The police also received a number of calls from people saying they'd been bilked. "The DA agreed to take the cases and investigate them as possible theft," Lauricella says.
The most serious charge brought against Paniagua involves a seventeen-year-old girl who claims he raped her. According to court records, the girl and her mother went to Paniagua's office in late March. Paniagua told the two that the teenager had a bad spirit in her and that it would cost $5,000 for a cure.
Oscar Paniagua, "messenger of truth."
Mike Miller
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The girl's mother went to the bank, withdrew the cash and returned to the office, according to the police report. Paniagua then took the seventeen-year-old into his inner office.
Once inside, the girl told police, Paniagua began kissing her and fondling her breasts and buttocks. Then he removed her clothes. She struggled and tried to escape, she says, but Paniagua laid her across his desk and held his hand over her mouth so she could not scream.
He then raped her, she told police, and told her not to tell anyone what had happened.
Police arrested Paniagua on April 19. He was held on $500,000 bond for each sex-assault charge -- $2 million in all, says Detective David Colaizzi.
"At the preliminary hearing, Paniagua's attorney argued about the bond," Colaizzi says. "There was a gentleman there -- the district attorney said he's kind of a prominent person in the Hispanic community -- I spoke with him briefly, and he vouched for Oscar, said he'd be responsible if he makes bond and that he would see that he doesn't leave the country and that he would not allow him to do counseling work."
The identity of the man who went to bat for Paniagua is unclear -- a prosecutor says she believes it was the president of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, but that group's president is a woman. Paniagua's attorney at the time, David Givens, confirms that a onetime Rockies baseball announcer appeared in court with Paniagua, but he says the man did not take the stand on Paniagua's behalf.
In arguing for a reduced bond, Givens told the court that his client had no prior felony charges before the sex-assault charges, nor "any reports of misbehavior in which he was performing the same kind of work." In addition, he said, Paniagua had given him his passport to turn over to the "proper authorities" until the cases were settled.
Even Denver prosecutors didn't fight the initial motion to reduce the bond to $40,000. "Apparently Paniagua had already returned for a court appearance, and there was no criminal history," says Lynn Kimbrough, a spokeswoman for the Denver DA's office. "We talked with the INS, and they assured us they had a hold on him. So at the time of the hearing in which lowering the bond was brought up, we did not object."
Unfortunately, the INS information proved incorrect; that agency did not have a hold order on Paniagua. If it had, he would automatically have been turned over to the INS and subject to deportation. Had the DA's office known there was no hold order, Kimbrough says, it might have fought the bond-reduction request.
Instead, Paniagua posted bond and was released from jail June 7.
On July 21, Paniagua's new attorney, Harvey Steinberg, filed a motion with the court requesting that Paniagua be allowed to leave the state. Judge Jeffrey Bayless okayed the request July 27.
The DA's office "did not have a chance to respond to that request," says Kimbrough. "We were not alerted to the defense motion. The first we heard of it was when we got a signed order from the judge."
Since late July, police have been unable to track down Paniagua to serve him with the papers on the theft charges. They've issued an "at-large" warrant for his arrest.
They might have a chance to serve those warrants on September 5, when Paniagua is scheduled for a hearing on the sex-assault charges.
"It's dirty of the law to let him go," says Rose Griego. "I bet if I'd went and slapped him, I'd be in jail for a year."
