MEET ‘THE GODFATHER’

To cut to the chase: For the past 18 months, I have been the target of an extortion scheme perpetrated by a rogue Columban missionary named 'Father' Shay Cullen, who moved to the Philippines from Ireland in 1969 and has since become one of the most wealthy and powerful criminals in the country, chewing up and spitting out his victims without concern for the damage done.

[Editor’s Note: This is the second of what will ultimately become a six-part post that is intended to answer the question “What the hell happened in the Philippines?” with three additional posts devoted to an investigation of 'The Troll'. These posts can also be found on my Facebook page, and it is recommended that they be read in sequence.]

“LEGAL CASES PILE UP AGAINST CULLEN, PREDA”
the front-page story in the newspaper Freeport
called out in June 2000 – yet, 20 years later,
he’s still there, and still using street
kids as human shields.

It is not uncommon for men of a particular persuasion to seek out a position of authority that surrounds them with children – and well known that Ireland is ground zero for child abuse by Catholic priests – but Cullen took it to the next level in 1974 by opening a facility near Subic that he called Preda Foundation that was originally established for drug abuse victims but switched its focus to sex abuse victims when the priest realized that “sex sells” – and the money flowed, along with deportation requests for Cullen and what was known as his “Preda Fund-Raising Show” from every sector of society from barangay captains to police, the NBI and the Justice Department, to the church, the citizens of Olongapo, who signed a petition declaring the priest “Persona Non Grata”, the Christian Laity of Olongapo, the Superior General of the Columban Center in the Philippines, the Knights of Columbus, Knights of Rizal, Daughters of Mary Immaculate, and his own disgusted and maltreated staff.

Shay Cullen, the 'Godfather' of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Managing to avoid prosecution for decades, it wasn’t until August 2000 that an arrest warrant for Cullen was issued by Judge Eliodoro Ubiadas for “having carnal knowledge with a 7-year-old girl against the latter's will and consent and while she was deprived of reason or otherwise unconscious” in the office of Preda Foundation, forcing him to lay low in Manila for six weeks – but the priest is also well-connected and has many local prosecutors, politicians and police on his payroll. Unsurprisingly, it was his contacts in the Catholic Church aided by disgraced president Joseph Estrada who had the rape charges against him dropped shortly before Estrada himself was arrested for plundering the country.

Having devoted the last 20 years to exposing the man who raped his little girl, the distraught father has been subjected to a vicious onslaught of legal actions and hacks in an attempt to silence him.

PEOPLE OF THE PHILIPPINES V. SHAY CULLEN

Cutting his teeth as a young seminarian in the 60s at the notorious ‘Hostel of Horrors’ on Eccles Street in Dublin, Cullen also has several homes for boys in the Philippines that he has been uncharacteristically quiet about, as he has about his own childhood trauma at the hands of the sadistic Christian Brothers.

 The first Christian Brother.

In impoverished countries like the Philippines, ‘setting up’ foreigners – who are all considered to be rich – is big business. It is a very old story: ‘Give me money or I will tell the police that you slept with so-and-so’. Because it is so easy to file a complaint, and have a warrant issued for someone’s arrest, and because in the Philippine legal system one is guilty until proven innocent, the accused can be picked up and made to sit in jail for years awaiting trial even if he was 1,500 miles away at the time of the alleged offense. Cullen – who according to one Homeland Security officer is not a priest at all but a garden-variety thug and a conman – actually wrote a book about how to exploit the legal system in the Philippines, which the publisher will not sell in the country for fear of lawsuits. 

This hustler however has a different modus operandi. He is not after money from foreigners, not directly anyway. As long as he is at one stage or another of a case – real or imagined – he gets handouts from the government, and the more cases the better.

“In the Philippines, bringing a criminal charge is not very
 difficult or expensive,” Cullen noted in his February 25, 2018
advertorial in The Manila Times. His preferred number seems to be five, and 
should one of these charges result in a conviction, he gets the Holy Grail: donations from across Europe, where he conducts an annual roadshow to

pitch his latest schemes to gullible supporters. 

This is his business model, and the web is awash with the stories of his victims, most notably Sherry Zimmer, an American woman and former neighbor of Cullen’s who simply got on his nerves and had five charges of kidnapping and illegal detention filed against her in 2014 after she was hauled from her farm by plain-clothes ‘officers’ at the age of 65 and driven in a pickup truck with a roll of cash on the dashboard to the local jail, where she spent 126 horrific days while the priest raked in massive cash awards from donors unaware that the entire story had been fabricated just for them. (To be continued.)

#ShayCullen #PredaFoundation

DEDICATION

These posts are dedicated to Sherry Zimmer,

who has spent the last five years tirelessly

amassing documentation and conducting

interviews to expose Shay Cullen and

his accomplices both within and

outside the Preda Foundation.

People are listening, Sherry.