Priest took more than $250K from 'grandmas' at wealthy church, authorities say

He called them his grandmas...

The Rev. Alex Orozco befriended the elderly women shortly after his assignment to St. Rose of Lima parish in Short Hills.

Orozco was a new priest, charming and kind and afire with enthusiasm.

And always, it seemed, willing to accept money, parishioners said.

For a car. For a big-screen TV. For a house in the Poconos. For another house in his native Colombia. For credit card bills. For a second car. For plane tickets. For furniture. For dental work.

From 2013 through the end of last year, Orozco allegedly took more than $250,000 in cash and goods from women in the wealthy parish after telling them hard-luck stories about the financial woes afflicting him, his family members and his friends.

The case has sparked a criminal investigation by the Essex County Prosecutor's Office and has raised broader questions about the limits on what clergymen should accept from generous parishioners and whether some of those transactions rise to the level of fraud or theft.

A law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation said detectives are trying to determine how many people Orozco solicited money and gifts from at St. Rose before his transfer last year to a different post at the Church of the Nativity in Midland Park, Bergen County.

Both churches are in the Archdiocese of Newark, which has not informed either parish of the allegations, according to parishioners and the law enforcement official, who was not authorized to speak for attribution.

The official called the investigation "open and active," saying Orozco sometimes collected multiple payments from different parishioners for the same expenses — car payments and insurance, for instance — even though both were covered by the archdiocese.

'They want to embrace me'

In an interview with NJ Advance Media at the Midland Park rectory, Orozco, 37, acknowledged accepting large sums of money and other items, but he said that in most cases, he did not ask for them.

"People came to me and said, 'Father, do you need something? Father, do you need anything?'" Orozco said. "Always, always always. ... I try to be very open to people. I try to be the best of myself. They want to embrace me, helping me."

He said he did ask one parishioner, Patricia Brady, to help him buy a house in the Poconos so he could have a retreat away from the rectory. Brady, now deceased, gave him $25,000 — a sum NJ Advance Media confirmed with the executor of her estate — but Orozco never did buy the home.

Asked what he did with the money, Orozco said: "I couldn't do it (buy the house), so what I did was try to help other people. So basically I gave it away to people. I did. I helped many people in Colombia. Unfortunately, that happened."

He also acknowledged asking another St. Rose parishioner to buy him a house in Bogotá, Colombia, for his family after she offered her help.

The woman, who was interviewed by detectives in December, told NJ Advance Media that while she freely gave the priest money and gifts on many occasions without solicitation, she did not offer to buy the $150,000 house and, in fact, began to grow suspicious of his motives.

The woman spoke on the condition that she be identified only by her first name, Patty, because she is a wealthy widow who lives alone.

Orozco said he alerted the archdiocese to the criminal investigation in January, after he was questioned by detectives, and that he spoke with Archbishop Bernard Hebda, a co-adjutor archbishop who is expected to replace Archbishop John J. Myers when he reaches retirement age next year.

"He said, 'Don't worry. We are going to help you with this,'" Orozco said. "That was it."

Jim Goodness, a spokesman for the archdiocese, declined to comment on the investigation, calling it a personnel matter. He said the parishes have not been notified because Orozco maintains his innocence and has not been charged.

"Would you want someone to be talking about you if you were being looked into for something and it turned out to be untrue?" Goodness asked. "You're looking at potential harm."

An attorney hired by the archdiocese to represent Orozco in the criminal probe said the priest "unequivocally denies" he engaged in wrongdoing at St. Rose.

"To the contrary, he is and has always been a hardworking, compassionate and dedicated priest," the attorney, Edmund DeNoia, said in an emailed statement.

"There have been no criminal charges filed against Fr. Alex," DeNoia said, "and we firmly believe that any investigation into Fr. Alex's actions will result in his good name and reputation being cleared."

DeNoia did not respond to a follow-up question about whether Orozco reported the money he accepted on his income tax returns.

From actor to priest

In a Youtube video recorded in 2012, shortly after his ordination in the Newark Archdiocese, Orozco recounts his path to the priesthood.

He was a television actor, model and salsa dancer in Bogotá, enjoying a measure of celebrity and the trappings that went with it, he told an audience of seminarians and young men considering religious life.

"I remember when I was working in television, I was making a lot of money. A lot of money," Orozco said. "I had a very nice car. I had a lot of stuff. And I was happy. But when Mary and God called me to follow this life, the real joy is not coming from material things. ... The real joy is coming to be with God."

Orozco, who repeated the story in his interview with NJ Advance Media, said he spent 10 years in a religious order in Colombia, taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

A former classmate who had become a priest in the Newark Archdiocese then contacted him with an offer to attend Immaculate Conception Seminary at Seton Hall University, he said.

The archdiocese has among the highest rates of ordination in the country, in part because it aggressively recruits potential priests from Central and South America and from the Philippines, according to annual statistics compiled by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Ordained May 26, 2012, Orozco was immediately assigned to St. Rose in Short Hills, one of the most affluent communities in New Jersey.

A laundry list of needs

Patty, the widowed parishioner, said she met the priest soon after. He quickly befriended her, visiting her home for meals and occasionally bringing her presents. Sometimes he was accompanied by Juancho Muñoz Montoya, a Seton Hall seminarian whom parishioners described as Orozco's friend from Colombia.

It wasn't an unusual arrangement. Patty, 82, said she is a woman of deep faith, appreciative of the work that priests do and the sacrifices they make. She said she has regularly helped people in need, giving away some of the fortune amassed by her late husband, an investment banker.

"I'm a very Holy Spirit kind of person. I truly believe that," she said. "He has had his hand on my shoulder my entire life, and I thought this was another manifestation."

When Orozco told her of some of his financial difficulties, struggling to survive on his $1,200-per-month salary, she didn't hesitate to open her checkbook. The law enforcement official confirmed Patty's account of her spending, and Orozco, in the interview in Midland Park, acknowledged accepting most of the checks and items.  

Patty said she gave the priest $13,000 to pay off a sport utility vehicle and an additional $20,000 for another car when he traded in the first. Orozco, she said, never told her he received a vehicle allowance of about $500 a month.

When he said he needed work on his teeth, Patty said, she wrote a check for $6,000. She bought plane tickets for Orozco and Montoya to travel home to Colombia and back to New Jersey. At one point, she said, the priest told her a large, specialized window at his mother's home in Colombia had been damaged in a storm. It would cost $5,000 to fix it, he said. She wrote a check.

On another occasion, she said, Orozco told her Montoya's grandmother was at risk of losing her home in Bogotá because she owed back taxes.

"I said, 'Well, how much do you think that is?'" Patty said, adding that Orozco told her $6,500 would allow Montoya's grandmother to keep the house. She wrote another check made out to cash.

"You have no idea what a charming fellow he is," Patty said. "He could sell you the Brooklyn Bridge."

Orozco always appeared grateful, she said, but the stories of hardship kept coming.

For nearly two years, she said, she paid his credit card bills in full, making the checks out to Bank of America. She repeatedly asked to see bills and receipts, she said, and he repeatedly came up with excuses, saying he paid online and couldn't find receipts for his purchases.

"When we got to $75,000, I said, 'This is getting to be a lot, Alex,' and he totally ignored me," Patty said.

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