There can’t be anyone, with normal human sentiments, who read reports of the evidence in the on-going paedophile case without having his or her stomach turned. Reading the testimony of the two boys, particularly the detailed stories in The Malta Independent (find them on-line) made me sick and angry. How did these two kids slip through the safety net of social services and the police for so long?
The defence lawyers tried to cast doubt on their testimony. I know this is common defence practice, but the line should be drawn somewhere. Professional detachment is one thing; helping further the unhappiness of two boys whose lives have been a misery so far by claiming they are lying, is another thing altogether. One of the defence lawyers asked: “Can something they saw, even on television, be mentally transferred onto someone else?” The answer is yes, but it depends on how old the boys were at the time and on what that “something” is. There is no 10-year-old boy on earth who can give a graphic description of what it feels like to be sodomised unless he has been sodomised himself. It would occur to no boy of that age to fake an inability to walk properly, purely to pretend that a man had repeatedly rammed his penis up his nether regions. I am sorry to be so graphic, but these are not matters about which we can afford to be mealy-mouthed. Boys of 10 do not know about sodomy. They do not know that there are some men who like to sodomise boys. They have no way of knowing that when a man sodomises a 10-year-old boy, the boy is unable to walk afterwards.
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It is almost irrelevant whether the boys are now confusing, during the onslaught of a trial a full four years later, the details of what happened to them then. Quite frankly, I am surprised they have not been driven mad by their horrible lives. Women held as sex slaves in similar conditions have been driven to suicide. The fact remains that in the immediate aftermath of their ‘rescue’ by social services and the police, when they were just 10 and 11, they told a child counsellor exactly what had happened to them, in full graphic detail that no boys so young could ever have invented. The child counsellor reported all this in detail to the court. The defence lawyers did not have the temerity to suggest that perhaps she was lying or confusing the details. Instead, they picked on the children.
It is normal practice to ask children in situations of trauma to draw pictures that describe events. The counsellor said that the younger brother drew graphic images of sodomy, masturbation and other forms of sexual interference. He drew both Anthony and Denis Pandolfino, and himself. He also spoke to her about what happened, and would end up sobbing in distress. He told her that Dennis Pandolfino had been touching him up and performing pastazati on him since he was eight years old. What struck me on reading this is the boy’s ingrained sense of human dignity. He didn’t know what was happening to him, but he knew it was very wrong and that he was being degraded and abused.
The boy told the counsellor that Dennis showed him rude pictures of naked men and women, on his computer and in magazines. I was on the point of crying myself when I read the counsellor’s description of how this little boy naively and trustingly drew a picture of a police car and a policeman, and told her that the police would save him and his brother from the two men. I really admire the counsellors who do this kind of essential work. How they cope with the emotional fall-out is beyond me.
The counsellor also reported to the court what the older brother, then 11, had told her. In his sexual innocence, he said that Dennis Pandolfino used to do things to him in his bedroom that hurt him a lot and made him scream with pain, “but no one ever heard me”. That bit was unbearable to read, as was the description of how he found it difficult to walk after the things that Dennis did to him in the bedroom. The boy’s inability to walk properly and the love bites on his neck were what alerted an anonymous person to call the police. Touchingly, the boy told the counsellor how he tried to protect his young brother from the sexual advances of Anthony Pandolfino, even though he was scared of him because he had threatened to shoot him with a gun he kept in the house. “I put up with it because I was afraid he would kill me,” he said. The other Pandolfino brother, Anthony, he described as a hanzir. He told the counsellor something even more profoundly disturbing: that Anthony Pandolfino used to film boys of around 15 years old “doing rude things.” This concurs with reports that hit the media some years ago, about Dennis and Anthony Pandolfino having been found in possession of a great number of home-made video films of naked boys performing sexual acts. Rack your brains and you’ll remember it. At the time, I wondered who the boys were and where these two depraved men had got hold of them. I suppose this part of the men’s history of depravity wasn’t mentioned in court because there are certain restrictions on the raising of past cases. Fortunately, there are no such possible controls on people’s memories and on existing records in newspaper archives.
