Grand jury hears Oakhill ethics case

By PETER H. MILLIKEN

VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER

YOUNGSTOWN — A grand jury is hearing evidence on Mahoning County’s purchase of Oakhill Renaissance Center.

Special prosecutors appointed to investigate possible violations of Ohio’s ethics law related to the county’s purchase of Oakhill began presenting evidence to a grand jury Thursday.

However, no indictments related to Oakhill were announced.

Dennis P. Will, Lorain County prosecutor, and Paul M. Nick, chief investigative counsel with the Ohio Ethics Commission, made their presentations in an extended session of the grand jury.

They and Anthony Dean Cillo and Billie Jo Belcher, assistant Lorain County prosecutors, were appointed by Mahoning County’s common pleas judges in November 2008 at the request of Mahoning County Prosecutor Paul J. Gains.

After the grand jury adjourned Thursday afternoon, Nick declined to say how many witnesses the special prosecutors had presented.

Neither he nor Will would say when they would return to present more evidence. However, Nick said they were before a regular Mahoning County grand jury, not a separate special grand jury.

“They’re independent, so I don’t know what they’re doing, and that’s the way it should be,” Gains said of the special prosecutors.

“I don’t know their schedule, and I don’t know what evidence they are presenting.”

The grand jury’s term ends April 30. All grand jury sessions take place in secrecy.

Besides hearing from the special prosecutors, the grand jury also handled cases unrelated to Oakhill. However, the grand jury produced an abbreviated list of only nine indictments and two refusals to indict in routine local cases presented to it by local prosecutors. A typical weekly Mahoning County grand jury session features 20 or more such indictments.

The grand jury, which meets each Thursday morning and typically adjourns by 1 p.m., was in session from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. to hear the special prosecutors and handle routine business.

When they were appointed, Gains said he was requesting the special prosecutors, who he said would be independent of his office, to “avoid any appearance of impropriety.” Gains said the probe concerns possible criminal violations of the state’s ethics law related to conflict of interest.

With Will and Nick outside the grand jury room on the third floor of the county courthouse was Linette Stratford, chief of the civil division of the Mahoning County Prosecutor’s Office, who had successfully defended the county against a lawsuit by the Cafaro Co. to rescind the county’s purchase of Oakhill.

Stratford declined comment about Thursday’s proceedings.

The investigation by the special prosecutors pertains to events concerning Mahoning County’s purchase of Oakhill Renaissance Place – the former Forum Health Southside Medical Center – for use as a county office complex.

The non-profit Southside Community Development Corp., which owned Oakhill after Forum’s departure in 1998, filed for Chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcy on May 3, 2006.

That filing raised the prospect of abandonment of Oakhill and the potential immediate forced relocation of its tenants, including the county coroner’s office, the city health department and the Mahoning-Youngstown Community Action Partnership, which operates a Head Start pre-school program.

With Commissioner John A. McNally IV dissenting, Commissioners Anthony T. Traficanti and David N. Ludt voted to buy Oakhill in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in May 2006.

County Auditor Michael V. Sciortino and then-county treasurer John B. Reardon joined McNally in publicly opposing the county’s purchase of Oakhill. They cited concerns about undetermined costs of buying, operating and maintaining the aging, five-story, 338,000-square-foot former hospital complex, which was built in stages between 1910 and 1972.

The Cafaro Co., landlord of the county’s Department of Job and Family Services at Garland Plaza on the city’s East Side since 1988, filed an unsuccessful lawsuit to rescind the county’s purchase of Oakhill, to which the commissioners planned to move JFS.

On the very day U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Kay Woods approved the county’s purchase of Oakhill in July 2006, McNally, Sciortino and Reardon immediately met with Anthony M. Cafaro Sr., president of the Cafaro Co., in Cafaro’s office, Reardon testified in the July 2007 trial of that lawsuit.

During her trial testimony, Lisa A. Antonini, then the county Democratic chairwoman, acknowledged her cellular phone records showed 28 calls made or received between her and Cafaro headquarters between Aug. 12, 2006, and March 17, 2007, but said she never spoke to Anthony M. Cafaro Sr. about Oakhill.

Cafaro Co. executives made donations to Democratic candidates.

While the county was acquiring Oakhill, Antonini was also the county’s chief deputy treasurer. She became treasurer in March 2007 after Reardon left for Columbus to become state superintendent of financial institutions.

As that trial began in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court, the county moved JFS from Garland to Oakhill.

At the end of the four-day, non-jury trial, Visiting Judge Richard M. Markus ordered Sciortino to issue the $75,000 check for the Oakhill purchase. Sciortino, who had previously refused to issue that check, issued it the afternoon the judge ordered him to do so.

After the trial, the Cafaro Co. agreed to drop its appeal of that lawsuit in exchange for a $913,590 settlement of a breach-of-lease lawsuit the company had filed against the county.

The health department, coroner, MYCAP and JFS remained at Oak-

hill, where they were joined by the county Veterans’ Service Commission in December 2008. The county eventually plans to relocate its recycling division, auto title department, board of elections, adult day care center and the Mahoning Valley Violent Crimes Task Force from its Southside Annex to Oakhill and close the Southside Annex.

The end of the county’s Oakhill-related legal battle with the Cafaro Co. didn’t end the fallout from the Oakhill acquisition.

Gains, who had helped Stratford defend the county in the Cafaro litigation, sent a letter in October 2007 concerning the Oakhill matter to the Ohio Ethics Commission, which voted to open a probe of the matter in December 2007.

Antonini, Sciortino and McNally confirmed that they received subpoenas directing them to turn over Oakhill-related documents and correspondence to the county grand jury in April 2008.

At the end of 2009, Anthony M. Cafaro Sr. and his brother, John J. Cafaro, vice president of the Cafaro Co., announced their retirement and placed the company in the hands of Anthony’s sons, William A. and Anthony Jr., as co-presidents.