Kids for Cash Read online

  His mother concedes that Shane is responsible for the behavior that got him into such difficulty, but she believes things might had been different had Ciavarella shown more compassion for a thirteen-year-old honor student whose only real crime was adolescent curiosity.

  Meanwhile, the Conahans and Ciavarellas were enjoying their new wealth. Conahan bought a house next to Ciavarella on Deer Run Drive in Mountain Top, a leafy suburb of substantial homes moated by lawn and landscaping south of Wilkes-Barre. Another Mountain Top resident was Robert Powell, whose family often joined the judges for weekend pool parties and cookouts. The view from society’s box seats was good. The Ciavarellas and Conahans, enriched and unscathed, bought a recreational vehicle together, which they used for vacations and for tailgate weekends at Penn State football games. Then they raised their sights on leisure time and bought a three-thousand-square foot condominium in Palm Beach County, Florida, for $785,000. Unit 303 in the Mariner building at the Jupiter Yacht Club had a balcony view of the marina on the Intracoastal Waterway. To facilitate the purchase, the judges created an entity they called Pinnacle Group of Jupiter LLC, a Florida-based company that was set up in the names of their wives, Barbara Conahan and Cindy Ciavarella.

  Ciavarella was not nearly as wealthy as Conahan or Powell, and in anticipation of Mericle’s finder’s fee for PA Child Care, he borrowed $150,000 from Barbara Conahan. He also signed up for dozens of credit cards and took thousands of dollars in cash advances on each. When he finally received the first $330,000 in laundered money from Mericle in January 2003, he spent $310,000 of it just to pay off his debts. Ciavarella received an additional $75,000 in Mericle money in April and another $75,000 in July. Despite the total of $480,000 from Mericle, plus his judicial salary of $158,000, by the end of 2003, Ciavarella’s main bank account had only $4,333.

  Late that year Ciavarella met in his chambers with Powell and Conahan—when Powell says he learned for the first time that he, too, was also expected to pay the judges. “You mean you blew through one million dollars already?” Powell asked incredulously. “They both kind of laughed and said, ‘yeah.’” Powell said Ciavarella produced a sheet of statistics giving his estimates of the profits from the operations of PA Child Care. “You guys are doing very, very well,” Powell said the judge told him. “I know what’s going on up there.” And, of course he did—because he was sending the kids there. When Powell protested that Ciavarella’s estimates did not take into account one-time startup expenses, he said: “Judge Ciavarella started to get animated. He said, ‘I don’t care. I know what you got up there, and I want to be paid.’”

  And so Powell agreed to a scheme in which he would funnel cash to the Pinnacle Group, owned by Barbara Conahan and Cindy Ciavarella. The payments would be disguised as monthly rentals on the judges’ condominium and as various fees for docking Powell’s fifty-six-foot sport fishing boat, the Reel Justice, at the adjacent marina. All through 2004, Powell wrote checks for such items as “slip rental fees” ($78,000), “leases expenses April May June” ($75,000), and “rent prepay” ($52,000). The Pinnacle Group also received two wire transfers totaling $220,000 from Vision Holdings, a Cayman Islands entity owned by Powell. Powell later told federal investigators that he paid $585,000 just to rent the condominium—even though it was only available in the hot summer months and even though the judges had paid only $785,000 to own it. Even while it was still a useless, unfinished, unfurnished shell, Powell agreed to a $15,000-a- month lease over ten years—or a total of $1.8 million—for the condominium. But in fact he paid thirty-nine months’ rent—or $585,000—in just the first nine months of 2004.

  Ciavarella’s draconian demeanor soon became a courthouse rubric, and the word spread among police, attorneys, and probation officers that juveniles often were better off without a lawyer—and if they had one, they would fare better if they pled guilty. Not only was this bad advice, it was inaccurate. Among the juveniles who appeared before Ciavarella between 2000 and 2008, 60 percent of those without lawyers were sent to detention while only 22 percent of those with representation were placed. When twelve-year-old David was arrested in 2004 in connection with a rock-throwing incident by a group of boys who broke several windshields near a busy highway, his parents consulted a lawyer. They were advised that David should plead guilty—even though the boy said he had not been one of the rock throwers. Somewhat reluctantly, the parents went along with the advice, but they brought with them a file of commendations David had received and presented it to Ciavarella. After accepting the plea, Ciavarella dug into the file, pulled out a Boy Scout citation David had received from former Governor Tom Ridge, and regarded young David with head-cocked amusement.

