Feds: The Entire County is Corrupt!

pO157.

Posted to Legal on Thu Jan 28, 2010 at 11:25:27 AM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.

The recent conviction of former NFL football star and disgraced Luzerne County (PA) commissioner for taking bribes is the latest in a long string of corruption cases in this Pennsylvania region. What started as an investigation into one of the worst cases of judicial misconduct in the history of the nation has ensnared numerous officials at all branches of local government --- leading the Justice Department to go so far as to start a website listing all the pending cases.

Disgraced former Commissioner Skrepenak says that the reason he accepted $5,000 from developers is because he was "ignorant" but defended himself by saying almost all the public officials in that area do it. Corruption generally consisted of cash for contracts, jobs (including teaching positions), stealing money, expensive gifts (including suits), or outright jailing of defendants to at private prisons that the sentencing judges had financial interests in.

Commissioner Skrepenak is right. Since the investigations began about 23 public officials in this area have been charged with crimes. They include a school superintendent, three county judges, four courthouse officials, and five school board members. What is shocking about these cases is their schemes all were unrelated --- machine politics, the mob, graft and political favors are so common place in this coal mining region for over a century that Skrepenak and others say most politicians don't even realize what they are doing is illegal. The situation wasn't helped until recently when the FBI began investigating for once:

"There's no question this is an area that traditionally has not seen a lot of public corruption investigations, and now there are several big ones going on," said FBI spokesman J.J. Klaver. "It is a major undertaking, but we seem to be getting it done, so that's a good thing."

In other cases, a former clerk was convicted of accepting a $1,500 suit from a contractor to get favorable treatment in a building case. In other cases school administrators admitted taking bribes, and a local work and training center was apparently billed highly inflated prices for construction. In other news, the judicial seats on the Luzerne County bench vacated by the resignation of the corrupt as fuck judges were filled with a public defender earlier this month. He indicated he did not want to run for re-election and will simply work case by case to restore confidence in the local judiciary.

(Unconfirmed sources that did not want to go on the record informed your reporter that despite what the FBI said above corruption rapidly intensified and became more widespread in 2006, the year that neighboring Lackawanna County lawman Dwight Schrute turned in his badge.)