Child Rape Victim Pleads with Merrick Garland for Help

​November 17, 2022

The Honorable Merrick B. Garland, Attorney General of the United States
Office of the Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20530-0001  

Dear General Garland:   

I write to tell you about a great injustice that has been done to the children of Boston over many decades and which continues to victimize them today, so I allege, and I ask for your help in making it right. 

 In 2020, I wrote to Suffolk County District Attorney Rachel Rollins about a small group of children, including myself, who had been kidnapped and deliberately hurt at the Charlestown Boys Club in 1963, sometime between the last week of June and the first week of July. 

 DA Rollins was the third District Attorney I had written to. The first, Ralph C. Martin, who at the time was also a sitting member of the board of directors at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston, Inc. (“the Club”), told me that the statute of limitations had run out and there was nothing he could do. But it turned out that both of the accused had moved out of state long ago, thus tolling the statute of limitations. Still, DA Martin declined my plea for help. 

 The second DA, Daniel F. Conley, who was not a named member of the same board but nonetheless attended newsworthy gatherings by other board members at Club events, gave me a hearing with ADA Catherine Tucker. There was no forensic interview and ADA Tucker told me that she would not be following protocol during my hearing, nor would the hearing be recorded. At the end of the hearing, she told me that there would not be an investigation of my allegations. Moreover, she forwarded me a letter that DA Conley wrote to Jeffrey F. Jones, managing partner of the Boston law firm Palmer and Dodge and chairman of the Club’s board of directors, and told him that the Suffolk County District Attorney had seen no evidence to support the allegations I made at the hearing he granted me, even though I never got to show my voluminous evidence because a second planned meeting for that purpose was eventually refused by ADA Tucker and Victims Advocate William Paige. 

 Many years after that, DA Rollins gave me a hearing with ADA Alissa Goldhaber. Ms. Goldhaber had seven other people with her, all professionals, and they all had questions. At the end of my lengthy forensic interview, all eight people, one by one, carefully explained to me why they believed what I had told them. And an investigation was opened. 

 The allegations I made were that, in 1963, two brothers, James and Michael Power of Charlestown, had kidnapped, raped, and mutilated a roomful of pre‑teen boys inside the equipment room at the Jordan Gym in the Charlestown Boys Club. I also explained that the resulting injuries required decades of recovery that entailed numerous surgeries, according to another victim, and very painful psychotherapy. And I documented all of my own injuries with medical records. 

 Within weeks of opening the investigation, before anyone had been contacted by the Boston Police, news of its existence was leaked to the four senior members of the board of directors at the Boys and Girls Club of Boston. And then the news was leaked to the two accused Power brothers. I have documentation to prove these leaks and their chronology. Most importantly, in order to have known the names of James and Michael Power, someone had to have obtained the records of my forensic interview, which is the only place where I ever named the accused, a witness, and three other possible victims (one confirmed), nowhere else, ever. Those records were deliberately leaked, in violation of Massachusetts laws that protect victims of child abuse, like myself. Thus, the Massachusetts system is failing the victims of its most unspeakable crimes. And that is another reason I ask for your help. 

 Upon contact with Det. Jeff Firnstein from the Boston Police Department’s Crimes Against Children Unit, James Power denied any involvement, and his brother Michael refused to answer any questions whatsoever. When Det. Firnstein finally heard from Michael’s lawyer, after a very lengthy wait that he almost abandoned, Det. Firnstein told me that the two accounts sounded synchronized and contrived, using similar “words and phrases.” Det. Firnstein told me that it was his impression that the two brothers had “recently communicated with each other.” In addition, Det. Firnstein also contacted Edmund Moussally, who worked at the Charlestown Boys Club in 1963 and told me, in 1999, that he knew what had happened and someone named “James” was one of the perpetrators. Mr. Moussally knew the person’s last name and deliberately chose to withhold it from me, telling me, just before he spoke the last name, “I don’t remember,” as if he was saying he didn’t remember at this time, maybe later. But in the summer of 2021, Mr. Moussally told Det. Firnstein that “he knew nothing about it” and denied ever telling me otherwise. 

