New Hampshire corruption drove the Fr. Gordon MacRae case

This article was published at Fr. Gordon MacRae’s blog in 2023.  It sat there for over a year entirely unnoticed. Then on Wednesday February 12, 2024, its author, CLAIRE BEST emailed a link to it to the head of a New Hampshire coalition against corruption in the courts. It has since attracted world wide attention. 

For the last 29 years, Father Gordon MacRae has been denied justice, relegated to Concord Men’s Prison in New Hampshire.  Despite an ex-FBI agent’s 3-year investigation, a Pulitzer prize-winning Wall Street Journalist’s multi-part exposé, even a current investigation into the police officer who framed him, nothing has thus far moved the needle — except perhaps in the court of public opinion.

Finally in 2023, the pieces of this puzzle have come together to explain why this might be: The New Hampshire Department for Children, Youth and Families (DCYF), some New Hampshire Police, local attorneys, the “compliance officer” for the Diocese of Manchester, and the Attorney General’s office have been involved in a racket.  For Father Gordon MacRae to get justice, they would all risk being exposed in an organized crime to frame him in order to extort the insurance for the Diocese and trigger an expansion of business that spreads to the Catholic Medical Center, schools, nursing homes, day care centers, clinics, addiction recovery centers, banks, insurance companies and media.  This is an enterprise worth billions that stretches far beyond the borders of New Hampshire across the US and internationally.

While Father Gordon MacRae has been incarcerated, New Hampshire has covered up horrific child sex abuse by its very own employees at the State’s Youth Detention Center.  The NH DCYF has failed multiple audits by the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General (DHHS OIG).  It has downplayed Medicaid fraud.  Opioids and fentanyl overdoses have skyrocketed.  Children and young adults have died or disappeared, drugs have been trafficked, arms have been trafficked, money has been laundered, billions have been made and a monopoly without accountability has blossomed.  That monopoly is tied to the interests of the US Government and its three letter agencies.  Framing Father Gordon MacRae to get inside the Diocese of Manchester looks like it was a strategic plan that has had catastrophic consequences not just for MacRae but for anyone who has become a tool for, or victim of, the Government infiltration of Catholic organizations.

Father Gordon MacRae was prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned in 1994, the year the Clinton Crime Bill (authored by Joe Biden) was enacted.  It is also the year that the Violence Against Women Act was passed enabling $9 billion in grants from the Department of Justice to police, prosecutors and Non-Government Organizations (NGOs).  Creating crimes that didn’t exist (while hiding those of state employees or friends of law enforcement and the courts) in order to access grants has undermined the integrity of the justice system in the State of New Hampshire and across the land.

“Justice for the Victim” has been a rallying cry in New Hampshire which has deliberately and consistently failed to ascertain the validity of claims of domestic and sexual assault, while pre-determining victims and predators without doing anything that could remotely be called due process.

Lots of people are denied justice each year and decades later a few of them go free after prosecutorial and police misconduct, or other flaws in the original investigations and trials, are exposed.  Some years ago in Pennsylvania, a “Kids for Cash” scheme was unravelled.  It involved police, prosecutors, judges and private attorneys.  In California, a local journalist came across a series of gatherings in which judges, prosecutors, private attorneys and the media conspired to rig cases in civil, family and criminal courts.

What has transpired in New Hampshire bears all the same markings as these.  A few breadcrumbs here and there have provided clues to an epic scandal that has been carefully hidden from the public for decades — in large part due to a small “club” who are vested in the profits from it.  That club comprises law enforcement, non-profits, local councils, attorneys general, elected representatives, justices, other members of the New Hampshire Bar and certain media outlets.  They figured out that by controlling the news, they could control the narrative.  And by controlling the narrative they could leverage the outcomes of criminal trials and civil lawsuits.  Father Gordon MacRae is a victim of this corruption which even includes local “investigative” reporters who have no critical thinking skills but are determined to reinforce the court corruption in their coverage — presumably due to the sponsorship of their media outlets.

In 1995, a prosecutor in New Hampshire failed to let the defense know that a police officer who arrested a man on trial for murder had a dishonest track record.  The state dropped the case.  The defendant’s name was Carl Laurie, for whom the “Laurie List” is named.  A 1963 US Supreme Court case, Brady v Maryland, requires the prosecution to provide any and all exculpatory evidence to the defense in a timely manner before any criminal trial.  Somehow New Hampshire ignored this rule, and for decades judges and prosecutors have been OK with that.  This is most likely because there isn’t really a division between police, prosecutors, judges and media in New Hampshire.  So a lie that works for one finds its way up the ladder to work for all.  Elected DAs who have challenged the ethics of this have been voted out of office (Robin Davis, DA of Merrimack County) or have been undermined by the Attorney General taking over their prosecutions (Michael Conley, DA of Hillsborough County).  It is easier in New Hampshire to promote a lie than it is to defend the truth because there is a waterfall of money to be made in the lie — federal grants, civil settlements, contracts, promotions, rewards.

