Kids for Cash Read online

  Conahan, as president judge, regularly steered key cases to his co-conspirator, even when that strategy backfired. That happened in 2006 when Ciavarella entered a $3.5 million verdict in a libel trial against the Citizens’ Voice. The award went in a nonjury trial to a businessman who claimed he had been defamed in a series of articles involving money laundering and Billy D’Elia, the local organized crime boss. The newspaper appealed the decision, and it was overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which ordered a new trial because Conahan had improperly assigned the case to Ciavarella. There was testimony at the trial that D’Elia had bragged he had influenced the verdict through his friendship with Conahan.

  But Ciavarella was still a widely respected public figure, whose policies had broad community support. “Success stories” were reported of kids who were adrift, then came before Judge Ciavarella and straightened out their lives. Ciavarella was known to console the parents of children he had just sent to detention, go to the graduations of kids he believed he had rehabilitated, and help them get into college. Young adults recalled the days when he coached them to victory after victory on the Catholic Youth Center swim team. He was active in the community. In December 2005, the Italian-American Veterans of Luzerne County gave him its certificate of appreciation for his contributions to the post. He was a member of the board of directors and chairman of the annual family picnic.

  In March 2006 Ciavarella was honored as Man of the Year by the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick of Greater Wilkes-Barre. At a dinner, the judge was introduced by his son, Marco Ciavarella, who was a freshman at Penn State University. The elder Ciavarella was moved to tears when his son spoke about the admiration that juvenile defendants had for his father. “I’m humbled, not only to receive this award, which I will cherish forever, but by the words of my son.” The judge said his parents—Mark Ciavarella Sr. and Mary Cunningham Ciavarella—taught him to respect other people, his religion, and his Irish heritage. This prompted U.S. Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski (D., PA) to read a congratulation to Ciavarella into the Congressional Record: “Judge Ciavarella has served his community well both on the bench of the Luzerne County Court and in the many leadership roles he has undertaken with numerous civic organizations. The quality of life in the greater Wyoming Valley is made better due to the work of people like Judge Mark Ciavarella.”

  The following week, Ciavarella and Conahan each secretly pocketed half of the $150,000 finder’s fee from Rob Mericle for the expansion of the Pittston center, and they filed annual disclosure statements with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that concealed the kickbacks from Mericle and Powell, which now totaled $2.7 million.

  With the pesky Muroski out of the way, the rogue judges had smooth sailing in the summer of 2005. On July 20, the Pinnacle Group issued a $350,000 check to Cindy Ciavarella. She signed and deposited it in her husband’s personal account. This, of course, was part of the $1 million finder’s fee from Mericle that was laundered through Powell’s Cayman Islands operation. Ciavarella was still winning high marks, especially from school administrators, for his draconian decisions sending kids to institutions. He rode this wave of popularity into the election of November 8, 2005, when Luzerne County voters overwhelmingly approved his retention for another ten-year term with nearly 60 percent of the votes. Ciavarella campaigned briefly and told interviewers that probation was not an effective way of dealing with juvenile offenders. He invited a Times-Leader reporter into his chambers and showed letters of gratitude from juveniles who had appeared before him, been sentenced, and then become responsible adults. He said the juvenile court allows him to find the most appropriate treatment facility for the youths who come before him. “It’s probably the only court where you can make a difference in a child’s life,” Ciavarella said one week before the election. “You have the ability to put them in a treatment program that helps them get from the lowest point in their early lives to a place where they feel good about themselves.”

  But ten days after the election, Pennsylvania’s Superior Court—acting on an appeal filed by the Times-Leader—overruled Conahan’s decision halting the audit of PA Child Care by the state Public Welfare Department. It was the beginning of the end for the judges. In blunt terms, a three-judge appeals court panel rebuked Conahan for abusing his discretion in stopping the audit without first holding a hearing. The appeals judges said they were baffled by Conahan’s claim that the audit would reveal “trade secrets.” They said the action appeared to be “nothing more than a ruse to prevent public exposure.” When the hundreds of pages of documents in the preliminary audit findings were opened, there were no trade secrets.

