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  To get cheap labor to extract the anthracite while maximizing profits, the coal barons recruited aggressively in Europe. The successive waves of immigrant miners—first Welsh and Irish, then Italians and Slovaks—moved into tiny towns called “patches” that were centered on the mining operations. The miners’ relationship with the coal companies was close to slave-master. They lived in company-owned housing under leases that could be canceled at whim. The miners were required to buy all of life’s necessities from the company store, which charged exorbitant prices. Itinerant peddlers with better prices were not allowed in the patches. These “coal-crackers” labored fourteen hours a day, often in near darkness standing in knee-deep water or lying flat on their stomachs. Death and injury were their constant companions. Their entire existence was permeated with threats—loss of home, loss of job, loss of life. Insecurity and submission to authority became part of the coal-cracker gene pool.

  By the turn of the last century, some 100,000 miners worked in the anthracite region, but demand dropped sharply after World War I, and northeastern Pennsylvania slipped into the Depression well before the rest of the nation. World War II brought a brief revival of prosperity before a permanent malaise set in at midcentury. By 1960, fewer than 8,000 men worked in the mines.

  From the beginning, the coal barons formed alliances with anyone who could be helpful, and one powerful group that became intimately associated with the mining business was organized crime. The first mob boss in northeastern Pennsylvania was Sicilian-born Santo Volpe, who ran bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution operations while heading up several coal companies. Volpe’s political connections got him a seat on the Pennsylvania State Coal Commission, and from here he helped Mafia family members take over local coal companies. Joseph Barbara assumed mob leadership in 1940, and it was at his summerhouse in Apalachin, New York, that an infamous meeting of America’s top Mafia leaders took place in 1956. Around 1960 Barbara was succeeded by Russell Bufalino, who would become one of the nation’s leading organized crime figures with interests in loan-sharking, gambling, and legitimate businesses like coal companies. By this time the mobsters’ influence permeated not only the ownership side, but the United Mine Workers union as well. Sweetheart labor contracts became common.

  Moreover, the big coal companies had been selling or leasing the mines to small, Mafia-controlled operators who hobbled the UMWA and other unions and bribed state mining inspectors. This cleared the way for mine owners to engage in unsafe practices, especially “robbing the pillars”—the practice of mining from the columns of coal that had been left behind by earlier operations to support the roofs of the mines. In September 1958, a federal grand jury in Scranton began investigating organized crime’s infiltration of the anthracite industry. Dozens of company and union officials testified under subpoena.

  Then, on the unseasonably warm evening of January 22, 1959, the roof fell in—literally. The icy waters of the Susquehanna River broke through the roof of the pillar-robbed Knox Coal Company River Slope mine near Pittston. Twelve men were killed and the mine was flooded. It took nearly five hundred railroad cars and 25,000 cubic yards of dirt, rock, and boulders to seal the hole. Billions of tons of anthracite were made inaccessible. The grand jury indicted August J. Lippi, the local UMWA president, and several subordinates for accepting bribes from Knox Coal. Company officials and state mine inspectors were charged with conspiracy and involuntary manslaughter. Most of them eventually went to jail on lesser charges, but the trials exposed the widespread corruption of the anthracite industry by organized crime.

  The Knox Disaster, as it came to be called, hastened the already inevitable decline of the anthracite industry. But according to Robert Wolensky, a sociologist who grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania and co-authored a 1999 history of the disaster, there was a far deeper legacy: “Owners, bosses, inspectors and mineworkers alike knew that illegalities had become epidemic. They realized that powerful corporations with Wall Street addresses used contractors and lessees to accomplish questionable or illegal goals. They knew that organized crime had become part of the cancer. Finally, they knew that the UMWA had turned away from the mineworkers to become an accomplice in the scandal. Many otherwise upstanding citizens participated in the crooked dealings. The culture of corruption that had engulfed the industry caused serious damage to the community’s social and moral fabric, leaving wounds that remain to the present.”

