Former Boy Scouts executive testifies on reported abuse

PORTLAND, Ore. - A Boy Scouts leader testifying in a sex abuse lawsuit said Tuesday he reported the abuse confession of another group leader, only to find the man still with the organization more than a decade later.

In testimony Tuesday at the Portland trial, Larry O'Connor said he was surprised to see the man he reported in 1970, wearing the full uniform at a national Scouts jamboree in 1981.

"I went up to him and asked, 'What are you doing here?' " O'Connor said. "And he just walked away from me."

O'Connor, 67, said he volunteered to testify after reading about the $29 million lawsuit filed by a Portland man abused as a boy by an assistant scoutmaster in the early 1980s.

O'Connor, who now lives in Alaska, served briefly as a district executive with the Boy Scouts in Kansas in the late 1960s, and said he had attained the Eagle Scout rank, the organization's highest for members.

He said he ran into problems with the organization as an adult, including his refusal to follow the practice of creating "ghost units" to inflate membership ranks that caused a national scandal for the Scouts in the early 1970s.

"I almost lost my job over it," he said.

In the case of the abuse that a fellow Scout leader confessed to him, O'Connor said he called his boss, who was the Boy Scouts council executive for his area, and also wrote him a letter about it. He said he was never told what action the Scouts took, and he was not told what happened after his report of seeing the man again 11 years later.

"We were told to report to the executive of the council we were in and then be quiet and not talk about it to anyone," O'Connor said.

He also said he learned on a visit to the former Boy Scouts of America headquarters that the national office kept files on suspected sex abusers now called "ineligible volunteer" files, but nicknamed "perversion files."

O'Connor said they were contained in black binders atop file cabinets at the former headquarters in New Jersey. The Scouts have since moved their national headquarters to Irving, Texas.