Commonwealth v. Joseph Cordaro: The Extraction
This is Part 2 of a two-part article. Part 1 covers the conflicts, the judge, the complaint, the $1.00 deed, and the evidence the case was built on. The companion procedural audit documents 28 findings with rule-by-rule citations.
Fact Opinion
Nineteen charges, seven days before the plea
On September 12, 2024, defense attorney Joseph D’Andrea filed Omnibus Pre-Trial Motions — the defense’s shot at challenging probable cause, the investigation, and the conflict of interest. On October 9, 2024, seven days before the plea hearing, the DA’s office filed 19 counts of wiretapping. Third-degree felonies. Up to seven years each. Offense date: March 30, 2016.
The statute of limitations for a third-degree felony in Pennsylvania is five years. March 30, 2016 to October 9, 2024 is eight years and six months. The charges were time-barred on their face.
Seven days later, Cordaro withdrew his pretrial motions. The next day, he entered a nolo contendere plea.
The federal complaint calls the 19 counts fabricated, alleging “the statute of limitations for this ‘crime’ had long expired. The defendants were just saber rattling.” Whether they were fabricated or simply meritless, their effect is documented: the defense’s only procedural challenge to the case was abandoned, and the plea followed immediately. The omnibus motion was the last chance to put the conflict, the investigation, and the charging decision on the record. Its withdrawal eliminated that chance.
In our opinion, this is the same play we documented in Commonwealth v. White: pile on charges to collapse the defense. In White’s case, the Information ballooned from two counts to twenty-one. In Cordaro’s, 19 felonies appeared from an eight-year-old phone app one week before trial. The charges weren’t meant to survive litigation. They were meant to prevent litigation. And they worked.
The sequencing raises a prosecutorial vindictiveness question under United States v. Goodwin, 457 U.S. 368 (1982). A defendant files pretrial motions. The DA responds with 19 additional felony counts. The defendant withdraws and pleads. Whatever the DA’s intent, the timing speaks for itself.
“Fine only”
The plea colloquy, filed October 17, 2024, stated that “the Commonwealth has agreed to a sentence recommendation of a fine only.” The sentence Judge Edwards imposed three weeks later was not a fine only.
The actual sentence: 12 months probation. $500 fine. $9,955.50 in restitution. Random drug testing. Warrantless personal and property searches. 20 hours community service. $50/month supervision fee. General conditions of probation.
Joseph Cordaro had zero criminal history. No juvenile adjudications. No adult arrests. No adult convictions. The charge was a single M2 — a non-violent document offense arising from a family estate dispute. The PSI reported no substance abuse history. He was drug-tested anyway.
The gap between “fine only” and the actual sentence is not explained in the available record. Under Pa.R.Crim.P. 590, a plea must be knowing, intelligent, and voluntary. A defendant who pleads based on a representation that the Commonwealth recommends “a fine only” and then receives probation, restitution, drug testing, warrantless searches, supervision fees, and community service has received a sentence materially different from what was represented.
We think a defendant hearing “fine only” would reasonably understand that to mean: you pay a fine, you go home. That’s not what happened. What happened was 12 months of state supervision on a property-dispute misdemeanor, with the probation department collecting fees the entire time. The department that collected those fees is the one whose officer wrote the sentencing recommendation.
The bills
The restitution demand tells the real story. On November 5, 2024, two days before sentencing, A.G. Howell’s office filed a Restitution Recommendation demanding $19,911.17. The dollars correspond to two invoices from Fred Howell’s law firm. Mary Martin Moran billed 68.7 hours at $225 an hour. Fred Howell billed 12 hours at $300. Moran’s time accounts for 85% of the total hours and 81% of the fees.
Read Fred Howell’s billing block and find this: he billed 7.0 hours at $300/hour, and the activities listed include meetings with “District Attorney.” The District Attorney is his son. Fred billed time for meeting with his own son’s office, bundled those hours into a legal invoice, and the DA’s office then demanded the defendant pay the invoice as criminal restitution.
Part of the bill — $9,323.42 — covers a guardianship petition. File #24-231. A separate civil proceeding. Joseph Cordaro wasn’t even a party to it. Under 18 Pa.C.S. § 1106, restitution must reflect actual losses caused by the criminal conduct. Guardianship litigation costs don’t flow from the execution of documents at Ellen Memorial. They flow from a family member’s decision to pursue legal authority over an elderly parent in a separate court. Moran billed 33.8 hours on that petition alone. Howell billed another 5.0. Total: $9,323.42. Those hours were included in the restitution demand against a man who was never a party to the guardianship case.
Edwards imposed $9,955.50 — approximately half the requested amount. No on-record explanation for the reduction. No analysis of which expenses were attributable to the criminal conduct versus the civil dispute. The victim listed on the restitution is Charlmaine Cordaro. The dollars flowed to Fred Howell’s firm.
