Why Did David Ambroz Leave the Boys & Girls Club of Boston?

Rev. Dec 2 2023

In 1963, eighteen-year-old James Power, who was working as a camp counselor at the Charlestown Boys Club near Boston, and his gay, fraternal twin, Michael Power, kidnapped a small group of pre-teen boys who were attending the day camp and then raped, mutilated, and tortured them. I was one of those boys.

The Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston, which, at that time, was headed by Boston Brahmin Helen Bowdoin Spaulding, covered up the crime. Shortly after it happened, they celebrated Michael in a picture alongside Governor Chubb Peabody, which they published in their newspaper, the Charlestown Patriot. But they didn’t fete Edward Darragh, most certainly not. And you should definitely read about Ed Darragh.

In 1963, settlements were made with parents whose children told them what happened. But I could not speak about what had been done to me, and there was no one in my home who cared enough to notice any difference in me, unfortunately. In fact, the only way I found to deal with it was to repress it in my mind, and I did that down to my bare bones.

However, when I was just seventeen, the wobbly legs that the Boys Club left me to walk through life with began to show some very difficult ways, and I went into talking therapy, for three years. But it was not successful, and efforts to talk about what had happened to me resulted in a brief hospitalization at the Massachusetts General Hospital. That is a good measure of the severity of injury I suffered during a mere two-week summer vacation at what turned out to be the most dangerous place on Earth for me, in 1963.

Eventually, after more than a decade and going in to the early eighties, I quit talking therapy for good to make my own way by learning to brave the horror that I had endured that afternoon in 1963. All it took was courage to begin healing. Fortunately, the same emotions I had experienced that day at the Charlestown Boys Club persisted within my subconscious as recurring emotions that haunted my daily life and never went away. So I was able to trace those lingering emotions back to their origin, and that is how I learned what had happened to me, through something called dithyrambic tragedy, about which I now write books that are slowly gaining me some fame, when Jack Connors and [redacted] at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston aren’t looking.

At that time, in 1996, I wrote to the CEO of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston, Frances Moseley, and asked for their help. Under counsel from Judith A. Malone and Jeffrey F. Jones of the Palmer and Dodge law firm in Boston, they told me to prove it, which was a very fateful decision on their part. And thus began a journey toward justice that has endured to this day in 2023.

Stupidly, the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston repeatedly raised the bar every time I brought them evidence, eventually demanding corroboration from the perpetrators and other victims. But when I produced that, it still wasn’t enough — because they never wanted proof, they just wanted me to go away. And if I didn’t go away, they were going to make it very difficult for me, and not just difficult to prove. They were going to make life difficult, with computer and phone hacking. overt stalking, illegal listening devices, and theft of US Mail, to name just a few.

The next thing I had to do was go to the Suffolk County District Attorney in Boston, which I had already done with Rachel Rollins’ two predecessors, since 1996, each of whom told me to take a hike, especially Conley. Finally, in October of 2020, Rachel Rollins opened an investigation; that’s twenty-four years later.

However, before all that happened, I wrote to Josh Kraft (Mr. Ambroz’ predecessor) at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston in July of 2018 to see if they had any interest in trying to resolve our dispute. And they did not, nor did they even acknowledge the letter. (In fact, going forward from that letter, they would not respond in any manner whatsoever to any communication from me, which I attribute to James Bucking at Foley Hoag, as I stated in this letter.)

Unfortunately, things did not go well through my contact with the Suffolk County District Attorney. After my forensic interview (and while I waited), a team of eight professionals deliberated for about fifteen minutes, maybe longer, and then voted unanimously to open an investigation, that day.

But then, very strange things began to happen. News of the investigation was leaked to the senior members of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston board. And everyone who was contacted by investigators denied having any knowledge of the crime, despite some having previously told me that they did have knowledge. The only exception was Michael Power, who hired a local attorney, refused to answer any questions whatsoever, and returned all US Mail that he explicitly marked “refused.” And then, even though the DA does not close ongoing investigations of child rape, this investigation was shut down and closed, illegally. I have made numerous efforts to keep it open, and all of my efforts have been explicitly and rudely rejected by federal, state and city officials.

[See letter to Sgt. Det. Pamela Harris, who supervises the Boston Police Dept.’s Crimes Against Children Unit, or CACU.]

Notwithstanding these difficulties, I was determined to move forward. But I wanted to be conciliatory, so, once again, I wrote to the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston to ask if they had any interest in trying to resolve our dispute. By that time, in September of 2021, David Ambroz had become president and CEO just six months earlier in February, and I addressed my letter to him.

Within weeks of receiving my one-sentence letter (see below), David Ambroz left the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston.

Obviously, I have no knowledge of the events that played out prior to his departure, and I can only speculate. However, there is circumstantial evidence that he left as a direct result of my letter. And that comes from Jeff Bezos visiting my LinkedIn profile.

My profile gets very little notice. One day, I got just one visit.

Anyone who uses LinkedIn knows that they do not tell you who looks at your profile. But they do tell you the company where the visitor works. And they also tell you their occupation, without correlating any of that information. 

One day, when I had just one visitor, the company listed was “Amazon” and the position was “founder.” Therefore, I concluded that Jeff Bezos visited my profile.

Why would Jeff Bezos visit my profile?

For whatever reason, and I honestly do not know what made me think of it, the next day, I visited bgcb.org, the website for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston, and saw that David Ambroz was no longer the president and CEO. Then I looked to see if he was working at Amazon, and he was.

From this, I suspected that David Ambroz mentioned me to Jeff Bezos as a possible reason for his leaving the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston. But I do not know that as a fact.

Thus, I ask the question: why did David Ambroz leave the Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston?