http://www.philly.com/philly/news/pennsylvania/20091113_Another_guilty_plea_in_Luzerne_corruption_probe.html
Posted on Fri, Nov. 13, 2009
Another guilty plea in Luzerne corruption probe
SCRANTON - A deputy clerk in Luzerne County, where a federal corruption probe is in progress, has agreed to plead guilty to taking a bribe.
Federal prosecutors say a contractor took William Brace to New York City and bought him a tailor-made suit worth about $1,500. Prosecutors say the suit was a reward for help in getting a county contract.
The plea agreement filed yesterday says Brace agreed to cooperate in the investigation. Brace was the 17th person to be charged in the county since January as part of the probe. Most of the accused are public officials.
Defense lawyer Joseph Nocito did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment
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http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homep ... abuse.html[/url]
Posted on Wed, Nov. 11, 2009
Luzerne officials deny knowing of abuse
By William Ecenbarger
For The Inquirer
WILKES-BARRE - To the frequent frustration and occasional exasperation of a special panel investigating judicial corruption in Luzerne County, yesterday's testimony gave off the steady and unmistakable sound of the buck being passed.
Phrases like "I was not aware," "Yes, but," and "It was not my responsibility" wafted from the witness chair as officials who oversee the county's courts denied knowing that thousands of adolescents were being locked away, often for petty offenses, after hearings in which they had been effectively denied lawyers.
When Luzerne County District Attorney Jacqueline Musto Carroll challenged the 11 members of the state-appointed Interbranch Commission on Juvenile Justice to "tell me what you do when you have a judge who is a crook," she was promptly interrupted by the questioner-in-chief.
"You report him," interjected John M. Cleland, the commission chairman and a judge on the state Superior Court.
Cleland and his fellow panelists have until May 31 to discover how two former judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan, managed to get away with what federal prosecutors say was a five-year, $2.8 million kickback conspiracy, a scheme that one juvenile-justice advocacy group called "one of the largest and most serious violations of children's rights in the history of the American legal system."
Musto Carroll said she was unaware that more than half the teenagers whose cases came before Ciavarella did not have legal representation. She said the judge's "zero-tolerance" policy was a result of the 1999 Columbine High School shootings.
"I think Judge Ciavarella was probably doing what he thought he ought to do," the district attorney testified. "I have heard in a number of cases, what he did actually straightened out kids' lives. Some went on to get scholarships and college educations."
That brought an angry response from panel member Robert L. Listenbee, head of the juvenile unit of the Defender Association of Philadelphia. "Ms. Carroll, I remind that you and I as attorneys took an oath to uphold the Constitution. There were children here whose basic constitutional rights were being violated every day. Let's keep that in mind."
Lawyer Kenneth J. Horoho Jr., a commissioner from Pittsburgh, offered a litany of questions about Musto Carroll's having not known or questioned Ciavarella's methods. Horoho concluded, "The bottom line is that 'zero tolerance' went unchallenged by your office."
"Don't worry about Luzerne County," Musto Carroll assured the commission. "As long as I'm here, it's in good hands."
Yesterday's first witness was David W. Lupas, Musto Carroll's predecessor as district attorney and now a county judge, who said that none of his assistants ever brought concerns about Ciavarella's conduct to his attention.
Panel member Dwayne D. Woodruff - the head juvenile judge in Allegheny County, and a former Pittsburgh Steelers safety - noted that 54 percent of the children brought before Ciavarella did not have lawyers. "Would you expect your assistant D.A.s to come to you with that?" Woodruff asked.
"No one came to me," Lupas said.
Cleland interjected, "I could understand a case here and a case there. But 6,000 cases? This went on for years, and it was a massive deprivation of rights. No assistant D.A., no public defender, no private lawyer ever raised a question? That's hard to believe."
Basil G. Russin, who has been chief public defender in Luzerne County since 1980, said that even if he had known the extent of Ciavarella's denial of rights to juvenile defendants, he would not have had many options. "We don't have the time or the money to look into things very deeply. We just do the best we can," he said.
Besides, Russin said, the judges' get-tough stance against juvenile misbehavior had wide public support.
"Everybody loved it. The schools loved it because they got rid of every problem kid. The parents loved it because there were kids they couldn't control. The cops loved it because it got kids off the streets, and the D.A. loved it because they were getting convictions."
In earlier testimony, Sandra Brulo, a former Luzerne County probation official, said she had raised concerns about Ciavarella with her boss, but did not hear back.
"Don't you think you should have taken it further when you didn't get any satisfaction from your supervisor?" asked Ronald P. Williams, a panel member from nearby Wyoming County, raising his arms in amazement.
"I took it to my boss," Brulo replied. "That's as far as I thought I should go."
