Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work
Last November, David Gentile reported to the federal prison camp in Otisville, New York, to begin a seven-year sentence for a $1.6 billion fraud.
He told the other inmates not to get used to having him around. Within days, he expected to be gone, because a Catholic priest was pressing his case directly to President Trump.
He was right. Less than two weeks into the sentence, Trump commuted it. Gentile walked out a free man — his conviction left standing, but his prison term erased and the threat of forfeiting more than $15.5 million wiped clean.
What happened next is the subject of an investigation published Sunday by Kenneth Vogel, Nicole Hong, and William Rashbaum of the New York Times. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn opened a criminal inquiry into how that commutation came about. Trump’s own political appointees at the Justice Department shut it down.
At the center of the story is the Rev. Frank Mann, a 73-year-old retired priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn who gave 47 years to the people of Queens.
For most of those years his was a gentler kind of public witness.
Mann rescued stray cats from the streets of Queens, wrote on spirituality and animal welfare, and described an awakening to the suffering of animals that he traced to Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, calling his mission a vocation of healing, hope, and justice.
He once teamed up with The Tablet, the Brooklyn diocese’s newspaper, to host a New York premiere of a documentary about farmers who walked away from the cruelty of industrial agriculture.
His friendship with Trump began in a strange way. Mann came across the Trump family gravesite overgrown and untended, bought a weed whacker, cleaned up the plot, and mailed a photo to the White House. A phone call came back, and a friendship grew from there.
Mann delivered the closing benediction at Trump’s inauguration in January 2025.
The benediction itself should trouble anyone who takes prayer seriously. Mann ended it by urging the nation to go forth “with these words of President Trump’s emblazoned on our hearts,” then recited a passage of the president’s campaign rhetoric and sealed it with “Amen.” A politician’s applause line was offered up to God as if it were holy writ. It bordered on blasphemy.
Gentile is no ordinary candidate for presidential mercy. His private equity firm, GPB Capital Holdings, was convicted of defrauding more than 10,000 investors of roughly $1.6 billion. Prosecutors described the victims as hard-working, everyday people — small business owners, farmers, veterans, teachers, and nurses. Some of them lost their retirement savings to him.
According to the Times, investigators gathered evidence of jailhouse communications in which Gentile discussed paying $2.5 million or more to people or companies to help win his clemency. He told other inmates he had already arranged a payment to the priest.
A parishioner at a Brooklyn church where Mann sometimes says Mass recalled the priest describing his role without much hedging. Mann said Gentile had been unjustly convicted, that he had spoken with Trump and counseled him, and that the president commuted the sentence at his suggestion.
Mann tells a very different story. In an email to the Times, he denied any role at all:
“There is no way in either Hell or God’s incredible universe that I had ANY involvement in Mr. Gentile’s commutation. Such delusional nonsense! All I have EVER offered were my heartfelt prayers for him and his family.”
When the White House learned the priest might have been paid, Trump himself called and asked him directly whether he had taken money. Mann said no.
Days later, he was back at the White House for a Holy Week Mass and meal — the same gathering where Paula White compared Trump to Christ as Bishop Robert Barron applauded, a moment we flagged at the time.
Brooklyn’s career prosecutors began looking into the commutation by late February. By May the inquiry was dead. An associate deputy attorney general named Aakash Singh phoned the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York to express concern, and soon afterward the prosecutors were told to drop it. A Justice Department spokeswoman said everything had been handled by the book.
I reached out to the Diocese of Brooklyn to ask whether it is conducting any internal review of Father Mann’s conduct. The diocese declined to comment.
This is the same Justice Department that walked away from its case against New York Mayor Eric Adams while training its firepower on the president’s critics. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, says Trump “finds it detestable that anyone would even attempt to profit off pardons.” The investigation that might have tested that claim no longer exists.
Trump’s approach to clemency has spawned a cottage industry of lobbyists and fixers who collect millions from people chasing pardons they could never earn on the merits. In March, one lobbyist was charged with trying to extort half a million dollars from a client who had already received a Trump pardon.
Real mercy looks nothing like this. Pope Leo XIV has pleaded for clemency for forgotten prisoners as an act of mercy toward the powerless. What unfolded for David Gentile was its inversion — freedom handed to a wealthy man who had robbed the powerless, while his victims were left with the wreckage.
Set all of this against what Pope Leo XIV told a class of new priests in St. Peter’s Basilica last May. A priest’s life, he said, must be “transparent, visible, credible.” We live among the people of God, the pope told them, “so that we may stand before them with a credible witness.” Leo has been just as blunt with his own clergy about authenticity, warning Rome’s priests against turning the collar into a brand.
We know what a credible priestly witness looks like. Last summer, nuns and priests in Texas put their bodies between ICE agents and the migrant families they had come to seize. When the Trump-Vance White House banned Communion at an ICE facility, Catholic clergy took the administration to court. The accusation against Father Mann points the other way — a priest who, if the evidence holds, traded on his nearness to the most powerful man in the world for a man who preyed on the weak.
Father Mann seems to have had an honorable vocation. He tended a stranger’s grave because he believed it was the decent thing to do, and he gave nearly half a century to the priesthood. Like so many who are pulled into Trump’s orbit, he may have let friendship with power carry him somewhere no priest should go.
I hope and pray the allegations aren’t true. If they are, I hope he comes clean — for the sake of his own soul, and for the thousands of people David Gentile fleeced who then watched the man who ruined them walk free.
As much as my heart breaks for the priest, it breaks more for the injustice done here — above all to the people Mr. Gentile defrauded, some of you reading this among them, who handed him your savings in good faith and watched them disappear.
The officials Trump appointed have shut this inquiry down. But what was promised or paid to spring a man who stole from farmers and retirees will not stay hidden forever — and a priesthood, like a presidency, is finally judged by whom it chooses to serve.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the farmers, veterans, teachers, and retirees David Gentile robbed — and with every person of goodwill who believes that justice should never carry a price tag, and that the priesthood exists to serve God’s people rather than to broker favors for the powerful.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than an age where the wealthy can purchase mercy that the forgotten never receive. They are looking for the kind of credible witness Pope Leo keeps calling us toward, where the truth is told plainly and the powerless are not abandoned.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the corruption of power — I am asking you to join us.
If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:
Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.
Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.
Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.
A paid membership also opens the full archive — the biographical series on Pope Leo’s life and formation, the Epstein-Bannon Investigation, and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.
Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.
Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
