“We need to be careful. I could get fired for this,” Cynthia McClendon told a bail bondsman. She was right — and she and her employers paid the price.
As a clerk at the Elm Street state courthouse, McClendon (at right in photo) slipped a confidential file to bondsman Philip Jacobs in return for a $500 gift. She resigned her post on June 2, the same day she pleaded guilty to one count of soliciting and accepting a gratuity. Sentenced in U.S. District Court Monday to a felony bribery charge, she wept for the damage she did to the career she loved and to the office that took her in.
In a sentencing before U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton, the 51-year-old woman received a sentence of one year’s probation, with four months’ home confinement and 100 hours of community service, for her minor role in a bail bond bribery scheme. She is the eighth person to be sentenced in a wide-sweeping corruption probe that began as an investigation into former police Lt. William White and ended by bringing down the city’s most powerful bail bonds family, Robert Jacobs and his sons Philip and Paul.
Monday’s sentencing drew a meager crowd compared to the standing-room only hearings of the bail bonds scion and his sons. The 45-minute hearing drew two supporters, a guard, a reporter, and a government man in a pinstriped suit.
Those in the courtroom heard about a courthouse career that began with the trigger of a gun and ended with the “devastation” of those who sought to help her. The tale was told by McClendon’s attorney, Robert C. Mirto, above the sniffles of his client, who stood beside him in a black suit.
(The tale is also told at length in the defense’s sentencing memo. Click here to read it; click here to read the government’s response.)
Refuge On Elm Street
Mirto told of how, as a young mother about 23 years ago, McClendon had to flee a former life at the barrel of a gun. She was living with her daughter and her first husband, who was prone to fits of drunken rage. One night, when she refused to comply with his drunken demands, he grabbed their daughter in his arms and fired a gun at McClendon’s head.
The bullet missed.
“To this day, she can still feel the bullet pass by her ear,” wrote Mirto in his sentencing memo.
McClendon fled with her daughter to New Haven, where she applied for a job at the State Superior Courthouse on Elm Street. Court staff were moved by her story, Mirto said. They hired her for a job in the public defender’s office, even though she didn’t have the requisite typing skills. They sent her to literacy training and started her off on what would become a 20-year career.
The way Mirto put it, McClendon was a “naive” person whose “simple nature and overwhelming trust and kindness” led her to fall into the manipulative hands of a powerful bail bonds family, the Jacobses. When she started working there, Robert Jacobs and his sons, Philip and Paul, had an office inside the courthouse, Mirto pointed out. They kept close relations to office personnel, often buying them lunch or lending them money.
For a period of 10 years, until the Jacobses were banned from the courthouse in 2004, McClendon gave them access to confidential files so they could find contact information for people who jumped bond, according to court documents. In return for her help, McClendon got a total of about $1,500 from Philip Jacobs, according to her guilty plea.
She also accepted cash from Robert Jacobs as a courtesy for providing him information. On five or six occasions, he lent her between $100 to $200, some of which she failed to repay, according to the plea.
The clerk used the money to tend to her ailing parents and help send her daughter to college. She wasn’t caught during that time period, though she admitted to the behavior in her plea. McClendon was finally caught with the help of Philip Jacobs, who was cooperating with the FBI following his own arrest.
On May 22, 2007, Philip Jacobs, armed with a microphone, called McClendon and asked her to look up an address for him. She complied, and in a filmed exchange, he met her behind the courthouse and handed her an envelope with $50.
“We Need To Be Careful”
A second recorded phone conversation leaves no doubt that McClendon knew what she was doing. Again, on July 30, 2007, Jacobs called McClendon and asked her for the confidential file of a client who had skipped bond.
“We need to be careful. I could get fired for this,” she told him. She insisted that they meet near her home on Olive Street, where she handed off the file. As a reward, Jacobs gave her $500, which she used to buy clothes for her parents.
McClendon knew the transaction was wrong, but she suffered from “precarious finances” for 20 years, struggling to support her daughter while her ex-husband failed to come through with child support. When she took the $500, her parents had been evicted from their home, he said.
“She was vulnerable because she had need,” said Mirto (pictured). He said she has been punished plenty through public humiliation in the press and losing her job and medical benefits. She is living without health insurance, he said, because COBRA payments would have cost $545 per month, a price she can’t afford. A diabetic, she has been paying for expensive medications out of her own pocket.
McClendon is now remarried. She and her husband are struggling to make ends meet, with high medical costs and supporting her parents, one of whom has cancer. She just started work as a receptionist in a law office.
