Catholic Church Tipped Off Joliet Newspaper Reporter to Child Porn Investigation: Attorney

The Joliet newspaper reporter jailed on child pornography charges was tipped off by officials from a Catholic parish that he was under scrutiny, an attorney said.

Federal agents “learned that the Catholic Church had notified John Gabriel about this investigation,” said attorney Steve Landis.

Gabriel, 78, is standing trial this week in Chicago. The same day he was expected to take the witness stand and give his version of events in federal court, his much younger live-in lover, 35-year-old Margarita Hernandez, was in a Joliet courtroom for her own sex case.

Landis represents Hernandez and was trying to get the felony sex case dismissed.

Hernandez was arrested in October 2012 and charged with indulging in a sex date with a 15-year-old Chicago boy. The youth is a friend of the son of one of Hernandez’s cousins, officials said.

Landis made his case Wednesday morning to have the case dismissed. Landis argued that the search warrant obtained by the feds to go into her home was actually targeting Gabriel and was overly broad.

“The warrant’s a little bit unusual,” Landis said, calling it a “spaghetti warrant” and accusing federal agents of “throwing out a lot of allegations and hoping one of them sticks.”

“This amounts to a fishing expedition,” Landis said.

Landis also said the agents could not have expected to find child pornography when they knew church officials had alerted Gabriel to the investigation, giving him time to get rid of anything incriminating.

But a federal prosecutor said agents did recover photographs. The same prosecutor detailed how Gabriel was informed he was the target of a federal investigation.

In a transcript of a hearing in Gabriel’s case, Barry Jonas of the U.S. Attorney’s Office explained that both Gabriel and Hernandez taught catechism at the church, which a source said is in Cicero.

“When (the) Chicago Police Department (was) alerted to this, they went to the church,” Jonas said. “Rightfully so, the defendant and Margarita Hernandez should not be by—by teenaged children. They warned the church, the church said something to the defendant and Margarita, and now the defendant knew he was—the jig was up. He was caught.”

Gabriel then “started wiping the computer program,” Jonas said, but agents still found “pictures of the victim” as well as of her sister and of Hernandez.

In addition, Will County prosecutors said video was seized of Hernandez “having sex with two different adolescents who appear to be possibly under the age of 18.”

Almost a year after Hernandez was taken into custody, Gabriel was arrested on charges of charges of persuading, inducing and enticing a minor to engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing child pornography.

Prior to the start of Gabriel’s trial this week, prosecutors revealed that the community newspaperman allegedly created an elaborate “fantasy world based in religion” in order to dupe an underage girl into posing for sex pictures he posted on a website in hopes of enticing “young boys to have sex with” her. This fantasy world was populated by numerous angels and priestesses who would email Gabriel’s victims and encourage them to submit to his sexual advances, as well as to have sex with underage boys, according to a court filing. The emails were actually written by Gabriel himself, according to prosecutors.

Closing arguments for Gabriel’s trial were scheduled for Thursday.

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