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If you want to accuse Dr. Cyril Wecht of being abrasive, you’ll get no argument here. Tacked to my cubicle wall is a letter the former Allegheny County Coroner sent us back in 2001. “Perhaps some of the Muslim terrorists took over the offices of the Pittsburgh City Paper recently,” he wrote in response to our post-9/11 coverage.
If you want to accuse Wecht of using taxpayer resources for personal business, you’ll also get little argument. For one thing, the 2001 letter was written on county stationery. Anyway, we’ll know better later this month, when Wecht faces a federal trial on charges that, among other things, he blurred his private pathology consulting work with his job as a county coroner.
It won’t surprise me if Wecht is found guilty of some of the 41 charges U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan has filed against him. His own defenders have acknowledged he may have made accounting errors and overbilled clients, or charged them for travel expenses picked up by taxpayers. But when that trial begins, Wecht will be the official in that courtroom I worry about least.
For starters, many of the charges — that Wecht used a county fax machine for private business, for example — are penny-ante stuff. Put things in perspective: When Wecht was replaced by medical examiner Karl Williams last year, the county agreed to pay Williams $175,000. That’s a 173 percent pay hike over the $64,000 Wecht had been earning. That’d cover a lot of faxes.
This is the point where someone says, “It’s the principle that matters! We must demand the highest ethical standards from our public officials!”
Fair enough. So why does Brad Orsini still have a job?
Orsini was the lead FBI agent investigating Wecht’s case. But as Wecht’s attorneys later discovered, Orsini had admitted falsifying other agents’ signatures on evidence packets used in other cases. Orsini has since been reassigned, but he still draws a government salary. Given that Wecht is facing federal charges for deceptive paperwork, one wonders how the Justice Department can keep Orsini on its payroll.
And while the feds indicted Wecht for overcharging his clients, it seems they’ve done some overcharging themselves. Last week, prosecutors withdrew more than half of the charges they originally filed against Wecht. They did so in part because they’d accused Wecht of committing mail fraud … when the documents he’d sent “may have been hand-delivered instead.”
It’s amusing this matters at all. Ordinarily, the government doesn’t make a federal case out of private billing disputes; it could do so here only if Wecht used the U.S. postal service. (Legal tip: Before you send a postcard saying “Wish you were here!” without really meaning it, check with an attorney.) Wecht allegedly bills his clients wrongly; the government makes wrongful accusations about how those clients were billed. Who am I supposed to be outraged at again?
Some Wecht backers suspect Buchanan is politically motivated — that she targeted him because he’s a prominent Democrat. Buchanan is, after all, a Republican U.S. Attorney in an administration that has deeply politicized the Justice Department.
It’s worrisome to think Wecht might have been targeted. It’s more worrisome to think that he wasn’t. I mean, what if this stuff goes on all the time, only no one notices?
What if lots of investigations are carried out by FBI investigators with a history of falsifying signatures? What if the feds often indict people on spurious charges, if only because they want to force a defendant to make a plea bargain? That possibility is taken for granted by observers — the Post-Gazette‘s coverage of Wecht recently mentioned it in a casual aside. But doesn’t that count as an abuse of office, one that ranks a bit higher than taking home a box of paper clips? I’m supposed to get worked up over Cyril Wecht’s alleged abuse of the postage meter, but shrug off a possible abuse of a federal indictment?
I’m not losing sleep over what may happen to Wecht. Unlike a lot of defendants, he can obviously take care of himself — otherwise he would have taken a plea before any of this stuff came to light. Even if he’s guilty, he’s already stepped down as coroner. He’ll never again have the chance to abuse his fellow citizens on the taxpayer’s dime.
Mary Beth Buchanan, I’m not so sure about.
(Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story that misstated Wecht’s salary as coroner has been corrected.)
This article appears in Jan 10-16, 2008.
After reading this story, I went to a local paper and read the revised indictment. What a waste of taxpayer money? Mary Beth Buchanan should be investigated for abusing her position of trust and wasting resources for her own personal political gain.
After you get through the first twenty pages of the indictment of Cyril Wecht that attack him for making money and infer that Cyril should have given all his money to the county he earned in his private business, you should get to the meat of the indictment, but guess what it is not there.
Mary Beth Buchanan wants Cyril in jail for using a county fax machine to send faxes to his private client. Here’s one big issue with the accusation, what if Cyril did not send the faxes? I imagine that Cyril had his secretary handle these matters and since she worked in both offices, Cyril’s Private Practice and the Coroner’s Office, perhaps she made an error. Guess you will need to go after her as well or give her immunity for sending faxes. I mean, you can send a fax from Kinko’s for 50 cents per page, so guessing from the indictment accusation, Cyril’s alleged misuse of a fax machine is probable less than $100 of cost. Of course, we the people who Ms. Buchanan allegedly serves will never know because after spending millions on the investigation, her crack team still can not provide a figure on the money.
Then there is the mail fraud accusation. It seems Cyril allegedly mailed out three packages that were for his private business through the Coroner’s Office. Once again, I imagine it will be hard to prove Cyril is mailing these items out. I imagine it may just be another clerical error by his secretary.
The next accusation is because Cyril allegedly misused the fax machine and the Coroner’s Office gets less than 10 grand in federal money, Cyril is in turn guilty of misusing federal funds. Yeah, this accusation is another great creative leap.
Missing from the indictment is any count relating to the alleged body trade with Carlow. Of course the indictment mentions this accusation at the onset right next to how evil Cyril is to have made $9 million over a ten year time frame, but no indictment charge relates to it.
So through this investigation, Allegheny County was deprived of one of the best coroner’s in the world. Wait, I’m sorry. Allegheny County is not deprived of him, they now have to pay his private fee for his services. Additionally, the County had to hire a new coroner at a 50% premium above Cyril.
Additionally, the area lost substantial resources that could be utilized for other areas. Areas such as fighting violent crime, curbing the drug trade, etc.
Having read “Bitter Pills” about Mary Beth’s use of perjury to convict Dr. Rottschaefer, watched her zealous pursuit of Sheriff DeFazio, read how she used 55 million to put only one man in jail for selling bongs (Tommy Chong), I am left with the opinion that Mary Beth Buchanan may be the worst US Attorney in the history of Western PA.
It is unfortunate that while Ms. Buchanan is quick to use resources to go after Dr. Wecht for allegedly misusing his office and abusing the public trust, she fails to realize that she has been committing the same infractions to the people of Western PA at a much greater level.
I hope the truth shines through in this case and Cyril is exonerated. After such time, I can only imagine the backlash that will fall on a public servant that misuses millions of dollars of tax payer money for her own political ambitions.
Oh, I forgot to mention. Because Cyril used a piece of letter head with the county on it to send a letter to the editor against Mr. Schiller of Penn Hills, the government has added this to their list of fruitless idiotic charges to attempt to put him in jail.
If not for the half assed idiotic Judge Schwab being on this case, I imagine the charges would have been dismissed years ago. Instead, we have a circus over the next few weeks which will result in nothing other than a waste of taxpayers money due to Mary Beth Buchanan’s self serving actions.