By Greg Forester, Staff Writer
Jim McCloskey may not look like your average guardian angel.
But the 66-year-old, balding Presbyterian pastor is just that to 43 people.
Mr. McCloskey’s nonprofit Princeton-based Centurion Ministries, freed all of them from wrongful life imprisonment or death sentences for rapes or murders they did not commit.
They will be in town with Mr. McCloskey and the rest of Centurion Ministries during today’s celebration of philanthropist William Scheide’s birthday, an all-Bach concert at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium that will benefit Centurion Ministries.
Centurion Ministries has freed wrongly imprisoned men and women all over the nation since Mr. McCloskey began the life-or-death work in 1980. Back then he was a student chaplain, working toward a master’s of divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary after a career in the Navy, including stints in Japan and Vietnam.
A life in business and out of the church that Mr. McCloskey called “promiscuous” led him back to the church.
As a chaplain, he spent time at Trenton State Prison where he had interactions with prisoners. There he met Jorge De Los Santos, an illiterate, heroin-addicted man who claimed innocence despite a life sentence for a Newark murder.
Years worth of work on the case for Mr. De Los Santos brought the Newark man his freedom in 1983 and Centurion Ministries notoriety, more amazing stories of freed prisoners and expansion.
Centurion Ministries now has a $1 million annual budget and a staff of five full- and four part-time employees. Kate Germond, who co-manages Centurion with the pastor, has a natural knack for organizing, working on cases and detecting innocence, according to Mr. McCloskey, who said Centurion could not run as well as it does without her.
Ms. Germond got on board with Centurion in 1987 when the ministry still was being run out of a bedroom that served as Mr. McCloskey’s home during his time at the seminary. The seminary student performed errands and drove the homeowner, a woman in her 80s, in return for the room.
Ms. Germond read about what Mr. McCloskey was doing and became interested. She had just moved to Manhattan with her husband after spending time as a businesswoman and activist in California.
”I thought he probably needed someone to help organize,” said Ms. Germond, noting her rather cluttered office belied such a statement.
She helped Mr. McCloskey get organized, maintain correspondence with prisoners and determine who to help. Ms. Germond also kept up on the latest forensic and investigative techniques, which have evolved considerably since the early 1980s.
”I was always just a snoopy girl who read a lot of mysteries,” Ms. Germond said.
Centurion Ministries insists on interacting strictly with prisoners during their investigations, as opposed to friends or family, and the nonprofit only works on murder or rape cases involving “lifers” or death row inmates, Ms. Germond said.
All of what Mr. McCloskey, Ms. Germond and the rest of Centurion Ministries does stems from the original De Los Santos case in 1980.
Mr. McCloskey had become fed up with a life of business and pleasure.
”I was feeling this internal urge to leave business and surrender my life, to give up the worldly life,” Mr. McCloskey said.
Once in the seminary, the chaplain work began, exposing the former businessman to life in Trenton State Prison. At the time, Mr. McCloskey assumed the American justice system was nearly flawless, and most or all of the people he met inside the stone walls of Trenton State were rightly convicted and serving sentences for crimes they committed.
Not so, said the prisoner and illiterate junkie Mr. De Los Santos, a Puerto Rican serving a life sentence for a murder charge stemming from the 1975 murder of a used car salesman. Mr. De Los Santos said he had been convicted based on the testimony of Richard Delli Santi, another junkie and a career criminal who had been in jail with Mr. De Los Santos in Essex County.
Mr. Delli Santi testified his fellow prisoner confessed the murder to him while in prison. But what had not come out during the trial was Mr. Delli Santi was a career criminal who had been arrested 40 times by Newark police, and he had made a habit out of testifying about jailhouse confessions he received from other inmates, Mr. McCloskey said.
Mr. Delli Santi had even done this to his own cousin, Danny Delli Santi, according to Mr. De Los Santos.
”Delli Santi was always in trouble,” said Mr. McCloskey. “He learned how to work the system.”
Mr. Delli Santi had actually reviewed Mr. De Los Santos’ police reports, which the illiterate junkie showed to him because he couldn’t make heads or tails of the documents. Such a review provided all of the juicy details for the courtroom testimony, which convinced the jury and sealed Mr. De Los Santos’ fate.
Armed with this information, Mr. McCloskey told Mr. De Los Santos he would take off a year from the seminary and dedicate it to developing information to free the inmate.
”I told him that if I caught him lying, I would be gone,” Mr. McCloskey said.
The seminary student and chaplain quickly learned he was a greenhorn when it came to the justice system, but he did make progress. He contacted Danny Delli Santi, who was serving time in another part of Trenton State Prison, and found Richard Delli Santi, who was living in the Bronx. “He looked like a sewer rat,” said Mr. McCloskey.
He convinced the jailhouse informant to come clean about his false testimony. In court, the pastor and longtime attorney Paul Casteleiro filed a writ of habeas corpus for wrongful imprisonment and got a rare subpoena from the judge for unlimited access to the Essex County prosecutor’s office.
”That’s like gold,” Mr. McCloskey said.
At the prosecutor’s office they found a damning piece of evidence — a document on which the prosecutor wrote that “RDS (Richard Delli Santi) is “in the habit of giving testimony.”
More evidence piled up. It turned out Mr. Delli Santi swore he had never given testimony or worked as an informant, even thought it happened multiple times in other cases. Back in court, Judge Frederick Lacey reviewed the Delli Santi’s trial testimony, noting the case “reeked of perjury.”
In July of 1983, Mr. McCloskey’s work paid off. Mr. De Los Santos was freed after spending nearly nine years in prison.
Through that case, Mr. McCloskey found about two other men in similar situations, Nathaniel Walker and Rene Santana, who said they were both innocent of rape and murder, respectively.
More work by Mr. McCloskey led to two more freed men, this time in 1986. Mr. Santana was freed after a star witness recanted, revealing he had cut a deal for false testimony with the Essex County prosecutors. Mr. Walker was freed after blood evidence revealed he could not have committed the rape for which he was sentenced to life in prison plus 50 years.
Those cases led to considerable attention for Centurion Ministries across the nation — and in the prison community — which drew Mr. McCloskey to Texas, Louisiana and other places, working to free prisoners.
The nonprofit has grown, moving to several offices on Nassau Street before settling in its current location on Witherspoon Street. There, a group of 20 volunteers — mainly retired citizens from the surrounding suburbs — work on computers developing cases.
Mr. McCloskey attributes the number of wrongly imprisoned persons to a variety of factors, including prosecutors’ use of criminals as star witnesses, the vulnerable lives of defendants, ineffective lawyers, pervasive perjury and racial prejudices.
Working to free victims from the effects of these issues relies on some old-fashioned detective work.
Mr. McCloskey, Ms. Germond and an investigator and former Pulitzer-prize winning reporter named Paul Henderson head out to work cases, mainly in courthouses or on the streets where some of the alleged crimes were committed. Mr. McCloskey has only had a gun pulled on him once, and not in North Philadelphia, Harlem, Newark, South-Central Los Angeles or any other crime-ridden areas that have been the focus of Centurion Ministries investigations.
”I had a gun pulled on me by a blue-collar white gentleman in Monmouth County,” Mr. McCloskey said.
Staff photo by Mark CzajkowskiJim McCloskey, founder of Centurion Ministries, standing center, and Kate Germond, associate director, seated far right, during a breakfast at the Nassau Inn Thursday with some of the former inmates they helped free.

