and another relative, allegedly talked extensively about their friends winning big settlements for fraudulent claims.
On Sept. 5, 2013, Williams was recorded on a call with Antonio Fort from the Western Illinois Correctional Center in Mount Sterling, records show. Williams said he was looking forward to getting “forever paid” when he was released.
“Yeah, the same priest,” Williams said. “His name’s Father Dan. Bro was just on the news. … He’s a descendant of the Pope, bro. The real Pope.”
“Right, right,” Fort responded on the call.
“He was at that archdiocese (expletive) from down there, wherever Catholics at, man,” Williams said. “They’ve got everlasting money, bro.”
That phone call took place a year after the alleged ringleader of the conspiracy, referred to in the lawsuit as John Doe 101, and another associate, John Doe 102 had reached large settlements with the archdiocese based on their false accusations against McCormack.
After that, the two began recruiting and paying others to pursue their own claims against the church, coaching them how to lie and pooling money from settlements, some of which was advanced to new claimants “in exchange for a share of future settlement proceeds,” the lawsuit alleged.
Among those recruited was the ringleader’s cousin, referred to as John Doe 111, who allegedly was a member of the Ziploc Money Gang faction operating near Douglas Park on the West Side. The lawsuit alleged Doe 111 was introduced to the same attorney who’d won previous settlements and agreed to pay Does 101 and 102 a portion of any money he eventually won from the church.
In his lawsuit filed in July 2014, John Doe 111 alleged he came into contact with McCormack through the summer basketball team the priest coached, a claim corroborated under oath by his cousin, the alleged ringleader, according to the lawsuit.
After his settlement was reached in late 2017, John Doe 111 paid some of the money to the ringleader and used other funds to bond a fellow Ziploc gang member out of jail, the lawsuit alleged. He also spent money on a trip to Las Vegas and luxury clothing. Redacted photos from social media included in the lawsuit allegedly show Doe 111 drinking Champagne with the caption “Million Dolla Swagg.”
But the money also caused rifts among the co-conspirators, according to the suit. In 2017, after learning of Doe 111’s settlement, the ringleader was recorded threatening violence if he didn’t get paid.
“If he think he gon’ just (expletive) over everybody … I’m beating your ass,” he said, according to the suit. “You still have to feed me, (expletive). I’ll pop your ass myself.”
John Doe 111 was killed in an unrelated shooting in December 2022, the lawsuit stated.
Around the same time, two other co-schemers, John Doe 103 and John Doe 104, filed lawsuits but did not agree to share their settlements, the lawsuit alleged. The ringleader contacted their attorney, Lyndsay Markley, and said they believed the claims were fraudulent, according to the suit.
The ringleader was later recorded saying Markley seemed to acknowledge the allegations were dubious, but “she said she ain’t gonna drop them ’cause, you know, she tryin’ to get her cash too.”
The claims were eventually settled in March 2017, according to the lawsuit. The Tribune reported that month the archdiocese had agreed to settle three lawsuits for a total of $3.15 million.
Markley is not accused of intentionally filing any fraudulent claims. Reached by phone Monday, she said she had not seen the lawsuit and could not comment.
Meanwhile, lawsuits involving McCormack kept coming despite increasing signs that many of the claimants were lying, according to the allegations in the archdiocese’s countersuit. In 2020, two other incarcerated members of the Ziploc gang, John Does 120 and 121, allegedly conspired to make false claims, including that Doe 121 had attended St. Agatha and was abused by McCormack while helping the priest clean the church and an office.
To bolster the claim, Doe 120 said it would help if a friend would report that Doe 121 had showed “a little gayness here and there,” according to the suit. Doe 121 was later recorded calling the friend and telling him “to be prepared to corroborate the claim as suggested,” the lawsuit alleged.
Before sending his letter to Markley detailing the alleged abuse, Doe 121 read it over the phone from prison to his sister. She told him he shouldn’t worry too much about the details, according to the archdiocese.
“(Markley) going to be looking at it as, like, ‘Aw, damn, we got another millionaire. Woo woo woo woo woo woo,’” the sister said on the recorded prison line, according to the suit.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