  Tom Crofcheck, the Public Welfare Department’s certified fraud examiner, went back to work on the PA Child Care audit in early 2006. When their work was complete, he and his auditors concluded that the state had overpaid at least $4 million in reimbursement costs to the county for PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care. The audit team found that Powell used profits from the two juvenile detention facilities to make millions of dollars in interest-free loans to other enterprises he owned, including $140,000 in prepaid flight time on his Rockwell Sabreliner luxury turbo jet, which he bought in November 2005 for $2.6 million. Other unauthorized expenditures were $5,800 for a limousine ride to a college basketball tournament and $3,500 for a custom-tailored suit for a political friend who worked at the detention centers. In all, the Crofcheck team found more than $1.2 million in expenses that should not have been reimbursed by the state. They also found “questionable costs” totaling $836,636 in state payments for the fees of Dr. Frank Vita, Conahan’s brother-in-law. Vita had earned some $1.1 million for evaluating juveniles under an arrangement with the court that was not subjected to competitive bidding. The auditors also found that Vita had submitted “cookie-cutter” evaluations—that is, they employed language that was cut and pasted from standardized material. Often the evaluations were nothing more than a new first and last page with “boilerplate” language in between. And, in one instance, the evaluation confused one child with another. It also noted that youths were often detained in PA Child Care for days or even weeks to await Vita’s evaluation.

  Before the final audit was released, Crofcheck went on a cruise with his family in June 2007. When he got back, he was abruptly informed by his superior that he was being removed from his position as audit director and would take on a new job, one that didn’t exist until now. The new position would place him in an office very close to his home in Luzerne County and would end his 180-mile daily commute. It was very tempting as there was no cut in salary. But he knew something was wrong, and he decided to fight. Then, on June 13, 2007, he was called to a meeting with his superiors in Harrisburg and informed that he was being removed from his job because of poor performance. He was shocked, then recovered and pointed out that in his first six years he had received the highest possible ratings in his annual evaluations, and that the person now demeaning his performance had recently evaluated him as “a model civil servant” that “other state employees should try to emulate.”

  When Crofcheck asked for details of his alleged poor performance, he was told he should not have given the working papers of the audit to Steve Flood back in 2004. Crofcheck explained that the material had been subpoenaed by Flood, and the DPW legal counsel had told him the subpoena was legal. Crofcheck believed that the bureaucratic attitude toward audits was that the problem didn’t exist until the auditor found it—and therefore the problem was created by the auditor. Crofcheck was placed on six months’ probation, but he returned to his job in a few months because his superiors left state government. (He was immune to political pressure because he had civil service protection and believes that when he retires, his job will be removed from the civil service system.)

  Three years after it began, the audit was released in 2007. Just before it was made public, Crofcheck met with attorneys for PA Child Care, who asked him, “Is there anything we can do to get you to not issue that report?”

  “Y
es.”

  “What?”

  “Let me turn everything over to the federal inspector general,” Crofcheck said, while thinking, If they don’t like me, wait ’til they see what the IG is like.

  They backed off.

  In May 2010, three years after the administration of Governor Edward Rendell tried to remove Crofcheck from his job for poor performance, the same administration gave him the Governor’s Award of Excellence for his role in pushing the audit of PA Child Care. In presenting the award, Rendell told Crofcheck: “As Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, I commend you for your initiative, leadership, and strong commitment to public service. Pennsylvania state government is fortunate to have you. Citizens across Pennsylvania experience the results of your accomplishments through the services you provide. The impact of your work stands as irrefutable endorsement of the exceptional human talent and abilities of all commonwealth employees.”

