Commonwealth v. Joseph Cordaro: How Three Families Ran a Criminal Case in Wayne County
The following is editorial analysis, not a news report. Factual claims are sourced from the criminal docket, the incident report, billing records, the Pre-Sentence Investigation, and exhibits filed in the federal civil rights complaint, Cordaro v. Howell et al., Case No. 3:26-cv-01041-JKM (M.D. Pa.). Analytical claims represent the author’s interpretation of documented events. This is Part 1 of a two-part article. Part 2 covers the extraction, the billing, and the aftermath. The companion procedural audit documents 28 findings with rule-by-rule citations.
Fact Opinion
On May 22, 2024, Chief County Detective Peter Hower arrested Joseph Cordaro at DA Howell’s father’s direction. That’s not an inference. It’s in the incident report. Hower would later tell Cordaro, according to the federal complaint, that he was “sorry” and “had to arrest him because Fred said the civil matter wasn’t going well.”
This is a story about a criminal case that ran on one family’s schedule. The father filed the complaint. The son approved the charges. The son’s former boss presided. The father’s law partner billed 68.7 hours against the defendant. The law partner’s brother then represented the defendant. The probation officer who wrote the sentencing recommendation was the son of the nursing director at the facility where the alleged crime occurred. And at the end, after the defendant had paid every dollar demanded of him, the DA nolle prossed the charge — not before trial, not before conviction, but five months after sentencing, using a procedure that Pennsylvania practitioners call “highly irregular” for post-conviction cases. The standard vehicles for undoing a conviction — a PCRA petition or a motion to vacate — would have required someone to state, on the record, why a conviction obtained five months earlier needed to go away. A nolle prosequi requires no explanation. No one had to say the word “misconduct.”
The charge went away. The probation didn’t. Cordaro remained under state supervision for another eight months — drug-tested, subject to warrantless searches, paying $50/month in supervision fees and $250/month in restitution to the same probation department whose officer wrote his sentencing recommendation. Six days after the nolle prosequi — after Joseph had already been convicted, sentenced, stripped of the deed, stripped of the power of attorney, forced into a civil settlement, and ordered to pay his accuser’s legal bills — the DA wrote a letter to the Attorney General acknowledging that his office couldn’t handle cases involving his father.
We have the documents. We have the docket. We have the billing records. What follows is what we think those documents show. Read it with that in mind.
What the docket doesn’t tell you
Pull the criminal docket for CP-64-CR-0000272-2024 and find the field marked “Judge Assigned.” It’s blank. Find the “Judge Name” column on the calendar events page. It’s blank on all seven entries — the arraignment, the plea hearing, the sentencing, all of them. The “Final Issuing Authority” field lists a retired Magisterial District Judge, not the Common Pleas judge who accepted the plea and imposed sentence.
You’d have to read deep into the Entries section, starting on page 4, to learn that President Judge Janine Edwards presided over every hearing in this case from the first order on June 27, 2024, through her last on July 28, 2025. She accepted the nolo contendere plea. She imposed sentence. She granted the nolle prosequi. She denied early termination of probation — on a charge the DA’s own office had already nolle prossed.
The docket tells you one more thing on page 4: “Information Filed, 07/01/2024. Filed By: Howell, A.G.”
A.G. Howell is the Wayne County District Attorney. He is Fred Howell’s son. He worked at his father’s law firm, Howell & Howell, for approximately twenty years before winning election as DA in 2019. Fred filed the criminal complaint. A.G. signed the charging document. His own employees investigated and arrested the defendant. No outside law enforcement body — not Honesdale Borough Police, not the Pennsylvania State Police — evaluated the complaint or exercised independent judgment.
In our opinion, this is how a case gets hidden in plain sight. If you wanted to make a prosecution hard to scrutinize from the outside, you’d start by leaving the official record opaque about who’s actually running it. Anyone pulling this docket to check for a conflict between the judge and the prosecutor would find no judge and no prosecutor to check against. Edwards’ name is buried. A.G. Howell’s name appears once, on page 4, as the filer. The docket does not identify the arresting agency’s chain of command. You’d need the incident report to learn that the detective who made the arrest reported directly to the complainant’s son. This is the second case where we found this exact pattern.
The judge who used to be the boss
President Judge Janine Edwards served as Wayne County District Attorney before being elected to the bench in November 2017. A.G. Howell was her Assistant District Attorney. She supervised him. He succeeded her as DA in January 2020. She and Fred Howell are both past presidents of the Wayne County Bar Association. Edwards began her legal career at the firm of John J. Martin in Honesdale in 1997. Martin is the current bar association president. His family members appear on both sides of this case — including Mary Martin Moran, Fred Howell’s law partner who billed 68.7 hours against Cordaro, and John J. Martin II, an assistant public defender at the same courthouse. The Public Defender’s office did not represent Cordaro, but the connection illustrates how far the Martin family’s institutional presence extends. None of this was disclosed to the defendant.
Wayne County’s 22nd Judicial District has two Common Pleas judges. When a small district has a conflict, you bring in a visiting judge. It’s routine. It exists because districts like this are small enough that the local bench and the local bar know each other, and conflicts spread.
The docket contains no entry reflecting a request for a visiting judge, a referral to the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts, or any consideration of recusal. Edwards didn’t request reassignment to her colleague, Judge Meagher. She didn’t request an outside judge. She took the case herself — a case brought by the DA she’d supervised, originating from a complaint filed by a man she’d shared the bar association presidency with — and she kept it from start to finish.
