How a prominent Ware attorney preyed on troubled boys - and why some people in town continue to stand by him.
Joel Pentlarge was a pillar of the community. A lawyer by trade, he built himself a reputation as a civic missionary, donating hour upon hour to Ware’s governmental boards, first as a selectman, then on the conservation commission, where he fought to protect the old mill town’s fragile wetlands and foothills.
Social activism came second nature to Pentlarge, a sign of his pedigree in an affluent New England family. His mother, the late Frances “Effie” Eaton Pentlarge, taught by example: An esteemed member of Maine’s politically progressive circles, Effie Pentlarge crusaded for social justice. In the early- to mid-1990s she helped revive a decades-old political movement to extend civil rights to gay and lesbian Mainers and co-founded Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays in Maine to build bridges between gay and straight people.
Effie Pentlarge’s oldest son also professed a deep concern for social justice. Joel Pentlarge directed his altruism toward down-and-out children and families. The primary beneficiary of the lawyer’s largess was Valley Human Services, a not-for-profit social services agency in Ware that provides a range of support services, including sexual abuse counseling, to low-income clients. Pentlarge not only offered pro bono legal work to the $1.8 million-a-year state-funded agency, he also served on its board for 18 years. He was one of VHS’s most loyal champions and benefactors.
On the side, he took a special interest in young street toughs, boys who had trouble with the law or at school and, quite often, with their families. He employed them as handymen at his various rental properties in town. But more than that, he took them under his wing.
Sure, there were whispers: What did Pentlarge really want with these troubled boys? He was an out gay man, out and proud. When accusations of child molestation surfaced in the mid-1980s, Pentlarge and his friends deflected them by crying prejudice and homophobia. Well-meaning people were intimidated by the insinuation that questioning Pentlarge’s motives was an act of bigotry, that it fed into a detestable stereotype that suggests gays are pedophiles at heart.
But the whispers persisted. By the early 1990s, the volume grew loud enough to reach the ears of the state police. And then, investigators say, the boys themselves balked. They agreed to tell their stories, but hesitated to testify — out of fear and shame and, perhaps, admiration. Or even love.
“He raised children to a level of understanding and respect that all kids want,” said Assistant District Attorney Alex Nappan, who prosecuted Pentlarge last summer on five counts of child rape, sex crimes that began in 1985 and ended in 1998 just before a grand jury returned the first of five indictments against Pentlarge.
“All kids want to be heard and understood,” Nappan said. “Joel respected kids to the point where he gave them the opportunity to make decisions that society doesn’t let them.”
By all outward indications, Pentlarge was unfazed by the state police investigation and others undertaken by the state Department of Social Services and the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers. Despite the heightened scrutiny, the prospect of public disclosure, the danger to his career, Pentlarge continued to pursue boys who needed guidance and money, and to groom them for sex.
For 15 years Pentlarge masked his pedophilia with his professional stature, his social position and civic good deeds, while other pillars of the community stood silently by, largely deaf and blind to his crimes. Pentlarge preyed on some of Ware’s most vulnerable and troubled boys, using money and alcohol — peppered with affection and attention — to extract sex.
That much Pentlarge admitted when he accepted the July 31, 2000, plea agreement that placed him behind bars at MCI Cedar Junction for a mere three to four years, a remarkably light sentence that Judge C. Brian McDonald accepted with great hesitation, insisting the plea agreement was far too lenient for the crimes Pentlarge committed.
Yet for many of Ware’s “substantial citizens” — a term McDonald used at sentencing to refer to Pentlarge’s apologists — any time at all was too harsh a punishment. Nearly a dozen friends, businesspeople, former town officials and, in one instance, a lawyer for DSS, offered their support in writing to the court. Many continue to support him today.
Few crimes elicit a more visceral reaction than child sexual abuse. Yet when we wring our hands and ask, “How does something like this happen?” the best answer may be “How doesn’t it happen more often?” The Pentlarge case demonstrates how easy it is for society to remain blind to child sexual assault, especially when the victims are adolescent boys. It also shows that when the perpetrator is an otherwise upstanding member of the community and his victims are tainted by troubled pasts, it is painfully easy for justice to be denied.
