Robert Evans and Jason Petty dissect Pennsylvania's "Cash for Kids" scandal, where judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan accepted $2.8 million in bribes from developers to incarcerate thousands of children for minor offenses like stealing nutmeg. The hosts expose how the debunked "super predator" theory fueled racist zero-tolerance policies, leading to horrific conditions at facilities like PA Child Care and Glen Mills. Ultimately, the corruption collapsed only after an FBI investigation in 2008, revealing a system where financial greed destroyed young lives, resulting in convictions for Ciavarella and Conahan that highlight the devastating cost of judicial bribery. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Financial Literacy Month Kickoff00:02:07
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
It's financial literacy month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
I'm Ana Navarro, and on my new podcast, Bleep with Ana Navarro, I'm talking to the people closest to the biggest issues happening in your community and around the world.
Because I know deep down inside right now, we are all cursing and asking what the bleep is going on.
Every week, I'm breaking down the biggest issues happening in our communities and around the world.
I'm talking to people like Julie K. Brown, who broke the explosive story on Jeffrey Epstein in 2018.
The Justice Department, through we counted four presidential administrations, failed these victims.
Listen to Bleep with Ana Navarro on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Will Farrell's big money players and iHeart podcast presents soccer moms.
So I'm Leanne.
This is my best friend Janet.
Inner City Hood Politics00:15:48
Hey.
And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
Absolutely.
A redacted amount of years later.
We're still joined at the hip.
Just a little bit bigger hips.
This is a podcast.
We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
Oh, they hit a BOGO.
Well, then you got it.
Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's sad, my all of you are about to be?
I'm Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastards podcast.
Bad people.
Tell you all about them.
My guest today, Mr. Jason Petty, aka Prop.
What's up, man?
Drop the government name and let's go.
I'm out here.
That's how much I care about you.
There are two people in the world that call me Jason.
It's my wife and a lady named Jen Hatmaker.
They're the only two people on earth that call me Jason.
And Robert for some time.
And now, Robert.
Jason, we can bleep your legal name.
It's all good.
Don't worry about it.
I ain't scared.
All that stuff has been expunged.
Those are mine.
I was a minor, so you can't talk about the face.
Oh, that is appropriate for today's topic because prop.
Today we're talking about a couple of aspects of the juvenile justice system that I think we're all going to find super fun.
Oh, no.
Real, real good time.
I don't know.
Okay, go ahead.
No, no, no.
I mean, how do you feel about kids, you know?
Well, I love kids.
I got two of them.
I love the juvenile system.
I've been a part of it.
It looks like it works pretty well.
Yes.
So there's a number of connections with this.
My father was a SDPO2 for California, which is a deputy probation officer for the juvenile system in Los Angeles.
He retired from it, you know, because it's like, like we said before, can't change the system from within.
It just doesn't work.
So like, so he kind of bailed out, but he at least was like, at least I could be an advocate for the time that I'm there.
And when some of y'all may know that I used to, I was a teacher before I was doing music and poetry full time.
And I started off at my first teaching job was at Central.
Well, it was a substitute position, but it was with all of the juvenile halls in California.
So East Lake Correctional Facility, Camp Rocky, Camp Amphiba.
So my first teaching experience was all in the juvenile, juvenile systems.
So like, I'm very connected to the story you're about to talk right now.
And again, I was in the system.
Yeah.
And it's, there's an anthropological theory I'm kind of fond of, which is the, the idea that like essentially all civilization, and by that, I don't mean necessarily like skyscrapers and electric lights, but just the idea of like human beings organizing in groups to do things started because of the need to raise kids because like it is evolutionarily advantageous to have a big brain that allows you to make tools.
But at a certain point, our brains got so big that you can't put, you can't like just come out with a brain that big where you're going to kill the person giving birth to you, right?
Like you can only give birth to a brain so big.
So we started, our kids started coming out younger and younger and less and less capable of doing anything, right?
Like if you're there at like the birthing of like a calf or a baby or like a dog, yeah, they could just like they're up and they're doing shit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Pretty fucking quick in most cases.
And like by the time a human baby, you have like a puppy and a baby at the same time, by the time that human baby can like kind of waddle, that dog will more or less be able to like hunt.
The dog's fine.
Yes.
Yeah.
The dog's ready for the world.
There's a whole premise in my book, Terraform, where I talk about the development of culture.
And it's because we're the only species that aren't born with everything we need to survive.
We had to create language.
We had to create covers and stuff like that.
Exactly what that thing is.
And one of the only things you like, you right in my zone right now, one of the only things that is universal in human civilization across every country and time was the idea of protecting our children.
Yeah.
I would say that's the most fundamental human thing in the world.
Like I don't have kids.
I don't ever want to have kids.
Don't.
But I still think it's every adult's fucking responsibility if you can protect a child to protect the child.
Like period.
Period.
Like, and that's why the people we're talking about today are such fucking nightmares.
They're human, humans who have like fundamentally decided, but what if we did the opposite?
Bro.
For like money, racism, and to get elected.
I wish y'all could see my face right now.
Cause like I said, we got two different stories this week.
For our first story today, Prop, what have you heard about the Kids for Cash scandal?
I was also a high school teacher.
So yes, I've heard of this.
Yeah, it's not great.
No.
So before we get into this, I think we need to talk a little bit about some relevant background.
So violent crime in the United States almost quadrupled between 1960 and 1991.
By 1995, serious crimes, including homicide, were all falling.
So crime is by 95 starting to drop again.
But right at around the time crime was beginning its fall that continued up until fairly recently, 24-hour news in the internet really started to get going.
And stories about violent crime and crimes directed against particularly white suburban people were hugely popular.
You can make a lot of money in the news.
Bang, bang.
Right?
Yeah.
And crimes committed by teenagers against particularly that demographic were like the easiest way to get fucking eyeballs on screen.
Yes, I know.
Yeah.
I am a child of the war on drugs, the gang injunctions.
I am a child of all this.
Yes.
Yeah.
Now, the problem was discussed through, obviously, the news and fictional media, but it was also something that academics talked about.
In November of 1995, a political scientist named John DeLulio Jr. wrote an article for the Weekly Standard, which is a right-wing opinion magazine titled The Coming of the Super Predators.
Oh, my God.
Now, this article was based.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You got a lot of damage.
Y'all, this person ruined my childhood.
Yeah.
Ruined it.
Because of the work he's about to talk about.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
He dropped a bomb on, I don't know, a few million kids' childhoods conservatively.
The article that he wrote was based primarily on data from boys in Philadelphia that showed that 6% of young, like of minor male minors in Philadelphia accounted for more than half of the serious crimes committed by male children in that city.
Now, as you might have guessed, number one, there's a number of reasons for this.
This is just Philadelphia.
There's a lot going on here.
It's maybe not the best thing to draw broad, sweeping societal conclusions from, especially in a vacuum.
And as you probably won't be surprised to hear, the article that DeLulio wrote was filled with very uncomfortable race-related lines, like this paragraph.
While the trouble will be greatest in black inner city neighborhoods, other places are also certain to have burgeoning youth crime problems that will spill over into upscale central city districts, inner ring suburbs, and even the rural heartland.
To underscore this point, Abraham Recount, who's one of the people he's talking to, recounted a recent town hall meeting in a white working class section of the city that has fallen on hard times.
They're becoming afraid of their own children.
There were some big, beefy guys there, too.
And they're asking me, what am I going to do to control their children?
So there's a lot going there, including the idea that like, well, crime in the inner city is obviously going to happen.
It's a problem because it might spill over into upscale areas in the suburbs, right?
There's so much happening here.
I'm trying to like, yeah, because I'm so like, even the timeframe, like, like, I, I'm revealing my age here, but I'm in high school when this is happening.
So, like, I am who he's talking about.
Yeah.
You know, absolutely.
Inner city black male.
You know what I'm saying?
So I'm like, and just little, that stuff would drop.