She testified that probation officers, not attorneys, asked young defendants to sign forms just before they entered Ciavarella's courtroom that waived their right to a lawyer. Commissioner George D. Mosee, a deputy Philadelphia district attorney, asked Brulo if this was a proper role for probation officers.
"We did what the judge instructed us to do," she said.
"Even when their very liberty was at stake?" Mosee asked. Brulo did not answer.
Joseph Massa, senior counsel for the state Judicial Conduct Board, which investigates complaints against judges, told the panel that his agency had acted properly more than two years ago when it referred allegations it received against Ciavarella and Conahan to federal prosecutors.
By not acting on its own, the board allowed the jurists to stay on the bench until they resigned this year. The judges stepped down after a federal grand jury indicted them on racketeering, bribery and fraud charges.
"To allege the [Judicial Conduct Board] members put their heads in the proverbial sand while juveniles in this county were sent to the hoosegow is a disgrace," Massa told the panel.
Ciavarella is accused of taking bribes from operators of two for-profit detention centers in return for sending children to the centers. Conahan is accused of securing lucrative contracts for the private jails, which the state paid according to the numbers of inmates they housed.
Once the scheme was set up, prosecutors say, Ciavarella guaranteed that the jails were filled with a steady stream of juvenile offenders.
Ciavarella and Conahan are awaiting trial. They initially pleaded guilty but withdrew their pleas after a federal judge rejected the terms of their plea agreements.
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Seeking Juveniles' Stories
The Juvenile Law Center, the legal advocacy group in Philadelphia that sounded the alarm about unconstitutional practices in Luzerne County's juvenile court, wants to know if similar rights violations are taking place elsewhere in the state.
It is promoting a questionnaire on its Web site,
www.jlc.org/shareyourstory, for children or their parents to tell their stories anonymously.
The center is putting together a report for the state panel investigating the scandal in Luzerne County, where judges are accused of taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to place youths in for-profit detention centers.
The law center wants to hear from youths and parents from outside Luzerne County. Their responses will help the center make recommendations for improving the state's youth courts.
The questionnaire covers a number of practices that emerged from the scandal. Among other youths who have landed in a Pennsylvania juvenile court, the center wants to hear from defendants who were referred to juvenile court for an incident that took place at school; were shackled or handcuffed while in court; waived their right to an attorney; or were sent to a for-profit detention center.
SOURCE: Associated Press
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/20091110_Judge_tells_of_perverted_justice_in_Luzerne_juvenile_cases.html
Posted on Tue, Nov. 10, 2009
Judge tells of perverted justice in Luzerne juvenile casesBy William Ecenbarger
For The Inquirer
WILKES-BARRE - The judge who studied Luzerne County's "cash-for-kids" scheme said yesterday that children's constitutional rights had been denied and justice perverted "in ways that I would never have dreamed possible."
Judge Arthur E. Grim of Berks County, who reviewed transcripts of about 100 cases of juveniles caught up in the scheme, said the scandal grew out of "unfettered power, greed, opportunity, and intimidation."
Lawyers, court employees, and school officials knew of the scheme, but winked at it for convenience or self-preservation, Grim testified.
He described his findings to the Interbranch Commission on Juvenile Justice, an 11-member panel named by Gov. Rendell, legislative leaders, and the state Supreme Court to look into the scandal.
The commission opened two days of hearings here yesterday in its inquiry into systemic failures that permitted what federal prosecutors say was a $2.6 million kickback conspiracy involving former Luzerne County Court Judges Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan.
Grim said "an almost routine disregard for the rights of juvenile offenders" was known to lawyers, court staff, and school authorities, yet went on for six years or more.
He said many school officials supported Ciavarella's "zero-tolerance" policies toward teenagers no matter how minor the offense.
"When a misbehaving kid was brought to school authorities, they immediately picked up the phone and called the police," Grim testified. "They did this because they knew that if they did, that child would go before Judge Ciavarella and would be out of their hair as a problem."
He said many court officials failed to speak out because they owed their jobs to either Conahan or Ciavarella. Under orders from Ciavarella, Grim said, officers of the Juvenile Probation Department stationed themselves outside the courtroom and persuaded parents to give up their children's rights by signing waiver-of-counsel forms that were improper and legally defective.
Grim noted that in 2001, the state Superior Court reversed Ciavarella's sentencing of a 13-year-old because the judge had failed to inform the defendant of his right to a lawyer.
"Judge Ciavarella vowed publicly that this would never again happen in his courtroom. This was widely known by the general public, and especially by the members of the bar. Yet Ciaverella subsequently repeated this behavior over and over again. To my knowledge, not a single member of the Luzerne County bar ever spoke out."
He speculated that local lawyers were silent because Ciavarella was the president judge of Luzerne County Court and they feared retribution in other cases that came before him.