 I allege that the four most senior members of the board of directors of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston are the individuals to whom news of the investigation was leaked. I also allege that those senior members contacted Mr. Moussally and suborned him. And I have documentation to prove that as well because, in 1999, after speaking to me, Mr. Moussally also spoke with Boston Globe reporter Jamal Watson, who asked Mr. Moussally if it was possible that this happened,” and Mr. Moussally replied “it may have happened.” 

 And I allege further that the four most senior members of the Club are prominent civic leaders here in Boston who have enjoined local authorities in the police and judicial departments to prevent any and all investigations of what happened at the Charlestown Boys Club in 1963. 

 I ask for your help in overcoming this deeply wayward conspiracy of silence and persecution because it is the children of Boston, specifically the poor ones, who will suffer its true burden. 

 Det. Firnstein has since been transferred out of the Crimes Against Children Unit (CACU) and Victims Advocate Brittany Doherty has left the District Attorney’s office. I tried to communicate with both the Suffolk County Victims Assistance Program and the head of the CACU, Sgt. Det. Pamela Harris, to ask for the name of a new contact for me, in order that I might continue the investigation on my own and pass on what I find to CACU, but neither person nor anyone in their office would help me. They explicitly declined. In addition, ADA Goldhaber has not answered any of my letters. Insofar as I have no one, either in the Suffolk County DA’s office or within the Boston Police Department, with whom I can communicate and present new evidence, the investigation has virtually been shut down. But ADA Goldhaber told me that her office “does not close these investigations.” However, in my case, that is precisely what has happened. And I wish to make it well-known, by writing you, that this illegal shutdown presents a grave danger to the children of Boston. 

 If an investigation of what happened at the Charlestown Boys Club in 1963 cannot be undertaken, then the crime will go unpunished. This was a crime in which small, crying children were deliberately mutilated and tortured, as some tried to run for their lives. And if that happens, there is nothing to stop it or any lesser assault from continuing, certainly not a culture that saw it happening openly, according to Mr. Moussally, and did nothing to stop it back then. Quite the contrary, in fact, as I am about to explain. 

 Just four years after I wrote to every member of the Club’s board of directors in 2000 and told them what had happened to me, it happened again in 2004 when Brendan Coleman was tried and convicted of raping a child “in a secluded area of the Charlestown Boys and Girls Club,” according to the Boston Globe on June 20, 2003. 

 The Club’s attorneys do not deny that Brendan Coleman raped a child, but they deny that it happened at the Charlestown Boys Club, even though the Boston Globe first reported that was precisely where it happened and only corrected their story after DA Ralph Martin, a sitting member of the Club’s board of directors at the time, admitted a mistake in identifying the scene of a crime involving the rape of a child at an organization on whose board he sat. 

 I would go a step further, despite the Club’s denials, and suggest that Brendan Coleman’s assault happened in the exact same room where I had been raped along with about a dozen other boys in 1963. That is the equipment room, the only room in the entire gym, which is separated from the Charlestown clubhouse by a long tunnel that lends to mischief because it completely separates the boys from the main building. That equipment room is the only “secluded area” in the former church now known as the Jordan Gym. 

 When I was there, the equipment room had two ornamental half‑moon windows that were situated near the ceiling, like portholes. After what happened in 1963, the Club replaced those two “portholes” with regular full‑size windows looking out onto the gym. But then they did something that was very telling. 

 The equipment room where all this happened is partitioned with a dividing wall that splits the room in half but does not extend the length of the room because there is only one doorway. Looking through one of the two windows on each side of the partition does not show the other side of the room. After installing a new full‑size window on each side of the single doorway, which required brick-and-mortar construction, they then removed the window on the side where the crime I allege had happened, which required another brick-and-mortar construction. Clearly, an administrative decision was made to seal up that side of the equipment room in which the Club knew a horrific crime had occurred and which had necessitated the need for two new windows in the first place. And they deliberately undertook the labor and the expense to undo that crucial remedy, as if they were stupidly and arrogantly spitting into the face of history. The other possibility, that they wanted it to continue, is unthinkable. 

 In fact, though I am unable to say how regularly assaults like the one I endured happened, I can document that pedophilia was rampant and not hidden from view in the fifties and sixties, which means I have photographs and eyewitness accounts of it by both children and staff in the sixties. (Please see attached.) 