And it's like, you see, people like, I'm walking home from school in my PE clothes, no less, you know, because I got, I got shipped out to a suburban high school, you know, so like it wasn't my, I was long story short, joint custody, yada, yada, right?
So I went to the nicer high school.
So walking home, I'm just like stupid headphones on, listening to Wu-Tang and like watching the lady clutch her purse and cross the street and just about like you're nervous about situation.
And I'm like, dude, like I'm, you see my nerd ass in PE clothes with my bow straps on my backpack.
Like I'm really a, you're telling me I'm a problem.
And the reason why I'm a problem is because this is this source material that us moving into your city, into this part of town, is going to bring the problems that you're talking about in this thing.
Absolutely.
Yeah, that's, that's exactly.
And that, that kind of fear, that's, that specific population sphere is what he's stoking with this.
Yeah.
And obviously the bulk of this article, there's that little study from Philadelphia that's that that is kind of the statistical nut for what he's writing here.
But most of it's based on interviews with police officers and other individuals with a very obvious bias.
One district attorney is cited in the article as saying about children, they kill our maim on impulse without any intelligible motive.
And a police officer is quoted as saying, I never used to be scared.
Now I say a quick Hail Mary every time I get a call at night involving juveniles.
I pray I go home in one piece to my own kids.
See, there's some books.
It's like all these times where we say like, like, fast forward to Tamir Rice, and you're treating this 14-year-old like a goddamn adult.
It's this shit.
It's like, like, we not just like we're kids.
Yeah.
Kids like everybody else.
I'm sorry.
I'm so triggered right now.
This was, you totally picked the right thing, bro.
Yeah, it's not going to get less frustrating.
Yes, I know.
So in the article, these quotes are followed by quotes from a group of what DeLulio describes as life-term inmates in a prison in New Jersey.
And DeLulio makes sure we know of these inmates that, quote, many of them are black males from inner city Newark and Camden.
And these guys, he quotes as being terrified of today's super predator children too.
So he's being like, look, even these black criminals in prison are scared of kids these days.
Like it's really a pretty horrific article.
Yeah.
Now, according to Wikipedia, DeLulio is a Democrat today.
I don't know if that's true.
I don't know much about his present life.
It is important we be clear that he was wrong about everything.
He predicted in this article, his big prediction is that because of these super predators, juvenile crime would triple by 2010.
But of course, by the time he wrote this article, juvenile crime had already been dropping for a couple of years.
And by 2011, juvenile homicides had plunged by two-thirds.
So he's literally the opposite of what he says happens pretty much.
And despite the fact that he was perfectly wrong about what's pretty much the only noteworthy claim he makes in his career, DeLulio received two awards in 2010 for excellence in academics.
Of course, it is.
It doesn't matter.
What matters is you gave people an excuse to be scared and do violence.
That's all you got to do.
That's all you got to do, man.
Folks.
Yeah.
Yo, what's interesting about this moment is around, I'm going to really show y'all some like actual hood politics, was like around the end of the 90s, there was a call that came from really from jail that was like, y'all got to stop doing drive-bys.
And it was basic because it was like, listen, dude, it's just, it's just not G. Like this is not, we're not spending our lifetime in prison for y'all to just drive by somewhere and shoot something.
So even like even the violent crime kind of slowing down, that was like we did that for ourselves.
You know what I'm saying?
Like it's like, it wasn't, and granted, obviously like war on drugs and the gang injunctions and Rico and all this different stuff and the gang uptick, like obviously like you're, of course you're going to drop, you're going to drop crime if gentrification starts.
Other stuff, the economy is expanding hugely.
Yeah.
And the outlet gets created.
Yeah, I'm like, we got jobs.
Number one, I'm like, well, we're adults now.
We have jobs and there's other things to do happening around this.
You start to see the impact of the fact that they got lit out of fucking gasoline, you know, starting in like, what, the 70s or the 80s.
So like a bunch of shit happens.
That's why crime drops by so much.
What's important is that DeLulio is, again, perfectly wrong.
Absolutely wrong.
Yeah.
Now, despite this fact, his work had a huge influence on how juvenile crime was perceived.
And it led to a massive change nationwide in how often children were tried and sentenced as adults.
I want to quote now from an article in NBC News about this period because it makes a good point about some broader trends that DeLulio's work fed into.
So he's not obviously the beginning of this.
Quote, just a few years before, the news media had introduced the terms wilding and wolfpack to the national vocabulary to describe five teenagers, four black and one Hispanic, who were convicted and later exonerated of the rape of a woman in New York Central Park.
This kind of animal savagery was already in the conversation, said Kim Taylor Thompson, a law professor at New York University.
The super predator language began a process of allowing us to suspend our feelings of empathy towards young people of color.
And again, I might quibble about it that this began the process.
Yeah.
But it escalates.
I think it's fair to say that it does escalate.
Absolutely.
And more to the point, it leads to kind of some structural things that escalate how this is actually built into the legal system.
Now, it's probably worth noting before we move on that DeLulio's mentor was a political scientist named James Q. Wilson.
Now, Mr. Wilson got famous for writing a 1985 book with the title Crime and Human Nature, which argued that criminality was caused by specific genetic factors.
There it is.
You will not again.
Yeah, you know where this is going, right?
He also got famous for chasing around Dennis the Minis.
Yeah, yeah, deep cut.
Mr. Wilson.
Deep cut.
This is that, Mr. Wilson.
Yes.
All right.
Anyway, go on.
He spends a lot of his book writing paragraphs like this.
A central problem, perhaps the central problem, in improving the relationship between white and black Americans is the difference in racial crime rates.
No matter how innocent or guilty a stranger may be, he carries with him in public the burdens or benefits of his group identity.
Now, facts, you know.
Yeah, the fact that, like, yes, people carry with them like the benefits of how their group, the group that they visually at least belong to is perceived by society.
Sure.
Yeah.
But it's, yeah, there's a lot of kind of eugenics-y shit in this book where he's sort of talking about like certain populations are more prone for crime.
Racial Crime Rate Myths00:02:50
And he definitely ignores a lot of important things like how economics feed into it and how certain historical trends there's obviously he's he's he's a piece of shit.
And it's not surprising that racists said racist shit.
What is surprising is that both of these guys, these very right-wing, very kind of white supremacist-y thinkers, are backed not just by conservatives, but by supposedly liberal colleges.
And what they wrote was uncritically disseminated by large chunks of the mainstream media.
And here's NBC again: The Marshall Project's review of 40 major news outlets in the five years after his Weekly Standard article shows the neulogism popping up nearly 300 times.
And that is an undercount.
There was the Philadelphia Inquirer's fawning magazine profile of DeLulio, who grew up there.
Until recently, Pennsylvania had the country's largest population of people still serving life sentences without parole for crimes they committed as children.
There was also a lengthy, mostly gentle New Yorker profile, a spot on the New York Times' op-ed page, and an appearance on CBS Evening News.
The media exposure led to conference invitations, which led to more media exposure.
The word super predator became so much a part of the national vocabulary that journalists and talk show hosts used it without reference to DeLulio, including Ivan Oprah Winfrey in a segment on Good Morning America.
So this is one of those things that is just such a successful piece of fucking culture jamming.
Clinton too.
Yeah, Clinton too, everyone uses it.
And most people don't even recognize, know anything about DeLulio, know anything about Wilson, know anything about like where this comes from.
They just kind of take it as scientific fact almost.
That moment, even with Oprah's like stellar reputation with black people, that moment, like we never forgot that.
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying?
That was like, yo, really?
Like, you really going to let this man talk about us like this?
Yeah.
And it's perfect.
What he's saying is really perfectly framed for shows like Oprah was doing, for like daytime TV, right?
It's the kind of thing that people who are like in the middle of their day will stop to hear about because you're tickling that amygdala.
You're making the like for one thing, adults are always a little not always, but it is very common for adults to be kind of uncomfortable around teenagers.
They're weird.
They like things you don't understand.
Yeah, you forgot what it was like to be one.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
And if you can, again, there's a shitload of money to be made in tapping into the fact that a lot of adults are just kind of uncomfortable around teens.