Joel Pentlarge lit on Massachusetts State Police radar screens five years before investigators and the Northwestern District Attorney’s Office were able to collect all the necessary elements of a successful prosecution.
Court records show that as early as 1993 state police had spoken with boys they suspected had been molested by Pentlarge. Investigators say the boys were unwilling to testify, and without cooperative victims who were willing to testify before a grand jury, the state’s case was fatally weak. The rapes continued.
In 1998 investigators got two big breaks. First, State Police Investigator Sgt. Sue Cronin, who declined to be interviewed for this story, uncovered a potentially damaging pair of letters between Pentlarge and long-time friend Tara Lindquist. In the first letter, which Lindquist sent to Pentlarge in May 1984, she inquires about his seeming fascination with adolescent boys. In his June 1984 response, Pentlarge gives a seven-page explanation of why his sexual attraction to minor boys is normal and natural and even morally defensible.
“It reads like a pamphlet for NAMBLA,” Nappan said, referring to the North American Man/Boy Love Association, a controversial organization that promotes the view that sex between adult men and boys is natural and should be decriminalized.
In the letter, which Judge McDonald sealed from public view but quoted from in his sentencing, Pentlarge defends pedophilia and tries to distance himself from the “stereotypical pedophile who uses candy, drugs, force or trickery to garner the sexual involvement of an unsuspecting child unbeknownst to his parents.”
Lindquist had sent copies of the correspondence between her and Pentlarge to DSS. After the agency decided not to pursue a full-fledged investigation, it destroyed the letters, as is standard DSS policy, Nappan said. Sgt. Cronin, who had spent years investigating Pentlarge, knew of Lindquist’s letters to DSS. When Cronin found out Pentlarge’s DSS file had expired, she went to the source. Pentlarge’s friend had kept copies of both letters and turned them over to Nappan.
But the letters alone were of only limited use as evidence in a criminal case in Massachusetts. In his letter to Lindquist Pentlarge did not admit to any specific illegal activity involving any of the boys who eventually testified before the grand jury. Instead, Pentlarge offered a stunningly cogent defense of his sexual interest in minor boys.
Investigators’ next important break came when three boys agreed to add their voices to two others who had already resolved to tell their stories to a grand jury. Together, their stories told a far more comprehensive and compelling story of abuse and detailed a pattern of victimization that had continued virtually unabated from 1985 to 1998. By late 1999 grand juries had handed up five indictments containing the accounts of four different victims who testified that Pentlarge had raped them.
By the time prosecutors officially accused Pentlarge of raping four boys, he all but embodied the stereotypical pedophile he had described in his 1984 letter to Lindquist. Instead of the “candy, drugs, force or trickery” Pentlarge listed as the pathetic lures of the run-of-the-mill pedophile, however, he used attention, affection and hard cash to get what he wanted.
In one account included in court records, two boys explain how, several weeks into a regular gig doing odd jobs for Pentlarge, he called them into an apartment he maintained above his Prospect Street law offices. Then he broke out the rum and Coke.
“Ours were strong. His looked kind of weak,” the boy testified. “We had a good buzz going.”
Pentlarge then asked the boys if they “wanted to earn extra money.”
“Yeah, that’d be cool,” the boy said. “What do we have to do?”
According to the boy’s grand jury testimony, Pentlarge replied, “Would you like to go into the bedroom?”
“When we went into the bedroom things kind of changed,” the boy testified. “We thought at first we would watch him masturbate, but then it was for him to perform oral sex on us.”
One boy who worked for Pentlarge in the early 1990s described during the investigation how after a short stint working for Pentlarge as a hired hand, Pentlarge began asking him to come to his house at night to do work. The boy would return home with between $10 and $100, depending upon what Pentlarge was paying that night for sex. According to court records and interviews with investigators, the boy said his family knew what was going on but sent him back night after night because he was making decent money.
Tommy admits he too did it for the money. But he still considers what Pentlarge did to him rape.
Sex paid better than anything else a teenager could scrounge up in Ware, Tommy, one of the boys who testified before a grand jury, said in an interview with the Advocate. (His name, and the names of any victims referred to in this piece, have been changed to protect their identity.) He said he doesn’t have a stomach for alcohol, so he didn’t drink the rum and Cokes Pentlarge mixed for the other boys. But when you’re 15 and poor, 25 or 50 bucks in your pocket is pretty intoxicating all by itself.
