Kids for Cash

by William Ecenbarger

  Few Pennsylvanians outside the legal profession have heard of the Judicial Conduct Board. Only one Luzerne County parent claimed to have contacted the agency. The father of Matthew, the boy accused of throwing a piece of steak at his mother’s boyfriend, said he called the board in Harrisburg to complain about the way his son had been treated in court. According to Matt’s father, the conversation went like this: “You’re calling from Luzerne County, aren’t you? You’re talking about Judge Ciavarella, right? We’ve had several calls about Judge Ciavarella, but you’ve got to understand, you’ve got to have a lot of ammunition against a judge. This will just be more fuel for the fire.”

  There was nothing further from the Judicial Conduct Board.

  While the board was transfixed by Judge Lokuta’s rude courtroom manners, Ciavarella and Conahan were banking another $1 million in kickbacks. Western PA Child Care, the second detention facility in Butler County, was completed in July 2005, clearing the way for what would be a second $1 million “finder’s fee.” To begin the laundering process, Mericle paid the $1 million to Vision Holdings, the Cayman Islands company controlled by Powell. From here the money went into the Pinnacle Group, controlled by Cindy Ciavarella and Barbara Conahan, and then checks in smaller amounts were issued to the individual bank accounts of Conahan and Ciavarella. When Chester Muroski’s misgivings about the wealth of Conahan and Ciavarella were being derided by his colleagues, the two had already accepted some $2.5 million in illegal payments.

  In like manner, when the $1.5 million addition to the Pittston center was completed in February 2006, Mericle executed another broker’s fee of $150,000 that went from the contractor to Powell’s Cayman Island operation to Cindy and Barbara’s Pinnacle Group and then to the two judges’ checking accounts. By this time the judges had collected $2,150,000 from Mericle for finder’s fees and another $590,000 from Powell in rentals and other fees connected to the condominium in Florida. None of this was reported to the Internal Revenue Service, state tax officials, or in the annual financial disclosures to the Judicial Conduct Board required of all judges.

  But all this money, nearly $2.75 million from both sources, was not enough. According to Powell, the judges would summon him to their chambers and demand more money. Ciavarella said he knew how much money Powell was making from his half-ownership of the PA Child Care operation, and that he and Conahan wanted part of it. As Powell recalled, Ciavarella told him in June 2006: “It’s time for you to step up. I know how much money you have going in there. You can’t bullshit me. I know you have a lease, I don’t have to send kids there anymore.” That was a reference to the $58 million, twenty-year lease that took effect in 2005.

  Powell felt squeezed. He believed Ciavarella and Conahan had the power to bankrupt him by urging judges in other counties not to refer delinquents to PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care. Moreover, Powell regularly tried big cases before both judges, and he knew they were not above perverting justice to punish him. At one point Powell refused to return their telephone calls, but Powell said Ciavarella and Conahan started calling Powell’s friends and relatives. On Saturday Powell went to Conahan’s house and met with the two judges on the patio: “I told them, ‘I’m not going to do this anymore.’ They laughed at me.” Around the Fourth of July holiday, Powell took his family on a vacation trip to Italy, but when he returned the judges called him. When Powell answered, it was Ciavarella, who told him, “You can’t ignore us. When I tell you we’re going to meet, we’re going to meet.” Finally, in August, Powell made the first of four cash payments, and for the balance of 2006 he stuffed cash into Federal Express delivery boxes and sent it to the judges. Over a period of about four months, Powell siphoned $143,500 in cash payments to Conahan and Ciavarella.

  The payoffs began on August 11, 2006, when an agitated Powell ordered Patrick Owens, the treasurer of his law firm, to begin withdrawing $42,000 in cash from his bank account—in amounts under $10,000 in order to avoid attracting the attention of the IRS. Owens cashed five checks, put the $42,000 in a bank bag and brought it to Powell. Powell put the money—twenty-, fifty-, and hundred-dollar bills—into two Federal Express boxes, which were picked up on August 16 by Nicholas Callen, a court official who worked for Conahan. Callen, who was not aware of the contents, delivered the boxes to Conahan in his chambers at the courthouse.

