BADGE OF COURAGE
How fed nailed his childhood molester
When Jim Clemente walked into the Bronx home of his former summer camp director, it wasn’t for old time’s sake.
The twentysomething Clemente was wearing a wire. Federal agents and an NYPD detective were listening in.
And his old camp boss, Michael J. O’Hara, was showing Clemente pictures of kids he’d molested — just like he’d abused Clemente a decade prior.
“I was scared to death while I was there,” Clemente, now 59 and retired from a storied FBI career, recalled of the 1986 meeting.
Clemente had convinced the predator he was a kindred spirit, and he had to keep his cool or the criminal case being built against O’Hara — a Boy Scout leader, Catholic-school teacher and youth-basketball coach believed to have sexually abused hundreds of kids — would fall apart.
The meeting was his sixth in three months with the violent, intimidating drunk with the perpetual “s- -t-eating smirk,” Clemente recalled. The same man who had violated him while he was a teenager working at a Catholic Youth Organization camp in upstate Godeffroy.
Clemente, at the time of the O’Hara investigation, was a fledgling Bronx Family Court prosecutor. He would go on to become a criminal profiler for the feds, to his present career as a writer for the TV show “Criminal Minds.”
Strangled by shame and fear, a young Clemente could only confide in his high-school guidance counselor, a priest, the Rev. Frank Stinner, about the abuse.
“Say 10 Our Fathers and 10 Hail Marys. I absolve you of your sin. Don’t ever speak of this again,” Stinner said.
He kept silent for a decade. But after a fateful conversation in 1985 with his brother — in which they both confessed to knowing of O’Hara’s perverted predilections — Clemente called the FBI-NYPD Joint Task Force on Sexual Exploitation of Children.
“As I was telling the story, I started shaking, shivering,” he said. “I was 15. It was my first time ever being away from home.”
O’Hara, a Long Island native, was a “tough love” authority figure who hit kids and shot his rifle off without warning. He had Clemente, a junior camp staffer, stay with him alone in the woods to help close the campground.
O’Hara complimented him, took him out, handed him booze. He started talking about sex.
“I didn’t know he was manipulating me,” Clemente said. “Eventually, he molested me, and he did it again and again.”
When he returned home to Goshen, “I went in the shower, and I turned the light off . . . and I just cried. That was the day I kind of withdrew from everybody.”
Months after he reported O’Hara, the task force needed Clemente’s help. “I was like no f- -king way! I can’t sit down and have a cordial conversation with this guy!”
But his answer changed the day he visited his alma mater, Fordham University — and saw O’Hara sitting in the registrar’s office. He made a remark about Clemente’s mother passing. “It creeped me out, and it pissed me off. I called the FBI and I said, ‘I know where he is, wire me up.’ ”
Clemente enticed O’Hara to a meeting, saying that he needed to talk and that O’Hara was the only one he could turn to.
O’Hara got straight to the point, saying, “This is about sex, right? It has to do with what happened between us?” according to Clemente.
O’Hara, then 43, gleefully shared his horrific legacy: He had been a pedophile since he was 19, working at a Queens orphanage on the night shift with access to kids.
“He bragged about it,” Clemente said.
They spoke for three hours.
“The detective met me, and they took off the wire, and I immediately ran to the bathroom and puked my guts out.”
It was six meetings before Clemente was able to help steer investigators to victims at a school at Hastings-on-Hudson. The recent cases would be viable in court because they were within the then-five-year statute of limitations.
In one meeting, Clemente was able to palm two of the molestation photos O’Hara showed him, which became crucial evidence in the case.
O’Hara was arrested in 1987 and convicted on a child-pornography charge. He was sentenced to a year in prison.
When the case was finished, one of the FBI agents Clemente worked with took him to lunch and handed him an application to join the bureau.
“It really was the pivotal turning point in my life,” Clemente recalled.
During his FBI career, he worked on child-trafficking cases, and one of the pedophiles he busted was Father Stinner.
Clemente plans to sue the Archdiocese of New York, which ran the summer CYO camp, in Manhattan Supreme Court on Monday under New York’s new Child Victims Act, which created a one-year “look back” window for sexual abuse cases past the statute of limitations. He called the law “amazing.”
Investigators believed O’Hara, who died in 2000, had as many as 200 victims.
“It’s shameful that the Archdiocese of New York Catholic schools did not remove O’Hara in 1966, when he was caught the first time,” said Clemente’s lawyer, Jeff Herman.
Talking openly about molestation is the only way to stop it and to move on, said Clemente.
“I can tell you from experience, once I went forward and once I confronted him, that’s when I started to turn it around,” he said.