Grim noted that many parents who sought out lawyers to defend their children were told not to bother, because it would "only make matters worse" with Ciavarella.
"It was common knowledge that something was rotten in Denmark," Grim said.
The state Supreme Court appointed Grim, a senior judge, to review juvenile cases Ciavarella handled. Following his study, Grim recommended that about 6,500 convictions meted out by Ciavarella between 2003 and 2008 be overturned. In an unprecedented step, the high court adopted this recommendation on Oct. 29.
Grim said yesterday he decided to recommend throwing out nearly all the cases because so much money was involved in the kickbacks that "it was impossible for Ciavarella to be impartial."
Federal prosecutors say Ciavarella and Conahan collected $2.6 million from the owner of two privately run youth detention centers in exchange for the judges' sending teen defendants there.
Ciavarella and Conahan had agreed to plead guilty, but a federal judge this summer rejected their agreements with prosecutors. They withdrew their pleas and have been indicted again on racketeering charges.
Grim recommended that serious consideration should be given to opening Juvenile Court proceedings to the public, and to creating a system of circuit-riding judges and public defenders with special skills in dealing with juveniles. State law closes criminal court proceedings for people under 18.
Superior Court Judge John M. Cleland, chairman of the commission, emphasized in opening remarks that one of the panel's primary goals was to discover "what it would have taken to encourage people to act" and prevent the injustices.
"How do we create a system in which those who see corruption call the police? How do we create a system in which prosecutors who see a judge flagrantly disregard the law make a report to the [state] Judicial Conduct Board? How can we develop a system in which we select and educate our Juvenile Court judges so that glib sloganeering - and using phrases like 'zero tolerance' - is not mistaken for thoughtful judicial reflection?"
The commission may begin getting answers when hearings resume today, with testimony scheduled from representatives of the District Attorney's Office, Public Defender's Office, and Juvenile Probation Department.
Cleland also issued this plea to the people of Luzerne County:
"We know the people in this community did not consciously choose to stand on the side of injustice at the expense of children. But what was it that made it so hard to do the right thing? Were people afraid? Were they intimidated? By whom? What protections would they have wanted? Where would they have wanted to take the information they had?"
The hearing was in a large meeting room at a hotel outside the city. About 50 spectators, including local officials and representatives of advocacy groups, attended the day session. The crowd size doubled for the evening hearing.
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/20091116_In_Pa__coal_region__a_mother_lode_of_corruption.html
In Pa. coal region, a mother lode of corruption
First came "cash for kids." Now, six school board members are charged with accepting bribes from would-be teachers.
By William Ecenbarger
For The Inquirer
WILKES-BARRE - Early in the spring, the FBI made an extraordinary appeal that was carried by newspapers and broadcast media throughout northeastern Pennsylvania:
"If you are a teacher, prospective teacher, employee, or prospective employee of any kind who has been required to provide money, or anything else of value, to any individual in connection with being hired at any public school in northeastern Pennsylvania . . . you are requested to immediately contact either Special Agent Richard Southerton or Special Agent Joseph Noone in the FBI's Scranton office at telephone number 570-344-2404."
Almost immediately, the telephones were ringing. To date, six school board members have been indicted on charges they accepted bribes in exchange for hiring teachers in their districts. The FBI won't comment, but no one doubts there will be more charges.
Based on indictments and subsequent guilty pleas, the going rate for a teaching job is $5,000 in the Wilkes-Barre Area School District and the Hanover Area School District.
"The harsh truth is that it costs at least a couple of thousand dollars to get a job in a school district around here," says Thomas Baldino, who has taught political science at Wilkes University for 20 years. "You either pay it or you go well outside the area to teach. I have had really bright students who can't get teaching jobs here because they can't afford to pay for them."
Most of the attention in the federal probe into official wrongdoing in northeastern Pennsylvania has justifiably focused on the $2.8 million kickback scheme in which two Luzerne County judges allegedly sentenced juveniles to detention centers without legal representation. However, indictments have been dropping like cinder blocks outside the courthouse as well.
Indeed, as of the close of business Friday, U.S. Attorney Dennis C. Pfannenschmidt said 19 Luzerne County officials had been charged with criminal conduct in an ongoing investigation that goes well beyond the courtrooms of Michael T. Conahan and Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., the former judges who have been indicted in a "cash-for-kids" conspiracy.
The miscreants have included Charles Costanzo, who was convicted of making off with about $650,000 as county workers' compensation administrator, and William Brace, who last week pleaded guilty to accepting a $1,500 tailor-made, monogrammed suit in exchange for facilitating the award of a contract while he was deputy county clerk.
It's all merely the latest chapter in a legacy of official wrongdoing that stretches back more than a half-century and is punctuated by coal barons and mobsters - a "culture of corruption" that has snared judges and congressmen, legislators and councilmen.