And to our, I mean, I taught freshmen, so I was around teens all the time.
But in adult defense, teens are weird.
Oh, yeah.
I got one in my house.
I was a person without a taser for sure.
I got one in my house.
And I'll be like, I love you.
You are, you are, you are my child.
I am raising you, but you weird because like, oh, yeah.
Teens Are Weird Adults Too00:02:53
Yeah.
They're like all sorts of, all sorts of music that I just think finally, people, finally, music is wrong.
It took a long time.
It took a long run.
Everyone before me who said that music was wrong was wrong, but now it's wrong.
Now it's wrong.
Now, now it's wrong.
Now, I am happy to report that my child is an old soul when it comes to music.
And like, we actually like a lot of the same stuff, except for her BTS obsession.
But besides that, we're like, we're pretty much on the same page.
But that's an exception.
Her father's a rapper.
So, of course, she's going to know a little bit more about music.
Yeah.
It's anyway.
So the fear dreamed up or drummed up by these nonsense theories and the media recitations of them led to a surge in zero tolerance, in zero tolerance rules for kids in school and a lot of horrible shit we covered in an episode we did titled The War on Children.
If you want more of an idea of how politicians grabbed onto all of this, I should read a quote from Senator Oren Hatch in 1996.
We've got to quit coddling these violent kids like nothing is going on.
Getting some of these do-gooder liberals to do what's right is real tough.
We'd all like to rehabilitate these kids, but by gosh, we are in a different age.
About right.
Orin Hatch, everybody.
Orin Hatch, everybody.
The man who made sure that you can sell supplements filled with lead to people and there's no regulations on it.
Good man.
That's our guy.
We love Oren Hatch.
So today, however, we're not, this is just a leaded because the thing that we are talking is one of the worst crimes all this rhetoric and racism directly enabled.
This is a story of greed that begat violence on an almost industrial scale.
The cash for kids scandal.
Yep.
Now, our two main bastards for today are a pair of former judges, Mark Ciaverella and Michael Conahan.
Yeah, Ciaverella is how it's pronounced, more or less.
Now, Mark A. Ciaverella was born on March 3rd, 1950, in Wilkes Bar, Pennsylvania.
He was raised on the east end of the city and he went to a Catholic high school.
Here's how the New York Times described his upbringing: quote, a stellar athlete and student, Judge Ciaverella, was the son of a brewery worker and a phone company operator.
Nicknamed Scooch, like his father, he drove a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle for years.
Even after moving away, he visited his aging mother daily until she died in 2007.
So the boy's name was Scooch.
Scooch.
Scooch.
What up, Scooch?
And Scooch grows up, you know, to his credit, he's working class.
Like a lot of most people who become judges not, don't come.
That's what I'm trying to say, man.
You got a nickname like Scooch, bro.
Like, how do you become a joke?
You know, man, you're Scooch.
Yeah, I'm like, you're one of the guys, bro.
They don't, they don't call rich kids Scooch.
No.
Nobody, nobody ever went to a British boarding school and got called Scooch.
Bro, Scooch, man, you and Scooch, y'all cut school, went to the corner liquor store, stole a beer, and like hung out and smoked your granddad's cigarettes.
From Scooch To The Bench00:06:46
Like, absolutely.
Scooch stole a lot of cigarettes.
Yeah.
I'm going to say 13.
At least, yeah.
So, after law school, he went to Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.
I think that's how it's pronounced.
Mark Ciaverella ran for a seat in the country's Court of Common Pleas in August of 1994.
Now, as a judge, because he wins, he becomes known for the fact that he is a harsh sentencer and also kind of like he likes to be kind of the Judge Judy dude.
He likes to have these like quips and shit.
And I want to play an ad from his 1994 campaign to make it clear how inside of the super Predator Zeitgeist this dude was.
I hate this guy already.
Yeah, he's not great.
I'm a teen and convicted of murder, rape, or violent crimes against our children or the elderly.
You can expect that I will impose the maximum sentence allowed by law.
Now, you can't do that.
No, legally.
No, you can't.
You cannot run to be a judge.
There's a thing called the Judicial Code of Conduct.
Dude, one of the things it says is that if you're running to be a judge, you can't make pledges or promises to voters about your rulings.
Other than that, they'll be faithful and impartial.
Listen because you're a judge.
Let me, okay.
Can I, can I put my teacher hat on right now?
Yeah.
Okay, listen.
Civics lesson.
You got your three branches of government, right?
And two of the three branches are elected officials.
The reason why you don't elect quote unquote judges are because they are supposed to be above the fray.
You're supposed to not be able to because of popularity, what's going on in the world.
You're supposed to not be, they are supposed to be above that because they are adjudicating the rights and privileges of everybody around us.
So you're not supposed to do that.
You even running an ad is already like, fam, what is you?
You can't like this is not.
Did you go to law school, G?
Like, you're not allowed to.
I'm so frustrated right now.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It is frustrating.
Yeah.
But you know what's not frustrating, bro?
The products and services that support this podcast.
Because they are.
Very few of whom are running for judgeships, although evidently some.
Did you just say that the products and services aren't frustrating?
None of them?
Not a single one.
I don't know, man.
Some of those dudes be seeping in.
I don't know what our filters be doing.
You know what I'm saying?
But I will say it's a lot of y'all because y'all be showing up, boy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Watch it be the Washington State Highway Patrol again.
Yeah.
How did that happen?
How did that happen?
It's weird, too, that they would like.
And why us?
Yeah.
Who becomes a cop in Washington because of a podcast ad?
It's like when Coke Industries was like, who the fuck?
Like, what motherfucker listens to a podcast and goes, well, that's where I'm giving my oil refining business.
Who is our demographic?
Who do we want to move to Ohio?
Yeah, it's very funny.
People that listen to these podcasts.
Yeah.
So here's some ads.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ango Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right.
It wouldn't be that.
There's a lot in life.
Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really started making money.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today, now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hi, I'm Bob Pippman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
This season of Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, take to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
Listen to Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgetista Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
Child Prison Money Deals00:15:37
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Ah, we're back.
So one of Judge Ciaverella's opponents in that election, Thomas Cometa, later, like, he brings up that like this ad is a breach of judicial ethics.
Yeah.
And Cometa says pretty sensibly: how can you trust someone who runs for judge and breaks the law as a candidate to like follow the law while they're a judge, right?
Exactly.
Now, our boy responds that it's fine because all of the key words in his ad were quote allowed by law, which is a very funny response to that.
I hate this guy so much.
Yeah.
Oh my God, I hate this guy.
You ruined my childhood.
I'm telling you, whoever that is, he ruined my childhood.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I'm not even in his state.
Oh, boy.
He, he, he was a real king of ruining childhoods, this guy.
So, Judge Chiavarella, however it's pronounced, I'm hearing some weird things in the Italian site that I just checked in to double check this, and I forgot.
Look, people, there's a lot of names in this show, a lot of names.
I even watched a documentary about this.
I forget I'm bad at it.
Like, you could deal with it.
Go listen to fucking, I don't know, what's another podcast that is good at names?
None of them are because they're all sort of people like me.
Probably some sort of NPR name.
NPR name.
Yeah, go fucking listen to NPR.
They do this shit.
They're good at that.
The thing is.
So the thing is, he put a lot of innocent people in jail.
I already know that.
He does.
Oh, that's.
You ain't even got to tell that.
I already know he did.
Yeah.
Yes.
So that's Judge Ciavarella's background, right?
That's the kind of man he is.
And we'll return to him in a minute because he's our main character today, but we should talk about a friend of his, Judge Michael Conahan, who's another part of this story.
Oh, Conahan.
Conahan.
Yeah.
Now, where Chiavarella was a working-class kid who clawed his way into the upper crust, Michael was born sipping mint juleps at the country club.
That may be a slight exaggeration, but his dad was town mayor for 12 years.
So he is, you know, like he's the mayor's son.
Yeah.
I hate this guy.