  On November 2, Powell crammed another $20,000 into a FedEx box, but this time he instructed Jill A. Moran, his law partner, to deliver the money to Conahan’s house in the suburbs. She had known Conahan since childhood, and when she got there the judge and his wife insisted that she take a tour of the house. Moran did not know the contents of the box, and she left the box of cash on the seat of her unlocked car in the driveway, retrieving it just before she left and handing it to Conahan. On November 20, Powell again summoned Moran into his private office and gave her a FedEx box to deliver to Conahan. This time, again unknown to her, it contained $50,000. She telephoned Conahan to arrange the delivery to his house, but he said he was on the road and would stop at her townhouse to pick it up. Again, she left the money on the seat of her car, which was parked in her open garage, and handed it to Conahan when he arrived.

  Then on December 16, Powell again summoned Moran to his office, but this time he directed her into an adjacent and windowless executive washroom. Here he began stuffing bundled fifty- and hundred-dollar bills into the box. When her face showed amazement, he said,

  “These greedy motherfuckers won’t let me go. Just take this thing and hopefully this is it.” She took the box, which this time held $31,500, and telephoned Conahan to arrange the drop. He said he would pick it up at her home the next day. That night, knowing what was in the box, she brought it into her house rather than leaving in her car. She said when the judge took the money the next day, he was very casual and gave no indication that anything was unusual.

  Had the Judicial Conduct Board chosen to look into the charges it received against Conahan, it could have stopped the bribery conspiracy sooner. This, in turn, very well might have prevented the eight-month incarceration of sixteen-year-old Stephen, who appeared before Ciavarella in October 2007 and pleaded guilty to driving without a license and presenting false identification to police. During this time the court garnished a $598 Social Security survivor’s check he had been receiving since his father’s death.

  And perhaps thirteen-year-old DayQuann wouldn’t have been pulled out of school, handcuffed, and taken in a police cruiser to PA Child Care, where he spent a three-day weekend for failing to show up for a hearing as a witness to a fight. The boy suffered from a learning disability and didn’t understand the subpoena he had been handed two weeks earlier, and his mother said she was unaware of it. The first night of detention he telephoned his mother and begged her to get him out immediately. But she didn’t get to see her son until the following Monday, when he was brought into Ciavarella’s court in shackles. Ciavarella released DayQuann when the situation was explained. His mother expected an apology, but Ciavarella said he had no regrets and would do the same thing again because “I take court orders very seriously.” His mother said when DayQuann got home, “he looked dead, like life was taken away from him. It took him quite a while to get back to normal, and then he was angry.”

  And had the JCB done what it was created to do, Krystal might not have spent three months at Wind Gap in 2007 for possession of drug paraphernalia. It was her first offense, but Ciavarella ordered her shackled and taken away. “It went by so quick,” she recalled. “It left me thinking, ‘Did that really just happen?’” At Wind Gap, “the other girls were bragging about stealing cars and beating up people. I felt so out of place. Even the officers said to me, ‘What are you doing here?’” Three years later she was still troubled by the experience. It was a permanent shadow across her thoughts: “I’m constantly reminded: if there’s a cop behind me, I think about it. You just have no choice but to move on, but it’s always in the back of your head. I’m never going to forget about
it. It’s three long, hard months.”

  Brianna also might have been spared three months at Wind Gap. She was sixteen when she came before Ciavarella on trespassing charges involving loitering in front of a building. Her mother told the Times-Leader that Brianna’s hearing lasted less than five minutes: “We couldn’t say anything. They just took her away. They removed her jewelry and handcuffed and shackled her right in front of me.” She said Brianna was changed—withdrawn and uncommunicative—when she came home. She dropped out of school: “Before she was put away, she wasn’t a perfect student, but she followed rules and did what she was supposed to. She was active and outgoing and went to church.” The girl was still troubled three years after her detention experience. “She has no desire to get an education or to try to better herself; she thinks everyone is out to get her.”

