$25,000 ‘LOADED GUN’

Newsday/Steve Wick and Eden Laikin

Raymond Trypuc was tired of so many things by the time he decided to call Monsignor Alan Placa,the man in charge of dealing with sexual abuse complaints against priests on Long Island. He wastired of trying to shake his addiction to cocaine, tired of all the rules at the treatment centerhe walked out of in Arizona. Mostly, though, he was tired of trying to sort out why a trust priesthad abused him as a boy. The priest is the Rev. James Bergin. It was sometime after November 16,1993, that Trypuc got on the phone with Placa, the vice chancellor of the Roman Catholic Diocese ofRockville Centre, and struck a deal: For $25,000, he absolved the church of any additionalfinancial responsibility and agreed never to take his complaint public with a lawsuit. Withinweeks, Trypuc, 28, was dead of a cocaine overdose. Bergin died in 1992.

(New York)