Now, his dad also owned a funeral home and was a heinously abusive prick.
While Conahan was begging for clemency, spoilers, years later, his lawyer said, quote, he comes from a family with a patriarch who drove his children to success and used money as a barometer of that success.
He was taught the ends justified the means.
Wait, did you say he was begging for clemency?
Yeah, this is when he is being tried for the stuff that he does.
So take this with a grain of salt, right?
Oh.
Yeah.
But here's the Times Tribune, reporting on what he claimed about his upbringing later.
Mr. Conahan was beaten mercilessly by his father when he was a teenager for simply forgetting to stoke the family furnace at the funeral home.
His childhood left him with deep insecurities and inadequacies that he repressed with alcohol.
So he's he definitely, I think, has a drinking problem.
We'll talk about how much we believe any of that or how much we believe it's even if he does what he says later.
See, that's the stuff that I'll be like, listen, man, you just, you just can't trust white people.
Yeah.
Because I'll be like, what that should do was build empathy.
Yeah.
That you went through that.
You should be like, you know what?
I'm going to be much more gracious to a lot of people.
These people come from struggle.
It's been hard.
Hell, I was beat for doing things that wasn't.
I understand that you may have made some bad decisions in your life.
It's all good, man.
I'm going to give you a second chance.
But no, you decided to become nah, bro.
Nah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's one of those, like, I know a lot of people who got smacked around as kids.
Me too.
Most people I know did not do the things that this guy later did.
I don't even, y'all.
That's why I was like, you don't even need to finish.
I've been smacked around.
You know what I'm saying?
I got spanked in my public school.
Dude, me too.
Yeah.
Now, while Conahan was still a child, there was an incident in his father's political career that one of his sisters would later note as relevant.
Their dad awarded a business contract to a good friend, which led to charges that he'd committed an ethics violation.
Quote, the elder Mr. Conahan couldn't understand why people considered it an ethical violation because he was awarding a contract to a friend because he thought that friend's work would benefit the community.
She said their father never understood this.
He couldn't see what the problem was.
So in these two guys, prop, you've got one working class kid with a chip on his shoulder who's willing to violate ethical guidelines to threaten children in order to get elected by hitching his star to a racist criminal justice trend.
And then you've got the insecure and possibly traumatized rich kid, son of a politician, raised to believe that blatant cronyism and corruption is fine if your goals are noble, right?
So these are our main characters today.
Yo, real combo.
I appreciate you having me on this because I would have had thoughts had I been listening to this show.
I'd be like, I got thoughts.
So I'm very glad to be on this.
Yeah.
Oh boy, buckle in.
So Judge Ciaverella was on the county court of common pleas and Judge Conahan was the president judge, which gave him power of the purse.
He gets to decide spending for a lot of the local justice system, right?
Like he's a big part.
He has a lot of power in deciding where the money goes in terms of like incarceration and stuff for the county.
The New York Times lays out what happens next.
Quote, it all started in June of 2000 with a simple business proposition.
According to the judge's indictment and more than 40 interviews with courtroom workers, authorities, and others, Robert J. Powell, a wealthy personal injury lawyer from Hazelton, Pennsylvania, and longtime friend of Judge Conahan, wanted to know how he might get a contract to build a private detention center.
Judge Ciaverella thought he could help.
The two men agreed to meet, and according to prosecutors, somewhere in that conversation, a plan was hatched that courthouse workers and county officials would later describe as a freight train without breaks.
First, Judge Ciaverella put Mr. Powell in touch with a developer who also happened to be an old friend, Robert K. Merrickle, to start work on finding a site.
Then in January 2002, the month Judge Conahan became president judge, giving him control of the courthouse budget, he signed a secret deal with Mr. Powell, agreeing that the court would pay $1.3 million in annual rent on top of tens of millions of dollars that the county and state would pay to house the delinquent juveniles.
And by the end of that year, Judge Conahan had gotten rid of the competition by eliminating financing for the county detention center.
So they make a deal with these people making a child prison, and then they close the county child prison and agree not just to send kids there and give them the money that comes from sending kids there, but to give them a special $1.3 million a year deal on top of all that money, right?
Yeah.
So already pretty fucked up.
It's already all bad, dude.
Like in every, well, okay, let me not say every in California.
When I was teaching, the idea, the, the theory was it takes about $3,000 a day to educate a child.
So when you got into school, took role, and you clicked, Evans, here, click, the school got $3,000.
Right.
So this is why role was so important.
And when you ditched why it was so important, why they had truancy offers, officers, why the police pulled up if you wasn't at school, because it's like, I make three grand every time you hear.
And every time you not hear with some sort of unexcused absence, I'm losing $3,000 per student.
So I am incentivized just to make sure you're in the seat.
I really don't care whether you learn anything or not.
I just need to know you in the seat.
So when you add that to prisons, it's the same thing.
How much does it cost to prison a kid to, you know, imprison a kid?
$3,000?
$5,000?
You mean to tell me I can make how much?
How much can I make per this?
Okay, dope.
Well, then check this out.
Here's the situation.
How about I feed you stuff and you just throw me money back?
God, it's fucked up.
I mean, and it is, it is like, it's a little more understandable in schools just because like, yeah, school has fixed costs.
Budgets are usually tight.
And like that's a problem.
It is a problem.
With what's happening here, they had a place to put these kids.
It was fine.
It's purely about allowing a couple of dudes to profit, to profit off of incarcerating children.
And this was a really obvious scheme, too.
Many of their colleagues saw what was going on, at least the surface parts of it, and complained.
Judge Chester Moroski sent a letter to the county commissioners complaining about the increase in detention costs.
He was transferred by Conahan to another court a couple of days later because again, Conahan's the president judge.
Yeah.
So this other judge complains and he's like, yeah, you're, you got a different job now, man.
Yeah.
Moroski later told interviewers, quote, they were unstoppable.
I knew something was wrong, but they silenced all dissent.
And again, he doesn't know everything that.
we would know later.
He just knows that like something shady is going on and he complains about like the detention center.
So there's a lawsuit over this.
The county controller, Steve Flood, leaked a state audit, which showed that the state had analyzed the deal to lease the center as a bad one.
So Steve Flood leaks that like, hey, the state said that like there's no good reason to do this.
This is just like seems to kind of be a grift.
Yeah.
Now, the child prison in question, which was named PA Child Care, then sued Mr. Flood for releasing trade secrets while Judge Conahan sealed the lawsuit to stop any of the leaked documents from getting out to the public.
One court worker later told the Times, everyone began to assume that the judges had some vested interest in the private center because they were pushing it so doggedly.
Yeah.
And they did.
Of course they did.
I was like, please get to that.
Like, of course they did.
Why kids get maximum sentences?
We teenagers getting maximum sentences.
Anyway, going.
Oh, boy.
It's prop.
You already know how bad this is, but also it's going to be worse in some ways than I think you might be ready for.
You probably are because I only know my own experience.
I only know California.
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, I'll be interested to see if you're surprised by some of the things these kids go away for because I don't know.
Like you said, I mean, they're like, okay, before you tell me this story, I will tell you the story of a friend of mine who he was an upperclassman, was in, I'll tell you two stories.
One, he was in the back seat, basketball player in the back seat, asked for a ride home.
You know, your kids, you know, some kids got a car.
Like, everybody have a car.
This kid's got a car.
It's like, hey, can I get a ride home?
It's like, yeah, get it right home.
We're going to make a stop right quick.
So the dudes up front in the front made a stop right quick, broke into somebody's house, robbed some stuff, get in there.
He's in the back seat sleep.
Oh, right.
Fuck, dude.
The kids tell, even on the stand, the kids were like, yo, he really had nothing to do with it.
We was just giving him a ride home.
He's not really involved in all that.
Kid did five years.
And they told him, they told the judge, dude, we were just giving him a ride home.
Like he had nothing to do with it.
Still went to prison, right?
I have another friend whose uncle was hiding a syringe from his mom or my friend's grandma because that was his uncle, right?
So he was like, so that's my friend's mom.