  When Bernandine was fourteen, she sent threatening messages via the Internet to another girl’s web page. She admitted authoring the notes in court and spent three months in Wind Gap and at PA Child Care. Her mother said that two years after her release she was still troubled: “She’s frightened all the time. She’s paranoid. She can’t trust nobody. You try to tell her something, she doesn’t want to believe it.”

  And prompt action by the JCB might have prevented Jesse’s ordeal. His childhood had been something short of idyllic. He was born into a household where there was neither oversight nor foresight. Things were just allowed to happen. His parents divorced when he was ten. At the age of sixteen, he fled home to live on his own. He got a job in a tire shop. But he didn’t make enough money to cover the rent, so he moved in with a friend when he was seventeen. Then one of life’s defining moments occurred. Jesse did the right thing. But he paid for it dearly. He volunteered to keep an eye on his friend’s younger brother, who was twelve years old and often in trouble at school. When he saw the boy carrying a laptop computer, he asked where he had gotten it.

  “Look what else I have,” the twelve-year-old said, and he pulled a pistol out of his pocket. Jesse slapped his ward on the side of the head.

  “What’s wrong with you? Where did you get that?” Jesse grabbed the gun and took it away from the boy, who said he had stolen it and was going to use it to kill another youth who had been bullying him. Jesse said his first thought was, “‘What if it happened? That would have been on my conscience because I could have stopped it.’ So I did. Then, I thought, I can’t just throw it along the side of the road. Someone could come along and use it to kill somebody.”

  Jesse said he questioned the boy, determined the owner of the gun, and tried to return it to his home the next morning. When no one answered his knocking on the door, he went to work at the tire shop and called his older cousin for advice. His boss overheard the conversation and demanded an explanation. Jesse eagerly pulled the weapon from his pocket and handed it over. His boss said he was going to give the gun to the police. Jesse felt relieved, like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

  He heard no more until about a year later. He was a passenger in a car that was stopped by police for speeding. The police ran Jesse’s name through their computer system and told him there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest on charges of possessing a stolen firearm. At first he didn’t understand, but then he remembered the incident with the pistol and his friend’s brother. He was arrested, taken before Ciavarella, and sent to PA Child Care to await a hearing. He knew Ciavarella’s reputation for speedy justice, and so he decided to write an explanation of the circumstances by which he came to have the gun and hand it to Ciavarella at his hearing. The probation officer gave him five minutes to write, and then took the document and handed it to the judge when Jesse stepped before him.

  Jesse had asked for a public defender, but no lawyer showed up, and he faced Ciavarella alone. The judge ignored Jesse’s note, which was inches from his hands, listened to the charges and, peered down at the boy with nostril-wrinkling contempt, saying, “Remand him until further notice.” To Jesse, Ciavarella’s words sounded like the dive klaxon on a submarine, but even worse was being shackled hand and foot: “I felt like an animal.” He sat that way in a room at the courthouse for some eight hours before he was placed in a van with other juveniles for a five-hour trip to Western PA Child Care. The shackles were finally removed when he arrived. “But that place was horrible,” he said. “There were some really tough guys there, and there were fights all the time. I know for sure that I didn’t belong there.” Jesse scoffs when his stay at Western PA Child Care is called placement: “It may have looked like a dormitory, but it was a jail because there was a lock on the door.”

  Jesse only spent a week there. Someone finally listened to his story and believed it. He was placed on probation and released. He was now eighteen years old. He did not return to school, but eventually got a GED diploma. The experience with Ciavarella left a wake, and three years later he was still bobbing around in it. The memory keeps coming back, like water filling a hole. Jesse has a lockjaw shyness and distrust of what he calls “the system.” Like many youths, he measures events on a scale of fair and unfair. The sight of a police officer makes him nervous, and he watches his rearview mirror for flashing red and blue lights: “And if you can’t trust a judge, who can you trust.” It’s not a question. He has trouble getting and holding down a job. “I don’t want to make excuses, but the stuff I went through—all those hours in shackles—I’ll never forget.”

