Judge Ciavarella, stop where you are and keep your hands visible. >> Court is still in session. What's this regarding? >> Payments connected to private juvenile detention facilities. >> There are two versions of Mark Ciavarella. The juvenile court judge Luzerne County trusted with its children, and the man on the federal indictment who sold those same children for $2.6 million in kickbacks. [music] Both are the same person. >> Every ruling I made was lawful. >> We'll discuss that outside the courtroom. >> Very well. >> She was 14 years old. Her offense was building a fake MySpace page that mocked her assistant principal. >> [music] >> She walked into the Luzerne County Courthouse in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania expecting a stern lecture and a warning. 8 minutes later, she was in shackles [music] being marched out of the courtroom toward a private detention facility she had never heard of >> [music] >> in a county she had never visited run by men her judge was being paid by. By the time the scheme collapsed, [music] nearly 4,000 children would walk through that same courtroom the same way. Many of them never came back the same. Several of them never came back at all. This is the story of how a sitting American judge sold children for cash from his own bench. And how it took a teenager's mother to finally bring him down. Before we go any further, have you ever stood in front of someone in authority >> [music] >> and felt that you had no real chance of being heard? Tell me about it in the comments. [music] And if you are not subscribed yet, do it now. We cover the cases that should have ended careers decades earlier than they did. Mark Arthur Ciavarella was born in 1950 in the city of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in the heart of the Anthracite Valley. His parents were the children of Italian immigrants who had come to northeastern Pennsylvania for the coal mines two generations earlier. By the time Mark was born, the deep mines were dying. The rivers ran orange with acid drainage, and the families that had built the valley were holding on to whatever respectability they could. His father worked as a route salesman for a local beer distributor. His mother kept the house and kept the parish bingo books. Mark was raised on Sunday mass at St. Theresa's, weeknight homework at the kitchen table, and an unspoken understanding that the only way out of a dying coal town was a diploma on the wall. He attended Coughlin High School in Wilkes-Barre. Teachers there remembered him as polite, ambitious, and quick with a handshake. He played intramural sports without much distinction. He served on the student council. He was the kind of student who took the long view, who already understood that in Luzerne County, a young man with a law degree and a good last name could become anyone he wanted to be. In 1968, he enrolled at King's College, a small Catholic school built into the brick spine of downtown Wilkes-Barre. He majored in political science, joined the Italian-American Student Association, and worked nights at a family-owned restaurant on Public Square. He graduated in 1972 and went directly to Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh, 260 miles to the west. Classmates there described him as relentless. He was not the smartest student in the room, they said, but he worked harder than the smart ones, and he was twice as good in front of a courtroom. He earned his law degree in 1975. He came home to Luzerne County. He passed the Pennsylvania bar that same year. He hung out a shingle as a defense attorney in a second-floor office on South Main Street, two blocks from the courthouse where he would one day preside. He took court-appointed cases. He defended DUIs and bar fights and the occasional small-time drug charge. He married a Wilkes-Barre woman named Cindy in 1977. They settled in Mountain Top, a leafy suburb above the city, and started a family. For nearly two decades, he built the kind of practice that turns a young lawyer into a local fixture. He joined the Luzerne County Bar Association. He coached his children's sports teams. He sat on the parish council at St. Theresa's. He was a regular at La Festa Italiana in Pittston every August, working the sausage tent for the Knights of Columbus. By the early 1990s, he was one of the better-known defense attorneys in the valley, the kind of name people gave their cousins when the cousins got into trouble. In 1995, he ran for the Court of Common Pleas. Local newspaper endorsements called him experienced, hard-working, and grounded in the community. His campaign literature emphasized law and order. He promised to be tough on crime, tougher on drugs, and toughest of all on juveniles, who, he said, were running wild in a county that had lost its way. He won the election comfortably. He was sworn in on January 5th, 1996, with his wife and three children in the front row of the ceremonial courtroom on River Street. His judicial colleagues noted his energy, his political instincts, and his appetite for the spotlight. His early evaluations called him decisive, in full command of the bench, and willing to make difficult decisions. One older judge, asked about Ciavarella decades later, said only this: "Mark always wanted to be the biggest man in the room. That was the first thing you noticed about him. That was the only thing some of us ever noticed." In 2002, he was reassigned to juvenile court. He would later say, "This was the assignment he had always