PHILADELPHIA – A pair of witnesses testified during a court hearing Wednesday that reputed northeastern Pennsylvania mob boss William “Billy” D’Elia had envelopes delivered to disgraced former Luzerne County President Judge Michael T. Conahan at the courthouse and that Conahan met with D’Elia and another admitted felon multiple times to discuss fixing cases.
The hearing was ordered by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court after a Wilkes-Barre newspaper argued that a defamation case handed down against the paper by Conahan’s colleague, indicted former Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., should be vacated. Lawyers for the newspaper are arguing that Conahan helped fix the case on behalf of a friend of D’Elia’s. In petitioning to reopen the case, the newspaper’s lawyers cited the judges’ guilty pleas in federal court to honest services fraud charges, as well as newspaper articles in The Legal and its sister publication, Pennsylvania Law Weekly , detailing suspicions of case fixing in Luzerne County and ties to criminal figures.
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