“But I was hoping someone would help us,” Tommy said. “… We had investigators come up to us. We’ve had all kinds of other people come up to us and ask us about Joel. They just didn’t seem like they were interested in what we were telling them. Joel’s got money, you know.”
But things changed for Tommy one night in 1998 when he walked into a room and found Pentlarge with a younger boy, who was dressing frantically. In this boy Tommy saw his own reflection.
“When I saw Nick with Joel that night, that was it,” said Tommy, who started having sex with Pentlarge for money when he was 15 and is now in his mid-20s.
“Nick had no shirt on, Joel was putting his shirt back on and was answering the door. I said, ‘Nick, you’re coming with me.’ I grabbed him and took him to McDonald’s. … When I saw him there with Joel, I felt like I needed to protect [him and the other boys]. Without any question. He would really mess up [the other boys'] lives, too.”
Tommy decided he would cooperate fully with state police investigators and would try to get some of the other boys to join him. Pentlarge’s house of cards began to crumble.
In preparation for trial, which was to begin in mid-July 2000, Pentlarge hired Harry Miles, a skilled and prominent Northampton defense attorney. The boys, who had been looked after by Massachusetts State Police investigators throughout the grand jury inquiry and pre-trial phases, steeled themselves for the painful ordeal of cross-examination.
As victims go, these boys were no angels. The natural sympathy a prosecutor might expect from jurors seated to hear a child rape case could easily have been undermined by the boys’ own misdeeds. Several of Pentlarge’s victims had criminal records. One is now jailed in Vermont. Another was on probation at the time of the trial for sexually assaulting a young child.
On the second day of the trial, before a jury had been empanelled, Pentlarge accepted a plea agreement promising him no more than four years in prison. The plea spared the young victims the ordeal of facing the man who had effectively made prostitutes out of them; it guaranteed the district attorney that Pentlarge would do time; and it put an end to Pentlarge’s 15-year pattern of sexual abuse of Ware’s vulnerable boys and ensured he would remain on probation for life.
The deal also let Pentlarge off easy for a crime the commonwealth considers serious enough to warrant a life sentence. By contrast, one of Pentlarge’s victims, who five years after Pentlarge first raped him turned around and sexually molested two children, faces a more severe sentence for violating probation than Pentlarge received for his entire 15-year string of sexual abuse. The man has not been convicted of any additional crimes; he violated probation by not completing the sexual abuse counseling ordered by the court. In a December hearing in Franklin District Court, he was given one more chance to live up to the terms of his probation. If he fails, he faces five to seven years in prison.
Apparently, no one was more deeply troubled by Pentlarge’s light sentence than Judge McDonald, who clearly considered the three-to-four-year term a slap on the wrist. During a mid-July hearing on sentencing, McDonald scorned both the prosecution and the defense and refused to accept the plea agreement until he felt certain that signing off was not just in Pentlarge’s interest but also in the best interests of his victims. McDonald delayed sentencing to consider the matter.
On July 31 the judge entered a packed Hampshire County superior courtroom prepared to sentence Pentlarge. He had received the Hampshire County Probation Department’s report on the plea agreement assessing its suitability to the crimes. He had heard from the victims’ witnesses, advocates charged with protecting the rights of victims who are randomly dragged down the rabbit hole of the criminal justice system. And he had read the letters he had received from Pentlarge’s supporters — men and women of stature and substance who asked McDonald for mercy, something the 50-year-old attorney himself had never requested.
McDonald sat, held up the handful of those letters and spoke: “In my not so lengthy judicial career, I have not given any case greater consideration and thought regarding a sentencing decision. …
“I am shocked at some of those letters. And they disturb me greatly and make me wonder what is wrong with a society where substantial citizens believe that volunteer work for an airport or an interest in dogs or maintaining low-income residential housing or employing young people should excuse the conduct of Mr. Pentlarge and would justify a sentence that does not involve punishment by incarceration. … In my view it’s worse than naivete. In my view, these letter writers are blind to the crimes committed by the defendant.”
The letters of support were not part of the case file in Hampshire Superior Court, but the Advocate was granted permission to view them after petitioning Judge McDonald.