So he's like, it was a syringe in his backpack.
I had no idea.
You have this thing that was called the gang injunctions in Los Angeles, which was like, if you were, if you were in more than, if you were in a group of two or three more people, right?
It's considered a gang, right?
So standard, you're walking home from school with two of your friends.
You're in a gang, right?
So the fool pulls him over, searches the backpack.
You got a crack syringe, right?
The judge, listen, on mama's Robert, the judge was like, this kid has no criminal record.
I truly believe his story, but the law says I have a mandatory minimum of five years.
Oh boy.
This kid did five years for his uncle's syringe came out a criminal.
Guy came out of prison, a criminal.
Like he was like, yeah, now he's a criminal because you just threw him to the wolves.
Yeah, and there's a lot of documentation of that.
Like that's what happens when you send kids to these facilities.
All right.
So we'll continue.
I will tell you some of the things these kids went away for.
And we'll see how you feel about that.
But Jesus Christ.
Okay, so Pow, the guy who is the realist or the lawyer who helps start talking about this deal, would later claim in court that after they get this thing underway, the two judges extorted him for bribes.
And they basically said, we won't send more kids to your facility and it'll go out of business, right?
If you don't pay us directly.
I think that's a lie.
Obviously, they got paid.
I think he's lying about them extorting him.
I suspect this was the plan from the beginning, right?
There's a number of reasons this is unlikely.
One thing is that as the Times Tribune reports, which is a local paper, there were plenty of other kids from Pennsylvania to go to go to the juvenile detention center.
They wouldn't have gone out of business if these judges had stopped.
So I think they just had, I think they had a mutually beneficial arrangement.
I don't think he got extorted at all.
The reality seems to be that Powell and his business partner, the builder of the PA child care center, Robert Merrickle, agreed to bribe Conahan and Judge Ciaverella in order to secure $1.3 million a year in guaranteed rent, plus additional funds, because every time they get another youth prisoner, they get more money.
So in exchange for this, Judge Ciaverella and Conahan get hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, in total about $2.8 million.
And this is over, I think, like a four or five-year period.
So a lot of money.
Now, Judge Ciaverella was extremely eager to do his part, as this quote from the Wall Street Journal's coverage makes clear.
Quote, Judge Mark Ciaverella Jr. reportedly sent kids to the private detention centers when probation officers didn't think it was a good idea.
He sent kids there when their crimes were nonviolent.
He sent kids there when their crimes were insignificant.
It was as though he was determined to keep those private prisons filled with children at all times.
According to news stories, offenses as small as swiping a jar of nutmeg or throwing a piece of steak at an adult were enough to merit a trip to the who's gauge.
Over the years, Mark Ciaverella racked up a truly awesome score.
He sent kids to detention instead of other options at twice the state average, according to the New York Times.
He tried a prodigious number of cases in which the accused child had no lawyer.
Here, says the Times, the judge's numbers were fully 10 times the state average.
And he did it fast, sometimes rendering a verdict in the neighborhood of a minute and a half to three minutes.
What?
Yeah.
Oh.
Judge Mark Ciaverella Scandal00:11:30
Like, oh, man.
Just instantly.
Some people will say there were 30-second judgments where he just stands before him and he's just, you're done.
Bro, so this is the stuff my pops would talk about.
He would be like, we would know him among the other probation officers.
They would already know, like, this kid don't need to go to no, he don't need to go to like, he's fine.
Just like, let me, you know, I'll take care of him.
You know what I'm saying?
And you stand in front of judge.
As soon as you see the judge, you'd be like, oh, shit, here we go.
He's not going to listen to me.
You know what I'm saying?
So my father was like, in his 30 years, he never, he never, he never recommended prison ever.
30 years, never recommended prison.
He was always like, I'll take him.
I'll take them.
Didn't matter.
He knew the judge.
When he walked in, he knew the judge.
He would be like, the kid's going to jail.
This kid's going to jail.
He just knew as soon as he looked at the judge.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's one of those like, yeah, it's just so fucked up that it could work that way, that it's ever been allowed to work that way.
That like it doesn't, everyone can know it's wrong, including like fucking the parole officers.
And everyone.
It's just this guy.
It's one of those things.
Like, I know some people who have like not done time because they got a judge who was like, get a great judge.
Chill.
Like a judge who was like, was like, this is bullshit.
Like, I'm not, I have no desire.
A friend of mine just didn't go to prison a couple of, we were at his all-in-court with him a couple of months ago.
And it was because the judge was like, well, this is, this is like basically said the judge equivalent was like, this is a stupid case.
Yeah.
So that does happen.
I mean, that's the Auburn, you know, the Ahmed Aubrey case.
Like, that was a good judge.
He was like, what?
You get them sometimes.
Yeah, sometimes.
And when they're bad, they can do a lot of damage.
And that's like Ciaverella does a lot of damage.
Yeah.
The Morning Call, which is another local paper in Pennsylvania, does a good job of outlining some of the several of these cases.
And this is from after this all broke as a story and a bunch of the judges' victims sue.
So I'm going to read a quote here of them kind of summarizing some of the worst cases.
Among them was Melanie Petrillo, who said she was 12 when she first went before Ciaverella in juvenile court in 2002.
Ciaverella, she said, wouldn't let her speak in her own defense.
On Monday, Petrilo testified that a visiting friend set a small fire in a garbage can outside her house.
She went inside to get a glass of water and police quickly arrived.
She was arrested and later taken before Ciavarella, who sentenced her to a few months at the former Luzerne County Juvenile Detention Center.
It was horrifying, Petrilo recalled.
I had to put a blanket over my head so the cockroaches wouldn't fall on me.
Like many of Ciaverella and Conahan's victims, this was the start of years of relentless contact between Petrilo, a child, and the criminal justice system.
When Petrilo went away for the first time, it was to a county center, not to the place bribing the judge.
But she was released under harsh probation terms, which of course she violated, which brought her back in front of Judge Ciaverella, who then sent her to PA Childcare, who was this place giving him kickbacks.
Of course.
Yeah.
Very old story.
Petrilo claims this time behind bars led to her falling in with a bad crowd due to her reputation, which led to her getting a burglary charge.
She winds up in front of Ciaverella a third time, and she doesn't get out of juvenile detention until she's an adult.
Like her whole childhood from age 12 on.
So the last six years of her childhood just gone as a result of this chain of events.
Now, the judge sent another girl, Elizabeth Laurent, to a PH to PA childcare for 32 days after she was caught bringing opiate pills to school.
She, of course, then had, after getting out of PA child care, she has a probation violation.
Obviously, this happens with all of them.
And she winds up in front of Judge Ciaverella again.
He sends her next to Camp Adams, which is a juvenile boot camp.
I haven't seen any evidence this boot camp gave him kickbacks.
Like, he doesn't always send kids to the places that are paying him.
He really likes to send kids, incarcerate children, even if he's not getting money.
He's just fine to take bribes for it, too.
Elizabeth Laurent, because she winds up getting sent to this boot camp, loses the college scholarship that she'd won.
And obviously, things go worse for her after this.
She claims that she started hanging out with a quote-unquote bad kid because the parents of her old friends wouldn't let her hang out with him anymore.
And like, yeah, things go, you know, from there, she's in and out of different places.
Her overwhelming memory of Ciaverella as he demolished her hopes and dreams.
Again, she had a college scholarship set up when this happens.
Was coldness and what she described as a nonchalant demeanor.
That's what every like he's again, very perfunctory for him.
Zachary Richards wound up in front of the judge because he stole a candy bar.
He was after this.
Yeah, at age 14, he steals a candy bar.
Ciaverella sends him to juvenile detention.
And he's there for the rest of his childhood, from age 14 to 18, mostly in PA childcare, the place giving the judge kickbacks.
His mom is adamant that Zachary never recovers from this, and she blames his suicide at age 27 on Judge Cievarella.
She is not the only mother making this claim.
And I'm going to quote now from a write-up by Pin Live.