Detective James F. McLaughlin

 In June 2018 the police detective who began investigating Father Gordon MacRae in the late 1980s was added to the Attorney General’s secret list of corrupt police officers — the “Laurie List” — also known as the Exculpatory Evidence Schedule for a charge of “Falsification of Records.”  James F. McLaughlin, New Hampshire’s top child sex crimes detective, was brought out of retirement in 2017 to work on a Grand Jury Criminal Investigation of St Paul’s School following the framing of scholarship student, 18-year-old Owen Labrie, by Concord Police Detective Julie Curtin.

Attorney General Gordon MacDonald brought McLaughlin into the investigation to supervise Detective Julie Curtin and Lieutenant Sean Ford.  The report into the school and alleged cover-ups of sex abuse from 2009 to 2017 was completed in August 2018 and a settlement agreement was reached between the Attorney General and the school administration in September 2018.  The agreement required a “compliance officer” and a contract with victims advocacy organization the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence (NHCADSV).

The agreement mirrored one that had been entered into in 2002 after James F. McLaughlin’s investigation into Father Gordon MacRae triggered the circumstances for a Grand Jury criminal investigation, a  “compliance officer” and settlement with the Diocese of Manchester.  The NHCADSV had brought on board Brian Harlow of SNAP (the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) in 2012.

Though Harlow had no connection to the MacRae case, he had been one of the original “victims” to come forward for the Diocese of Manchester investigation in 2002.  NHCADSV wanted him to help them expand their business and they had a contract with the Department of Defense as well as with the University of New Hampshire which had a strategic agreement with the (Obama) White House 2014 “Not Alone” task force to combat sexual assault on campuses.  The Chair of the University System in New Hampshire is Alex Walker.  He just so happens to also now be the CEO of Catholic Medical Center in the Diocese of Manchester.  As published in a Catholic Medical Center statement:

“Alex has been actively involved in the community for many years.  He currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the University System of New Hampshire and on the New Hampshire Business Committee for the Arts.  In 2019 and 2020 he co-chaired the Bishop’s Charitable Assistance Fund with his wife, Lisa.  He was Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Palace Theatre, and past Chairman of the Board of Directors of Granite United Way.  He has also served on the New Hampshire Bar Association’s Board of Governors, the New Hampshire Supreme Court’s Access to Justice Commission, the Board of Directors of City Year New Hampshire, the Board of Directors for the Business and Industry Association of New Hampshire, and the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors where he served as Chairman of the Board in 2011.”

Alex Walker provided counsel to the Diocese alongside the Nixon Peabody law firm which was formed in 1999 in Boston and Manchester.  Gordon MacDonald, an attorney at Nixon Peabody became Attorney General and is the current New Hampshire Supreme Court Chief Justice.  Before he took office as AG, he successfully managed to block an audit of his client Purdue Pharma.

New Hampshire’s opioid crisis has been one of the worst in the country.  Catholic Medical Center was fined $3.8 million recently for a kick back scheme.  The Boston Globe  has exposed cover-ups of medical malpractice by CMC’s administrators headed by Alex Walker.  Curiously however, the Boston Globe Spotlight team which covered the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal in 2002-2003 is only interested in exposing a portion of the story that benefits ambulance chasing civil attorneys.  The Globe  is guilty of removing comments under articles which smacks of the newspaper’s own compromised position preventing its journalists from seeking the real truth as opposed to the monied subjective “his/her/their truth”.

With the addition of Detective James F. McLaughlin on the police misconduct “Laurie List,” AG Gordon MacDonald was suddenly compromised.  He had hired McLaughlin because of his history with the Diocese and now he had to hide the fact that he knew McLaughlin was dishonest in the middle of the investigation into St Paul’s School which he had ordered.  Instead of coming clean, Gordon MacDonald kept McLaughlin’s dishonesty secret because he was part of the club that had profiteered from McLaughlin’s misconduct.  His success as an attorney is deeply tied to his representation of the Diocese of Manchester.

The “compliance officer” in the Diocese was Father Edward Arsenault who became a Monsignor before being defrocked by the Pope after he pled guilty to defrauding the diocese, a dead priest’s estate, and Catholic Medical Center in 2014.  Among the expenses Edward Arsenault had clocked up using church funds were the purchase of cell phones, computer equipment, trips to Boston, meals out and work with journalists as well as travel expenditures for himself and his young adult lover.

Recent articles in the last few weeks have revealed that the FBI had planned to infiltrate and undermine the Catholic Church.  Christopher Wray, head of the FBI, has tried to toss this off.  But the case of Father Gordon MacRae and those of police officer, James F. McLaughlin and Monsignor Edward Arsenault should force a wider inquiry into the Government’s involvement in Catholic institutions going back to the 1980s when Sylvia Gale made up a false rumor about MacRae and shared it with McLaughlin launching his investigation of MacRae.

