Taking the money and running

Craig McCoy has a disturbing article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about buying judges:

When Jill Moran went to work for Robert Powell's law firm, she never thought her career as an attorney would come down to this dismaying moment: watching in shock as Powell, cursing and muttering, stuffed wads of cash into a FedEx box that he wanted her to hand-deliver to the president judge of Luzerne County. "These greedy [expletives] won't let me go," Powell said, his hands full of $100 and $50 bills. "Take this to them, and hopefully it will be over."
In fact, the money was the last payment in about $2.9 million that federal prosecutors say was given to two county judges, Michael T. Conahan and Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., in a "kids for cash" scandal that ranks as perhaps the most serious judicial outbreak of wrongdoing in recent decades in the nation.
In startling testimony at Ciavarella's trial last week, Moran and Powell agreed that Powell had cursed out the judges as he packed the box with money inside their law office in Hazleton. The pair and other witnesses delivered a graphic account of the judges' alleged original conspiracy and failed cover-up. In a brazen scheme, authorities say, two detention centers owned by Powell were filled with thousands of youngsters deemed delinquent by Ciavarella, Luzerne County's lone Juvenile Court judge. (Conahan, as the county's president judge, had assigned him to that post.)
Providing detail that did much to fill out the bloodless accounts available mainly in indictments and guilty-plea agreements, Moran and Powell talked of lawbreaking that went on for years and of scheming that traded on the circumstances of troubled children.
As the star witness in the unfolding federal trial against Ciavarella (Conahan pleaded guilty last year and awaits sentencing), Powell said the judges had extorted the millions from him and a business associate in return for making sure that $30 million in taxpayer money flowed over five years to his two juvenile-detention centers. Powell, now 51, a bulky 6-foot-5 former Division One college basketball player, had thrived as a personal-injury lawyer and a businessman. But he said he had been defenseless in the face of the judges' demands for more and more money.
"They were absolutely relentless," Powell said. He said his warnings had gone unheeded. In fact, he said, Conahan urged him to switch to cash after Powell warned that the previous payments would eventually explode into disasters. "I'm not doing this anymore," he testified he had told Conahan. "I can't do this. This is not going to end well."
While the bulk of the money was delivered via wire transfers, Powell testified, he did switch to cash, with the mistaken idea that this was the better way to keep the payments secret. But even figuring how to handle the cash was a headache, Powell testified. In all, he said, he paid $143,500 in cash as part of the scheme. "When you're moving that much money, it's big. The only thing I could think of was a FedEx box," he said. Yet "as ludicrous and foolish as it sounds, it's not that easy to stuff that much cash in a box."
Moran, now 42, testified that she had telephoned Conahan, a longtime friend of her parents', and that he had driven to her house to pick up the box. His manner, she said, was "cordial, like nothing was amiss".
Three years after she served as that cash courier, Moran's role caught up with her. While she wasn't criminally charged, she agreed under pressure from the U.S. Attorney's Office in the region to resign in 2009 as Luzerne County prothonotary- the keeper of records for civil court cases.
For Powell, the damage has been much worse. He has pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the scandal and is awaiting a likely prison sentence. Now disbarred from practicing law, he told the jury that his ethical mistakes had ruined his career and damaged his marriage. Powell said he was filled with remorse about his actions: "I was sick doing it. I shouldn't have done it. I regret doing it." At the same time, he said, the judges could have cut off his juvenile-center funding with "one phone call". In fact, according to testimony last week, Conahan, using his power as president judge, had cut off funding for a juvenile facility once owned by the county, setting in motion the scheme for Powell to open his for-profit centers.
Conahan's installation of Ciavarella, his close friend and neighbor, as the sole judge of Juvenile Court ended a system by which different judges rotated through that post. As the top judge for delinquent minors, Ciavarella became known as a tough taskmaster who sent record numbers of kids to Powell's center rather than granting them probation.
Powell said the two judges' clout had gone virtually unchecked. "They were the two most powerful men in Luzerne County," he said. "They had the ability to go into a courtroom and do anything they wanted to do. There was no one they didn't know. They knew politicians and they knew mobsters, and they flaunted their positions with both of them."
In a separate legal proceeding, Ciavarella has acknowledged that he and Conahan knew William D'Elia, the alleged boss of organized crime in northeastern Pennsylvania. Ciavarella said that Conahan had dined regularly with D'Elia, and that the reputed mob figure also had attended at least two of Ciavarella's fund-raisers for judicial races.
Ciavarella's defense team has yet to mount its case (that is expected to happen early in the week) but, in opening statements, the lawyers contended that the millions paid to their client had been "finder's fees" for putting Powell in touch with the builder of his facilities. They said these payments may be ethically questionable, but had not been kickbacks or extorted money. As for the cash, they contend that Ciavarella knew nothing about it. In cross-examinations, the defense repeatedly pointed out that the boxes of money had always been delivered to Conahan, not to their client.
Powell testified that both judges had known about the cash, and he dismissed the "finder's fee" rationale as a "patent lie", something cooked up to disguise the real nature of the payments. He also said the money had been routed to the judges in circuitous ways designed to disguise its origins. "It was extortion," Powell said. "It was a kickback. I wasn't paying them for any services rendered." Again and again, he said, the judges pressed him for money. He said he had grown astounded at how quickly they would come back for more, asking them at one point: "You mean you blew through $1 million already?" To this remark, Powell said, the two judges "kind of laughed, and said, 'Yeah.'"
The two had lavish lifestyles, including jointly buying a $900,000 condominium in the exclusive resort of Jupiter, Florida. There, Powell docked his million-dollar yacht, named Reel Justice.
As word of the federal investigation leaked out, Powell said, Ciavarella and Conahan were full of fear, worried that cell phones were being used as tracking devices and worried about being secretly taped, a well-placed fear, since Powell did wear a wire eventually. Still, their fear had its limits. With the FBI, IRS, and federal prosecutors in full pursuit in early 2008, Powell testified, Ciavarella met with him and said: "I'm sorry this happened". He then asked him for an additional $40,000. Powell said he had finally summoned up the resolve to take a new tack: "I don't have $40,000, and if I did, I wouldn't give it you," he testified he had told the judge. "This is over."

Rico says a nice bunch of guys; they make Pennsylvania proud...