James P. Thomas, a retired Air Force colonel and a former Ware selectman, is among those who petitioned the judge on Pentlarge’s behalf. Thomas is now president of the Palmer Airport Association and also the CEO of Riverside Aviation Inc., an aviation dealer in Ware. Before Pentlarge’s arrest, Thomas and Pentlarge had worked closely together to preserve the community airport, which was at risk of being shut down.
When Judge McDonald castigated “substantial citizens” for being blind to Pentlarge’s crimes, he held Thomas’ letter, among others, in his hand. The crimes had taken a toll on the community, Thomas wrote. But he wasn’t referring to Pentlarge’s victims: “It would be a great loss to the community and the pilots who depend on us saving the Palmer Airport,” Thomas wrote, “if we lost [Pentlarge's] valuable legal services for a number of years.” In asking for leniency, Thomas mentioned neither Pentlarge’s crimes nor his victims.
“One of my big fears,” wrote Clifford D. Heaton, a Springfield attorney, “is that tenants will stop paying rent and building mortgages will be foreclosed so Pentlarge will lose his only source of income.”
Also among the letters pleading for leniency is one from a lawyer for DSS, Nappan said. The letter was not included in the stack McDonald released to the Advocate; Nappan, however, kept a copy in his files. “The letter from the lawyer for [the child protective agency] basically says, ‘Joel’s a good guy and shouldn’t go to jail.’ After sentencing, this same guy says to law enforcement, ‘I’m ambivalent about my role here.’”
The justifications of the letter-writers and of others interviewed by the prosecution are nothing if not callous in their disregard for the victims. Worse yet, some seem to believe Pentlarge was a “benign” perpetrator.
“How can you say that,” Nappan said, “when this was rape?”
There is a sickening irony in public accounts of the Pentlarge case: Pentlarge’s acts of social beneficence in Ware’s civic affairs and at Valley Human Services not only helped camouflage his crimes but actually enabled him to continue to victimize some of the very people VHS, and social service agencies in general, exist to help.
Investigators say allegations swirled about Pentlarge for years. Neighbors had inklings, teachers raised question, the state police had suspicions. The victims simply never had the standing or credibility or support to make their accusations against Pentlarge stick.
One victim, Tommy, claims he confided in counselors at VHS that Pentlarge was molesting him. He says he spoke with a counselor in the early 1990s. In fact, he says, the counselor initiated the conversation.
“She was a little worried about him herself,” Tommy said. “She had asked me if Joel had ever touched me and I said ‘Yeah, he has.’ I thought we’d talk about it more, but we didn’t get into it in any detail or anything. That was the only time I mentioned it. I really thought they were going to help. Nothing happened.”
Social service agencies, teachers, doctors and other professionals who are responsible for children are so-called “mandated reporters”; if they know a child is being abused, or even have a strong suspicion, they are obliged to file a complaint with DSS. Nappan said he is satisfied that Valley Human Services never withheld information to protect Pentlarge. He said there is no information to suggest that VHS broke the law.
Whether VHS did the right thing is another matter, one that will likely haunt the agency and the community it serves for a long time.
A human services professional familiar with the case said VHS counselors who treated some of the boys noted that some boys’ actions and responses to questions raised serious concerns about sexual abuse. There were suspicions about Pentlarge, the source said, but nothing ever happened because the boys never made a direct accusation.
That fact raises a troubling question for VHS: If state law mandates reporting if there is a suspicion of abuse, why didn’t VHS counselors confide in DSS? The agency’s official response, according to VHS Vice Chairman Kevin O’Regan, is that suspicion is one thing, evidence is another. There simply was no evidence that Pentlarge had done anything wrong.
One of the more troubling aspects of VHS’s association with Pentlarge is that even after the grand jury returned its multi-count rape indictment against Pentlarge, the agency itself took no action against him.
When reached by the Advocate, VHS Director Evie Glickman said she would not discuss Pentlarge. “I’m sure you can understand that this has been a very difficult time for [the agency],” Glickman said. “It’s over and we want to put it behind us.”
When asked what action the agency took against Pentlarge, Glickman acknowledged it had taken none. Pentlarge took a leave of absence in 1998 after the first indictment was handed up. When it was clear in the fall of 1999 that the DA’s office wanted to prosecute, Pentlarge resigned.
