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Prosecutors present new evidence to grand jurors in Oakhill probe
Federal, state and county officials were at the grand jury session Thursday.
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Oakhill Renaissance Place in Youngstown
YOUNGSTOWN — Special prosecutors probing Mahoning County’s purchase of Oakhill Renaissance Place made a repeat appearance and evidence presentation before a grand jury.
No Oakhill-related indictments were announced, however.
County Administrator George J. Tablack, with an arm-load of documents, was inside the grand jury room on the third floor of the county courthouse for more than an hour Thursday afternoon.
The grand jurors spent the morning hearing local criminal cases presented by local prosecutors. After lunch they heard evidence presented by special prosecutors Dennis P. Will and Paul M. Nick.
Will and Nick, who had presented to the same grand jury two weeks ago, arrived late Thursday morning with banker’s boxes full of documents and a giant story board draped with a blue cloth cover.
With them were Linette Stratford, chief of the civil division of the county prosecutor’s office; Gary Snyder, a detective with the county sheriff’s department; and agents of the FBI and the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation.
Stratford was among the lawyers who defended the county against a lawsuit by the Cafaro Co., which unsuccessfully sought to rescind the county’s purchase of Oakhill, the former Forum Health Southside Medical Center.
The county’s Department of Job and Family Services ended its 19-year tenancy in Cafaro’s Garland Plaza on the city’s East Side and moved to Oakhill as that lawsuit went to trial in July 2007.
At the request of Paul J. Gains, county prosecutor, Mahoning’s common pleas judges appointed Will and Nick as special prosecutors.
When they were appointed in November 2008, Gains said the special prosecutors would be independent of his office and that their probe would concern possible criminal violations of Ohio’s ethics law related to conflict of interest.
Just before Will and Nick arrived, Judge James C. Evans, presiding over this session of the grand jury, told press members, who were waiting on the third floor, not to interview anyone they believed to be a grand juror or a witness before the grand jury.
All grand jury proceedings are secret.
Will is the Lorain County prosecutor, and Nick is chief investigative counsel for the Ohio Ethics Commission.
After the grand jurors adjourned at 3:20 p.m., Will and Nick left without comment.
After the grand jury session, a deputy and an FBI agent carried the giant cloth-covered story board back to the BCI office at 20 Federal Place downtown.
The story of Oakhill dates back nearly four years.
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 after Oakhill’s owner, the Southside Community Development Corp., filed for Chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcy.
County Auditor Michael V. Sciortino and then-county Treasurer John B. Reardon joined McNally in publicly opposing the purchase. They cited concerns about undetermined costs of buying, operating and maintaining the five-story former hospital complex, which was built in stages between 1910 and 1972.
On the very day a bankruptcy judge approved the Oakhill purchase in July 2006, McNally, Sciortino and Reardon immediately met with Anthony M. Cafaro Sr., who was then president of the Cafaro Co., in Cafaro’s office, Reardon testified during the trial of the Cafaro lawsuit.
During her trial testimony, Lisa A. Antonini, then the county Democratic Party 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 executives made campaign donations to Democratic candidates.
While the county was acquiring Oakhill, Antonini also was the county’s chief deputy treasurer. She became treasurer in March 2007 after Reardon left for Columbus to become state superintendent of financial institutions.
At the end of the Cafaro lawsuit trial, Visiting Judge Richard M. Markus ordered Sciortino to issue the $75,000 check for the Oakhill purchase. Sciortino had withheld the check for a year.
Gains, who had helped Stratford defend the county against the Cafaro lawsuit, sent a letter in October 2007 concerning Oakhill 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, who had been 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.
milliken@vindy.com