U.S. Government Does Not Deny Active End Game of George Gibney Investigation

by Irvin Muchnick

The United States attorney for the Southern District of New York is not denying Concussion Inc.’s reports that the American government is investigating the resident alien status of former Irish Olympic swimming coach and confirmed sex criminal George Gibney as part of a larger grand jury probe of USA Swimming abuse cover-ups and insurance fraud.

In a statement emailed to us yesterday, James Margolin, spokesperson for the U.S. attorney, Geoffrey S. Berman, said, “We’re declining to comment” on a set of specific questions regarding the status of the Gibney investigation.

Our query to Berman included the name of the assistant U.S. attorney, co-coordinator of the office’s work on human trafficking, who sources close to the federal investigation say is directing the examination of Gibney’s activities in this country since the 1990s, with a view to whether he should be extradited back to Ireland to face criminal charges — either on a 27-count indictment that was quashed by the Irish Supreme Court in 1994 on procedural grounds but could be revisited, or on newly emerging information and additional charges.

At this time, I do not believe it would be prudent to publish the name of this assistant U.S. attorney. But I note that the person’s partial name and role in the U.S. attorney’s human trafficking prosecutions are openly listed on the networking website LinkedIn.

Gibney is known to have raped and impregnated a teen Irish swimmer on a training trip to Tampa, Florida, in 1991, before he attained American residency through the Donnelly diversity lottery visa program. In 1998 the Irish government’s Murphy Commission, tasked with reviewing the country’s legacy of sexual abuse in swimming, which landed several of Gibney’s high-ranking coaching colleagues in prison — one of them for murder — concluded that Gibney’s accusers were “vindicated” by the evidence against him assembled by the Garda (national police).

Last week U.S. attorney Berman’s office issued the same “We’re declining to comment” statement to an Irish media outlet. And yesterday the Irish Sun joined the Irish Newstalk network’s Off the Ball podcast in reproducing my reporting that the American investigators are not focused on the ambiguities of Gibney’s immigration paperwork — which included a curious 2010 decision by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) not to remove him from the U.S. even though his application for naturalized citizenship had just been rejected by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), likely because the application had concealed his criminal indictment in his native country.

Rather, the current federal investigation is probing possible nefarious activity by Gibney while he has been living here. (After interludes in Colorado and California, Gibney has resided in Florida for more than a decade.)

The 2010 moves by ICE and USCIS were among the revelations of the settlement, in 2017 at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, of my Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, Muchnick v. Department of Homeland Security, for information from Gibney’s immigration file. Another key disclosure from the FOIA case was a heavily redacted American coaching job offer letter, which, as U.S. District Court Judge Charles R. Breyer had pointed out in his ruling in my favor, I believe may have been generated or engineered by the American Swimming Coaches Association.

The importance of the new non-denial by the U.S. attorney is not that it proves this end game of the Gibney investigation — the statement is neither a denial nor a confirmation. However, everything Concussion Inc. has been reporting about the larger grand jury investigation since early 2019 has been borne out to date. The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Orange County Register all have reported details of the non-Gibney aspects of the investigation, most notably the irregularities of USA Swimming’s former offshore reinsurance subsidiary, the United States Sports Insurance Company (USSIC), which was headquartered in Barbados. I have been writing in depth about the controversial USSIC since 2013.

See “As George Gibney Action Looms, USA Swimming Is Under the Microscope For Its Uniquely Irregular Insurance Practices,” May 22, 2019, https://concussioninc.net/?p=13861. A technical look at some of the insurance issues is in “Flashback: Concussion Inc.’s Early 2019 Coverage Anticipated New Reports of Federal Grand Jury Investigation of Swimming’s Insurance Practices,” October 7, 2019, https://concussioninc.net/?p=14014.

The July second edition of my ebook The George Gibney Chronicles: What the Hunt For the Most Notorious At-Large Sex Criminal in the History of Global Sports Tells Us About the Sports Establishments and Governments on Two Continents, https://www.amazon.com/George-Gibney-Chronicles-Establishments-Governments-ebook/dp/B07NZ6S3PJ, explains that federal investigators are taking a close look at Gibney’s chairmanship in the late 1990s of the “International Peru Children’s Eye Clinic Foundation,” which, with the sponsorship of a Catholic parish in the Denver area, ran a medical mission to Peru. This was at a time when a Peruvian Catholic sect, Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, whose sexually abusive founder now lives in disgrace (and outside the reach of Peruvian law) in Rome, was establishing a foothold in the Archdiocese of Denver.