In our opinion, this wasn’t restitution. It was debt collection through the criminal justice system. The DA’s father ran up legal bills across two civil proceedings, the DA demanded the defendant pay them as criminal penalties, and the judge imposed half with no explanation. That’s not a sentencing. That’s an invoice with a gavel behind it.
Add it up. The federal complaint alleges Fred Howell is entitled to 5% of Charlmaine’s estate upon her death. The AutoZone sale was for $570,000. Five percent of $570,000 is $28,500. His firm billed $19,911.17 in legal fees across the civil and guardianship cases. That’s $48,411.17 in potential revenue flowing to Fred Howell’s firm from a single family dispute — before accounting for any additional estate administration fees on other assets. We have not independently verified the 5% figure, but the billing records are in the federal case file and the estate notice confirms Howell as attorney for the estate.
The defendant’s lawyer was the billing lawyer’s brother
On July 24, 2025, attorney Woodrow Martin entered an appearance for Joseph Cordaro and filed a Motion for Early Termination of Probation. By that date, the charge had been nolle prossed. All penalties had been satisfied. The docket labels the nolle prosequi “Not Final.” Woodrow Martin is the brother of Mary Martin Moran.
Sibling relationship confirmed via Facebook. Mary Martin Moran is Fred Howell’s law partner at Howell Moran PLLC. She billed 68.7 hours against Joseph Cordaro. Her billable hours became the restitution Joseph was ordered to pay. Her brother then represented the man who was paying her bills.
The docket reflects no disclosure of this relationship.
The conflict runs through the restitution. Restitution was a condition of Cordaro’s probation. That $9,955.50 covered legal bills generated overwhelmingly by Mary Martin Moran — 68.7 of the 80.7 total hours billed. Woodrow represented the man who was court-ordered to pay his own sister’s billable hours, on a motion to end the probation under which those payments were being collected.
Judge Edwards denied the early termination motion on July 28. Four days. No hearing on the calendar. No explanation in the docket. Woodrow did not file a motion for reconsideration. He did not request a hearing. He did not appeal. He filed one motion, took the four-day denial, and walked away. Cordaro served the remaining five months of probation on a charge the DA’s own office had nolle prossed.
John J. Martin II, who shares the surname and practices at the same self-described “family-owned” Martin firm, is an Assistant Public Defender at the Wayne County courthouse — the same courthouse where the Cordaro case was prosecuted. The Public Defender’s office did not represent Cordaro. Martin II’s significance is his family connection to Mary Martin Moran, whose 68.7 billable hours became the restitution the defendant was ordered to pay. John J. Martin is the current president of the Wayne County Bar Association. Edwards began her career at Martin’s office in 1997.
In our opinion, this is what a closed system looks like. The defendant’s attorney has a sister whose firm generated the bills the defendant is paying. That sister’s partner is the father of the DA who brought the charges. The defendant’s attorney has a relative — Mary Martin Moran’s — in the Public Defender’s office down the hall. The judge started her career at the family patriarch’s firm. And when the defendant’s attorney files a routine motion on a dead conviction, the judge kills it in four days without a hearing.
Whether Woodrow Martin disclosed any of these relationships to Joseph Cordaro is not in the available record. Under Pa.R.P.C. 1.7, it should have been.
The probation officer’s mother ran the nursing staff
The Pre-Sentence Investigation that recommended Joseph Cordaro’s sentence was prepared by Ryan Altemier of Wayne County Adult Probation. Ryan Altemier’s mother is Tammy Altemier. She was Director of Nursing at Ellen Memorial Healthcare Center — the facility where Charlmaine Cordaro was a patient, where the documents at the center of the criminal charge were allegedly executed, and where a supervisor allegedly ordered those documents shredded.
Tammy Altemier held positions at Ellen Memorial for 38 years. The prosecution’s evidentiary foundation relied on statements from nurses at that facility. Those nurses didn’t just report to her. She hired them. She trained them. The facility’s own retirement tribute said so.
Her son then prepared the document that recommended Joseph Cordaro’s sentence: $500 fine, 12 months probation, $19,911.17 in restitution, drug testing, community service, and supervision fees. His department collected those fees. The relationship is not disclosed in the PSI.
Ryan Altemier’s wife, Mandy Altemier, is Adult and Children’s BCM Supervisor at Wayne County — inside the same county human services apparatus that processes referrals about elderly persons’ cognitive capacity. Whether her office touched the guardianship petition whose costs were billed as restitution is an open question. The guardianship docket would answer it.
We are not alleging that Ryan Altemier acted improperly. We are documenting a structural conflict that was never disclosed: the probation officer who wrote the sentencing recommendation is the son of the woman who hired and trained the witnesses the prosecution relied on. A reviewer examining the PSI for potential bias would have no basis to identify that connection. It isn’t in the document.
