There’s a shop in West Palm Beach, Florida, called “Da Franz.” Its website indicates it sells Sicilian ceramics. Its business registration indicates it belongs to Edward J Bolognini and Francesco Bolognini-Arsenault.
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The business was opened in June 2021 and states that it is formed “to import the beauty of Italy, in all its forms — to the United States.”
Edward J. Bolognini, formerly known as Monsignor Edward J. Arsenault, pled guilty to theft from the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, where he had been fast promoted to effectively run the finances and compliance of not just the church but also the insurance for all Catholic institutions (schools, hospitals, childcare centers, nursing homes, mental health institutes, etc) in the US and quite possibly around the world.
The extent of his power and network was extraordinary and could be compared to that of Jeffrey Epstein. His rise in the 90s and 2000s coincided with the growth of several New England Law firms, including Nixon Peabody, out of which came the former AG of New Hampshire: Gordon MacDonald, who is now New Hampshire’s Supreme Court Chief Justice.
AG Gordon MacDonald’s deputy, Jane Young, is now the US Attorney for New Hampshire. MacDonald (at Nixon Peabody) had worked closely with Arsenault sorting out dozens of quick settlements on behalf of the Diocese for complainants of sexual abuse — many of which were filed with little to no evidence.
“Arsenault refused to say yesterday whether the church had acknowledged the validity of the claims in Hutchins’s lawsuits as part of the settlement, telling reporters to read his press release. Arsenault’s press release hedged on accepting responsibility, referring to victims as people who had “reported” abuse.”
AnnMarie Timmins authored the above article for the Concord Monitor. She went on to marry one of the prosecutors against the Diocese: Will Delker.
Details about what exactly Edward J Arsenault did to land him on the wrong side of the law or how it got discovered in 2014, some years after he left New Hampshire and was presiding over St. Luke’s Institute in Maryland, were rather vague in New Hampshire’s local newspapers. Published charges included stealing from a dead priest’s estate, having inappropriate sexual relations with a minor (at least in initial reports), and stealing from a Catholic hospital — the Catholic Medical Center in Manchester where he had been in charge of increasing profits. The hospital has recently been in the news after fines for a kick-back scheme and for ignoring complaints against a surgeon whose malpractice resulted in multiple patient deaths. NH Catholic Charities is now presided over by Bishop Peter Libasci, who was accused of historic sexual abuse in 2021, which he denies.
One can’t help thinking that Edward J. Bolognini, once Monsignor Edward Arsenault, is somehow the kingpin in a gigantic international insurance fraud, drug trafficking, and pedophile scheme. And that others in New Hampshire’s police departments, law firms, non-profits, news organizations, and judiciary don’t want prying eyes looking at. But the public should be looking at this with a magnifying glass.
The receipts point to an alarming pattern of cover-ups and extortion rackets while the game goes on. Is it just a coincidence that Edward Arsenault’s 1999 venture “Virtus LLC — Protecting God’s Children” is registered at 10 Ferry Street, which just happens to also house an enterprise connected to Jeffrey Epstein: International Rescue Committee? Or that Ghislaine Maxwell was found hiding out in New Hampshire and that a director of her fake non-profit “TerraMar” came from Portsmouth, New Hampshire?
Boston Police Union Chief Patrick Rose has been known to the police, DCF, and the City of Boston as a pedophile since the early 90s, according to a recent lawsuit following his convictions for 25 counts.
Edward Arsenault made frequent trips to Boston, clocking up charges to the Diocese starting in 1999. He worked with journalists (Boston Globe’s “Spotlight Team” included, I believe), and he was close to the police — James F McLaughlin in particular, who looks more like a pedophile than a sex crimes officer.
McLaughlin had been known for his corruption dating back to the 80s — several years before he framed Father Gordon MacRae, who still sits in Concord Prison today after 28 years, denied justice, while Edward Arsenault (defrocked by the Vatican, unlike MacRae, who maintains his priesthood status), roams free between Florida, New York, and DC with addresses in all three accompanied by his young Italian husband, Francesco Bolognini-Arsenault.
A sex addict monsignor with accounting acumen and running PR with pedophile police officers, what could go wrong? It sounds like the Jeffrey Epstein way of doing things, and perhaps they were both “intelligence,” and hence the light sentence. Was Monsignor Edward Arsenault ever a bona fide priest who truly believed in Catholicism, or was he just sent to infiltrate it for the FBI — a promiscuous and savvy informant behind a trafficking and extortion racket?