As his client wiped tears away, Mirto spoke of how much she loved her courthouse job. He submitted 10 letters of support from court personnel describing her as a kind and diligent worker.
“She cries every day, your honor,” Mirto said.
Office Up For Sale
Taking her turn before Judge Arterton, Acting U.S. Attorney Nora Dannehy (at right in photo) responded to the letters of support.
“This is not about people being kind to one another” on a daily basis, she objected. “This is about a public employee who put the confidence of her office up for sale over a long period of time.” As a clerk, McClendon should have known the importance of upholding attorney-client confidences, Dannehy said.
Those confidences were broken when McClendon gave the bail bondsmen special access to the files, which contained confidential information. In the defense’s sentencing memo, Mirto noted that the Jacobses probably weren’t seeking that confidential info; they were likely just looking for addresses and phone numbers that, in their haste, they had failed to get from their clients.
After Dannehy’s stern words, McClendon herself approached the lectern, unfolding a white piece of paper with a handwritten note on it. Leaning forward, her hair tucked tightly into a bun, she choked out an apology.
“I apologize to each and every one of my colleagues” in the court system, she said. “All I have ever done is put my heart and my soul into my work.” She pleaded for mercy, saying that “for making an act of poor judgment, I have already learned an extremely important lesson.”
She returned to her chair after grabbing two tissues from her husband, who was sitting in the front row of the audience in a red blazer.
Judge Arterton, speaking from her chair in a grave and careful manner, spelled out the severity of the offense. The circumstances of the offense are serious, she said, “because they implicate the integrity of the judicial system. That is an integrity that cannot afford any breach.”
Arterton said she found it “troubling” that McClendon’s “corrupt relationship” with the Jacobses took place over 50 percent of McClendon’s 20-year career in the courthouse.
She said that while McClendon was a hard-working single mother, “there are many people in situations such as yours, or worse, who do not compromise their principles” or “even take a dime.”
“If you loved your job so much, it is a difficult proposition for the Court to understand why you put it at risk,” she said.
On the other hand, Arterton said she recognized the humiliation and financial disarray of the defendant — and most of all, the clerk’s role as a minor player in a larger scheme carried out by a powerful bail bonds family.
“Having considered the hierarchy of felons in this case, you and at least one other fall at the bottom,” Arterton explained.
A Devastating Blow
In May, the judge waived a jail sentence for Jill D’Antona, a judicial marshal who pleaded guilty to taking bribes from the Jacobses to steer business towards them.
Each woman faced a prison sentence of between four months and a year.
Arterton ordered McClendon to pay $550 in restitution. She waived a fine that could have ranged up to $10,000.
The clerk left the court in a jubilant mood, giggling as she and her husband tried to duck out of sight of a camera.
“She’s pleased with how it went,” her attorney, Mirto, said.
Attorney Dannehy said she thought it was “a fair sentence,” given the defendant’s place in the bigger picture of the bail bonds scheme.
The corruption probe has sent three cops and two bail bondsmen to jail. Former Lt. Billy White is serving a 38-month sentence in prison for several instances of wrongdoing a bribery/theft scandal, which included taking money from the Jacobs family in order to help hunt down those who had skipped bond. Robert Jacobs, 81, is serving 15 months in prison at Otisville, N.Y. His sons, Philip and Paul, are carrying out four-month sentences at Otisville and in Devens, Ma., respectively, according to the Bureau of Prisons. All three pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery.
Meanwhile, the Elm Street courthouse is still reeling from the scandal.
Heidi Boettger (pictured), a clerk in the public defender’s office at that courthouse, crossed the New Haven Green Monday morning to support a woman she had worked alongside for 20 years. At one point, she served as McClendon’s boss at the office. She described McClendon as a valuable employee.
“She was a good worker. Her best feature was dealing with the public,” Boettger said after the sentencing. “Unfortunately, people she thought were her friends went against her.”
Boettger said the scandal has “devastated the office.”
“We’re just glad it’s over,” she said.
One defendant remains to be sentenced in the case: James Barone, a former Department of Corrections supervisor at the Whalley Avenue jail, pleaded guilty in August to illegally using the NCIC state computer system to get information for the Jacobs family. Barone, 48, of East Haven, faces up to a year in jail. His sentencing date is set for Nov. 3.
Is the end nearing in the corruption probe that has shaken the city and state, inspiring a reexamination of the bail bond system?
“Barone has yet to be sentenced,” Dannehy replied, “and beyond that, I have no comment.”