Fonzo's son was 17 and an all-star wrestler with a chance at a college scholarship when he landed in Ciaverella's courtroom on a minor drug paraphernalia charge.
Though the teen, Edward Kinzelowski, Edward Kinzikowski had no prior criminal record.
He spent months at the private lockups in a wilderness camp and missed his senior year of high school.
Kinzakowski emerged an angry, bitter, depressed young man.
He committed suicide last June at the age of 23.
He was just never the same.
He couldn't recover.
He wanted to go on with his life, but he was just hurt.
He was affected so deeply, more than anyone knew.
That's his, his mom.
Yeah, it's bleak.
Oh, yeah.
That stuff, like, that it just hits so close to home.
Yeah.
Because I know kids who were either my friends or people I taught that like I know the like, man, these are like gentle souls.
Yeah.
And then they're put in this situation over a motherfucking candy bar.
Come on, man.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then what's crazy is like, at least in Cali, camp is your best bet.
Yeah.
You know what I'm saying?
Because it's like, there's a school there.
You know what I'm saying?
It's not like East Lake.
It's not like Central, which is like, I mean, that's just, that's, or you get sent up to YA, which is California Youth Authority.
That's up in the north.
That's prison.
Yeah.
And it varies because some states, the wilderness boot camps are like the worst place you can go.
It just kind of depends on your system because some of those places are nightmares.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's just everywhere is different depending on how bad their juvenile detention.
And obviously our camp is not wilderness in any way.
It's just like, there's one in Whittier, California, like just right off the corner of like, yeah, like the wilds of Whittier.
Yeah, it's just Los Padrinos.
It's like Whittier and freaking Mar Vista Drive.
It's just like, oh, hey, look, there's a juvenile prison right there.
Yeah.
So one of Judge C. Everella's favorite places to send kids when he couldn't send them to PA child care was the Glen Mills School.
Ryan Lamaro, for example, was sent there by C. Everella for five years on a vandalism charge.
Another 14-year-old was sent there for the crime of stealing loose change from unlocked cars to buy a bag of chips.
So that's it.
That's that's why that kid gets sent to the Glen Mills school.
Not the car.
He ain't steal the car.
Nope.
Didn't even break a window.
Just took the change out of it.
I just needed some quarters.
Which, like, yeah, we can say isn't ideal behavior, but like, I mean, find the kid.
Let me, let me tell you what this place is like.
I want to quote from a Philadelphia Inquirer article for some context on the Glen Mills School, where he sends a child for stealing spare change.
Okay.
Another teenager was removed from Glenn Mills and sent to a state-run facility in 2017 after counselors stepped on the boy's face and broke his jaw so severely it had to be wired shut.
And last summer, two counselors were caught abusing a Philadelphia teenager on surveillance video.
One slammed him to the floor and choked him.
Then the other punched the 17-year-old in the face.
Both were later arrested.
So that's the kind of shit that happens at Glenn Mills.
I feel like you just said stepped on his face.
Yep.
That's what you said, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And these are two, these are a couple of cases, but like it happens so constantly that in 2019, Glenn Mills has its license revoked and the state removes all children from its custody.
Now, Glenn Mills had been founded in 1826.
So Judge C. Everella is a monster.
I'm sure this place has been about that bad forever.
Yeah.
In their defense, in the 1800s, you could step on a kid's face.
Yeah, you could, it was almost mandatory.
Yeah.
Now, and it's one of those things in when you read articles about like the fallout from the cast, the cash for kids scandal, you, you, there's a bunch of like comments from judges and other people in the criminal justice system being like, these men did tremendous damage to the criminal, to trust in the criminal justice system, to the sanctity of the courts, to the sanctity of justice.
It's like, I can't quite agree.
These guys are pieces of shit, but dude.
Yeah.
Like, don't, don't try to, don't try to kick rocks, bro.
Like, come on now.
We ain't as bad as them, though.
I mean, we bad, but we're better than don't try to give me that shit, man.
Yeah.
Kick rocks, dog.
You're good.
And the reality is that all of the horrible things we've talked about, he only got in trouble for because he took bribes to do them.
If he'd just done this because he was a piece of shit and he was willing to, he did a lot of it for without getting bribed.
If he just hadn't taken the bribes, he never would have gotten fined for this shit.
And in fact, the hellish sentences he imposed on children for minor, what you could only often loosely describe as crimes, were lauded and celebrated by his community for years.
In 2006, he was re-elected for another 10-year term.
NPR reports, quote, the community applauded him.
Schools applauded him.
Police applauded him.
He would go into schools and he would warn kids: if you come before me, I will send you away.
And so schools invited him year after year to come in and talk to them.
So when a kid came before him and there was a school crime, this could be a kid getting into a fight, or in our case, we had a kid who did a fake MySpace page for the principal.
He would say, Do you remember me being in your school?
And he would say, I wish I said I would send you away.
Get him out of here.
And that's what would happen.
He sends a kid to a fucking child prison for making a fake MySpace page about an administrator at the school.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
Like a fake MySpace page.
He sends a kid.
He locks a kid up.
He gives them a criminal record for a fake fucking MySpace page.
So this is why, look, let me, listeners, this is why during elections, when we hear terms like, oh, he's going to be tough on crime, we're like, that's a dog whistle.
This is what we're talking about.
Yeah.
It's like, that's what you mean by tough on crime.
Yeah.
Like if a kid makes a MySpace making fun of his principal, I'm tough on crime.
Like, all right, bro.
That's what you mean by crime.
Just blasting kids' lives apart.
Yeah.
For no real reason.
But you know who won't destroy the lives of children for no good reason.
Can't say.
You can't say that because it could be a Washington State Patrol advocate.
It could be a Washington State Highway Patrol ad.
I was like, I don't know, man.
Tough On Crime Dog Whistles00:04:14
I can pretty much guarantee.
And that one's a high possibility.
That one time we had little FBI ads.
Yeah.
Yeah, it could be the FBI.
Or it could be, I mean, even worse, it could be one of those, the food box companies that uses their profits to hunt kids for sports in islands off the coast of Indonesia.
Is there one you really don't like?
I don't know.
Which one?
I think you hate.
Oh, they're the ones who have the island where you can hunt kids for sport, right?
Are you serious?
Is that look it up?
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
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I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
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Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
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Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
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On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
Broken Window Theory In Court00:15:17
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
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Ah, we're back.
Ah, those are some good ads for you.
Now, 50% prop of children who appeared before Judge C. Evarella did so without a lawyer.
He remanded an average of 300 children per year into custody, which is nearly obviously one a day.
When you factor in vacations, it probably is about one a day.
In the years before he made the deal with PA Child Care, C.F. Arella had remanded about 4% of the juveniles in his court to criminal custody.
As soon as he starts getting paid, it goes to 25%.
So this is very obvious.
Some of the offenses that he locked kids up for included, as stated, making a fake MySpace page.
Other kids were jailed for stealing a $4 jar of nutmeg or throwing a sandal at a parent.
I know, right?
Yeah.
Why would you not laugh if you were a judge?
You're like, yo, you threw a chanta right now?
Throw a sandal at the kid.
That's a fair part.
I threw a chocolate.
The sandal that the kid should have is the judge should throw a sandal at him.
Just throw a sandal at him.
Yeah.
That is absurd.
Also, Jen's ears, let me tell you what MySpace is.
So, MySpace was when the internet was innocent and it was one of the precursors to it was a social media page.
It's when some guy named Tom tricked all of us into learning.
Imagine if Facebook hadn't destroyed civil society.
That was MySpace.
Yeah, it was popular for a while.
Some people found some good bands because of it.
And the guy who found it got $600 million and disappeared.
And is like, and is not mired in any way in any of the social media.
He's like, never changed his profile picture.
He never changed his profile picture.
And so far, there hasn't been any self-indulgent documentaries.
Hasn't said shit.
Just buy any, you're welcome.
That's what proves he's the only one of them who's a reasonable person because a reasonable person gets $600 million and fuck it.
It disappears.
Yeah.