  With the mines shutting down, people looked elsewhere for jobs, and the most likely sources were municipal governments, because there were so many of them. This was yet another legacy of the anthracite industry. These tiny municipalities were the descendants of the old mining patches, which had been originally established by the coal barons to give them iron-fisted control over taxes and laws. Luzerne County alone still has seventy-six municipalities—four cities, thirty-six boroughs, and thirty-six townships. Some examples: Sugar Notch Borough occupies one square mile and is home to 1,023 people; Bear Creek Village, two square miles, 284 residents; Nuangola, 1.3 square miles, 671 residents; and Pringle, one-half square mile, 991 residents. They have mayors, councilmen, and supervisors. In addition to these little fiefdoms, there are school boards and hundreds of commissions, agencies, and authorities. Each of them is headed by a public official with the power to hire and fire.

  Dr. Thomas Baldino, a longtime political science professor at Wilkes University, said that at first local politicians merely handed out jobs to their relatives and friends, “but before long patronage moved into pocket-lining.” Baldino was born and raised in South Philadelphia: “Therefore, I am no stranger of crooked politicians. But the difference is that in Philly we have at least had episodes of reform, like Joe Clark and Richardson Dilworth in the 1950s. Here, there’s never been a reform movement. What we’re seeing here today is the way it’s always been.” Wolensky, who now teaches sociology at the University of Wisconsin but returns regularly as an adjunct professor at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, concurs: “The level of corruption is unbelievable—it’s epidemic. It wasn’t until I moved to Wisconsin that I realized that corruption wasn’t a normal part of government. Paying to get a job is viewed as the proper thing to do—a way of saying thank you.”

  Even some of the public schools are highly politicized. A generation ago graduate students in the University of Scranton’s Department of Education were openly advised how much one had to pay to get a teaching job in parts of Luzerne County. It cost $2,500 in some corrupt districts, $3,000 in others. Payment was usually in cash placed in an envelope and usually slid across the table with the applicant’s résumé. Baldino said the old ways continue today: “It still costs a couple of thousand dollars to get a job in certain school districts. I have bright students who graduate but can’t get jobs here because they can’t afford to pay for it.” William C. Kashatus, a local historian who has written five books about the anthracite region and teaches at the Luzerne County Community College, said corruption has led directly to inferior schools: “We tell our best education students not to apply for jobs around here.”

  There is a very high tolerance for crooked politicians. Joseph Vadella was forced to resign as Carbondale mayor in 1997 after being sentenced to federal prison in a ballot-tampering scheme. Just two years later, Vadella 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 charges of fixing parking tickets and manipulating drunken driving cases. Both were elected to the same offices in 2009. Congressman Joseph M. McDade easily won reelection in 1992 and 1994 while he was under indictment on federal racketeering, conspiracy, and bribery charges. McDade was eventually acquitted.

  But the best example is Daniel J. Flood, the flamboyant longtime congressman from Wilkes-Barre, who was elected to a sixteenth term in 1978 while under federal indictment for bribery and perjury. Even today, the Wilkes-Barre Area School District in
cludes the Daniel J. Flood Elementary School. Flood finally resigned from Congress in 1980 after pleading guilty to accepting kickbacks for government contracts. He died in 1994. Kashatus has written a biography of Flood that recounts how Flood mastered the machinery of Congress to bring federal largesse to his district. He brought the area a veterans’ hospital, a regional airport, and he got Interstate 81 routed through Hazleton and Wilkes-Barre. However, his shining moment came in 1972 when Hurricane Agnes flooded the entire region. Flood rushed back to Wilkes-Barre in a Defense Department helicopter and declared, “This is going to be one Flood against another!” Flood led the recovery effort with enormous success. Even when he was up to his waxed mustache in corruption charges, Flood remained popular. Kashatus recalls: “When Flood was running for reelection in 1978, I would say to people, ‘Don’t you know that Daniel Flood is corrupt?’ They would say to me, ‘We don’t care what anyone says about Daniel Flood. He’s one of us.’”