I have long suspected that Edward Arsenault was never really a priest but actually an FBI operative who got inside the Diocese of Manchester to increase the business of The National Catholic Risk Retention Group and Catholic Charities in such a way that they would become intertwined with Maximus Inc — a for-profit enterprise acting on behalf of the Government.  His background is in accounting and finance and he also seems to be heavily involved in big pharma-adjacent enterprises: health/mental health non-profits.

Around the same time (1975) that the US Senate “Church Committee” Inquiry revealed the CIA’s work with 186 educational institutions and non-profits for MK Ultra experiments, Maximus Inc was founded by David Mastran, a Vietnam vet involved with DARPA.

Since then Maximus has grown to become the most enormous outsource company for the Governments of the US, Canada, Australia, UK, Israel and Saudi Arabia.  Its tentacles have reached into pretty much any Government program you can think of from the IRS to Medicaid, from student loans to Title IV funds, from Department of Defense contracts to Covid vaccination tracking.  For all intents and purposes, Maximus has taken over where the CIA and FBI left off when their clandestine and abhorrent human experiments were exposed by the US Senate Church Committee.  It would be hard to imagine that the CIA just stopped its experiments in its tracks with so many organizations involved.

In the 1980s in Keene New Hampshire, Sylvia Gale, an employee with State Child Protective Services and DCYF, created a false rumor about Father Gordon MacRae.  In an official DCYF letter in 1988, she told Keene Police Detective James F. McLaughlin that MacRae had been involved in a serious crime: the sexual abuse and murder of a child in Florida.  Sylvia Gale cited that the source of the fake Florida murder molestation that became McLaughlin’s “probable cause” was Msgr. John Quinn who was at the time Director of Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Manchester.

The crime did not exist and Father Gordon MacRae had never even been in Florida.  McLaughlin was known in 1985 for dishonesty but for some reason it took until June 2018 for his name to appear on a State list kept in secret by the Attorney General.

In December 2021 Detective McLaughlin’s name appeared publicly on the “Laurie List” of corrupt police for just a few hours before it was removed by Attorney General Gordon MacDonald.  Whether Sylvia Gale knew of McLaughlin’s dishonesty when she spread her rumor will forever be an unanswered question but since there were rewards being bandied about by McLaughlin, I believe she probably did know and that money was involved as a reward to her as a “witness” for creating the rumor.  Sylvia Gale was a DCYF supervisor of Patricia Grover, the mother of Father MacRae’s accuser at his 1994 trial.

In the time frame from 1985-2018, James F. McLaughlin rose to be New Hampshire’s most celebrated child and internet sex crimes investigator who instructed others in his tactics which included making false statements, procuring and coercion of “victims,” deleting exculpatory evidence, working with media to “shape the message,” federal entrapment (sending unsolicited images of minors), working with civil attorneys and non-profits/victims rights advocates in kick-back schemes.  He was given a lifetime achievement award in 2016.  At the same ceremony, Concord Police Detective Julie Curtin, was given an award for her work in investigating St. Paul’s school, singling out and framing 18-year-old Owen Labrie.  She worked with domestic and international agencies to censor social media for the “victim” who had been recruited in June 2014 for the latest sick experiment.  She was carrying the McLaughlin torch forward while he was supposed to retire.

James F. McLaughlin’s crooked enterprise yielded millions in grants, increases in police budgets, non-profit budgets and grants for DCYF, the University of New Hampshire and other affiliated agencies.  Why did it matter if a few people had to be framed when so much money could be extorted and former federal prosecutors working at Nixon Peabody are on their side?  The law firm’s business grew, turning it into a giant in representation for the health care industry.  Particularly that tied to Catholic healthcare institutions — where Monsignor Edward Arsenault was tasked with increasing profits — and the opioid industry.  Nixon Peabody represented Purdue Pharma when it was sued by the State of New Hampshire.  Creating sex offenders, extorting Catholic establishments, creating drug addicts and claiming Medicaid for medical treatments and facilities has been a sustainable business in New Hampshire for over two decades.

James F. McLaughlin’s enterprise is reminiscent of that of Tom Coleman, aka “T.J. Dawson,” a police officer in Tulia, Arizona who built a business, with accolades all along the way, framing members of the black community for drug offenses they did not commit.  Drugs would be planted on unsuspecting targets.

Instead of drugs, for Keene Detective James F. McLaughlin, it was sex crimes that were planted.  He would fabricate whatever story he could pull off to get plea deals and convictions.  In New Hampshire it was easy because the statutes for sex crimes require no corroborating witnesses or evidence.  Add qualified immunity for police officers to that, and sovereign immunity for prosecutors, judges and non-profits tied to the courts such as CASA, NHCADSV and agencies like DCYF.  They had the perfect racket: collect the federal grants, fabricate the crimes, hide the exculpatory evidence, train the witnesses, use media to garner public outrage to leverage civil settlements with attorneys at the ready to profiteer, and non-profits to train victims and write impact statements.  Wash, rinse, repeat.

Claire Best is the founder and CEO of Claire Best & Associates — an international film and television agency based in Los Angeles.  Her clients include Oscar and Emmy Award winners.  Her background is in documentaries.

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