After leaving active ministry in 2002 as a priest in Brooklyn, Stephen Placa got his pilot’s license and founded a flight school in Ronkonkoma, Long Island, the Heritage Flight Academy. Seven years later, he was convicted in Suffolk County of the sexual abuse of two boys, ages 8 and 10.
In 1987, the Rev. Thomas O. Morrow went on an indefinite leave of absence from the Diocese of Brooklyn and began working as a psychologist in Forest Hills. He was still officially a priest when he was indicted in 1996 on charges that he sodomized a 15-year-old boy he was hired to counsel, took nude photographs of him and gave him crack to smoke. The diocese said at the time it had never gotten any complaints of abuse. Eventually, it defrocked him.