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John Agar | jagar@mlive.com

The Grand Rapids Press

on October 19, 2012 at 12:53 PM, updated October 19, 2012 at 1:21 PM

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Two Grand Rapids men among those listed on Boy Scouts of America’s ‘perversion’ list.
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GRAND RAPIDS, MI – Two Grand Rapids men are among 1,200 listed in the Boy Scouts’ so-called “perversion files” that detail confidential sexual-abuse allegations against volunteers from the early 1960s to 1985.

An Oregon court ordered the release of the records as part of a $20 million judgment against the Boy Scouts of America.

“The secrets are out,” Kelly Clark, a lawyer in an Oregon lawsuit, told the Los Angeles Times.

The perversion list was released as part of a $20 million judgment against the Scouts in 2010. The files were exhibits in a 2010 trial in Portland in which a man had been sexually abused at 13 by his scoutmaster, Clark said on his Web site.

“Given that reality, the BSA’s insistence on trying to keep its secret files secret still is a continuing disappointment, and suggests that, even now, even after hundreds of criminal and civil cases arising out of abuse in Scouting, even after a Portland jury showed its anger with a verdict of nearly $20 million in the Kerry Lewis trial—even after all that—BSA is still trying to put the interests of its organization ahead of the public interest, and ahead of the interests of child abuse survivors,” he wrote on his website.

Details of the earlier case in Grand Rapids are contained in a July 6, 1961 “confidential record sheet” of personnel for the Boy Scouts.

The then-22-year-old Grand Rapids man was volunteer for Troop 245 from 1959 to June 1961. His status was “recommended for confidential file” because of allegations he molested a 6-year-old boy, and because arson investigators had kept watch on him for two years suspecting that he started fires.

He was accused of molesting a boy “with whom we find he has been very intimate for some period of time. The police picked him up in a public park in company of the boy, and the boy has signed some very serious charges against him. This has been suspected for some time on the part of a number of our Scouters,” an official for the Grand Valley Council wrote in a 1961 letter.

In a 1963 letter from the BSA Personnel Division to the scout executive for Grand Valley Council, the director of registration in New Jersey noted that charges against the volunteer had been dismissed because there was not sufficient evidence.

But, he said, “The information which you presented to us nearly two years ago is more than sufficient indication to the Boy Scouts of American that it does not desire the services of (the volunteer) as a Scout leader.”

The volunteer was also suspected, but not charged, in three other cases, one involving an 11-year-old girl.

The letter said Boy Scouts of America isn’t obligated to accept everyone for registration, and “seriously” doubted that the volunteer was qualified – and would not reconsider any application for reinstatement.

In a later note, the scout executive noted that local officials “were exerting pressure” to have the former volunteer reinstated, with his pastor, Civil Defense leader and troop committee vouching “for him most emphatically.”

The records did not say that he was reinstated.

The other local case listed in the files was a 40-year-old Wyoming man, a tool engineer and a father of three in the process of divorce, when he registered on Aug. 23, 1982.

According to an Aug. 17, 1982, article in The Grand Rapids Press, he was accused of second- and fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct with two boys at drive-in theaters in Cascade and Plainfield townships. He pleaded guilty to second-degree criminal sexual conduct, Boy Scouts records showed.

In 1984, a Boy Scouts official wrote that “we have now placed this man on the Confidential File.”

The West Michigan Shores Council also noted that there were two others, men from Ada and Holland, accused of misconduct. But their names do not appear in the files.

E-mail John Agar: jagar@mlive.com and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/grpressagar