Get on.
Buys an island and I'm gone.
Yeah.
C. Averella told one kid during sentencing to count the number of birds on the windowsill outside the courtroom.
He gave the boy one month in detention for each bird sitting outside the courtroom.
Like, that's the kind of shit he's doing.
Cause he's like, this is absurd fun for himself, you know?
Yeah.
Oh, because the kid ain't got no lawyer.
Yeah, because the kid ain't got a, yeah, what's he going to do?
Complain to someone?
Fuck that.
Yeah.
He can't be like, I feel like this, I feel like that's not legal.
I feel like you can't do that.
Yeah.
We should get her, kid.
Yeah.
It's pretty.
Don't make me $3,000.
In interviews during this period, Ciaverella was very open about how severe he could be.
He told one journalist, quote, my experience has been if you bring a child in who broke the law and put him on probation, chances are he'll be back in the system in a short period of time.
If a child believes the consequence will be anything other than placement, they don't care.
I have to find consequences that will get their attention.
Now, obviously, we know statistically that like the worst thing you can do if you want kids to not go on to go to prison is lock them up when they're kids.
Yeah, there's that.
It has a massive correlation with them being locked up as adults, but whatever.
Yeah, there's that.
Also, also, let me throw in this thing about probation, why kids go back.
Because if you say part of your probation is you can have no interaction with anyone from your former life or anyone who's involved in any sort of criminal or gang activity.
But if that person is your fucking brother, like, what do you, so do I need to move out?
Like, what do you, so if you catch me with my uncle who just sent me to go get some groceries, I, bro, I violated probation.
I guess I'm going back to prison now.
You know what I'm saying?
So like, even the probation stuff, like fool's going back, it's like you, that's you, so I have to move.
What you're saying is if I go back home and a probation officer pull up and I'm literally just sitting on my porch, you know what I'm saying?
And the person who's sitting across the street who just checking a mail just happens to be from the same hood I'm from, I broke my probation.
I'm going back to prison.
Yeah.
It's, yeah, it's like, it's very difficult for to not wind up in that situation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's, it's, that's how it's supposed to be.
Um, now, Judge C. Avarella explained in an interview to another reporter, quote, school is a place for kids to go and learn.
2% of kids at school should not ruin it for the other 98%.
Anyone who gets in the way of that, I don't have a problem sending them away.
Which is, I, I can't think of how many times I heard logic like this from like adults in my life when I was a kid that like, well, you just got to get rid of those kids who are disrupting everyone else as opposed to like, well, maybe you could figure out what's going on and divert responsibility.
Well, you're the red Mustang.
I'm trying to take care of them or whatever, but no, that's not.
You hear about the Red Mustang?
No.
That's similar to like the broken window theory.
Like the red Mustang is like, well, if any of us are speeding on the road and you're driving a Prius, like nobody notices.
But if you're speeding and you're a Red Mustang and everybody's going to catch you speeding.
So that kid who always got them outbursts, who always got, well, you're a Red Mustang, man.
Like everybody's going to see what you're doing.
So like if you, so you're the problem and everybody sees it.
So everybody sees you speeding, then all the little Priuses think that they can speed.
So then that's how they do these kids, man.
It's, yeah, yeah.
I almost punched an administrator with making that analysis once.
I was like, yo, I'm you looking at me like I'm 23 years old as when I first started teaching.
I'm like, I'm 23.
So I'm looking at you like, you're talking about me.
Like I'm that kid.
Like, what the?
No, I'm good.
I can't work here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's awesome.
I mean, because they're not thinking about it as like, I'm going, I think we should be destroying the lives of children and condemning them to a life of what in many cases is very close to slavery.
They're thinking like, well, this is, it's tough love.
This is how it's the same attitude towards like, well, yeah, sometimes you got to smack a kid around.
You know, sometimes you've got to like, you have to, you have to be harsh with children.
Otherwise, they'll, they'll grow into monsters.
Yeah.
Which that's a deeper analysis than we could do that.
But yeah.
I even told a kid who came out of Juvie that ended up in my class.
I told him that theory, but I told him in the theory in the sense that like, these people are gunning for you.
You know what I'm saying?
So I'm like, like, stay close, homie.
Like, just in the sense of like, I'm trying to like, I'm trying to protect you from this.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, matter of fact, like the Juvie you came from, I used to work at before I worked here.
So I'm like, I'm trying to tell you, bro, you don't, you ain't trying to go back, right?
They're gunning for you.
This is the way they think of you.
They think of you like this.
Bro, man, I'm, I'm, I'm so, read more.
Yeah.
Um, so the, yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty bad.
This is a pretty bad scheme that these guys have.
And again, it would have been perfectly legal if they hadn't been taking bribes.
Nothing about these horrible, you, you see in all the coverage, these like horrible cases that I've just related to you.
They go into detail about them, but they rarely note that like, and it would have been fine if they hadn't taken kicks.
Those aren't crimes.
Like, yeah, those aren't crimes.
You can be as bad to children as you want as a judge.
It's fine.
Yeah.
The scheme fell apart because in 2007, the parent of a child being railroaded by the judge placed a call to the Juvenile Law Center of Pennsylvania.
And these people rule.
They started to investigate and found that kids regularly appeared in front of the judge without any lawyer of their own.
And again, this is something he gets in trouble for.
It's something you can say like he doesn't have the legal right to do, but he'd done stuff like the campaign ad that he couldn't technically do.
Yeah, you know, he wouldn't have gotten in trouble for this if it hadn't been for the bribes.
I don't think.
I think it's really unlikely.
They noted, so these the juvenile law center looks into him and they notice that he's got this tendency.
Kids are showing up without a lawyer and he's got a tendency to very quickly make, declare children guilty and take them away from their parents.
So they petition the state Supreme Court in 2008 to vacate these judgments and the court denies them.
So again, if it hadn't been for the bribery, the court like already proved, if it hadn't been for the bribery, he probably would have been fine.
The thing that destroys him is that in 2006, so two years before the Juvenile Law Center starts their investigation and makes this petition, the FBI gets a tip about the fact that he's being bribed from somebody who works in and around him, right?
Finally, one of these fucking people, because everyone knows what's more or less what's happening.
They don't know for a fact about the bribery, but like he buys a yacht.
He and Judge Conahan have these mansions next to each other.
They've got like, yeah, they're like living judges don't aren't poor people, right?
Like they're just getting taken care of, but like they're living out of their means They walking in with a roly got the roly on it's like what's up guys like yo where you get that rolex?
Oh, you know, I mean work some overtime.
Like what yeah bam Yeah, where you get that Rolex from judge overtime?
Uh-huh yeah yeah, you get judges.
There's no such thing as judge overtime, gee.
So he uh, so somebody um, gives the FBI a tip, um and they do an investigation and in 2008, the same year that the uh, the State Supreme Court denies this petition, the FBI charges him um and they come out with, like you know they, it's the same thing we've seen with like the Capital, you get this big charging document that has all of the things the state is accusing them of, um.
They accuse Cavarella and Conahan of quote, ordering juveniles to be sent to these facilities, in which judges had a financial interest, even when juvenile probation officers did not recommend placement.
Now, a flurry of press coverage and investigations followed.
Here's the Juvenile Justice Center quote.
The scope of the violations of the children's rights in Luzerne County turned out to be more egregious than anyone could have imagined.
From 2003 to 2008, the Luzerne County judicial corruption scandal altered the lives of more than 2500 children and involved more than 6,000 cases.
Over 50% of the children who appeared before C. Varella lacked legal Representation.
60% of these children were removed from their homes.
Many of them were sent to one or both of the two facilities at the center of the corruption scandal, believed to be the largest judicial corruption scandal in our history.
This is like a lot of lives that these guys just nuke.
I mean, and those numbers are pretty stark.
So Judge Conahan, the guy who says his dad beat him and, you know, is an alcoholic.
As soon as the FBI starts gunning for them and there's charging documents, he is smarter than his partner.
He's like, yep, I did it.
You know what?
