Convicted for Cash: An American Grand Scam

Frank X. Panico and Xs in the Sky Films present “Convicted for Cash: An American Grand Scam,” a film about a Catholic priest falsely accused and imprisoned for life.

June 21, 2023 by Frank X. Panico and Xs in the Sky Films

Editor’s Note: This is our first “video post” at Beyond These Stone Walls. This 44-minute documentary film was created by Frank X. Panico, an award-winning short filmmaker whose work has been featured on EWTN, NewsMax, Salem Now and multiple other venues. Here is Frank X. Panico:

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“Take no part in unfruitful works of darkness, but expose them.”

— Ephesians 5:11

I created this short documentary film because I believe that railroading, convicting and imprisoning a Catholic priest through lies and deceitful tactics is an unfruitful work of darkness. The railroaded Catholic priest I refer to is Father Gordon MacRae. This documentary film is entitled “Convicted for Cash: An American Grand Scam.” It exposes the plight of a man of God wrongfully imprisoned.

When I learned of this true story, it drew me in. I have known Fr Gordon MacRae for less than a year, but after researching this story I feel that I have known him forever. I have studied every detail, and I have never personally vetted a subject of my films so extensively. There were many credible sources before me: The Wall Street Journal, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, The Media Report, The Catholic World Report, all bravely taking up the case of this wrongfully imprisoned priest against an avaricious tide of Catholic scandal and media coverage.

During production of this film, I often felt as though unseen spiritual warfare was in play. The evil one and his minions would have liked nothing more than for me to abandon this cause. I rejected such thoughts and came to know the truth. Father MacRae is an innocent man and the victim of a sham trial. I felt called to help someone who was absolutely falsely accused through a rogue communist-like legal system.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not the only reason I produced this film. I also found its subject matter to be intriguing and marketable. Not long after Tucker Carlson aired footage from the January 6th affair, an innocent prisoner caught in its net was released from prison just days later. I pray for the same result that this innocent man might be freed.

I am immensely pleased with the documentary, “Convicted for Cash.” Salem Now has picked it up so obviously they were pleased with it as well. As a daily communicant, I continue to pray at Mass for the well being and release of Fr. Gordon MacRae, a brother in Christ. Please view and then share Convicted for Cash by clicking on the link or the image below.

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The Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz on the Father MacRae case

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NOTE — NEWLY DISCOVERED EVIDENCE: In 2022, after Father MacRae had served 29 years in prison, compelling exculpatory evidence surfaced. It turns out that former Keene, NH sex-crimes Detective James F. McLaughlin was censured for “falsification of records” in another case nine years before MacRae went to trial. Previous Supreme Court rulings required that this be revealed to defendant MacRae and his legal counsel before trial. Instead, it was kept hidden. Since then, a Court has secretly sealed McLaughlin’s police file from further discovery. Nonetheless, news reports in New Hampshire reveal that the detective had a long history of police misconduct including allegations of falsifying evidence, threatening witnesses, tampering with tape recordings, selective investigation, and lying under oath. He briefly appeared on a list of dishonest police that is now also under judicial seal in New Hampshire.

Xs in the Sky Films

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Fr Gordon MacRae in the Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell

Shunned by some Catholic media, wrongly imprisoned Fr Gordon MacRae appears prominently in the Prison Journal of Cardinal George Pell published by Ignatius Press.

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Ryan A. MacDonald author of “Truth in Justice: Was the Wrong Catholic Priest Sent to Prison?”

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October 13, 2021

I was incensed recently to learn of the treatment one of Fr Gordon MacRae’s most important recent posts received from a purportedly Catholic online venue. His eye-opening post, “A Catholic Priest 27 Years Wrongly in Prison in America,” was typed, as he described it, “ten minutes at a time here and there” on whatever typewriter wasn’t already in use in the prison library where he works. He had to type half on one machine and the rest on another. He finished it seconds before a deadline for getting it into the mail on time.

And it was a blockbuster, shared to date about 5,000 times on Facebook alone. Some 800 members of Linkedin read it. Over the next week, thousands came to it from around the Globe, including many thousands in the United States. Many who read that post learned of Father G for the first time and were aghast at the story it told.

