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Attorneys for two of the Oakhill defendants want more time to argue the case shouldn’t be tried in Cuyahoga County
CLEVELAND
Attorneys for two defendants in the Oakhill Renaissance Place criminal conspiracy case want more time to prepare arguments that the trial shouldn’t be in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court because they haven’t had adequate time to review hundreds of hours of secretly recorded conversations that prosecutors plan to use as evidence.
Also, the attorneys for Youngstown Mayor John A. McNally and Mahoning County Auditor Michael V. Sciortino wrote in a motion that prosecutors have yet to provide additional secret recordings they have, thus making it impossible to raise the question of the court’s jurisdiction.
Lynn Maro, McNally’s attorney, and John B. Juhasz, who represents Sciortino, wrote in the motion — filed electronically with the court at 7:35 p.m. Saturday, with an identical document filed the same way at 4:24 p.m. Monday — that prosecutors have provided 354 recordings, a “vast majority” are one to two hours long, and “because of location and background noise,” the tapes “are not easy to listen to.”
Prosecutors wrote in a motion in October that it had 700 hours of secretly recorded conversations made between Oct. 18, 2005, and Aug. 6, 2010.
The two defense attorneys contend in their motion if they did nothing but work seven hours a day listening to the tapes every day since Oct. 16, when they were received, they couldn’t have listened to them all by Monday, the deadline to challenge the jurisdiction of the court.
“Given counsels’ other caseload, this was not possible,” they wrote.
Also, prosecutors notified the attorneys Oct. 30 by email that additional information — “it will be a long one” — would be provided with photos and documents related to the case, according to the defense attorneys’ court filing. That information hasn’t been provided, the attorneys wrote, “and is just as critical to the jurisdictional assessment as is the audio of the discovery.”
Maro and Juhasz requested they receive an additional 60 days to review the evidence against their clients with the clock starting when prosecutors provide all of the tapes as well as documents to them.
“The defendants seek nothing more than a reasonable amount of time to review the voluminous discovery that the government has collected, once the government supplies all of the discovery” so “the defense can effectively frame pretrial motions, including the jurisdictional motion,” they wrote.
The two also wrote that more than 100,000 documents have been provided, including 30,000 that were not part of the first Oakhill indictment dismissed in July 2011 because of tapes in the possession of the federal government not available to prosecutors in that case.
Defendants’ attorneys have contended the case should be heard in Mahoning County. Most of the 73 criminal counts in the indictment, unsealed May 14, allegedly occurred in Mahoning County, though there are some that allegedly happened in Cuyahoga County.
Mark Lavelle, the attorney for Martin Yavorcik — the third defendant in the Oakhill case — didn’t file an objection to the location of the case by the Monday deadline set Sept. 15 by Judge Janet Burnside, who is overseeing the matter.
Yavorcik, a failed 2008 Mahoning County prosecutor candidate who ran as an independent, along with Sciortino and McNally, the latter in his capacity as a county commissioner, face 83 criminal counts including engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity, conspiracy, bribery, perjury, money laundering and tamping with records.
The three have pleaded not guilty.
The indictment contends McNally, Sciortino and Yavorcik, along with others, were part of a criminal enterprise that conspired to keep the Mahoning County Job and Family Services office at Garland Plaza, owned by the Cafaro Co., on Youngstown’s East Side.
McNally was the sole dissenter when the other two county commissioners, Anthony Traficanti and David N. Ludt, voted in May 2006 to relocate JFS from Garland to Oakhill Renaissance Place, the former Forum Health Southside Medical Center.
The indictment and bill of particulars contend McNally and Sciortino, both Democrats, received benefits for opposing the relocation.
Yavorcik is accused of accepting money from “Businessman 1,” an unindicted co-conspirator believed to be Anthony Cafaro Sr., former head of the Cafaro Co., in exchange for agreeing not to investigate or prosecute members of the enterprise if he were elected prosecutor.
Court documents filed by the Ohio Attorney General’s Office and the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office, who are prosecuting the case, stated at least two confidential sources recorded phone calls and in-person meetings at various locations — primarily Mahoning Valley restaurants — that will be used in the trial against the defendants.