As an agency whose primary mission it is to protect and lift up the most vulnerable members of society, VHS failed. Not solely because it never saw the warning signs in one of its own, but also by remaining silent even after Pentlarge admitted he raped some of VHS’s own clients.
“Pentlarge was pretty clever,” said David Heinlein, who represents one of the boys who are seeking damages in two separate civil suits against Pentlarge. (Pentlarge’s lawyer in the civil suit, William Newman, declined to be interviewed for this story and said Pentlarge would not be interviewed either.) “His victims were individuals who had some history in terms of their own personal problems. And he created a he-said, she-said type of situation: ‘I’m Joel Pentlarge and I have a certain stature in this town and who’s going to believe you over me?’
“The second part of his justification was, ‘Even if I did what was alleged, how did I hurt you kids? You have this tainted history. You can’t ever prove that anything I did to you is any worse than what had happened to you in your own lives.’”
VHS’s O’Regan, a U.S. attorney who now heads the Justice Department’s Springfield office, joined the board in 1998, about a year before Pentlarge resigned in disgrace. O’Regan said an internal review determined that VHS officials knew nothing about Pentlarge that could or should have alerted them to his pedophilic behavior. The VHS board and the agency as a whole, O’Regan said, feel not so much a sense of guilt over Pentlarge as one of violation, an awful realization that one among them had so perversely dishonored the agency’s central mission.
“There has … been a profound effect on the board and on the agency as a whole that someone that it trusted committed such horrible crimes that were so contrary to what we as an agency try to do,” O’Regan said. “We exist to help people who are troubled and vulnerable. The fact that Joel took advantage of troubled children, that he raped them, is deeply disturbing. What Joel did was exploit the vulnerabilities of these kids, and that’s part of what is so disturbing.”
Pentlarge’s oldest victim is nearly 30 now. He could have been a VHS poster child: poor, illiterate, needy. He was 13 when the rapes began. He never learned to read or write, Nappan said. But he can fix almost anything. He now works as a mechanic in Vermont. Every day he wakes up and puts on two layers of clothes. He told Nappan he can’t stand the thought of someone undressing him.
In 1992, when he was 20, he told an investigator with the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers that when he was 15, “he had been forced by [Pentlarge] to have sex at least five times,” according to court files.
BBO investigator Robert Prince said in an interview with the Advocate that he investigated the complaint against Pentlarge and included the boy’s account in his final report to the BBO. But the board took no action against Pentlarge until December 2000, well after he had admitted to his 15-year string of rapes.
Neither Prince nor the BBO, which investigates allegations of professional misconduct by lawyers, will discuss the 1992 complaint against Pentlarge or the board’s inquiry into it. Earlier this month, however, the board disbarred Pentlarge, according to BBO Counsel Daniel Crane. Even so, Pentlarge may apply for reinstatement in eight years, Crane said. If the BBO’s past practices are any indication, Pentlarge stands about an 80 percent chance of practicing in Massachusetts again, according to a recent Boston Globe investigative report. Since 1990, 19 of the 25 lawyers who have been disbarred, forced to resign or indefinitely suspended have been reinstated on request, the Globe reported.
By the time Joel Pentlarge stood before Judge McDonald to hear his sentence, there was virtually no punishment that could make up for the ways in which the system had repeatedly failed his victims. Even after sentencing, justice had not truly been served, at least not in McDonald’s eyes.
“This is not an appropriate sentence for one of the crimes, let alone the five to which he has pled guilty,” McDonald said at sentencing. “And I cannot give the defendant leniency. He does not deserve leniency. He deserves punishment and scorn. …
“His life and the past 15 years have no redeeming value. For 15 years, by his own admission, he was a sexual predator, a child rapist, a molester of young boys.”
McDonald went on to say he had decided to accept the plea bargain out of respect for the victims who had been silenced by the community that held Pentlarge in such high esteem. If the boys, some of whom are now men, preferred to “avoid the public ordeal of testifying,” McDonald said, he would not force them to go to trial and bare their souls.
In retrospect, Tommy said, he wishes the judge had.
“[Pentlarge] doesn’t deserve three to four years. He deserves the rest of his life,” Tommy said. “He doesn’t even deserve his life, in my opinion. But, I don’t know, I’m not the judge.”