Then the heavy hammer of jaundiced Catholic judgment fell. With the help of a friend outside, that post was shared at the r/Catholicism community at Reddit which boasts some 129,000 members. A multitude of positive comments poured in, and then suddenly stopped. On September 28, Father MacRae received this message read to him in prison from his Gmail inbox. It was from the unnamed r/Catholicism moderator at Reddit:

“You are permanently banned from participating in r/Catholicism. You can still view and subscribe, but you won’t be allowed to post or comment. Due to the nature of your participation, we cannot permit you to continue participating in the r/Catholicism community.”

This suppression of a much respected voice in the public square is shameful and merciless. I cannot see any difference between this and recent decisions at Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon to cancel voices that do not stick to an established media narrative. The fact that this suppression was done in the name of a self-described Catholic community is an outrage, especially given the conditions under which this priest has to write.

Fr Stuart MacDonald, JCL, the Canon Law advisor for Beyond These Stone Walls, attempted to engage the r/Catholicism moderator with a statement that, despite his imprisonment, Fr MacRae is quite widely considered to be innocent of his charges, has not been dismissed from the clerical state, and has earned the respect of thousands of Catholics including priests and bishops.

Father MacDonald’s intervention was simply ignored.

The Prison Journal of George Cardinal Pell

Now contrast this treatment with that from another prominent Catholic voice in the public square, that of Cardinal George Pell. Formerly the Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney, Australia, Cardinal Pell had been appointed by Pope Francis to serve as Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy of the Holy See and the Vatican Council of Cardinals, a body of eight close advisors to the pope.

Then, like Father MacRae, Cardinal Pell was tragically accused of “historic” sexual abuse alleged to have occurred decades earlier in Australia. Also like Father MacRae, he was convicted in a sham trial without evidence despite a multitude of inconsistency and fraud surrounding his trial. This, too, was a case shamelessly tried in the media before it ever got to a court of law. The 78-year-old prelate was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison on March 13, 2019. It was, as was the Father MacRae trial, a case of prosecutorial “Trophy Justice.”

On November 3, 1170, King Henry II raged in public against Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. The latter had rightly challenged the King’s claim to ultimate authority over Catholic affairs and the discipline of priests. When the King asked aloud, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” four of his guards took it upon themselves to murder Becket during Mass in the Canterbury Cathedral.

Not that much has changed in a thousand years. Unlike most other Catholic journalists, I am no longer going to make any reference to the “abuse crisis” in the Church. It is now the “accuse crisis” in the Church. Any priest can be “gotten rid of” by a mere accusation of uncorroborated sexual impropriety dating back decades. It is, as Father MacRae described in a stand-out article at Linkedin, “A Weapon of Mass Destruction: Catholic Priests Falsely Accused.”

Many thinking people long suspected, and now know without a doubt, that Cardinal George Pell was entirely innocent of the claims against him. Following a first failed appeal, he served 13 months in the harshness of prison in solitary confinement before sanity returned to Australian justice. Finally, in a unanimous 7-to-0 decision, he was exonerated by the Australian High Court. The victory was not just his alone, but that of the entire Church too long held hostage by the “accuse crisis.”

During his time in prison, Cardinal Pell kept a journal that today has been hailed as a masterpiece of prison writing in the ranks of Saint Paul of Tarsus, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Father Walter Ciszek, and Saint Thomas More. Archbishop Charles Chaput described the Pell journal with clarity:

“Two lessons emerge from this astonishing work. The first is the length to which a hate-filled judicial process will go against an innocent man. The second is the power of a good man’s endurance in the face of humiliation and poisonous deceit.”

— Archbishop Charles Chaput

Echoing that long before even hearing it, Father MacRae wrote from his own prison cell his first of several articles about this story in defense of Cardinal Pell. He said he wonders today if Cardinal Pell was even aware of his first post about the state of Australian justice: “Cardinal George Pell Is on Trial and So Is Australia.”

Today back in Rome, Cardinal Pell might understandably have every reason to want to distance himself from the grave injustice that befell him, and from the “accuse crisis” in the Church that ensnared him and paved the way for his wrongful conviction. In this, he was not alone. I don’t think there was anyone, except perhaps the Cardinal himself, who pondered and prayed over this injustice more than the wrongly imprisoned Fr Gordon MacRae. So what a shock it was to him when he learned that while in prison Cardinal George Pell had pondered his plight as well.

