A candidate for coroner used donations to pay back a loan to himself.

A candidate for coroner used donations to pay back a loan to himself.
By STEPHEN SIFF
VINDICATOR TRUMBULL STAFF
WARREN -- Trumbull County Commissioner Joseph J. Angelo Jr. paid his wife $10,000 to manage a failed campaign to retain his seat.
Two days after losing the March primary, Angelo paid the money to his wife, Toni, for running his campaign for the previous five months, according to finance reports filed Friday with the Trumbull County Board of Elections.
According to a signed contract between husband and wife included in the report, the money was to compensate Toni for making phone calls, preparing campaign literature and staffing her husband's campaign office.
The contract said Toni would be paid the money to work from October 2003 to "election day 2004."
Had Angelo won the March primary, he would have had to defend his seat in a contested November general election.
Neither Joseph nor Toni Angelo could be reached Friday afternoon.
It is not uncommon for candidates in countywide elections to hire a campaign manager. However, it is unusual for a candidate to hire his wife for that role, said Craig Bonar, a Republican member of the board of elections.
"I would think the wife would be a volunteer worker," Bonar said.
He said that he did not believe that there was necessarily anything wrong with paying a family member to do the job.
"It would seem to me to be gray," he said.
Some figures
Nearly half of the Angelo campaign's expenditures from Feb. 12 to April 2 were to pay Toni Angelo. During that period, the campaign raised $23,000, primarily in donations of $100 and more. Angelo was top in all county races for fund raising in the last weeks of the campaign.
Another candidate to raise money successfully and spend it unusually was Dr. Phillip Malvasi, who collected $11,300 in contributions after Feb. 12.
Malvasi finished third in the three-way race for county coroner. On Thursday, he used all the money remaining in his campaign, $11,652, to partially repay a $36,000 loan from his personal to his campaign accounts.
Malvasi forgave the rest of the debt, reports show.