Oakhill judge refuses to drop corruption case
CLEVELAND
The judge in the Oakhill Renaissance Place criminal-corruption case refused a motion from attorneys for two defendants to dismiss the case over the amount of secretly recorded tapes given to them.
Attorneys for Youngstown Mayor John A. McNally and former Mahoning County Auditor Michael V. Sciortino, both Democrats, insist there are 2,000 hours of the tapes. Prosecutors in the case said there are 700 to 800 hours and all are in the hands of the defense attorneys.
In her Thursday ruling, Judge Janet R. Burnside of Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court, who is hearing the case, wrote: “There was no evidence that the 2,000 hours figure was the result of calculation, an educated guess or intelligent estimation. The evidence revealed no one ever bothered to count or itemize or even carefully estimate the number of hours.”
Defense attorneys based their claim of 2,000 hours on statements from special prosecutors in the first Oakhill case, dismissed in July 2011. That case was dropped because FBI agents had tapes of at least one witness and wouldn’t provide the tapes.
During an Oct. 16 hearing about the hours of tapes, Dan Kasaris, a senior assistant attorney general, said the FBI found 12 additional tapes, and that a confidential witness – identified as Harry Strabala, a Youngstown political consultant – had used two tape recorders and copies of those duplicate tapes were given to the defense.
Lynn Maro, McNally’s attorney, and John B. Juhasz, Sciortino’s attorney, contend prosecutors purposely violated evidence law and that the cases against their clients should be dismissed.
Judge Burnside wrote Thursday that there is “no evidence established that use of this figure was intentionally misleading or was anything other than a sloppy characterization that somehow came to have a life [of] its own.”
“We are pleased by the ruling,” said Dan Tierney, a spokesman for the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, the lead prosecutor in the case. “It validates the special prosecutor’s work and statements throughout the case that we have produced all of the recordings we had, and that the 2,000 hours was an estimate and not a hard number based on detailed logging or calculations.”
Attempts Thursday by The Vindicator to reach Maro and Juhasz were unsuccessful.
McNally, Sciortino and Martin Yavorcik, a failed 2008 independent candidate for Mahoning County prosecutor, are accused of being part of a criminal enterprise that illegally tried to impede or stop the move of a Mahoning County agency from a plaza owned by a Cafaro Co. subsidiary to Oakhill, the former Forum Health Southside Medical Center owned by the county. The subsidiary received $440,000 a year in rent from the county.
McNally, Sciortino and Yavorcik have pleaded not guilty to 83 total criminal counts, including engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity, bribery, conspiracy, perjury and money laundering.
The three were indicted May 14, 2014, in Cuyahoga County. The trial is scheduled to start March 1, 2016.
The judge’s decision “will keep everyone involved in the case on track to start the trial” as scheduled, Tierney said.