After death, a church leader's sordid side revealed By the time the letter arrived, the grass on Benjamin Hawkes' grave had grown thick. Historians had chronicled how he transformed the Los Angeles archdiocese into a billion-dollar institution. His portrait had been etched into a metal plaque and bolted to the wall of a sprawling church on Wilshire Boulevard. The archbishop, Roger Mahony, who had presided at the dedication of that plaque, had become a cardinal with thinning hair and deep wrinkles. The letter came to rest on his desk. "It's my turn to stand up and set the record straight," the shaky cursive read. Msgr. Hawkes was not a great priest, he was a sick man who used his status to abuse many. In the postwar boom that created modern Southern California, Msgr. Benjamin Hawkes was a power broker. The second-in-command to two cardinals, he ran the Los Angeles church for three decades, a span during which it grew into the largest, most diverse and by some counts wealthiest archdiocese in the nation. His knack for money and real estate gave him influence from Rome to Hollywood. He socialized with real estate titans, advised Vatican officials and even taught actor Robert DeNiro how to play a priest for a film role inspired by Hawkes' life. But Hawkes' revered place in the archdiocese's history is being reconsidered in light of the recent release of his confidential church personnel file. The file, made public in January in a lawsuit against the church, shows that 10 years after his 1985 death, two men came forward to say Hawkes had sexually abused them as teenagers. "I went into shock," said prominent California historian Kevin Starr, who has written about Hawkes. This was a great big commanding figure.... A celebrity. Cardinal James McIntyre took shotgun, Father Benjamin Hawkes the wheel. Their destination was the edge of town - wherever it might be that week. Southern California's population was exploding in the 1950s and '60s. Farms were becoming subdivisions overnight. A thousand Catholics moved into the archdiocese each week, and the church opened a new school every 26 days. Snapping up cheap parcels had become a pressing concern for the archbishop and the young priest who was his most trusted advisor. "They would drive the freeways and pick pieces of property out," recalled Hawkes' longtime friend Harley Noel. Hawkes, an accountant before entering the priesthood, had a head for numbers that attracted McIntyre's attention. The archbishop plucked him from parish work in 1952, just two years after Hawkes' ordination, and installed him at the chancery. Hawkes rose to the top quickly and stayed there for 33 years. His titles changed - private secretary, chancellor, vicar general - but his power endured. McIntyre and his soft-spoken successor, Timothy Manning, who arrived in 1970, were deeply spiritual men who preferred to spend their days crafting homilies and visiting parishes. They happily handed Hawkes their administrative duties. They weren't trained ... to be financial wizards. Msgr. Hawkes was. That was his background," Hawkes' former secretary, Betty Cotton, said. Hawkes liked to say he was responsible for "everything with a dollar sign in front of it," but in practice, he handled everything, down to the way church walls were painted. He made the budget, mapped out new parishes, hired contractors and even designed some of the churches. He decided which priests got new cars and handpicked seminarians to train in Rome, including two future cardinals. When scandal loomed, McIntyre and Manning consulted Hawkes. He signed the checks for alcoholic priests to go to rehab and for those who molested children to get therapy, according to interviews and church documents reviewed by The Times. His temper was as legendary as his power. When someone was late or sloppy, his shouts rang through the chancery. Priests sometimes left his offices in tears. A secretary who made a dictation error would have the offending page thrown back at her. "He alienated people," his longtime friend Noel acknowledged. But the alienation part - that's how they built the archdiocese. By 1967, the archdiocese's massive construction campaign had landed $27 million in debt. Hawkes' solution was to turn the chancery into a sort of bank for all the parishes. Centralizing assets allowed the church to use money from wealthy congregations to underwrite poor parishes. "We believe that the haves should help the have-nots," Hawkes often said. Less-affluent neighborhoods often revolved around those parishes, and their schools turned out generations of Catholics who remained devout as they climbed the socioeconomic ladder.