wanted." It was the assignment that would destroy 4,000 lives. To understand what happened next, you have to understand the courthouse where it happened. Luzerne County in 2002 was a place where political families had run the local judiciary for three generations. The president judge of the Court of Common Pleas was a man named Michael Conahan. Conahan was a friend of Ciavarella's, a fellow Italian-American from the valley, a graduate of the same law school, a regular at the same restaurants. The two of them had been close for 20 years. By 2002, they were also business partners in ways that would not become public until the FBI started reading their bank statements. The Luzerne County juvenile justice system worked like this. A child taken into custody by police was held at the county-run River Street detention facility, a mid-century building a short walk from the courthouse. The child would appear before the juvenile court judge, usually within a few days. If the judge found the child delinquent and ordered placement, the child would be sent either to the county facility for short stays or to a state-licensed facility for longer ones. Pennsylvania law required that the child be informed of the right to an attorney. Pennsylvania law required that any waiver of that right be knowing, intelligent, and voluntary. Pennsylvania law required a record. That was the system on paper. The system in practice depended entirely on the judge. In June of 2000, 2 years before Ciavarella was assigned to juvenile court, a Wilkes-Barre attorney named Robert Powell and a Luzerne County builder named Robert Mericle began discussing a private juvenile detention venture. Powell was a personal injury lawyer with a winery, a yacht, and a taste for political access. Mericle was a developer who had built strip malls and warehouses across the valley. Their plan was simple. They would build a privately owned juvenile detention center in Pittston Township. They would call it PA Child Care. They would contract with the county to take the children who currently went to the county facility. They would charge the county per child per day. Every bed filled was revenue. Every empty bed was a loss. There was only one problem. The county already had a detention center. The county facility was paid for. The county facility had staff, a budget, and a building. For PA Child Care to make money, the county facility had to be emptied first. In January of 2002, Conahan, as president judge, signed a placement guarantee agreement with PA Child Care. The agreement committed the county to a minimum number of juvenile placements per year at the new private facility. The next year, he signed a memorandum that effectively cut off funding to the county-run River Street facility. Within months, the county facility was closed. The children had nowhere to go but Pittston. Mark Ciavarella, newly assigned to juvenile court, would decide which children went there. And he would decide how long they stayed. A trust had been built over more than a hundred years that said an American child standing before an American judge was entitled to a fair hearing, the assistance of counsel, and a proportionate response. That trust was the only thing standing between a 14-year-old girl and a locked facility in another county. That trust was about to be tested. The first payment was wired on January 14th, 2003. Robert Mericle sent 997,600 dollars to a Florida shell company controlled by Robert Powell. From there, the money was distributed to accounts held by Ciavarella and Conahan, and to entities the two judges controlled. The IRS would later trace the funds through Pinnacle Group of Jupiter, through Vision Holdings, through a series of wire transfers from Wilkes-Barre to Florida and back again. The two judges called the payments a finder's fee. The federal government would call them something else. The payments continued for 5 years between 2003 and 2008. Mericle and Powell would route roughly $2.6 million to Ciavarella and Conahan. Some of the money came in lump sums. Some came in monthly installments labeled as rent on a Florida condominium the judges did not actually use. Some came as cash. By the time the federal investigation began, the two judges had received the equivalent of a kickback for nearly every child they sent to PA Child Care. In Ciavarella's courtroom on the fourth floor of the Luzerne County Courthouse, the pipeline ran on a schedule. Juvenile dockets were called in the morning. Ciavarella would take the bench in his black robe, sit behind a raised oak panel, and process children at a pace that astonished anyone watching from the gallery. He moved through cases in 2 minutes, 3 minutes, 5 if there was an argument. He did not ask whether the child wanted an attorney. He did not pause when the child said yes. Roughly half the children who appeared before him during those 5 years had no lawyer and were never advised on the record that they had the right to one. Many of them had no idea what was about to happen to them. The offenses were small. A 13-year-old boy was sent away for shoplifting a $4 bottle of nutmeg from a grocery store on a dare. There by a 12-year-old was sent away for accidentally hitting another child with a piece of steak at a backyard cookout. A 15-year-old was sent away for jaywalking. A 17-year-old was sent away for arguing with a teacher. The children were ordered into custody, shackled at the wrists and ankles in the courtroom, and walked out a side door toward a van that