  “Well, Mr. Big Shot Boy Scout, Governor Ridge is now the secretary of Homeland Security. Perhaps I should tell him that we have a terrorist loose on the streets of Luzerne County.” David was handcuffed, shackled, and taken away from his parents and placed in a wilderness camp for thirty-five days.

  By this time Ciavarella’s courtroom was a busy, sometimes chaotic place on Tuesdays and Thursdays when he held juvenile court. There were twenty or more hearings per day, and cases were moved quickly. Ciavarella often announced near the end of a morning that he was in a hurry because “I have a one o’clock tee time.” David described how it looked the day of his hearing: “There were lots of people in the courtroom at the time. I know there were other people being charged that were sitting around the corners of the courtroom already in handcuffs and shackles. There were lots of people behind us too. I don’t know who they were.” David’s father added, “The courtroom was filled, and I mean filled. It was packed. It looked like a marketplace. There were children, young people, not adults, in orange jumpsuits with the belts and the hands and the shackles on the feet standing kind of like off to the side.”

  Juveniles often spent days and weeks at PA Child Care even before getting in to see Ciavarella. Fifteen-year-old William spent five days at the Pittston facility before getting a hearing at which Ciavarella asked him if he had disrespected his grandfather. When William said he had, he was placed in Camp Adams for sixty days. William did not have a lawyer and he did not plead guilty to any charge. In 2003, thirteen-year-old Fred was held at PA Child Care from November 3 until he finally got a hearing on November 26. Seventeen-year-old Ruth was in PA Child Care for seven months on a simple assault charge.

  In 2003, the mother of thirteen-year-old Fred called police “to scare him” because he was misbehaving at home. But when the officer came to the home, rather than lecture Fred, he arrested him on disorderly conduct charges, even though his mother protested. He was held at PA Child Care for nineteen days before he got a hearing. When Fred finally went before Ciavarella, his mother assumed he would be ordered into counseling and so she didn’t retain an attorney. But after a two-minute hearing, Fred was taken away in shackles to Camp Adams for three months. His mother was assessed several court costs plus $480 a month that was garnished from her wages. She was forced to take money from her retirement plan, incurring taxes and penalties for early withdrawal.

  Within five months of the opening of PA Child Care, there were not enough beds to accommodate the targets of Ciavarella’s zero-tolerance policy. Powell and Zappala decided to open another facility—Western PA Child Care, a ninety-nine-bed facility in Butler County, Pennsylvania—about 230 miles from Wilkes-Barre. The company was created just four months after PA Child Care opened, and Mericle was designated as the contractor. Once again Mericle paid a finder’s fee to Conahan and Ciavarella. This time it was an even $1 million, disguised as a “registration and commission” agreement. Mericle paid the money to Powell, who in turn got it to the two judges in a series a money-laundering maneuvers. The money landed in the Pinnacle Group owned by Barbara Conahan and Cindy Ciavarella. Powell later told federal investigators that he allowed Mericle to run the money through him because if Powell didn’t he feared the judges would bankrupt him—Powell and Zappala had a $12 million mortgage on PA Chil
d Care—by refusing to send more children to the two private detention facilities.

  Ciavarella found an opportunity to help his old friend and new benefactor Rob Mericle in September 2004 when Mericle Properties sued three tenants over a lease dispute in an office building in Scranton. Scranton is not in Luzerne County, but in neighboring Lackawanna County. Nevertheless, Mericle filed the suit in Luzerne County, and Conahan assigned the case to Ciavarella. Lawrence Durkin, the attorney for the tenants, filed a motion asking that the case be shifted to its proper venue, Lackawanna County, but Ciavarella ignored the request and proceeded with the case. Ciavarella granted Mericle an unusual request for a preliminary injunction blocking the tenants from removing anything from the offices. The case was even eventually settled out of court. However, at no time during the proceeding did Ciavarella disclose that he already had received $505,000 from Mericle as a finder’s fee for PA Child Care and was in line for another $500,000 that would be paid in a few months for his role in setting up Western PA Child Care.