 For instance, Edward Darragh was a Charlestown resident who was, among other things, the director of the pool at the Charlestown Boys Club in the 60s, where boys were required to swim without bathing suits. He was also the director of the Midget Division, which put him in charge of the smallest and youngest boys at the Charlestown Boys Club. One man who knew Mr. Darragh at the Charlestown Boys Club wrote an account that describes Mr. Darragh as being in charge of another part of the club that was called a “secret club.” In order to get into the club, the boy had to agree to an initiation that required him to remove all his clothes in front of Darragh and other boys already in the secret club. That is what Mr. Darragh was really up to at the Charlestown Boys Club in the early sixties.  And it went on for years. 

 However, after what happened to me, it appears the Club cracked down on the pedophilia and removed Mr. Darragh from the organization, after which his behavior was finally exposed to authorities and he was sent to prison for life. But it seems he was well‑protected during his tenure at the Charlestown clubhouse, starting at least in January of 1957. More than one person, including Mr. Moussally, told me that he acted out flagrantly inappropriate sexual behavior with club members with impunity. 

 But as if that wasn’t bad enough, the Club also took pictures of boys, which I most certainly characterize as child pornography, and they published them in their community newspaper, the Charlestown Patriot Newspaper, which the Club owned. I enclose those published photographs for your consideration. And I ask you to please think about the effect they would have had on a pedophile living in the community. How easy and simple it would have been for him to just run down to the Charlestown Boys Club and enthusiastically volunteer? And if that was the case, how many were there? The photographs are a very clear signal, which the Club itself published in their community newspaper, that things had gone terribly awry at the Charlestown Boys Club in 1963. What they do not reveal is the actual horror that was playing out, which is only being revealed now, by me. 

 My point in telling you all this is to show that there is a very real history of children being assaulted at the Charlestown Boys Club, from the fifties all the way up to the twenty aughts. 

 And if these assaults cannot be investigated, as is certainly my case, then there can be no assurance that they will end, as I allege they have not. Secrecy most definitely protects the evil going on here, and silence most definitely preserves that secrecy. And, in fact, there are very real suspicions, as in the case of Brendan Coleman, that it continues today. Indeed, thirty years after what happened to me, former 90s Charlestown clubhouse director Jerry Steimel, while discussing my case with filmmaker Rudi Schwab, went on the record to state that he saw real fear in the eyes of children who were summoned to the gym for exercises. 

 I implore you to help me overcome this failure of justice, specifically, by investigating it — because my local authorities will not investigate it, as a matter of privilege and exemption. All that needs to be done is to interview Michael Power because he is remorseful and repentant, and he is unable to lie about it because he doesn’t have the spine. He will confess, if only he is interviewed. And then some healing can begin. 

 Please consider the merit of a society of people here in Boston that exercises privilege and exemption — rather than justice — in a matter of this gravity. And please consider the very long history of the problem that is being silenced by the immense burden of that privilege. 

 If you cannot investigate, at least consider helping me restore my rights. As a result of my efforts to fight this injustice, I have lost simple but fundamental rights and liberties like the use of the mail, both electronic and the US mail, right to privacy (even in my bedroom), right to housing, right to operate a small but successful business, and access to my local courts, including housing, small claims and criminal court, all of which is documented. 

 More specifically, I ask for your help retrieving my stolen mail. Following the DA’s suspension of its investigation, I wrote by certified mail to James and Michael Power to publicly accuse them. Michael twice refused to accept a letter from me and it was returned to me by the Post Office each time. But my letter to James, with whom the Club has been communicating for at least ten years, so I allege, was never delivered nor was it ever returned to me; it was stolen — while in the custody of the United States Postal Service. And it happened twice because I sent both letters via certified mail, once with the signature requirement and once without it. And both of James’ two letters were stolen. 

 I implore you to heed this most earnest plea and help me overcome this failure of justice. 

 My opponents have taken their adversity to an extreme, wherein it has become criminal and perverse, providing counsel and comfort to the perpetrators instead of the victims, which is the furthest place from justice.    

 Sincerely,       
/signed/
 James Chester     
 Enclosures: Attachments (14 pages)