The following is an excerpt from Prison Journal Volume 2 by George Cardinal Pell (Ignatius Press, 2021):

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From the prison cell of Cardinal Pell - Friday, 2 August 2019:

“By a coincidence, today I received from Sheryl [Collmer], a regular correspondent from Texas, a copy of the 15 May 2019 post on the blog These Stone Walls written by Fr Gordon MacRae. The article was entitled, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” Fr MacRae was convicted on 23 September 1994 of paedophilia and sentenced to sixty-seven years in a New Hampshire prison for crimes allegedly committed around fifteen to twenty years previously. The allegations had no supporting evidence and no corroboration.

“It is one thing to be jailed for five months. It would be quite another step up, which I would not relish, to spend another three years if my appeal were unsuccessful. But we enter another world with a life sentence. Australia is not New Hampshire, and I don’t believe all the Australian media would blackball the discussion of a case such as MacRae’s.

“The late Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, whom I admired personally and as a theologian, encouraged Fr MacRae to continue writing from jail, stating, ‘Someday your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and be instrumental in a reform.’ Fr MacRae recounts the extraordinary similarities between the accusations I faced and the accusations of Billy Doe in Philadelphia, which were published in Australia in 2011 in the magazine, Rolling Stone. Earlier this year, Keith Windschuttle, editor of the quality journal, Quadrant, publicized the seven points of similarity, pointing out that ‘there are far too many similarities in the stories for them to be explained by coincidence.’ [See Keith Windshuttle, ‘The Borrowed Testimony that Convicted George Pell.’ Quadrant, 8 April 2019].

"The author of the 2011 Rolling Stone article was Sabrina Rubin Erdely, no longer a journalist, disgraced and discredited. In 2014 she had written, and provoked a storm which reached Obama’s White House, about ‘Jackie’ at the University of Virginia, who claimed she was gang-raped at a fraternity party in 2012 by seven men. As MacRae points out, ‘The story was accepted as gospel truth once it appeared in print.’ [Note: Rolling Stone later retracted the article in April, 2015]. Jackie’s account turned out to be a massive lie. A civil trial for defamation followed; the seven students were awarded $7.5 million in damages by the jury; and Rolling Stone was found guilty of negligence and defamation.

“The allegations behind the 2011 Rolling Stone article, published in Australia, have also been demolished as false by, among others, Ralph Cipriano’s ‘The Legacy of Billy Doe’ published in the Catalyst of the Catholic League in January-February 2019.

“No one realized in 2015, when the allegations against me were first made to police, that the model for copycat allegations, or the innocent basis for the remarkable similarities, was also a fantasy or a fiction.

“I am grateful to Fr MacRae for taking up my cause, as I am to many others. These include in North America George Weigel and Fr Raymond de Souza and here in Australia Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Gerard Henderson, Fr Frank Brennan, and others behind the scenes.

“I will conclude, not with a prayer, but with Fr MacRae’s opening quotation from Baron de Montesquieu (1742) [from BTSW ‘About’],

‘There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.’”

— George Cardinal Pell, Prison Journal Volume 2, p. 58-60

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Editor’s Note: Please share this important post from Ryan A. MacDonald. After the harsh condemnation Fr MacRae received from rCatholicism at Reddit, he and we were grateful to learn that a recent article from Beyond These Stone Walls received a commendation in the October 2021 issue of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. The citation was for “exposing with clarity the double standard applied when priests are accused.” The article receiving the citation was: Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo

You may also like these other posts from Ryan A. MacDonald:

The Trial of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Fraud

The Prison of Father MacRae: A Conspiracy of Silence

The Post-Trial Extortion of Father Gordon MacRae

You may also wish to see our new feature on the BTSW Menu: Voices from Beyond.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Readers may recall that Father Stuart A. MacDonald, JCL, is the volunteer Canon Law advisor for Beyond These Stone Walls. He was also the subject of a post in July, 2021 entitled “Fr Stuart MacDonald and Our Tabloid Frenzy about Fallen Priests.” Father Stuart has since received the approval of his bishop to commence a doctoral degree program in Canon Law. We want to congratulate Father Stuart in this important development and the recognition of his expertise for which we hope to soon be a beneficiary. Please keep Father Stuart in prayer as he pursues this exhaustive program in addition to his parochial ministry.