  When a fourteen-year-old boy tried to hang himself with a bedsheet in December 2004, Ciavarella was quick to praise the PA Child Care staff for prompt action to prevent the suicide. He said he had been generally pleased with the treatment at the facility: “I’ve sent kids to other locations and at other locations they’ve tried to harm themselves. That does not mean people are not doing their job.”

  Ciavarella’s tough anti-crime stance didn’t always extend to adults—especially if they were well connected politically. On August 6, 2002, Trooper Jerry Sachney of the Pennsylvania State Police arrested a man who had carjacked a Dodge minivan along Interstate 81 and driven off to Wilkes-Barre International Airport with two terrified children—aged eleven and twelve—in the backseat. Their mother told police that she had witnessed the crash of an SUV, and when she stopped to see if she could help, the driver jumped into her vehicle and took off with her kids. They were found an hour later unharmed.

  Police traced the SUV to its owner and arrested Louis Pagnotti III, whose wealthy family had founded one of the largest anthracite firms—the Pagnotti Coal Company. Pagnotti was charged with seven offenses, including motor vehicle theft, interference with the custody of children, and unlawful restraint. As the arresting trooper, Sachney waited to be called to testify, but months dragged by without any action. Conahan initially handled the case, and preliminary hearings were canceled twice. Ciavarella took over the case in May, and on June 23, 2003, he dismissed three of the most serious charges. Five months later, the only remaining felony, theft by unlawful taking, was dismissed by Conahan, who then accepted Pagnotti’s guilty pleas to three misdemeanors, fined him, and placed him on probation. Sachney was amazed: “I couldn’t believe it. This guy had endangered the lives of two kids and he got off.”

  As word of Pagnotti’s wrist-slapping spread, courthouse rumors held that the case had been fixed. But no one wanted to challenge Ciavarella—let alone the Boss. Besides, law enforcement officials said that Pagnotti was involved in various enterprises with William W. “Big Billy” D’Elia, the former bodyguard and personal driver for Russell Bufalino, who was now the head of organized crime in northeastern Pennsylvania. Federal authorities said D’Elia had been like a son to Bufalino and was now a powerful crime boss with ties to mob families in Philadelphia and New York. Conahan and D’Elia had been personal friends for most of their adult lives, and their association was widely known throughout the Luzerne County Courthouse and beyond. “It was no big deal,” says William Kashatus, the local historian. “Politicians and the mob have been married up here for a long time. Conahan’s association with D’Elia was well known—and it only added to the mystique that made people afraid of him.”

  Nor was it any secret that the judge and the mobster were regulars for breakfast, sometimes as often as three times a week, at the Perkins Family Restaurant just outside Wilkes-Barre on State Route 309, just four miles from the judge’s chambers at the courthouse. They always sat beneath a big-bladed ceiling fan at a special booth in a section that was usually off-limits to other patrons. They would talk over coffee and ham and cheese omelets and then, hunched on the edge of red vinyl seats, they would spread file folders and papers on the Formica top and engage in earnest discussions. Sometimes pending cases at the courthouse were discussed. On other occasions, D’Elia stopped off at the courthouse, summoned a security guard, and handed her a sealed envelope with instructions to give it directly to Conahan.

  Ciavarella thought the openness of the relationship was unwise, but his objections were dismissed by Conahan, who said D’Elia and he had been breaking bread together for thirty years. “He’s been a friend,” Ciavarella would recall Conahan as saying. “I see no reason why I should stop.” But Ciavarella’s misgivings were on target. The U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Internal Revenue Service already were looking into that very relationship.

  However, these investigations were in incubation in 2003, and that November Luzerne County’s electorate voted overwhelmingly to retain Conahan on the bench for another ten-year term. Under the Pennsylvania Constitution, judges are first chosen in partisan elections, as Conahan had been in 1993, but then can continue in office after ten years by running unopposed in retention elections. It is exceedingly rare for sitting judges to lose a retention election—fewer than one in every 200 have since the system took effect in 1970. And although there was no visible opposition to keeping Conahan on the court, the judge accepted donations totaling about $283,000, including about $120,000 from local lawyers. Taking this money represented a complete about-face from Conahan’s pledge in his first campaign in 1993, when he said he believed taking campaign money from lawyers was improper. This time he not only took $283,000 in contributions, he spent only $61,000 of it on the campaign. The rest of the money, about $222,000, he paid to his wife and himself—supposedly for a loan they made to the 1993 campaign.