would drive them straight to Pittston. The one-way street case became the symbol of all of it. A 14-year-old girl, a first-time offender, was brought before Ciavarella for riding her scooter the wrong way down a one-way street. He sentenced her to 11 months of detention. The number of months reportedly matched the number of buttons on her shirt. A boy who appeared before him on a minor disorderly conduct count was given additional time after he named the wrong professional football team when the judge asked who he rooted for. These were not stories whispered later by activists. These were stories the children's own families told the same afternoon in tears on the courthouse sidewalk. The signs were everywhere if anyone had wanted to look. Ciavarella's placement rate was two to three times the state average. The vast majority of his juvenile defendants appeared without counsel. The percentage of children he sentenced to out-of-home placement for first-time nonviolent offenses was among the highest ever recorded in a Pennsylvania courtroom. The Juvenile Court Judges Commission of Pennsylvania flagged the numbers internally as early as 2004. No one acted. His lifestyle changed in ways the county noticed and did not quite question. He bought a condominium in Jupiter, Florida. He bought a 40-ft fishing boat. He paid cash for renovations to the mountaintop house. He traveled. He spent. Local lawyers who had known him for 20 years started joking about how well juvenile court paid. None of them realized the joke was true. Inside the courthouse, the public defender's office watched all of it. They saw children appear without lawyers. They saw the placements. They saw the families weeping in the hallway. The chief public defender raised concerns to county leadership in 2004 and was told the issue was not a priority. The position itself was eventually defunded. No one with standing was left in the building to challenge what Ciavarella was doing on the bench. By 2007, the pipeline ran without friction. He had been doing it for 5 years, 48 months without a single ruling reversed. Almost 4,000 children processed through. And he had no real reason to believe it would ever stop. We are about to walk into this courtroom from the other side. The investigation. The unraveling. If you have stayed with me this far, you already know this case is different from anything else on the channel. Subscribe if you have not. We do not look away from these stories, and these are the ones that need the most eyes on them. The unraveling started in the kitchen of a working-class home in Wilkes-Barre in the spring of 2007. Lorraine Transue, a paralegal in her 40s, was sitting across from her 14-year-old daughter Hillary. Hillary had built a fake MySpace page that mocked her assistant principal at Crestwood High School. The page was a joke. The school had called the police anyway. Lorraine took the morning off work, drove Hillary to the Luzerne County Courthouse, and walked her into Mark Ciavarella's courtroom expecting a lecture and a warning. What she got instead was an 8-minute hearing in which her daughter was found delinquent, ordered into custody, shackled at the wrists and ankles by by sheriff's deputy, and led out a side door toward Pittston. Lorraine was told to wait. She was told her daughter would be away for 3 months. She tried to ask about an attorney. She was told it was too late. Lorraine Transue went home and started calling lawyers. Most of them would not return her calls. One of them mentioned an organization in Philadelphia called the Juvenile Law Center. The Juvenile Law Center was run by an attorney named Marsha Levick and a co-founder named Bob Schwartz. They had been suing American juvenile courts on behalf of children for 30 years. Lorraine called them. Levick listened to Lorraine's story. Then she made a phone call to a colleague in Wilkes-Barre. The colleague had her own story about a Ciavarella case. So did the next attorney Levick called. By the end of that summer, the Juvenile Law Center had documented dozens of cases that followed the same pattern. Children appearing without counsel. Children sentenced to out-of-home placements for first offenses. Children given months of detention for jaywalking, for truancy, for petty theft, for the contents of their social media pages. In April of 2008, the Juvenile Law Center filed a King's Bench petition with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court asking the court to vacate hundreds of Ciavarella's adjudications. The Supreme Court initially denied the petition. The Juvenile Law Center filed again. They kept filing. They kept collecting cases. They started talking to reporters. Somewhere during those months, a confidential informant walked into the Scranton Field Office of the FBI and told agents that a Luzerne County judge was taking kickbacks from a privately owned juvenile detention facility. The informant was someone close to the operation. The agents listened. They opened a case file. They subpoenaed bank records. They started reading. What they found in the bank records was the entire architecture of the scheme. Wire transfers from Mericle's company to a Powell-controlled account in Florida. Disbursements from that account to entities held by Ciavarella and Conahan. Cash deposits in amounts just below the federal reporting threshold. Real estate transactions that did not pass the smell test. By the late fall of 2008, the FBI knew what the two judges had done. They knew when. They knew