Life Goes On Behind and Beyond These Stone Walls

After eleven years in publication, These Stone Walls begins life anew as “Beyond These Stone Walls” in order to lend some volume to a wrongly imprisoned voice

I cannot put into words the gratitude I feel for the voice from behind these stone walls that has been given to me. I will always be grateful to God and to those who set my voice free when TSW began in 2009. A lot has happened in recent months that now calls for a change of direction and a broadening of our scope. For whatever remaining time God allows me to have this voice, These Stone Walls will have a change of name and venue to become “Beyond These Stone Walls.”

This new site will contain all the content of the old, but if you have found your way here then you have already noticed a substantial change in format and appearance. We ask for your patience as this is a work in progress that will require time to rebuild. Each week, we hope to present not only my new post for the week, but also related content from this and other sources. The idea for a “spin off” of sorts began when a reader came upon TSW one day in a Google search for Pope Benedict XVI which brought the reader to one of my posts, and then to others.

This reader is a person of deep faith and a broad background in science and technology, but chooses to remain anonymous. The reader also discovered scattered among the Internet a broad range of articles, commentary, blog posts, and a few published books about me, Pornchai Moontri, and These Stone Walls. A suggestion was made to allow this content to be collected in one place and call it, “Beyond These Stone Walls.”

As most readers know, my friend, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri has been a part of this endeavor since my very first post in 2009. It was he who first came up with the name, “These Stone Walls.” As you know, Pornchai’s prison sentence ended on September 8, 2020. After 14 years as roommates, he was released to return to his native Thailand. You must not miss this story told in “Human Traffic: The ICE Deportation of Pornchai Moontri.”

As you might imagine, life was not easy behind These Stone Walls after Pornchai left. Since that day two months ago, I have been at the hub of a rescue mission. We had developed a promising new life for Pornchai in Thailand. That was entirely the work of TSW and its readers. We were well prepared for the day he was taken away, a day I described in a post about one of TSW ’s Patron Saints, “Padre Pio: Witness for the Defense of Wounded Souls.”

The rescue mission began because Pornchai’s departure should have been a simple affair that was filled with hope. All his necessary documents had been carefully prepared in advance. He left here with us both expecting that his stay in ICE detention would be brief — a matter of days, two weeks at most. Instead, he was thrust ever deeper into a nightmare of for-profit ICE detention while he was dragged across the country from one overcrowded facility to another. That whole story must be told, and it will be told.

So for much of the last two months since Pornchai was taken away, my prison cell became a center of operation for giving support to my friend and coordinating the efforts of people on three continents to secure his release and repatriation. Like all spiritual warfare, this battle was waged on many fronts. It was at this most difficult time that unwelcome changes began to take place with These Stone Walls. One technical difficulty after another surfaced over the last two months, and I finally decided that the new site currently being considered had to take on a larger role. The content on These Stone Walls was being manipulated.

Imprisoned Voices on a Global Scale

Complicating all of the above was our global confrontation with Covid-19, its latest series of outbreaks, and the near civil war taking place between left and right in America. There are those in our midst who know just what buttons to push and when to push them. The stories you have heard and read about people being silenced — even in the Church — are real, and I was nearly silenced as well.

Through grace, and with the help of advocates and your prayers, I think I have survived the onslaught for now. Pornchai is also surviving, though in horrible conditions, and is offering what he endures for our readers. I had hoped that by the time you read this his ordeal would be over and he would have arrived intactly in Thailand.  But even after 70 days in ICE detention, that is not the case.  I will write a full account of this story when that time comes, and I will count on you to make it known.

The photograph atop this segment demonstrates the enormity of the obstacles we face on a daily basis to maintain a voice from behind these walls and bring it to you. The most basic forms of human communication that we all take for granted must overcome many obstacles here. Even though Pornchai is no longer a prisoner, but merely an ICE detainee, I had to go to extreme lengths to reach out to him. One of our friends, Claire Dion in Maine, had to utilize two phones with separate lines and configure them so that their microphones and speakers were opposite each other. She added our photos for effect. Welcome to our world!

The real founder of These Stone Walls is Saint Maximilian Kolbe. When spiritual fatherhood beckoned him to secure the salvation of another prisoner, it cost him his life. He knew that going in, but self-preservation was overcome by heroic virtue. I do not lay claim to any of that, but I was beckoned by Divine Mercy to set my quest for freedom aside to help secure freedom for another. That did not end when Pornchai left these stone walls. Even in our disposable culture, spiritual fatherhood has no expiration date.