  Throughout his career, Flood maintained very cozy relations with the northeastern Pennsylvania Mafia. Indeed, Santo Volpe was a guest at Flood’s wedding, and years later the congressman regularly obtained federal contracts for a close associate of Russell Bufalino. Nevertheless, Dan Flood is Luzerne County’s most legendary politician and remains a local folk hero. In 2010, an official state historical marker honoring him was placed in Wilkes-Barre’s public square. It reads: “Dan Flood, U.S. Congressman from Pennsylvania’s 11th district, was a colorful and controversial figure in Washington, D.C., from 1944–1980. His seniority on the House Appropriations Committee and his genius for the legislative process resulted in the passage of such national Great Society programs as Medicare, Appalachian economic development, and urban redevelopment. Charged with improprieties in arranging federal contracts, Flood resigned from Congress in 1980. His Wilkes-Barre office was at the corner of W. Market and Franklin Streets.”

  In 2002, federal authorities launched a widespread investigation of public corruption and organized crime in northeastern Pennsylvania that is still going on. By 2012, it had resulted in indictments and convictions of more than three dozen public officials, including judges and school board members accused of taking bribes for teaching jobs. One of them was Greg Skrepenak, a Luzerne County commissioner who pleaded guilty to taking multiple payoffs from a developer who obtained a government-subsidized loan through a county authority. Skrepenak, a former All-American football player at the University of Michigan and subsequently an offensive lineman in the National Football League, told reporters that he didn’t know the kickback was illegal until his indictment. “Things have been like this for so long,” Skrepenak explained, “that I don’t think many people see a lot of wrong in what they’ve done.”

  Today there is a plaque at the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton International Airport listing the names of six county commissioners who were in office when the facility opened in 2006. Three of them have since been jailed on public corruption charges. Nevertheless, a motion to remove their names from the plaque was defeated by the airport’s governing body in October 2011.

  Kashatus sees a distinct contrast between the politicians like Dan Flood and the current crop of local miscreants: “The difference today is that the old pols were pouring money back into the system—to the party, giving jobs to people, getting funds for local projects. Today they’re just putting the money into their own pockets. The anthracite culture may be dead, but the mentality it created is still here. Until the outsiders outnumber the descendants of the miners, it will be here.”

  The juvenile justice scandal of the first decade of the twenty-first century is the worst manifestation of a legacy of official wrongdoing in Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region, which includes the cities of Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, and Hazleton. Here, there is a “culture of corruption” that has snared judges, congressmen, legislators, councilmen, and school directors for decades.

  Indeed, back in 1909, when the mines were booming, there was a burst of civic pride as the new Luzerne County Courthouse, a magnificent structure of Ohio sandstone and concrete, opened on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Wilkes-Barre. But the early arriving courthouse workers were greeted by rats that were expelled only after two months of efforts involving traps, cats, and ferrets. Next, there were flooded offices brought on by a faulty cooling system. In the ensuing controversy, a grand jury charged that the project had been “riddled with fraud and gross negligence.” The following month criminal warrants were brought against the commissioners, county controller, architect, and subcontractors. Among the allegations were overcharging, kickbacks, and the use of inferior building materials.

  The allegations eventually were dropped and soon forgotten, and today the courthouse is a stately, if timeworn, Victorian structure with wide corridors, stained glass, Italian marble, bronze statuary, paintings, and mahogany paneling. The most impressive feature, visible for miles, is the rotunda dome.

  3

  SCOOCH AND THE BOSS

  A finespun morning fog erased the landscape around the eighty-seven-year-old Luzerne County Courthouse and shrouded its neoclassical lines, sandstone walls, and terra-cotta roof. By noon, the stained-glass windows of the dome were being pecked at by snowflakes—the advance guard of the record-shattering blizzard of ’96 that would bury the city in a few days. The interior base of the dome carried a circular inscription: “O Thou Who Art High above All the Earth, Cause Thy Face to Shine upon this Habitation of Justice, this Dwelling-place of Wisdom and Probity!”