  About the same time Louis Pagnotti III walked out of Ciavarella’s courtroom a free man, seventeen-year-old Edward was coming in. Unlike Pagnotti, the boy had no connections with the power elite at the courthouse. His story would become a painful reminder that confining juvenile offenders makes it far more likely that they will become adult offenders.

  Edward was about to begin his senior year at Coughlin High School, where he was a star wrestler who barely missed the state championships in his junior year. This year he hoped to make it to the finals and then get a college athletic scholarship. But that summer he had been keeping late hours, drinking and associating with what his parents thought was “the wrong crowd.” Fearing that he was jeopardizing a life filled with promise in general, and a college scholarship in particular, they decided to put a scare into him. His father planted drug paraphernalia on the boy’s truck and then tipped off police. His parents were delighted by the prospect of Edward going before a tough-but-fair judge like Mark Ciavarella, who would intimidate him and give him probation. His parents didn’t think their son needed an attorney.

  Although he was not advised of the impacts of a guilty plea or of appearing without a lawyer, Edward pled guilty to a misdemeanor in connection with the drug paraphernalia charge and his mother and father awaited a stern lecture and probation sentence. But Ciavarella had something else up the black sleeve of his judicial robe. He found Edward delinquent and, as his parents watched in stunned grief, Edward was taken away immediately to PA Child Care. He was there for a month. His coaches and teachers wrote letters to the court urging leniency, but instead Ciavarella sentenced him to four months at a military-style boot camp. Here he joined violent juveniles and gang members. According to his mother, Sandy Fonzo, “My son was never the same. Ciavarella ripped him out of his home.” Edward missed his senior year and the 2003–2004 high school wrestling season.

  After his release, Edward was placed on probation, and one week before the probation expired he got into a fight. Facing simple assault charges, the boy was certain Ciavarella would send him
away again so he fled to Florida. He came back with his parents in about a month. The system didn’t catch up with him for two years, but in October 2005 he was involved in a minor traffic accident, and he was before Ciavarella again—this time for violating his original probation. Edward was nineteen years old, had a construction job, and was working toward his high school degree, but Pennsylvania law allows juvenile courts to retain jurisdiction over individuals until they reach twenty-one. Ciavarella sent Edward to Western PA Child Care for 120 days. Upon his release in early 2006, he was ordered by pay some $5,000 in fines to cover the costs of his two incarcerations. Ironically, he was tried and acquitted in adult court of the assault charge that had prompted him to flee to Florida.

  Edward was now a six-foot-one, 230-pound angry young man, and in 2006 he got into a fistfight at a party and beat his opponent so brutally that the other young man needed two operations. Edward was convicted of aggravated assault and sentenced to a three-to-six-year term in state prison. He was paroled in May 2010. He was depressed and drinking. On June 1 he shot himself in the heart. He was twenty-three years old.

  Sandy Fonzo said later her son’s suicide was the result of a downward spiral that began when Ciavarella sent him to PA Child Care at the age of seventeen. She says there were many other factors involved in his demise, and she does not absolve herself or his father of responsibility. But she believes he would be alive if he had not been sent away in 2004. Her personal conclusion coincides with the positions of nearly every expert on juvenile justice, including Juvenile Law Center’s Schwartz: “While it would be an exaggeration to portray adolescence as a proverbial ‘last chance,’ it is not an overstatement to say that it is much easier to alter an individual’s life course in adolescence than during adulthood. Events that occur in adolescence often cascade into adulthood, particularly in the realms of education and work, but also in the domains of mental and physical health, family formation, and interpersonal relationships. As a consequence, many adolescent experiences have a tremendous cumulative impact. Bad decisions or poorly formulated policies pertaining to juvenile offenders may have long-term consequences that are very hard to reverse.”