“America was a land of secret societies, interlocking signals passed like a perfumed handshake, the Three Kings of Orient R and Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer’s apprentice. Rigmarole and deadpan tomfoolery in the copes and chasubles of wizards, ceremonial aprons, kilts, satin jellabas and hairdresser’s sanbenitos. The opiate of the American people may be the church but their religion was the lodge. Politics was conducted not in smoke-filled rooms but from hermetic chambers and the freedoms of the open society were but the hoopla of a Shriners’ circus.” -Kenneth Tindell, The Banks of the Sea (1987)

The story of Gilbert Gauthe and Judge Henry Politz, while never mentioning a secret society in this article, surely has the outward appearance one would expect to see from a true blood oath brotherhood.

But first, the Gauthe brothers, Richard and Gilbert, active pedophiles since their youth. Gilbert and his younger brother, Richard, a Boy Scout leader, had molested scores of children. Richard Gauthe, who had been ousted from the Air Force and the Scouts for abusing children, had subsequently married a woman with three children in the late 1970s and, according to her, molested all three.

Richard Gauthe's former wife, Dixie Diez, said she had caught him molesting her son in 1980, years before Gilbert's arrest, and forced a confession from him. "Richard told me both he and Gilbert had been doing this for years," she said. "I knew Gilbert was a priest and had access to all those kids and I tried to turn him in, but the police didn't believe me. They said that, even if it was true, what I knew was hearsay and they couldn't arrest him."

Fmr. Scoutmaster Richard Gauthe was eventually convicted and jailed for molesting children in Great Britain. Gilbert, however, would remain free for five years after his sister-in-law alerted police to him.

"Father" Gilbert Gauthe, was the first of the pedophile priests to be prosecuted in the 1980s, he was one of the nation's most infamous pedophiles, a man who had molested hundreds of boys before his arrest in 1985. But he had mortal friends in ungodly high places, like Judge Politz.

That relationship reaches back at least to 1985, when Gauthe was arrested in Abbeville, La., and became the first of a number of such priests throughout the country. His conviction on 34 counts of child molestation began an avalanche of civil lawsuits against the Roman Catholic Church that continues today (written 1998).

Judge Politz, head of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a giant in his state's legal community, former president of the Louisiana Trial Lawyers Association, an officeholder on numerous boards and a man in whose name a scholarship has been established at the Louisiana State University law school...

That was the public face of the man who, by all appearances, was unwavering in his devotion to making sure Gilbert Gauthe, of all people, didn't have to be accountable for his crimes. ...Judge Politz, a family man with 11 children who was divorced in the early 1990s, and a man with a record so spotless that he was once considered as a potential nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court.

By Gauthe's own account, Politz is his "legal and moral" counselor. By Politz's account, he has simply assisted a younger man whose grandfather befriended Politz's widowed mother.

But readers can come away with their own conclusions...

http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news13/1998_11_01_HoustonChronicle_JudgesIntervention_Gilbert_Gauthe_1.htm http://archive.is/vdtgJ