Posted: Monday, 02 March 2009 11:13AM
Bring In The Big Guns
Steve Corbett Reporting
Monday, March 02, 2009
I’m worried about the FBI.
I’m concerned that not enough special agents exist in the Scranton office to handle the ongoing investigation into public corruption at the Luzerne County courthouse.
I’m also worried that supervisors will start slapping each other on the back over guilty pleas from two gangster judges and one dirty court administrator who’s the first cousin of one of the dirty judges.
But the FBI can’t stop there.
And the people must make sure they don’t.
The feds work for us, too.
And this probe that has taken years to culminate in the recent guilty pleas and agreements to serve prison time must continue. We need more than two or three agents working full-time on this case.
I’m serious.
I don’t know for sure how many agents are assigned to the case, but I know that money is always in short supply and that cases sometimes don’t go to court because of time constraints and financial concerns.
That’s probably why prosecutors accepted the guilty pleas in the first place.
I would have told the crooked jurists to stick it if I had been calling the shots when agents finally got the goods on former Luzerne County president judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan.
I would have wanted them in court where the people would see for themselves the depth of depravity to which these two public officials dropped in their greedy scheme to steal money and gut the public trust.
It’s easy to understand a prosecutor who might want to literally throw the book at these two for their rampage against the law and the people they were paid handsomely to serve.
But law-abiding people don’t behave that way in civilized society.
Instead we accept guilty pleas.
I hope the plea deals fall apart.
I still want trials for Ciavarella and Conahan. And if guilty verdicts come in, I want the judge to imprison them for more than the 87 months agreed to in the plea agreement.
I also want Eric Holder, the new United States Attorney General, to take a personal interest in the case. He’s familiar with the depth of corruption in Northeastern Pennsylvania and many years ago came to Scranton to prosecute a member of the Bufalino crime family who was charged with fixing a case.
That case involved Louis DeNaples, who eventually pleaded no contest after a hung jury that the late Bufalino goon Dave Ostico fixed. Now DeNaples is charged with perjury for allegedly lying about his relationship with members of organized crime – a relationship he denies.
Because of those charges he’s been forced to step down from his position as chairman of the board of a Dunmore bank where gangster judge Conahan also sat on the board.
Conahan and reputed boss of the Bufalino crime family Billy D’Elia have been linked by another gangster. And D’Elia has linked DeNaples to himself, even putting DeNaples at D’Elia’s daughter’s wedding where other guests included members of the Philadelphia Mafia.
That’s why I’m inviting Holder to come to town for a mini-reunion. We need him to see that his job is not finished in hard coal country. It’s a big country and Holder has his hands full. But we need him to come home to his beginnings and realize that this case means something personal to him.
This case means something personal to us all.
It also means that we need to be assured that enough cops exist to handle the investigation.
I’m worried that somebody will one day step in – for whatever the reason – and pull the plug on the cleanup of the massive culture of corruption that continues to harm generations of good people in this region.
Holder must guarantee that he will not step away from our problems until he is as convinced as he can be that lessons have been taught and lessons have been learned – that good men and women will work together to move to a just future for all people.
I’d even like to see Holder come home to Scranton and personally try a case – just like the good old days. I’m sure that some crook who is significant enough to cause Holder to once again walk into a Scranton courtroom is waiting somewhere in the shadows.
We truly need all the help we can get.
We shouldn’t have to worry that help might not be on the way.
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Corbett
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