Charge, extract, nolle pros
Here is the sequence the docket shows. The DA’s father files a complaint. The DA approves charges. The DA signs the Information. The DA’s employees investigate and arrest the defendant. The DA’s former supervisor presides. The DA demands restitution covering his father’s legal bills. The judge imposes it. The defendant pays. The DA nolle prosses the charge. Six days later, the DA writes a letter to the AG acknowledging that his office can’t handle cases involving his father. The defendant’s post-conviction attorney — the billing lawyer’s brother — files for early termination. The judge denies it in four days.
The Cordaro case was never referred to the Attorney General’s office. A.G. Howell prosecuted it from charging through sentencing, collected restitution covering his father’s legal bills, and nolle prossed the charge on April 1, 2025. Six days later, on April 7, 2025, he wrote to Executive Deputy Attorney General Michelle K. Walsh requesting her office take over a separate matter — a complaint by Janette Kammeier alleging Fred Howell had improperly withheld client files. In that letter, Howell stated: “I believe the District Attorney’s Office has a conflict of interest to investigate this complaint because the complaint involves my father, Alfred J. Howell, Esquire, and my former law office, which I left over five (5) years ago.” The letter does not mention the Cordaro case.
But it is a written admission, in the DA’s own hand, that his office could not impartially handle matters involving his father. He articulated the standard himself. He just didn’t apply it when his father called in May 2024 asking him to prosecute Joe Cordaro.
One procedural detail worth pausing on: the DA used a nolle prosequi to undo a conviction that had already been entered, sentenced, and partially served. Under Pennsylvania practice, nolle prosequi is a pre-trial action — the DA decides not to pursue charges. The standard vehicles for undoing a conviction after sentencing are the Post Conviction Relief Act (42 Pa.C.S. § 9541) or a motion to vacate. Both require stating reasons on the record. A PCRA petition requires showing that the plea was unlawfully induced or that there was prosecutorial misconduct. A motion to vacate requires the court to make findings. A nolle prosequi requires none of that. It is the one procedural vehicle that lets a conviction disappear without anyone having to say why. The entire record of why this conviction was undone is a single docket entry: “Motion for Nolle Prosequi filed by Wayne County DA’s Office.”
Two days after the federal lawsuit was filed in April 2026, the DA’s office requested transcripts of the plea hearing and sentencing. Those transcripts had not been requested for eighteen months. The timing tells you what the transcripts were for: litigation defense, not case administration.
The restaurant is demolished. Charlmaine died on April 22, 2025 — twenty days after the nolle prosequi. Fred Howell administers her estate.
The federal civil rights complaint alleges that during a post-settlement mediation, when Rosina refused to pay Joseph his share of the proceeds, Fred Howell told Joseph’s attorney Jeff Treat: “don’t make me have my son arrest your client again.” The complaint states Treat “was stunned at Howell’s cavalier abuse of process.” If substantiated, the coercive linkage between the criminal and civil proceedings is not an inference. It’s an admission, made to an attorney who can authenticate it.
Why we’re writing this
The Joseph Cordaro case is the second case we covered as extensively. We chose to write about it because we have the documents. We have the docket, the incident report, the billing records, the PSI, the federal complaint, the deeds, the Facebook confirmations of family relationships, the retirement tribute, the estate notice, the DA’s own conflict letter. We can show you what we’re talking about with citations to specific pages.
What we can’t show you, but what we believe, is that this case isn’t an outlier. This is a pattern. The blank fields on the docket. The presiding judge who used to supervise the prosecutor. The charges tethered to a civil dispute. The restitution set at the complainant’s legal bills. The families positioned across every institution. The plea that collapses under the weight of fabricated charges. The early termination denied on a nolle prossed charge.
We documented the same institutional architecture in Commonwealth v. Kaitlin White. Different defendant, different charges, same courthouse, same blank docket fields, same 22nd Judicial District. In that case, ADA Brendan Ellis prosecuted before his former law partner, Judge Matthew Meagher, and the conflict wasn’t disclosed for four months. In this case, DA A.G. Howell prosecuted his own father’s complaint before his former boss, Judge Edwards, and the conflict wasn’t acknowledged until ten months later — and only in a letter to the AG, after every dollar had been collected.
If you were a defendant in Wayne County, or anywhere in the 22nd Judicial District, and any of this sounds familiar, we want to hear from you. Pocono Review is investigating the patterns of prosecution in this county. We are interested in the experiences of the people the system has processed.
This is opinion, clearly labeled. The facts are public, equally well-labeled. The point of writing this isn’t to win an argument with prosecutors who will say we got it wrong. The point is to put on the record what we think this case shows, so that the next defendant, the next family, the next journalist, the next disciplinary investigator, the next voter, has a place to start.
This isn’t an article. It’s a public record. We hope it grows.
This is Part 2 of a two-part article. ← Read Part 1: How Three Families Ran a Criminal Case in Wayne County
Read the Procedural Audit: 28 findings with rule-by-rule citations
Read Supporting Documents: Commonwealth v. Joseph Cordaro
If you have information relevant to this case or to similar cases in the Wayne County Court of Common Pleas, contact tips@poconoreview.com.