  When Richard J. Gold became the deputy state public welfare secretary in charge of the Office of Children, Youth and Families in April 2007, he was the fifth individual to hold the post in four years. Gold was a Philadelphia lawyer with a distinguished career devoted to protecting the civil rights of children, the homeless, and the disabled. The office that he now headed, which administered Pennsylvania’s child welfare system, was in need of leadership. Gold was aware that about 80 percent of the money that counties used for juvenile delinquency and dependency came through his new office. Moreover, Pennsylvania was among the worst states in terms of excessive use of placement facilities. He resolved that, unlike his predecessors, he would visit individual counties to see firsthand how the money was being spent and to find ways to curb the use of placement. He wanted to start with the counties that were spending the most money, and quickly turned his attention to Luzerne County. He noticed that not only was the placement rate higher than anywhere else in the state, but in each of the recent years county officials had been coming back to the state for more money than originally allocated. Unaware of the controversy surrounding Tom Crofcheck’s audit of PA Child Care, Gold scheduled a meeting with county officials in August.

  When he got to the conference room in Wilkes-Barre for the meeting, he found a very hostile group of some twenty county juvenile treatment officials—plus Ciavarella. “Everyone seemed to want me to praise them for their work,” he recalled, “but I was concerned about the high placement rate and I asked what could be done to reduce the number of out-of-home cases and how the state could help to achieve this goal. I pointed out that percentage-wise, Luzerne had a higher placement rate than Philadelphia. I thought I was asking legitimate, basic questions. But their attitude seemed to be, ‘How does Richard Gold get off asking us questions like this?’ I kept asking about the overspending on detention and the high placement rate. I wasn’t getting any answers. They wanted to talk about other aspects of their program.” Everyone, that is, except Ciavarella. The judge sat at a ninety-degree angle to Gold, his face red and distorted with anger, and glared silently at him for the entire meeting. “I practiced law in Philadelphia for many years, and I had known a lot of cantankerous judges, but I had never seen anything like this. He was livid. But I was a newcomer, and I never imagined what was really going on. I figured he was a law-and-order judge and just didn’t like what I was saying. At the end of the meeting, I told them, ‘There’s something wrong with your numbers.’ No one said a word. I never expected that kind of a reception.”

  But an even bigger surprise awaited Gold when he returned to his office in Harrisburg. At the regularly scheduled meeting with his supervisors, he was reprimanded for upsetting Luzerne County officials. One of the rebukes came from Estelle Richman, the public welfare secretary and an appointee of Governor Edward Rendell. “She said she had received complaints—she didn’t say from whom—and she wanted to know what was going on,” Gold said. “I was dumbfounded. I told the secretary that I was just asking the same questions I was asking in all the other counties. She told me to be careful because I was from Philadelphia and there’s a lot of distrust about the city up there. Don’t rock the boat if you can help it.” Gold said Richman later met with the Luzerne officials “to calm down their concerns.”

  7

  HILLARY AND JESSICA

  Laurene Transue had just shrugged her coat off on a chilly January night in 2007 when her cell phone chirped. The voice at the other end was insistent and brusque. It was a Wright Township police officer, and he wanted to speak to her about her fourteen-year-old daughter, Hillary. He said Hillary had posted something on MySpace, the social networking website, about her assistant principal at Crestwood High School. He used words like “heinous,” “foul,” and “disgusting” to describe Hillary’s post. He said he was coming right out to arrest her on charges of terrorism and stalking on the Internet.

  Laurene called up the stairs and asked Hillary if she knew anything about a MySpace page and her assistant principal. “I started that months ago, and I haven’t written anything since,” she called back. Then she told the officer she would not meet with him without an attorney. She remembers that he said, “That’s what’s wrong with you parents—you’re always trying to protect your children.” She thought, Yeah, that’s right. I always try to protect my children. But she did not say it. She hung up instead.

  Before the phone call, Laurene had felt drowsy. She had just driven thirty miles from Northampton County Community College, where she had taught a six-hour class designed to help welfare recipients find careers. But now she was wide awake with a swelling lump of panic in her chest. She summoned Hillary, who quickly explained she had written a satire purporting to be her assistant principal’s MySpace profile. But there was nothing obscene, she said. Laurene called her mother, who told her to remain calm and call the officer back. She did. “He told me, ‘If we leave the lawyer out of it, I will just charge her with harassment.’ I said okay, and he said I would be getting something in the mail.” The officer said the Crestwood School District wanted to discipline Hillary and make an example of her as a way to discourage students from using social networking sites to comment on faculty. He assured her that Hillary’s punishment would be some form of community service and possibly a period of probation. Laurene Transue believed him.

