Mud flies in Lawrence district attorney race

By Jeanne Starmack

The district attorney rebutted his opponent’s accusations.

NEW CASTLE, Pa. — In a contentious campaign battle, private attorney Joshua Lamancusa is challenging incumbent District Attorney John Bongivengo in the Lawrence County Democratic Party primary Tuesday.

“He’s been implying that I’m a thief, because he can’t prove his case,” said Bongivengo from his offices in the county government center in New Castle last week.

Indeed, Lamancusa had an arsenal of accusations ready from his office at the private law practice of his father, Carmen Lamancusa, on the North Hill. He said Bongivengo has mismanaged his office on three fronts.

“There’s financial, personnel and case mismanagement,” he said.

Among his accusations of financial misdeeds, Lamancusa asserts that the firing of two employees shortly after Bongivengo took office in 2006 cost the county $80,000 to settle lawsuits.

He said Bongivengo’s office owes $22,000 to New Castle in overtime for participation in the district attorney’s drug task force, and Ellwood City is owed $10,000 for the same.

“He acknowledged it’s owed, and it’s the result of a recent drug sweep,” Lamancusa said. “But it’s outstanding from 2007, 2008 and 2009.”

He said that checks from the district attorney’s private account to police officers bounced.

He also said a victim was supposed to get $3,600 in restitution from a defendant through the district attorney’s office but never did.

Lamancusa added the district attorney violated a law that sets a one-year time limit for a case to be brought to trial, resulting in the dismissal of 75 cases during Bongivengo’s tenure.

Bongivengo responded to each charge.

He fired a county detective and a secretary a month after he took office. He said he considered the employees untrustworthy, and he was within his legal rights to fire them.

The grant supporting one county detective ran out, he said, and he chose to let that particular detective go.

He said the secretary contributed to his opponent’s campaign.

“It’s not wrong to fire a confidential employee for political reasons. That’s case law,” he said, adding that “confidential” refers to an employee who handles confidential information. He would have to be able to trust such an employee, he said. He said he wanted to fight the lawsuits, but the county chose to settle them.

Bongivengo said the money owed to New Castle is $20,000, not $22,000, and Ellwood City is owed around $4,000, not $10,000.

He said the investigations for the drug sweep in question began in 2007, but he does not reimburse for overtime until arrests are made. In this case, the arrests were made in recent months.

He said he pays for task force operations from two funds. The Drug Strike Back Fund is the county’s share of forfeited drug money, he said. “It’s unreliable. You never know when you’re going to get it.” The other, the Drug Task Force Fund, is funded by the state attorney general’s office, which takes around 90 percent of forfeited money in investigations that involve state police and AG agents. The AG’s office makes quarterly payments to the counties with that money, he said. He keeps between 5 percent and 10 percent of the money, which he splits with municipalities, he said.

Bongivengo also noted that of 5 percent the county keeps if state police and agents aren’t involved, half would be split with a local police force.

“The more he criticizes about the drug task force and the funding, that says to me, ‘you don’t understand,’” Bongivengo said of Lamancusa, whose political ad asks, “Where’s the $477,400 in seized drug money?”

“That money comes in slow and it goes out slow,” Bongivengo said. He said the AG’s office recently sent a payment, and he expected New Castle and Ellwood would be reimbursed by the end of last week.

Bongivengo said the victim who didn’t get the $3,600 restitution was a local business in a theft case. He said the defendant in the case agreed to reimburse the business so that the charges would be dropped. He said the reimbursement was in cash. The business was notified that it could send someone to pick it up, which it did, he said. Later, the business indicated it didn’t get the money. His office has a signed receipt from the business’s employee, however, he said.

Bongivengo also said he never bounced a check, and that the private account Lamancusa mentions is the district attorney’s petty-cash fund.

He said Lamancusa is referring to a situation in which an officer needed $500 to make a drug buy, but the bank said there were insufficient funds in the account. He said that was because the bank had not credited a deposit he’d made. The bank did eventually honor the check that day, he said.

Bongivengo said there are 49 cases, not 75, that he dismissed under Rule 600, which requires prosecution of a case within one year, or the case is dismissed.

He said that of those 49 cases, 24 of them expired before he took office, but he was the one who had to dismiss them. He said problems arose in the other cases because the state’s tracking system and the county’s didn’t mesh. Defendants were sometimes hard to find because they were already in jail somewhere, he said.

He also said there was an issue with manpower, and a 2008 change in law meant due diligence was no longer required to find people who didn’t show up for court. “The police don’t go get them,” he said.

A list of Rule 600 dismissals provided by Lamancusa reveals a range of charges that include burglary, drug violations, DUIs, bad checks, aggravated assault, forgery and thefts.

Bongivengo said he’s been responsible for 7,901 cases under Rule 600, and that he is now nearly 100 percent compliant.

Lamancusa, 35, says he is an experienced prosecutor, having earned his experience as a lawyer in the U.S. Navy’s Judge Advocate General Corps.

From 2000 to 2005, he served as a JAG attorney in Norfolk, Va., and in Naples, Italy. He prosecuted cases of child pornography and sexual assault.

In his military service, he said, he had a 98 percent conviction rate. He has been in private practice since 2005.

Bongivengo said being a JAG lawyer is commendable. But it hasn’t prepared Lamancusa to serve as district attorney, he said, because Pennsylvania law is quite different.

Bongivengo, 38, said that nothing prepares someone for being district attorney except being district attorney.

He said that since he’s been district attorney, the office has an overall conviction rate of 92 percent.

He said he personally has four convictions in murder cases — two for criminal conspiracy and two for first-degree homicide that include one death-penalty conviction.

Lamancusa lives in New Castle with his wife, Amy.

Bongivengo, a father of three, also lives in the city.

Republican George Freed will face either Lamancusa or Bongivengo in the November general election.