Yeah, well, you don't have to take me to court.
I plead guilty, right?
Which saves the government a lot of money.
And as a general rule, that's part of why if you plea, and this is problematic too, because oftentimes they use this to like fuck people over and like give people charges that maybe they wouldn't have if they went to court, but you kind of take, well, it better to take a guaranteed L and maybe go away for 10 years if this actually goes to right.
In this case, it's fine.
He's absolutely guilty.
He pleads guilty.
He gets like 11 years.
Robert Merrickle, who's the guy who's the builder, gets like a year or so.
So does Robert Powell.
So everyone involved pleads guilty and goes away, except for Judge Cieverella, who decides he's not going to plead guilty.
He denies he did anything wrong and he demands to take it to trial and fight his charges.
And he's the one that he's the one that like came from the struggle.
He's the trigger man.
Yeah.
And he's the guy who grew up poor, too.
Okay, this is all adding up.
Yeah.
Because like, if you know, you come from money, you know how to play the game.
You're like, listen, dude, I'm guilty.
Also, as a side note, for anybody who's in any sort of like romantic relationships, take the advice of the rich dude.
Just take the L. Listen, when you, if you wrong, you know you wrong, just take the L. You know what, baby?
Love, babe, my bad.
You are right.
It's comprehensively good advice.
It is comprehensively good advice.
The L.
Yeah.
Just take the L, guys.
So Judge Ciaverella does not do this.
And he makes it very public.
He's constantly, while his trial is going on, he's up in front of the press as often as possible.
He defends himself by saying shit like this to journalists about the bribes that he took.
Look, this was a finder's fee.
We needed this center built.
I was always yelling at kids because that's what they needed because parents didn't know how to be parents and so forth.
So what's the big deal now?
I mean, everybody was celebrating me all these years and now they're not happy with me anymore just because I took this money.
You said this defense to bribery?
Finder's fee.
Bro, this was a finder's fee, fam.
This commission, y'all talking about... Bribes, it was a finder's fee.
It's a fighter's fee.
I talked about how dangerous the streets of Philadelphia are.
I done cleaned these streets up and now you got a problem.
I'm making a little money off it.
Dang.
It's very funny.
So he gets convicted.
Of course.
He's sentenced to like 28 years in prison.
Now, Conahan also gets like 11 years or something like that, a pretty significant sentence.
But after he's in prison a few years, COVID-19 hit.
These guys get like convicted in like 2008, 2009.
COVID-19 hits, you know, a decade or so later.
And Conahan gets compassionate leave to go live with his wife under house arrest, right?
So he's like, he's back in his mansion with his wife.
He does his time, but like a little early.
Judge Cavearella is still incarcerated.
And he's appealed constantly.
He continues to protest his conviction and sentence.
And he asks to be set free as a result of COVID.
And I want to quote from an article in the Times Leader about his judge's response to him asking to get out early.
Chief U.S. District Judge Christopher C. Connor acknowledged that these are compelling reasons for compassionate release, but still denied it, saying that C. Everella continues to fail to acknowledge the seriousness of his conduct.
While he now concedes his honest service's mail fraud and tax fraud charges are serious crimes and are not to be taken lightly, Connor writes in his decision, he persists in downplaying the overall criminal scheme and his role within it.
Connor goes on to say that the primary need for C. Everella's lengthy prison sentence is so he can reflect on the seriousness of the crime and to promote respect for the law, something which Connor suggests has not happened.
So the judge is like, you still don't get it.
Yeah.
Think about that however you want, right?
Not, but, but I'm glad he's punished for it.
Fuck him.
That boy got to go home with the ankle bracelet.
The other homie that tried to fight is like, nah, nigga, y'all can sit in there.
Mail Fraud Downplayed By Judge00:02:52
Dang.
Yeah, and Conahan does some time.
And it's like, again, think about him getting let out early however you want.
Ciaverella is the one who is doing the direct harm.
The most direct harm, at least.
They both are doing direct harm.
Ciaverla is the one sentencing the kids, you know?
What kind of prison is that?
Do you know like what kind of prison they're in?
I think it's got to be a federal prison, right?
Because you get a prison.
Yeah, it's a federal prison.
It's probably a nicer federal prison, I would guess.
That's what I was going to say.
I was like, I guess it's not the worst of them, but I don't know.
You can't put no judge in no, you know, like G-pop.
You know what I'm saying?
You have to be careful with that guy so he doesn't get, you know, murdered.
Yeah, or he ain't doing a lot of time.
He goes, that time is going to be done real quick.
You put a judge in there with general population.
Yeah.
But yeah, that's the cash for kids scandal.
Oh my God, dude.
Good stuff.
How you feeling?
Triggered.
Yeah.
Reminded of a lot of things and bad.
I feel like this is the type of stuff that like I find so like, how do I say this?
Refreshing in the sense that like it's telling the rest of the world, like, see, we're not crazy.
Yeah.
I'm not making this stuff up.
When we say bigger, it's like, I don't have two hours to explain to you that the system is broken or that it's corrupt.
And just, well, if you were not guilty, then you have nothing to worry about.
Like to explain why that's the dumbest shit I ever heard.
It's like, listen, this is what I'm trying to tell you.
Like, fools get sent to jail on dumb shit because there's money to be made is what I'm trying to say.
You know what I'm saying?
And it's like this, they got in trouble because it was obvious.
Other judges make money doing this shit.
They just don't take a direct payment from a dude because that's stupid.
Because they're smarter.
They get consulting fees.
They get like side jobs where they're like working for this company or giving advice or like helping to do like, there's ways.
Everyone, it's the same way with like congressmen.
The dumb ones take a pile of cash for something.
The smart ones quit and get a highly paid job as a consultant, right?
Like there's so many ways people profit from doing the same thing.
These guys got caught because they were stupid as shit.
Yes.
Yeah.
And they still were able to nuke 2,500 people's lives, you know, at least for a while.
Hopefully, as many of them as possible recovered.
But you know, not all of them did.
Obviously, it's hard to come back and kill themselves, right?
Like, yeah.
Yeah.
It's hard to come back, dude.
It's hard to come back.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thanks.
All right.
Thanks for watching.
On Thursday, we're talking about the Texas criminal justice system.
That's the bastard.
It's the Texas juvenile criminal system.
Yeah.
Profiting From Stupidity00:03:50
So check back in Thursday.
And I don't know.
Go hug a cat.
Yeah.
What are we doing?
Is it a live show, Sophie?
Yeah.
February 17th.
Fool.
February 17th.
And in the episode description, you could click the link, but it's momenthouse.com/slash behind the bastards.
It's the three of us doing a live stream show.
And you can watch it wherever you want to.
It'll be live for a little while, too.
So if you can't do 6 p.m. Pacific, you can watch it on demand.
Yeah.
Any of them.
Yep.
Yeah.
That'll be a fan.
All right, everybody.
Yeah.
Check it out.
And, oh, yeah, I got a novel.
You can.
Yeah, you do.
You can Google After the Revolution AK Press.
If you pre-order it now, you get a signed copy.
It'll come out in May.
So go buy that.
You get a book too, don't you, Mr. Prop?
I do, man.
You can call me Ernest Slimmingway.
You know what I'm talking about, Mom?
Yeah, a poetry book called Terraform, prophiphop.com.
Come grab that book.
It's poetry and short story.
I think it's dope.
Sophie got a signed copy.
You know what I'm saying?
It's good stuff.
Yeah.
Check it out and go check us back out on Thursday where it'll be sad again.
Yep.
Bam.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
I'm Ana Navarro, and on my new podcast, Bleep with Ana Navarro, I'm talking to the people closest to the biggest issues happening in your community and around the world.
Because I know deep down inside right now, we are all cursing and asking what the bleep is going on.
Every week, I'm breaking down the biggest issues happening in our communities and around the world.
I'm talking to people like Julie K. Brown, who broke the explosive story on Jeffrey Epstein in 2018.
The Justice Department, through we counted four presidential administrations, failed these victims.
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