  The past few years had been turbulent for the Transue family. Laurene had gastric bypass surgery in 2002 that went terribly wrong and resulted in multiple complications. She was in a coma for three months, then bound to a wheelchair for three months, and finally needed a walker and a cane for two years. She was away from her home and family for six months and then faced a long rehabilitation. Hillary was sent to stay with an aunt and then with family friends from church. The Transues’ rented home in Canadensis, Pennsylvania, was sold, and they decided to move to Luzerne County and begin a new life in the town of White Haven.

  Hillary enrolled as an eighth grader in Crestwood Middle School in January 2005. She was five foot nine and towered above most of the girls and many of the boys at school. She sometimes dyed her hair deep black with streaks of pink. She stood out in other ways. Hillary was bright, brash, witty, and often acerbic. Around the faculty room she was sometimes called “The Queen of Sarcasm.” That sobriquet was embellished near the end of the school year in July 2006 when Hillary created a mock MySpace profile of the assistant principal, who had a school-wide reputation as a stern, inflexible disciplinarian. Under the website’s standardized heading “What Do You Collect,” Hillary wrote “Johnny Depp’s ‘tighty whites’ [underwear].” To the question, “Who Are Your Favorite People,” Hillary answered, “Satan” and “Bob Barker.” To accompany this “profile,” Hillary drew an unflattering sketch of the school official that included a swastika armband. Finally, there was a disclaimer, branding the entire exercise a hoax that concluded by saying, “I hope that Mrs. ——— has a sense of humor.”

  But Mrs. ——— didn’t—especially after others posted comments on the parody that were vulgar and obscene. A few months later
, the vice principal filed a complaint with the local police, who went to Verizon with a search warrant and traced the posting back to a wireless account in the Transue household. Then they made the telephone call to Laurene Transue, informing her that her daughter was going to be arrested.

  That was in January, and Laurene heard nothing until March, when she and her daughter were summoned to the Luzerne County Juvenile Probation Services office in downtown Wilkes-Barre. They were interviewed together and separately by the probation officer. Laurene was jarred by some of the questions. Were she and her husband intimate? Was Hillary a virgin? Was she gay? They were told that Hillary was being charged with criminal harassment, and that her recommended punishment, subject to the judge’s approval, would be probation. Did Hillary need a lawyer? The officer said a lawyer would not be necessary because Judge Ciavarella usually followed the recommendations of Probation Services. But Hillary had learned of Ciavarella’s reputation, and she told her mother she wanted an attorney. Laurene told her she was being silly. Ridiculous. No one was going to send her away.

  On April 17, 2007, Laurene Transue dropped Hillary off at the courtroom building and went to search for a parking place. When Hillary stepped off the elevator, she was directed to a desk to confirm her arrival with a probation officer. Did she have an attorney? No. When Laurene arrived, she was asked by the probation officer, Do you have an attorney present? When Laurene said she did not, she was told, “Sign here and sit in the waiting room through that door.” She signed the form. This was a violation of Pennsylvania’s juvenile court rules, which provide that only the juvenile can waive the right to counsel.

  During the previous week, Laurene had coached Hillary on how to show deference and respect to the judge. The girl wore a two-piece suit and blouse borrowed from her mother. Now they waited. Finally, the bailiff stuck his head out the door and hollered, “Transue!” They stood just inside the courtroom. With rising fear, Hillary watched the vice principal she had parodied kiss the cheek of the assistant district attorney who was prosecuting Hillary. Then they exchanged friendly banter. Any hopes she had of avoiding out-of-home detention (she thought of it as “jail time”) vanished. Then a voice boomed out, “Case number six, Hillary Transue.”