Pentlarge’s thoughts and motives are his own. But interviews with both his victims and his defenders and information contained in court documents and letters written on his behalf, help sketch a rough picture of him, a portrait of a man who had convinced himself that his sexual escapades, though likely to be misunderstood by the majority, were perfectly normal, or at the very least, defensible. If Pentlarge ever thought of himself as a perpetrator, he likely considered his acts “benign.”
“Some people still think we railroaded Joel,” Nappan said. “There’s still this big, unresolved issue for a lot of people. Joel broke the law, that’s clear. But what actual harm did he do? Joel would say he offered a safe, loving environment for kids from disenfranchised families. I don’t think Joel thinks he did anything wrong, but he certainly knows he did something illegal.” *
Boys Don’t Tell:
Why sex crimes against young males are tough to crack
Amassing evidence against Joel Pentlarge was relatively light work for state police and the district attorney compared to what it took to get his adolescent boy victims to testify that he had raped them.
Surveys of adults conducted over the past 20 years suggest that adolescents are the victims in 90 percent to 95 percent of all sex crimes against males, according to research conducted by the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center. Men were the perpetrators in 80 percent of the cases.
“There is the stereotypical concept that only women and children get victimized,” said Kenneth V. Lanning, supervisory special agent at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Va., and one of the agency’s top experts on sex offenders. “That’s only because boys who have been sexually victimized don’t talk.”
Lanning was slated to be an expert witness in the Pentlarge case before Pentlarge forfeited his right to a trial last July and accepted a lenient plea agreement that put him in jail for just three to four years.
One of the FBI’s leading experts on child sexual abuse, the recently retired Lanning is an alumni of both the Behavioral Science Unit that was creepily immortalized in Silence of the Lambs and the elite Missing and Exploited Children Task Force. In more than three decades tracking society’s most monstrous predators, Lanning had witnessed the “worst of the worst.” He understands perpetrators’ basic motives and methods; he knows their mind games.
Perpetrators exploit children’s’ weaknesses. The children in these cases are typically not 4-, 5- or 6-year-olds but young teenagers with complicated lives. Add poverty or family dysfunction, as was the case with most of Pentlarge’s victims, and the perpetrator’s leverage increases.
“Most kids get into this for the attention,” Lanning said. “For some there’s material gain, money, presents. And in some cases, there may even be enjoyment of the sexual activity. We don’t like to say that; we don’t like to admit that. … But that’s the truth, even though it’s almost the forbidden thing to say.
“There is no human being on the face of the earth who is easier to seduce into sexual activity than an adolescent boy,” Lanning said. “What’s the difference between seducing an adult woman and an adolescent boy?” Lanning asked abruptly. It’s a rhetorical question: “It’s about a thousand times easier to seduce a boy.”
Boys are intensely interested in sex and are actively exploring their sexuality; they are easily aroused and also sexually naïve. They are rebels with raging hormones. Because of these factors, Lanning said, teenage boys are often the targets of pedophile seduction.
But the numbers don’t show it.
Cases in which adolescent boys are the victims are among the most difficult to crack. Primarily because the stigma against homosexuality is so great, boys who are raped don’t talk — not solely out of shame or self-loathing or the simple impulse to wish it all away; boys don’t tell because they recognize, quite correctly, that society does not understand what happened to them, how they were seduced, and most pointedly, how they could let it to happen to them.
All kids crave attention, affection and kindness. What the perpetrators do in pursuit of their victims is nothing more and nothing less than seduction, Lanning said. “If this kind of activity was between two teenagers or two adults, it would be called dating,” Lanning said. “There’s a big difference, though, when this is occurring between a child or teenager and an adult, of course, because children can’t give consent.”
Pedophiles like Pentlarge are the “elite” of child molesters: men who are smart and likeable, with the kind of traits and habits human resource types call “good interpersonal skills.” And most perpetrators, Lanning said, need every ounce of sophistication and savvy to keep their house of cards from collapsing.
“Listen, have you ever tried to have sexual relationships with two, three, four people at a time? This is a delicate balancing act,” Lanning said. “These kinds of perpetrators have a lot to juggle. In the end, most of them end up making some kind of stupid mistake.”
– JoAnn DiLorenzo
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