  Beneath that dome, in the arched rotunda, a short, wiry forty-six-year-old man stood on the marble floor poised with his right hand raised and his left hand on a Bible held by his wife, Cindy. With his three children—Lauren, fourteen, Nicole, twelve, and Marco, nine—watching proudly, he intoned, “I, Mark A. Ciavarella, do solemnly swear that I will support, obey and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of this Commonwealth, and that I will discharge the duties of my office with fidelity.”

  Then the new judge’s face creased into a smile as his parents helped him slip into his black robe. Ciavarella had several reasons to be pleased on January 2, 1996. He was on the cusp of a ten-year term as judge that he had won the previous November after a bruising, expensive election campaign. Today was his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. And last night his beloved Penn State football team had trounced Auburn 43–14 in the Outback Bowl.

  Among the honored guests was Judge Michael T. Conahan, who exactly two years earlier had stood in the same rotunda and sworn to uphold the same two Constitutions. Conahan, too, had become a judge after a costly, combative campaign in which he promised he would uphold the judicial ideals of integrity and independence.

  Within a few years, Conahan and Ciavarella would become close personal friends and next-door neighbors on a pair of socially prestigious acres in the pricey suburb of Mountain Top. And they would become secret business partners in a scheme that would have devastating consequences for thousands of Luzerne County children and their families.

  Mark Arthur Ciavarella Jr. was born on March 3, 1950, the second of three children of Mark and Mary Ciavarella. He grew up with his two sisters in a six-room house that sat halfway up a hill in Wilkes-Barre’s East End section, which is a cluster of mom-and-pop stores and fifteen-hundred-square-foot wood-frame homes huddled neatly and sociably around the Holy Saviour Church at the very top of the hill. Its twin spires, visible for miles, loomed over the neighborhood like admonishing fingers. It was a place of confessing, communicating, baptisms, confirmations, marriages, funerals—life chasing its own tail. His father worked at the local Stegmaier Brewery and his mother was a Bell Telephone Company operator. Decades later, Ciavarella would recall that hardly anyone in his neighborhood locked their doors. And if they did, they left the key under the mat. People treated each other as though they would meet again very soon. The Ciavarellas worshiped regularly at Holy Saviour, and both parents were stern disciplinarians. Nevertheless, Mark was in and out of troubl
e as an adolescent, and several times he was suspended from school for getting into fights. When he was fifteen, he was arrested with some friends for stealing a car they wanted to take for a joyride. He was not charged. Instead he was sent home to face the wrath of his parents. “My poor mother was absolutely devastated,” Ciavarella told a newspaper reporter nearly four decades later. “When I saw how much I hurt her, I woke up and saw I was not the only one with consequences. I wasn’t the only one who would suffer for what I do. I vowed then, I would never do anything again to hurt her.”

  Young Ciavarella soon came to be known by his father’s nickname—Scooch. It is a frequent Italian sobriquet, meaning “pest,” that is often applied to unruly children. He was a good athlete who pitched a Little League no-hitter in 1962 and was a starting guard on the St. Mary’s High School basketball team that won the Catholic League championship in 1968. Scooch Ciavarella received a prelaw bachelor’s degree from King’s College in Wilkes-Barre in 1972; three years later he received a law degree from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. He was admitted to the Luzerne County bar in October 1975, and quickly developed a reputation for brashness. “He was loud, he was sure of himself, but he always came up just short of being obnoxious,” recalled James A. Gibbons, an attorney from nearby Scranton who is now a district magisterial judge. Ciavarella took on difficult cases—and sometimes got burned. In 1993 he sued Wilkes University on behalf of a woman who claimed her husband died from exposure to a toxic chemical in a school lab. Four years later the woman pleaded guilty to murdering her husband with slow doses of rat poison placed in his tea. In the 1990s, he coached the Wyoming Valley Catholic Youth Center girls’ swim team, which won nearly one hundred consecutive meets. Despite his emphasis on discipline and hard work, he was well liked by both the young athletes and their parents. Then, in 1994, Ciavarella decided that “the next logical step” in his career was to run for a county judgeship.