Huntington Beach Babbitt

Garofalo faxed a statement to the Weekly, in which he said, "All payments were made and all obligations paid in full . . . several years ago." But he did not explain why he was late with payments to his son's kidney fund.

Ultimately, Garofalo's quest for the house on Poppy Hill Circle blew up in his face—the face he was desperately trying to save from the moment he said yes to the deal, knowing he could never afford it. After owning the house for only one day, he had to sell it for $625,000 to George Pearson, another successful parishioner at St. Bonaventure—a millionaire who owns 80 gas stations. A man Garofalo considers a real big shot.

"He [Pearson] is a great guy. He takes priests on vacation. He takes kids to camp," Garofalo explained, full of awe and envy, when first questioned about the unusual real-estate transaction in April. "Since I don't have those kinds of resources, since I can't compete with [him], this is what I did for the guy."

Garofalo subsequently finagled his way into one of those cookie-cutter townhomes that one of his developer buddies built on Main Street, just north of downtown. He suggests he's happy to be there, which sounds good. It's certainly an improvement upon his previous residence, which was a Holiday Inn. Garofalo lived there for about a year, on the top floor—the penthouse, it was called, which doesn't sound so good when you're talking about a Holiday Inn. The view was of San Diego Freeway traffic jams and the empty Huntington Center parking lot.

Garofalo insists that Main Street is where he always really wanted to live. That's hard to swallow, especially since the fallout from his gesture in the Poppy Hill Circle deal has gone beyond indignity into accusations of illegality now being investigated by the district attorney, OC grand jury and the Fair Political Practices Commission. Even as Garofalo continues to reject speculation that he cashed in big-time—insisting that he made only $1 off the arrangement—his own pronouncements of innocence seem to grate on him. It's almost as if he's rubbing salt in the wound of his latest lost opportunity. "It actually would have been better for both of us had I closed the escrow, kept the subject property for the nine months or so . . . and enjoyed the $75,000 to $100,000 appreciation that was in the market," Garofalo told the Weekly in a May 1 fax. "You would have a much better story, and I wouldn't have minded so much."

The story of his life.