  When Ciavarella heard adult cases, his courtroom had a patina of inexorability and menace. His arrogance seemed to be growing right along with his net worth. The rumors of a business relationship between the judge and Powell had oozed throughout the legal community. But no one confronted Ciavarella—even when he heard cases in which he ruled favorably for a Powell client.

  Then Jeffrey B. McCarron, a Philadelphia attorney, came before Ciavarella in a legal malpractice case in 2008. Powell was the opposing attorney. McCarron had heard many rumors about the Ciavarella-Powell relationship from members of the Luzerne County bar, and he became alarmed when, leading up to the trial, the judge claimed to have misplaced all of McCarron’s motions. “He went back into his chambers and came out with a twelve-inch stack of them and said, ‘I haven’t read any of these, so you’re going to have to tell me what’s in them.’” Finally, McCarron teed up his courage (he risked being tossed in jail) and mentioned the unmentionable. The lengthy exchange is a quintessential example of Ciavarella’s audacity—especially given that he had already received more than $350,000 from Powell, some of it in cash, some of it disguised as rental and fees for the Florida condo.

  “Your Honor,” McCarron began. “I have two issues to raise, if I may. One is, apparently there’s been some considerable publicity involving Your Honor and also Mr. Powell, and I guess there’s other information that suggests that—I just want to ask about whether there’s a relationship between you and Mr. Powell which would present an issue to the fairness of the trial in this case by my clients. That’s all.” Tension hissed through the courtroom.

  “What significant publicity has there been concerning me and Mr. Powell?”

  “I understand there was something to do with a certain building for the county. In any event, I’m just asking the question whether there is a relationship between you and Mr. Powell which would present an issue about Your Honor sitting as the judge of this case.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Whether there’s been leisure time activities or anything of that—”

  “Based on what?”

  “I’m asking.”

  “I’m asking you, based on what?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m asking the court whether there’s an issue—”

  “And I want to know what you’re basing that on.”

  “The question?”

  “Yes”

  “I’m just basing it on—”

  “Do you ask every judge that question?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “—that you appear in front of
?”

  “Judge, if the answer is by—Your Honor—I’m just asking the question.”

  “I want to know why you’re asking that question.”

  “Because I thought to ask it. I thought to ask it.”

  “Anything else?”

  “There’s—can I—I’m raising the issue.”

  “Unless you give me a basis for that question, I don’t even see why it’s asked.”

  “It’s asked because I just want to be cautious about the situation. That’s all.”

  “What situation?”

  “I just want to be cautious because it’s been mentioned to me a number of times.”

  “By whom ?”

  “Well, they’re privileged discussions. It’s been brought—and by other lawyers. That’s all. I’m just asking the question. If it’s not an issue—”

  “What relationship?”

  “I’m sorry, Your Honor. I don’t—I’m asking the question. If there’s been—”

  “And now I’m asking the question.”

  “I don’t have details, if that’s what you’re asking for.”

  “Well, then, why ask the question?”

  “I’m just inquiring whether there is.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well.”

  “I don’t have to answer that question based upon that. Why should I answer that question based upon that? You want to present something to me, present it, and—”

  “Obviously, any relationship which would impact or interfere with the case.”

  “There is none.”

  “Okay.” A skeptical lilt crept into McCarron’s voice.

  Ciavarella said no more, but he shot McCarron a look that stuck two inches out his back.

  To no one’s surprise, Powell’s clients won a $3.4 million jury verdict. It was overturned two years later by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which ordered a new trial in the case because Ciavarella did not recuse himself from hearing the case involving his longtime benefactor.