Former lawmaker faces house arrest
HARRISBURG – Former Democratic state Rep. Frank LaGrotta of Ellwood City will spend the next six months under house arrest, but will not lose his state pension eligibility after pleading guilty Monday to putting two relatives on his district office payroll in 2006 as ghost employees. Dauphin County President Judge Richard A. Lewis also ordered LaGrotta to repay within two weeks the $27,092 his sister and niece pocketed in the scheme, to perform 500 hours of community service and pay $5,000 in costs.
After six months of house arrest with an electronic monitoring device, LaGrotta must serve 30 months of intermediate punishment, which is similar to probation.
LaGrotta’s sister, Ann Bartolomeo, and niece, Alissa Lemmon, also entered no contest pleas to misdemeanor charges of false swearing.
They admitted lying to a grand jury in Pittsburgh in April about sorting and filing paperwork for LaGrotta. The grand jury determined the records Lemmon and Bartolomeo claimed to have worked on “simply did not exist.”
Bartolomeo, 46, a teacher at Perry Elementary School in the Ellwood City School District, was sentenced to a year of probation and fined $3,000.
Lemmon, 24, was sentenced to 1 1/2 years of probation and fined $3,000.
Both women, who live in Franklin Township, Beaver County, declined opportunities to speak in court before sentencing.
LaGrotta, 49, avoided a maximum jail sentence of up to 14 years by cooperating with the state attorney general’s office in his own case and other investigations that Senior Deputy Attorney General Anthony J. Krastek called a work in progress.
The former 10-term state lawmaker reportedly is aiding investigators looking into whether more than $3.6 million in taxpayer-funded bonuses were illegally handed out to Republican and Democratic legislative staffers in 2005 and 2006 for campaign work.
Krastek said after the hearing Monday that he could not discuss how LaGrotta had cooperated or whether LaGrotta had testified before a grand jury convened in the bonus probe.
“This would’ve been a much different proceeding if he had not been cooperating,” Krastek said, referring to LaGrotta.
He added that LaGrotta’s conviction on two felony counts of conflict of interest will not cost him a state pension for his 20 years of work as a lawmaker.
LaGrotta will be eligible to start receiving payments from in November when he turns 50.
LaGrotta spoke briefly before sentencing, apologizing to his family and thanking the attorney general’s office for its professionalism in handling his case.
“Today is my parents’ 52nd wedding anniversary, and I guess I’ve given them better gifts before,” he said.
LaGrotta also told his sister and niece that he was sorry about not keeping up with the records he accumulated during his 20 years in office.
Those were the records Bartolomeo and Lemmon supposedly were supposedly sorting through and filing for LaGrotta between February and September of 2006.
But Bartolomeo and Lemmon testified for a second time before the grand jury in October, admitting that they did little or no work for LaGrotta.
“At best, the work they did was exaggerated,” Krastek said in court on Monday.
Judge Lewis told LaGrotta that coming up with a sentence was difficult because he had to balance the ex-lawmaker’s apparent good character against his serious violation of taxpayer’s trust.
“This involved a situation where, quite frankly Mr. LaGrotta, you placed your niece and your sister in a position of jeopardy,” the judge said. “You should’ve known better. You were an elected official, and you violated the public trust.”
The conviction comes nearly two years after LaGrotta lost his re-election bid in the May 2006 Democratic primary to Rep. Jaret Gibbons of Ellwood City.
Gibbons went on to win the 10th District seat in November 2006.
After leaving office in November 2006, LaGrotta was hired by House Democrats on Dec. 1, 2006, as an adviser to western Pennsylvania lawmakers.
He received the same $73,613-a-year salary he was collecting as a legislator. House records show LaGrotta last worked at that job on July 31.
LaGrotta has been collecting unemployment because that job was eliminated, according to House Majority Leader Bill DeWeese, D-Waynesburg.
In court on Monday, LaGrotta said he did not have a job.