how much. They had everything they needed. The federal grand jury sitting in Scranton issued its first subpoenas in the fall of 2008. The targets did not know yet that they were targets. Robert Powell, the personal injury attorney and PA Child Care co-owner, was approached by federal agents in late 2008 with a choice. He could continue to insist the payments to the judges were legitimate. He could go to trial and likely die in federal prison. Or he could cooperate. He chose cooperation. He agreed to wear a recording device. In a series of meetings over the following weeks, Powell met with Conahan. The meetings were captured on audio. On the recordings, Conahan can be heard discussing the structure of the payments, the cover story to be used if anyone asked, and the steps the two judges had taken to obscure the trail. The recordings would become, in the words of one prosecutor, as close to a confession as the government had any right to expect. Robert Mericle, the builder, was approached separately. He also agreed to cooperate. He admitted to making the payments. He admitted to characterizing them on his own books as a finder's fee. He admitted he had known throughout that the money was flowing to two sitting judges who were ordering children into the facility he had built. The financial trail was overwhelming. Federal investigators traced $2.6 million in payments from Mericle and Powell through Florida shell companies, through Vision Holdings, through Pinnacle Group, through condominium leases the judges had never actually lived in into accounts that the judges controlled. They found cash deposits at branches in Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton. They found unreported income on the judges' federal tax returns going back years. The Juvenile Law Center, working independently, was assembling a parallel record. They identified children sent to PA Child Care for offenses no other Pennsylvania court would have ordered detention for. They identified hearings that lasted under 3 minutes. They identified the systematic absence of defense counsel. They identified at least one case in which a child had been ordered into custody before any plea was even entered. The data was so consistent across so many cases that it looked less like a series of bad decisions and more like a production line. The Juvenile Law Center also began identifying outcomes that would later anchor the moral weight of the case. Edward Kenzakoski was a 17-year-old wrestler from Wilkes-Barre. His father had asked Ciavarella for what he called a scare after the boy got in a small amount of trouble. Edward was sent to PA Child Care. He came home different. He never recovered. He killed himself in 2010 at the age of 23. He was one of several. The Juvenile Law Center began collecting their names. In January of 2009, the United States Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced a plea agreement with Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan. Both judges would plead guilty to wire fraud and tax conspiracy. Both would serve 87 months in federal prison. The agreement was sent to the sentencing judge, the Honorable Edwin Kosik of the United States District Court in Scranton, for approval. Judge Kosik refused. Edwin Kosik was 83 years old when the plea agreements landed on his desk. He had been a federal judge since 1986. He had served in the Navy in the Second World War. He had watched the legal community in northeastern Pennsylvania for 50 years. He read the plea agreements. He read the sentencing memoranda. He read the materials submitted by the Juvenile Law Center. And in July of 2009, in a written order that stunned the federal bar in Scranton, he rejected both plea agreements as too lenient. His written ruling cited the judges failure to accept full responsibility, their continued insistence that the payments were not bribes, and the scale of the harm. He ordered the cases reopened. He ordered the government to bring full charges. He set the matter for trial. Mark Ciavarella made a decision in that moment that would seal his fate. He maintained, publicly and consistently, that the payments were not bribes. They were a finder's fee, he said. They were lawful compensation for introducing Mericle to county officials. He had not ordered any child into custody because of money, he said. He had simply enforced a zero tolerance philosophy. The two things, in his telling, were unrelated. The federal grand jury returned an expanded indictment in September of 2009. 39 counts, racketeering, honest services fraud, money laundering conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, tax offenses, extortion under color of official right. The indictment named both judges. Conahan eventually pleaded guilty to a single racketeering conspiracy count and agreed to cooperate. Ciavarella refused to plead. He insisted on his innocence. He demanded a trial. The trial began on February 7th, 2011 in the federal courthouse in Scranton. It lasted 12 days. The government called Mericle. The government called Powell. The government played the recordings. The government walked the jury through the bank records and the shell companies and the unreported income and the placement statistics. Ciavarella took the stand in his own defense. He told the jury he had done nothing wrong. He told them he had been a tough judge, but a fair one. He told them the money was a finder's fee. The jury was out for less than two days. On February 18th, 2011, the foreperson stood and