The police inspector who handles many child abuse cases took the witness stand after the counsellor. She said that when she spoke to the younger brother, he told her that Dennis Pandolfino had sodomised him – though of course, he wouldn’t have used that word, but just described what happened. He said that Dennis had shown him pictures of naked people on the television and on his computer. He told the inspector that his brother was living with Dennis’s brother Anthony, and that Anthony was doing the same things to his brother. The older brother, however, refused to speak to social workers about what was happening, even though he had bite marks on his neck and couldn’t walk properly. What shocks me most is that the boys appear not to have been examined by a doctor for evidence of sodomy. If they were, then the doctor’s report would have been an important part of the prosecution. The defence lawyers and their clients, who are saying that the boys are lying, would not have been able to suggest that they also faked the physical damage to their bodies. After the police searched the homes of the Pandolfino brothers and found stacks of boy porn, the two little brothers were put into care and the Pandolfinos were held on remand.
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The eldest brother, who is now 15, said in court a couple of days ago that Anthony Pandolfino gave him Playstation games on condition that he would allow him to “touch” him. Here it is worth pointing out that the implications of imissni, the Maltese for “he touches me” are much wider and more significant than in the English translation. He said that he saw Dennis Pandolfino push his brother’s head down and sodomise him. Unable to defend his younger brother against a middle-aged man, and too traumatised to stay in the room, he walked out. It was that single revealing phrase “he pushed his head down” that left me in no doubt that this boy is saying the truth.
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Anthony Pandolfino has chosen not to speak in his defence. His brother Dennis is denying everything and claiming that the large amount of child porn on his computer got there “by accident”. Something doesn’t ring quite true about the mother’s story, too. Her sobbing shenanigans in court seemed more like an attempt to get herself off the hook for serious child neglect and conspiracy in child abuse than any genuine shock and regret. The elder boy claims that his younger brother had told her what was going on “when he couldn’t take (the abuse) any more”. She, on the other hand, claims that the first she heard of it was when she got a call from social services. Yet the fact remains that no woman who is all right up there would ever hand over her very young sons to two middle-aged brothers who are living alone in different homes, one each, without wondering why they were so keen on having them.
There were telling clues in the testimony given by the police inspector who investigated the case, and by Dennis Pandolfino himself. The inspector said that as soon as she got the anonymous report about the boy who couldn’t walk properly, she began by looking up his name in the police files “because it sounded familiar”. Sure enough, the boy’s name came up in the records. His mother had been suspected of selling him in 1999 when he was just eight years old. The police had investigated the case at the time, and had concluded that she had not sold her small son to Anthony Pandolfino (yes, it was him already), but had given him the boy. I hesitate to say this, because I don’t have all the details, but shouldn’t it have occurred to the police that there was something odd about a middle-aged bachelor wanting somebody else’s eight-year-old boy, and something even odder about his mother giving him away to the man? Shouldn’t social services have been asked to keep an eye on him? And on what basis did the police conclude that the boy hadn’t exchanged hands for money – the fact that Anthony Pandolfino didn’t have a cash receipt to prove it? Look at the result of that careless investigation: ghastly suffering for two boys, for years to come.
The other clue that the boys’ mother isn’t saying the half of it is in Dennis Pandolfino’s claim that he suspected she was going to take her sons to Tunisia to sell them. This is not the kind of accusation that would be plucked out of thin air, even by someone as desperate as the man in the dock. If he worried about her selling them elsewhere (and so taking them away from him) then he must have had good reason to think it. It’s significant that the younger boy drew a picture of a policeman as his last hope of rescue, rather than of his mother. This woman’s behaviour rings all the alarm bells of suspicion, and I hope she is investigated and, if there is enough evidence against her, charged. It’s not unusual for women who sleep with men for money to sell the sexual services of their children. It happened routinely in the heyday of Strait Street – which is why any attempt to glorify that period is seriously misguided – and it still happens today. If you don’t believe me, ask your nearest social worker. The child won’t even know that he or she is being sold, or that the mother has engineered the transaction.
More oddly still is the fact that this woman sent a birthday card to Dennis Pandolfino while he was in prison awaiting trial for sodomising her sons. In it, she called him Dennis the Menace (oh, ha ha ha) and gave him a dressing down not for what he did to her boys, but for writing to her husband to tell him that she was sleeping with somebody else. When asked about this in court, she said that she was angry because he “had interfered in matters that were none of his business”. Yes, to be angrier at a man for betraying your adultery than for sodomising your small sons is perfectly normal, isn’t it? To think that people like this have children while good people have to jump through the hoops of IVF and adoption is perfectly sickening.
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Whenever you suspect child abuse, report it to the police, and persist in your reports until action is taken. Whoever it was who called the police to report an 11-year-old boy unable to walk properly and with love bites on his neck saved what was left of these two young brothers’ lives. To me it seems incredible that in so many years, nobody noticed what was going on and nobody helped them.