Edward Arsenault was released from NH State custody on September 14, 2015, just 17 months into his mandatory 4-year minimum sentence in State prison. He never got transferred to prison, however. Bizarrely, the day before his release, Amanda Grady Sexton of the NHCADSV wrote an op-ed in the Concord Monitor arguing in favor of a computer felony conviction for 18-year-old Owen Labrie from St Paul’s School, whose criminal trial became a landmark for New Hampshire in prosecuting high school sex crimes. A city councilor for Concord and in charge of the “Public Safety Committee” to whom the police chief reports, she claims in her bio that she helps police and prosecutors with strategies to shape media messaging. The Concord Police website indicates that it works closely with local non-profits.
Telling the public to look in one direction while secretly arranging something illicit is a noticeable pattern when it comes to NHCADSV and Amanda Grady Sexton, who also works on messaging for the DCYF, which was instructing interns to delete files of child sex abuse at the State Youth Detention Center. The NHCADSV never made any comment about this practice. The YDC is implicated in the Diocese Priest sex abuse scandal via Edward Arsenault, who allegedly fabricated stories to the YDC about a priest who’d been dismissed after finding pornographic material and sex toys and coming forward to report it to him.
On the board of the NHCADSV is Brian Harlow, who was allegedly one of the people who made a claim of priest sex abuse at the Diocese. He’s a co-leader of SNAP which has been severely criticized for kick-back schemes. He was “selected” in 2011 to serve on a planning committee for the NHCADSV.
What were the words in Arsenault’s press release from 2002?
“Arsenault’s press release hedged on accepting responsibility, referring to victims as people who had “reported” abuse.”
Brian Harlow spends his time as an advocate for those in need. In 2011, Brian was selected to serve on the planning committee to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Boston Globe’s Spotlight series exposing the cover-up of Catholic clergy sex abuse in the Boston diocese. In 2012, Brian began serving as co-leader of NH SNAP, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.
Was Amanda Grady Sexton involved in a scheme with Brian Harlow to throw some journalistic sensationalism to smear Owen Labrie & St Paul’s School in order to avert attention from Edward Arsenault’s release? It looks like it. Her organization, the NHCADSV, with Brian Harlow as a planner, became a financial beneficiary in the conviction and aftermath of Owen Labrie. Brian Harlow had been solicited by Jim Rosenberg when he was in the AG’s office as the first victim to come forward in the 2002 Diocese Priest sex abuse cases, which were all settled with money passing hands but no prosecutions or convictions.
Jim Rosenberg was the best man at Prosecutor Will Delker’s marriage to AnnMarie Timmins. Delker then became a judge like Bernard Hampsey, who’d corresponded on personal stationery with priests during the 2002 investigation into the Diocese. Hampsey felt the need at the time to threaten Rev. James “Seamus” MacCormack when he “became aware of a serious rumor that reflects on me personally and perhaps professionally.”
Coincidentally, Jim Rosenberg (after he left the AG’s office and became a partner at Shaheen & Gordon law firm) represented Andrew Thomson, the son of Governor Maggie Hassan’s legal counsel, in the State v Owen Labrie. Thomson became a principal witness against Labrie even though the prosecutor admitted to the judge that she was aware of a deal that had been made for him in light of sexual misconduct he’d been engaged in involving a minor at the school. Prosecutor Catherine Ruffle managed to get that confession sealed until eight months after the trial. As soon as it was unsealed and the deal became public knowledge, she retracted her statement, claiming to have misspoken. Former AG Michael Delaney, representing the school, corroborated her claim and said that no such deal had happened.
“But it gets worse. The other St. Paul’s males, the ones paying full freight to attend the school rather than on scholarship like Labrie, who testified against Labrie, also sent C.P. computer messages seeking a sexual tryst. Yes, exactly what Labrie was convicted for doing, except it never came out on cross that the good guys who testified for the prosecution were as guilty, if there is anything to be guilty of, as the defendant. And these witnesses lied about their relationship to C.P. at trial.”