read the verdicts. Guilty on 12 counts, including racketeering, including honest services mail fraud, including conspiracy to launder money, including filing false tax returns. The courtroom was silent. Ciavarella sat in his chair without moving. His wife, two rows behind him, put her hand over her mouth and did not take it away. He was released on bond pending sentencing. He walked out of the federal courthouse that afternoon and made a brief statement to the press on the courthouse steps. He said he was disappointed in the verdict. He said the payments had never been bribes. He said he had never sold a child. A reporter asked if he had any message for the families. He turned and walked to his car. Sentencing was set for August 11th, 2011. The families came. They came from Wilkes-Barre and Pittston and Hazleton and Mountain Top. They came from suburbs in three counties. They came with photographs of children, some of those children now grown and changed and broken. Some of those children dead. The federal courtroom in Scranton was full from the back wall to the bar. The hallway outside was full. The street outside was full of reporters and television trucks parked three deep along North Washington Avenue. Judge Kosik took the bench at 10:00 in the morning. The government read its sentencing memorandum. The defense read its own. Three victims spoke. A mother described watching her son taken from a courtroom in shackles for a fist fight at school. Another mother described her daughter coming home from PA Child Care a stranger. A third spoke a name into the record slowly and clearly so that everyone in the courtroom would hear it. Edward Kenzakoski. Her son. Then Judge Kosik delivered his sentencing statement. It ran for almost 10 minutes. He spoke about the institution of the judiciary and what the public is entitled to expect from it. He spoke about the children. He addressed Ciavarella directly. "You sold your office," he said. "And the children of this county were what you traded for. You have never accepted responsibility. You have not accepted it today." He paused for a long time. Then he imposed sentence. 28 years in federal prison. 336 months. The maximum the guidelines allowed for a defendant in his criminal history category. Restitution of more than $900,000. The right to appeal preserved. The right to surrender on a future date denied. Ciavarella was taken into custody from the defendants' table. Outside the courthouse, the families gathered on the steps. A woman in her late 40s named Sandy Fonzo, the mother of Edward Kenzakoski, was waiting when Ciavarella was led down the courthouse steps in handcuffs toward a federal vehicle. She screamed at him on camera. She screamed her son's name. She screamed the names of the years her son would never live. The footage was carried that night by every news station in Pennsylvania and many outside it. It remains one of the most watched moments in the public record of American judicial corruption. Michael Conahan pleaded guilty separately to a single count of racketeering conspiracy. He was sentenced to 17 and a half years. In December of 2024, President Joseph Biden, in one of the final acts of his administration, commuted what remained of Conahan's sentence. Conahan walked out of federal prison. He had served roughly 12 years. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in a unanimous order, vacated the juvenile adjudications of every child who had appeared before Ciavarella between 2003 and 2008. The number of adjudications wiped from the record was approximately 4,000. The court ordered the records expunged. The court ordered the children, by then many of them adults, restored to the legal status they had held before they walked into his courtroom. The court could not restore anything else. In 2022, a federal civil jury in Scranton ordered Ciavarella and Conahan to pay approximately $206 million in damages to nearly 300 victims. The verdict acknowledged what no criminal sentence had been able to articulate. That children had been traded for money. That the trade had reshaped their lives. That a court of law had been used as the instrument of it. The money will never be collected in full. The families know this. They sought the verdict anyway because the public record had to say what had happened in a courtroom, on a docket, in writing. Mark Ciavarella is still serving his sentence in federal prison. He is in his mid-70s. He has continued throughout his incarceration to maintain that the payments were not bribes. He has petitioned for sentence reduction. He has been denied. His earliest projected release date falls in 2035. He will be 85 years old. The children he sent away are now in their late 20s and 30s. Some of them speak publicly. Most of them do not. The ones who have spoken describe a single day that broke something in them that never came back. They describe sitting in a paneled fourth-floor courtroom in Wilkes-Barre and watching a man in a robe decide their future in less than 3 minutes. They describe shackles closing around their wrists. They describe the side door. They describe the ride to Pittston. They describe the moment they understood that the system they had been raised to believe in had never been built for them at all. That trust is what he broke. And in this country, when it goes, it does not come back. This case will sit with you for a long time. But the case on the right hand side of your screen right now is from a different kind of betrayal entirely. Click it.