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James Looby (MUGSHOT courtesy BERGEN COUNTY PROSECUTOR)
James Looby now faces charges of swiping $53,000 from the church’s fund for the poor.
Looby, 51, was taken into custody this week after investigators found that he used the money for plane tickets, credit card payments and other personal expenses, Bergen County Prosecutor John L. Molinelli said.
Molinelli said the Archdiocese of Newark alerted his detectives after a routine audit showed the money missing from the “Cares” bank account established by Saint Therese Lisieux Church.
Financed by parishioners and private businesses, the fund is there “to help parish families who were in financial need,” the prosecutor said.
Born in Cresskill, the fourth-oldest of five children, Looby attended St. Therese Grade School and Cresskill High School. He’s also a former member of Cresskill’s Knights of Columbus.
Looby curiously built his professional career on a Master of Science degree in computer technology online from Northfield University, which is part of an organization created by two men from Brooklyn and dubbed the “Granddaddy of Diploma Mills.”
His first job was as a computer tech with Wachovia Bank, where the church kept the special account, CLIFFVIEW PILOT has found. Looby also worked in tech support for ABC’s Channel 7 in New York before moving to Mercedes Benz in Montvale and, eventually, BASF Chemical, where he managed the finance department.
The Looby Cup
He become a Eucharistic minister at St. Therese’s nearly two decades ago, was once coordinator of the annual Dumont Day and was the Dean of Merit Badges for the North Jersey regional office of the Boy Scouts of America. In 1995, he was appointed to fill an unexpired term on the Dumont Board of Education; he later won election to the position.
A year earlier, he was named a Bergen County “Volunteer of the Year.”
Ten years ago, Looby donated a trophy to the New Jersey Drama and Forensics League that it could give to its annual statewide champion: It became known as the Looby Cup. Similar in some ways to the NHL’s Stanley Cup, the trophy is brought by the previous year’s winner to the state forensics championships to be given to the top team.
The forensics students compete in dramatic and comedic pairs, comedic and dramatic monologue, musical theater duets, improvisational pairs, “declamation,” scene competition, impromptu speaking, persuasive speaking, and poetry and prose interpretations.
Dumont has won the cup each of the past two years — essentially, bringing it “home.”
Looby left the corporate world in 2004 to become a full-time pastoral associate at St. Therese. He figuratively wore many hats with the church, serving as a youth minister, confirmation director, baptism coordinator and bereavement counselor, among other positions, according to the Archdiocese.
He also conducted communion services every Monday at Sunrise Assisted Living in Cresskill.
Looby has been living in Del Valle, Texas, since leaving St. Therese the last day of May — six years to the day that he officially began his mission there. The divorced father of three was ordained on June 11, 2005 in Newark.
Molinelli said Looby got a credit card for the account and made withdrawals that began in January 2006 and continued up until the time he left.
Looby was released without bail pending a court date on Tuesday in Bergen County Central Municipal Court in Hackensack.
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