LaGrotta, 2 relatives face charges

All three are to be arraigned today in Harrisburg.

HARRISBURG — A former Lawrence County state lawmaker is charged with two felony counts for hiring his sister and niece as legislative assistants in 2006 and paying them thousands of dollars in public funds for work they never performed.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett identified the defendants as former state representative Frank LaGrotta, 49; his sister, Ann Bartolomeo, 46; and his niece, who is Bartolomeo’s daughter, Alissa Lemmon, 24, all of Ellwood City.

LaGrotta is charged with two felony counts of conflict of interests, and Bartolomeo and Lemmon are each charged with false swearing for lying to the grand jury.

LaGrotta was a state representative from the 10th legislative district, which includes Lawrence County and parts of Beaver and Butler counties, from 1987 to 2007, and was defeated in the 2006 May Democratic Primary.

Corbett contends LaGrotta hired his relatives to do work that never existed.

A statewide grand jury found that after LaGrotta’s defeat in the May 2006 primary, he asked H. William DeWeese, leader of the House Democratic Caucus, to authorize the hiring of his sister as a legislative assistant in his Lawrence County district office.

Corbett said since 1998 to the present, Bartolomeo has been a full-time elementary school teacher in the Ellwood City Area School District.

She applied for the state position in June 2006, but the grand jury found the term of her employment was antedated to Feb. 1, 2006, in an agreement signed by LaGrotta, DeWeese and Bartolomeo. The agreement stated that she be paid $1,932 based on a 37.5-hour workweek.

She was paid $19,329 effective June 20, 2006, and was to revert to a regular biweekly salary of $1,932 beginning June 21, 2006, according to the attorney general.

They later determined she left LaGrotta’s employment June 30, 2006.

Bartolomeo told the grand jury she sorted through 60 to 70 boxes of documents that LaGrotta had kept for 20 years in a storage facility called the Wampum Mines. She said that at least half of the boxes contained PennDot drivers’ license and vehicle registration applications and that she crossed out drivers’ license and vehicle registration numbers and re-filed the applications chronologically.

The grand jury found that LaGrotta’s niece was hired as a full-time legislative assistant May 16, 2005, and was reduced to a part-time legislative assistant Sept. 12, 2005. 

Lemmon told the grand jury that on Jan. 3, 2006, she began working as an administrative assistant to the executive director of Tourism and Cultural Heritage for the Pittsburgh Convention and Visitors Bureau. 

LaGrotta, however, told Harrisburg party officials that she was leaving her state job Jan. 31, 2006. Although she was not working for LaGrotta, the grand jury reviewed payroll records that show that Lemmon was paid $1,131 on Jan. 16, 2006, and another $1,131 on Jan. 31, 2006.  

LaGrotta also requested she be paid for unused vacation and compensatory time.

Lemmon told the grand jury that she never kept track of her compensatory time or vacation time so she did not know how much she had accumulated or used, but an e-mail obtained by the grand jury showed that Lemmon was aware she was not entitled to vacation or compensatory time.

On Aug. 24, 2006, LaGrotta requested she be rehired as a legislative assistant. The request was approved by DeWeese, effective Sept. 12, 2006, for 20 hours a week at a salaried rate of $27.32 per hour.

LaGrotta notified the House Democratic Caucus on Sept. 14, 2006, that Lemmon would resign effective Oct. 10, 2006. She was paid $3,954 for this time period. 

From Sept. 12 through Oct. 10, 2006, Lemmon said she performed archival work for LaGrotta, similar to that of her mother, by crossing out drivers’ license numbers.

Lemmon was paid $6,216 in 2006 for work which she never performed.

The grand jury found that PennDot applications in Rep. LaGrotta’s office were routinely destroyed in the district office after three to six months. The grand jury found that the documents that Bartolomeo and Lemmon claimed to have worked on did not exist. 

Agents of the attorney general’s office interviewed the manager of the Wampum Mines storage facility, which is the location where LaGrotta claimed to have stored the documents. The manager, who has worked there for 23 years, said LaGrotta never kept boxes at the storage facility and because of its humidity, the Wampum Mines was ill-suited to safely store paper documents. 

LaGrotta was asked by the grand jury to produce any and all documents worked on by Bartolomeo and Lemmon in 2006. Through his attorney, he claimed that some of these documents were destroyed Sept. 1, 2006, and all of the other documents were taken for destruction by Wright’s Hauling on Nov. 30, 2006.

The grand jury found that LaGrotta hired Wright’s Hauling on Sept. 1, 2006, and again Nov. 30, 2006. Agents, however, interviewed the owner of the hauling company who denied removing any boxes of paper documents on either date.

The defendants are scheduled to surrender at 8:30 a.m. today before Harrisburg Magisterial District Judge Joseph Solomon in Harrisburg.

Senior Deputy Attorney General Anthony Krastek of the Attorney General’s Public Corruption Unit will prosecute in Dauphin County.