Philadelphians upset with corruption in their city may find a mild tranquilizer in Pennsylvania's anthracite coal region, which includes Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, and Hazleton, where the FBI and the Justice Department have been intermittently probing public officials and racketeers for more than a half-century.
Baldino says he was born and raised in South Philadelphia and is "no stranger to crooked politicians." But, he adds, "the difference is that in Philly we have at least had episodes of reform, like Clark and Dilworth in the '50s. Here, there's never been a reform movement. What we're seeing here today is the way it's always been."
"The level of corruption is unbelievable. It's epidemic," says Robert Wolensky, a Luzerne County native who teaches sociology at the University of Wisconsin but returns regularly as an adjunct professor at King's College in Wilkes-Barre. "It wasn't until I moved to Wisconsin that I realized that corruption wasn't a normal part of government."
Baldino and Wolensky agree that the common denominator in the historic corruption has been jobs. "The Depression started here early, when the coal companies started laying off the miners in the 1920s," Wolensky said. "People became desperate for jobs, and the only jobs were with the local governments."
Baldino said at first it merely involved local politicians handing out jobs to their relatives and friends. "But before long, patronage moved into pocket-lining."
A key factor is the unusually large number of local governments. Luzerne County has four cities, 36 boroughs, and 36 townships; Lackawanna County has two cities, 17 boroughs, and 21 townships. "This is an outgrowth of the fact that every coal company had to have its own town so it could control laws and taxes," Wolensky said. "These towns survive today, and each is a little fiefdom."
"Today," he added, "paying to get a job is viewed as the proper thing to do - a way of saying thank you. Many public jobs are expected to be given only after a bribe. If you don't put the thousand dollars in the envelope, someone else will because they are as desperate as you."
Baldino said the citizens of northeastern Pennsylvania were "very forgiving" of government miscreants. He cited the case of Daniel J. Flood, the flamboyant congressman from Wilkes-Barre who was elected to a 16th term in 1978 while under federal indictment for bribery and perjury. He resigned two years later and died in 1994. The Wilkes-Barre Area School District, one of the districts where teachers' jobs were sold, includes the Daniel J. Flood Elementary School.
Joseph Vadella was forced to resign as Carbondale mayor in 1997 after being sentenced to four years in federal prison in a ballot-tampering scheme. Two years later, he was elected mayor again - even though his name wasn't on the ballot and had to be written in.
In Moosic Borough, Mayor John Segilia and Councilman Joseph Mercatili were forced to resign in 1992 after pleading no contest to fixing parking tickets and manipulating DUI cases. Both were elected to the same offices two weeks ago.
On Oct. 15, Allen Bellas was charged with taking a $2,000 bribe as executive director of the Luzerne County Redevelopment Authority. He pleaded guilty, but it was too late to get his name off the Nov. 3 ballot as a candidate for reelection to the Wyoming Valley West School Board. Despite his admission, Bellas was elected to another term on the school board. He is expected to resign.
There was one sign in the Nov. 3 election that voters' forgiveness was running thin. Judge Peter Paul Olszewski Jr. was soundly defeated in his bid for retention. Such retentions are usually routine, but a photograph was published in September in a Wilkes-Barre newspaper showing the jurist with a convicted drug dealer at a Florida condominium owned by Conahan and Ciavarella. The photo was taken in 2005, before the judges' alleged misconduct became public.
Baldino and Wolensky agreed that the "cash-for-kids" scandal had appalled the community much more than other official transgressions. Ciavarella and Conahan are under indictment on 48 federal racketeering and related charges, accused of receiving $2.8 million from the developers of two juvenile detention facilities. In February, they agreed to plead guilty in a deal with prosecutors that called for 87-month prison sentences, but a federal judge rejected the accord last month, saying the two jurists had not fully accepted responsibility for the crimes. They switched their pleas to not guilty.
Wolensky said organized crime was "part of the social fabric" of northeastern Pennsylvania, which is home to one of the nation's old mob families - the Bufalinos. The current leader has been identified by state and federal authorities as William "Big Billy" D'Elia, who is serving a nine-year term for federal money-laundering and witness-tampering convictions.
There has been testimony in an unrelated state Supreme Court case that D'Elia met regularly with Conahan for breakfast at a local restaurant to discuss pending cases.
Late Friday, Gene Stilp, a Wilkes-Barre native who has been active in opposing corruption at the state level, placed "Crime Watch" posters in the Luzerne County Courthouse to give courthouse employees a way of reporting misdeeds. The posters, which depict the courthouse with a big eye, urge respondents to send their information to a box at the Wilkes-Barre post office.
"If anyone thinks that the end of corruption within the Luzerne County Courthouse is in sight, or that all past abuses have been discovered, they are sadly mistaken," Stilp said.