Lies beget liars in New Hampshire’s courts. She knew Andrew Thomson was committing perjury. So did Jim Rosenberg. So did Amanda Grady Sexton, and so did Concord Police. They all knew that Andrew Thomson had sent Owen Labrie’s accuser and the main state witness, Chessy Prout, an invitation to a sexual tryst: “a lap dance” and a “secret snuggle.” He knew she was 15 and under age, so he was engaged in exactly what Owen Labrie was being prosecuted for. But Shaheen & Gordon, the NHCADSV (also their client), and the State were going to get rich off this — frame the scholarship student to detract from the decades of sexual abuse they’d sorted out secret deals on, use the media to line up for the civil suit and go in and extort and hide all the records. They’d done it before with the Diocese, and St Paul’s was the perfect target for another blackmail enterprise that would enrich them all.
There were meetings between the prosecutors and the local attorneys representing the school, state witnesses (whose trial testimony revealed they’d been coerced earlier) during the trial. They all met each other, but they all kept Owen Labrie in the dark and denied him access to exculpatory evidence, including police evidence which the civil attorneys suing the school and the NHCADSV were given access to.
The school was told not to contact Owen Labrie but the prosecutors, police, and civil attorneys all shared information with each other. There was nothing independent for any of them. Just as there hadn’t been in 2002, it had become a well-oiled machine — a racketeering machine, the kind of machine that their pal Edward Arsenault knew all about and could advise on.
While the media focused on Owen Labrie and St Paul’s School, Arsenault could quietly get a handshake deal for a light sentence and early release. Who else could get off lightly in 2015/16? Governor Maggie Hassan and her husband Tom Hassan, who’d gone easy on a teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy who’d admitted sexual misconduct with a student while Tom was principal.
AG Joseph Foster decided not to prosecute even though the school was keeping two sets of records, and DCYF admitted to deleting files. Governor Hassan appointed him to his position. There was a media blackout. NHCADSV got a nice contract out of it all, however, just as it did out of the targeting of St Paul’s School. A math teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy was allowed to carry on until he was finally charged and convicted last year.
Instead of going to Concord Men’s Prison, Arsenault was transferred to a high-end condo (funding unknown) at 91 Lawrenceville Road in Salem, New Hampshire. He lived there under parole supervision with an electronic bracelet until his remaining sentence was mysteriously terminated by Judge Diane Nicolosi on April 4, 2017. One day later he received employment from Tulsa-based McCalmon Group Inc. — an interesting coincidence.
Diane Nicolosi had prosecuted a case once called State v Laurie in which she failed to inform the defendant of corruption and credibility issues of the police who testified against him. This became the case that years later resulted in the “Laurie List” (the secret list of New Hampshire’s corrupt police officers), which AG Gordon MacDonald tried to argue should not be released to the public. New Hampshire’s top sex crimes police officer who’d dealt with the Diocese and DCYF and framed Father Gordon MacRae— James F McLaughlin — was on that list. Yet not a single defendant who was investigated by him has received a new trial.
There’s a weird proximity between the timing & landmarks of favors granted to Arsenault for his convictions and the landmarks of strikes against Owen Labrie for his convictions, retrial, and appeals. Racketeering, blackmail, bribery, cover-ups, and a peculiar intertwining of church and state, police, prosecutors, lawyers, certain journalists, and non-profits dictated everything. How is it that the State’s top prosecutors could give a backhand deal to Edward Arsenault and allow him to continue to consult behind bars after his crimes against the Diocese?
Edward Bolognini claims he changed his name because he got married. We assume to Francesco Bolognini-Arsenault. There are also reports that Bolognini was his mother’s maiden name. He works in a non-profit (ReServe) in New York, besides having several other businesses, including the Sicilian ceramics venture and a luxury condo in Florida.
If you watched season 2 of the HBO show “White Lotus” and then you read about accounts of hidden paraphernalia found in the Diocese of Manchester removed by Monsignor Edward Arsenault when they were discovered by another priest, you might start to wonder what’s really behind the Bolognini-Arsenault Florida Sicilian enterprise and that secret agreement with Assistant AG Jane Young — the handshake. What would be Edward Arsenault’s need to tell a priest never to talk about this box of sex toys again?
Why was he then transferred to St. Luke’s Institute in Maryland when this came out, and why would an assistant Attorney General, Jane Young, sort out a deal with Arsenault to give him a soft sentence?
Watch for Part 2 Later Today …