Others of our friends who were here with me behind these walls are now free, and restored to their homelands. They write to me, and read what I write, from Japan, China, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Each of these countries, and also Thailand, have seen recent dramatic increases in visits to These Stone Walls. Divine Mercy is powerful, and prison walls were no match for it.

Beyond These Stone Walls

It has been interesting to hear from some of our friends in Asian countries where Catholicism is a small minority faith. Our friend in Japan wrote that he had no idea what I had been typing during all those years he was here with us. He said he was astonished to look up me and Pornchai from Tokyo and discover These Stone Walls. He spent weeks devouring posts that he knew were written during some of our most trying times. He finds them to be not only meaningful, but powerful. He is in awe of the back story of Pornchai, and finds the account of how we were thrown together, of all we endured, and of Pornchai’s conversion to be life-changing.

I think that what our friends around the world have found so enthralling is that they expected what I write to mirror the deprivation of prison. But it doesn’t. Just like real life, there are many sordid things here to write about, but what a waste that would be. The fact that we believe, and continue to believe even in the face of adversity and loss, is an affirmation of the Gospel. At a time when Americans are at each others’ throats in the most recent election cycle, this little voice from behind these prison walls has grown in magnitude abroad.

About seventy percent of our readers are in the United States. Canada, England, and Australia have always comprised the majority of others. In the last year or so, this has changed. In the weeks before making this transition to Beyond These Stone Walls, people from many other nations have flocked to these pages. Routinely now, India, Nepal, Japan, Thailand, China, Nigeria, and South Africa show up here in large numbers. Meanwhile, much of the European Union has drifted down the ranks of visitors. This mirrors almost exactly the weakness of Catholic practice and presence in historically Catholic countries while it thrives in Asia.

I like to think that the growing presence of readers from Beyond These Stone Walls is not because they relate to my imprisonment, but rather to the power of the Gospel and Divine Mercy to break through it. I hope you will continue to come here as we venture further Beyond These Stone Walls. We will need your help as this new adventure finds a foothold in the vast wasteland called the Internet.

A Necessary Postscript

Father Richard Heilman at the site, RomanCatholicMan.com has published a little book, the United States Grace Force Prayer Book. Claire Dion sent one each to Pornchai and me. It is a potent little book with a collection of the very prayers and devotions that I would have chosen had I composed it. My friend, Father Michael Gaitley, MIC, has a presence in its pages. His Prayer of Consecration to Jesus Through Mary is found there along with the Consecration Prayers of Saint Louis de Montfort and Saint Maximilian Kolbe. I sure hope that doesn’t go to Father Michael’s head, but I doubt that it will.

But none of that is the final point I want to make. If you ever doubt the power of Divine Mercy to invade your life with a not so-always-easy-to-see abundance of grace, then consider this: as I write this first post for Beyond These Stone Walls, Pornchai Maximilian Moontri is living in a cramped room with eighty ICE detainees in a chaotic place with the blazing lights on 24/7.

As he was preparing to leave here on September 8 for what we hoped would be a short stay in ICE detection during this global pandemic, we prepared a box of his books and other personal belongings to ship to Thailand ahead of him. Before sealing the box, he removed his copy of the United States Grace Force Prayer Book. He said he would rather risk losing it than not having it.

I had to pause while typing this because he contacted me through a friend to ask if we could send him another copy. “Did you lose it?” I asked in our phone call while wedged between two books. “No,” he said. “The other guys in the bunks around me all want to borrow mine.”

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae:  If you have been a subscriber to These Stone Walls, we have done our best to transfer your email address for notification of posts at Beyond These Stone Walls. If by chance we missed you, or if you wish to subscribe anew, please subscribe at the end of the post.

Also from Father G:  If you would like to send a note or card of encouragement to Pornchai, it may help to sustain him through this trial.  The address is:

Pornchai Moontri

A039064244

LaSalle Detention Facility 

P.O. Box 560

Trout, Louisiana 71371

And if you would like to help him as he begins life anew you may do so at:

Pornchai Moontri

c/o Beyond These Stone Walls

P.O. Box 205

Wilmington, MA 01887-0205

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