In Episode 4 of the first season of Leverage, a priest is brutally attacked on his way to a city council meeting where he was going to beg to save his church from a developer. His attackers, it turns out, were hired by the developer: “Get rid of the activist priest.”
Pure fiction, right? That sort of thing doesn’t actually happen . . . or does it? From Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City by Anthony Flint (pp. 157-8):
One evening [Father Gerhard] La Mountain informed Jacobs that he would not be able to come a critical Board of Estimate hearing on the [Lower Manhattan Expressway] project, saying he had to visit a sick friend in Massachusetts. But in fact he had been summoned to a meeting at an archdiocese office behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral in midtown, where a church administrator informed La Mountain that he should lower his profile in the fight against the Lower Manhattan Expressway. He was ordered not to breathe a word of this instruction. No one could ever prove how the silencing of the unruly priest came about, but Moses did have close ties with the archbishop of the diocese, Francis Joseph Cardinal Spellman.
So this is proof? Intimation and suspicion are now considered proof?
Love ya, Seth, but your standards of evidence are often shockingly low.
Les, my main point is that an activist priest was silenced. Obviously someone was behind it. It wasn’t an accident. It doesn’t have to be Moses for my point to be correct.