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Oakhill prosecutor objects to request to subpoena confidential witness
Monday hearing will address number of secretly recorded tapes
CLEVELAND
The lead prosecutor in the Oakhill Renaissance Place criminal-corruption case objects to a defense request to subpoena a confidential witness for an upcoming hearing – calling it “simply a ruse to destroy the identity” of the informant.
The defendants’ request “is merely to have the [witness] testify at a pretrial ancillary proceeding, thereby exposing his identity and subjecting him to unnecessary examination,” wrote Dan Kasaris, the Oakhill case’s lead prosecutor and a senior attorney general, in a court document filed Monday.
Kasaris was responding to a request last week from the attorneys of Youngstown Mayor John A. McNally and ex-Mahoning County Auditor Michael V. Sciortino, two Oakhill defendants, asking the judge in the case to allow them to issue a subpoena to a key confidential witness.
Attorneys John B. Juhasz and Lynn Maro – who represent Sciortino and McNally, respectively – requested the judge allow the subpoena be issued, without revealing the witness’ identity, to find out what he knows about the amount of secretly recorded tapes he made related to this case.
Judge Janet R. Burnside of Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court, who is overseeing the case, hasn’t ruled on the request as of Tuesday.
A hearing is scheduled for next Monday to resolve a long-standing dispute between the two sides over the amount of secretly recorded tapes made by two confidential witnesses from Oct. 18, 2005, to Feb. 5, 2011.
Attempts Tuesday by The Vindicator to seek comment from Juhasz and Maro were unsuccessful.
Defense attorneys contend in motions that there are 2,000 hours of tapes based on the July 2011 dismissal of a similar Oakhill case in Mahoning County.
Prosecutors in that case said they couldn’t proceed because the FBI had “approximately 2,000 hours of tape recordings” related to at least one defendant, and wouldn’t turn them over. Since then, the Federal Bureau of Investigation provided those tapes.
Prosecutors have repeatedly said 2,000 hours was an “off-the-cuff” estimate. It’s actually about 700 hours and all of them have been given to defense attorneys, they say.
The defense want “to expose [the witness] as part of their continued effort to have the state sanctioned for something that does not exist,” the prosecutors’ filing reads.
Also, prosecutors provided a letter in June from Deane Hassman, a Youngstown-based FBI special agent, who wrote that the bureau gave all the recordings it had to prosecutors.
Prosecutors say they’ve given those tapes to defense attorneys.
Hassman wrote the incorrect 2,000-hour estimate was “based upon the knowledge of 10,000-plus telephone sessions and hundreds of face-to-face meetings.”
In last week’s filing, Juhasz and Maro wrote Hassman’s letter was “another installment in the long history of covert deception that has surrounded the tapes.”
The confidential informant the defense attorneys want to question made a majority of the secret recordings.
In last week’s filing, Juhasz and Maro wrote the 133 tapes recorded by the second informant aren’t listed on the prosecutor’s notice of intent to use evidence.
In the latest prosecutor filing, Kasaris wrote: “The defense made no attempt to subpoena the second confidential [witness], a person who recorded nearly 80 in-person conversations and thousands of phone calls.”
For Monday’s hearing, Juhasz and Maro had subpoenas issued to Kasaris; Hassman; Wallace Sines, a Youngstown-based FBI special agent; Paul M. Nick, executive director of the Ohio Ethics Commission; David P. Muhek, an assistant Lorain County prosecutor; and Lorain County Prosecutor Dennis Will. The latter three were special prosecutors in the first Oakhill case.
In a separate filing Monday, Matthew E. Meyer, a Cuyahoga County assistant prosecutor, asked Judge Burnside to quash the subpoenas of Kasaris, Nick, Muhek and Nick. Cuyahoga prosecutors are assisting with this case.
The defense “failed to satisfy the legal standard for calling the state’s prosecutors as witnesses in this case,” Meyer wrote.
The Meyer filing said when asked about subpoenaing Kasaris, Maro said: “She wanted to ‘make sure [he] was doing his job.’”
Meyer also wrote that the four shouldn’t be required to testify because it would “violate both attorney-client privilege and work product protection.”
He wrote that the evidence could be obtained elsewhere. “The state anticipates that the federal government will make both [Hassman and Sines] available to testify in this case.”
Prosecutors contend McNally in his previous capacity as a Mahoning County commissioner and Sciortino, both Democrats, as well as attorney Martin Yavorcik, a failed 2008 Mahoning County prosecutor candidate, were part of a criminal enterprise that illegally, and unsuccessfully, tried to impede or stop the move of the county Department of Job and Family Services from the Cafaro Co.-owned Garland Plaza to Oakhill Renaissance Place, the former Forum Health Southside Medical Center, owned by the county.
The criminal enterprise also wanted to elect Yavorcik as county prosecutor to stop an investigation into the actions of its members, according to an indictment.
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.