The question is why. Edwards presided over a case initiated by her former ADA, at the request of his father, with the entire chain of authority running through one family. Visiting-judge assignments are routine in two-judge districts under Pa.R.Crim.P. 105 and AOPC protocols. She knew the rules. She didn’t apply them. It’s now a recorded pattern in Wayne County.
When the civil case stalled, the criminal case moved
The incident report is the most revealing document in the case. Detective Hower wrote it himself, in real time, and it tells a story the DA’s office probably wishes it didn’t.
April 24, 2024: Fred Howell contacts Hower and files the criminal complaint. The federal complaint alleges the same day, Rosina Cordaro — Fred’s client — files a civil suit against Joseph Cordaro (Am. Comp. ¶26–27, Doc. 4 at 12).
May 3, 2024: Howell tells Hower the civil matter is “tentatively resolved.” The criminal process pauses. Hower waits.
May 17, 2024: Howell tells Hower that Joseph is “not cooperating with the civil process.” What that meant, according to the federal complaint, is that Joseph had retained attorney Jeffrey Treat and filed an Answer contesting the civil suit. Howell requests criminal charges. The DA approves them the same day.
Joseph was arrested five days later.
Read those three entries and decide what you’re looking at. The criminal case didn’t operate on its own timeline. It operated on the civil case’s timeline. When the civil case was going well, the criminal case waited. When the defendant hired a lawyer and fought back, the criminal case accelerated. This is the fact pattern analyzed in Commonwealth v. Williams, 463 A.2d 1113 (Pa. Super. 1983): the use of criminal process to extract civil outcomes.
In our opinion, the incident report is a confession written in real time by the detective who made the arrest. He documented the gating mechanism himself. The DA’s father controlled the on/off switch for a criminal prosecution, and the detective wrote it down.
One more thing about the timeline. Between those second and third entries — between May 3 and May 17 — Joseph’s brother Phil died on May 8. Phil had attended a 2017 meeting at Howell’s office where Charlmaine expressed concerns about Rosina’s financial management. He had firsthand knowledge of Charlmaine’s wishes regarding the property. He could no longer testify when charges were filed twelve days after his death. We are not alleging causation. We are noting timing.
The convenient $1.00 deed
Three years before the criminal case, on January 14, 2021, Fred Howell drafted a deed transferring four parcels of commercial real estate — the Cordaro family restaurant property — from Charlmaine Cordaro to Rosina Cordaro for $1.00. He represented both parties to the transaction. He notarized it himself. No independent counsel reviewed the transfer on Charlmaine’s behalf. No independent notary witnessed her acknowledgment.
This deed is the foundation of everything that followed. Rosina’s claim to own the restaurant rests on it. The AutoZone contract for $570,000 rests on it. The civil suit Rosina filed against Joseph to protect that ownership rests on it. The criminal prosecution Fred Howell initiated through his son’s office to void Joseph’s competing deed rests on it. The restitution demand covering Fred Howell’s legal bills rests on it.
Fred Howell didn’t just facilitate this transfer. He controlled both sides of it, and then used the chain of title it created as the legal basis for a criminal complaint against the person who challenged it — his client’s own son.
Under Pa.R.P.C. 1.7(a)(2), a conflict of interest exists when there is a significant risk that the representation of one or more clients will be materially limited by a personal interest of the lawyer. Under Pa.R.P.C. 1.8(a), transactions between a lawyer and client must be fair, and the client must receive written advice to seek independent counsel.
In our opinion, this is the transaction that should have triggered scrutiny of everything that followed. A lawyer who drafts a $1.00 deed transferring commercial property between two of his own clients, notarizes it himself, and then initiates a criminal prosecution when a third party challenges it, is not acting as a neutral legal professional. He is protecting an outcome he engineered.
And here’s the financial dimension. Fred Howell is the attorney for Charlmaine’s estate. The Wayne County Legal Journal estate notice confirms it. As estate attorney, his fees are calculated against the value of the estate he administers. A $570,000 cash sale from the AutoZone deal produces a different fee than an operating restaurant retained by a family member. The federal complaint alleges he was entitled to 5% of the estate’s value upon Charlmaine’s death. We have not independently verified that figure. But the structural conflict doesn’t depend on a specific percentage. Any fee arrangement tied to estate value gave Howell a personal financial interest that ran in the same direction as the criminal prosecution. Five percent of $570,000 is $28,500 – remember that amount because its not the only potential profit the Howell family stands to make.
Whose restaurant was it?
In 2023, before any criminal complaint, before any allegation that Joe exploited his mother, Rosina Cordaro appeared on WNEP’s Newswatch 16. She told the station that she wanted to retire, that she couldn’t find a buyer, and that Cordaro’s Restaurant — open for almost 70 years — would be torn down. “I want to thank them for 69 wonderful years,” she said.
The restaurant was not Rosina’s. The criminal complaint itself says: “The victim, Charlmaine Cordaro, owns Cordaro’s Restaurant. She owns the real estate, liquor license and all personal and business property.” But Rosina went on television and announced she was closing it because she was tired. Not because Charlmaine wanted it closed. Because Rosina wanted to retire. Her attorney was Fred Howell — the same Fred Howell who drafted the $1.00 deed transferring the property to Rosina, who later initiated the criminal complaint through his son’s office, and whose legal bills became the restitution demand. The Incident Report identifies Howell as representing “the victim, Charlmaine Cordaro.” The federal complaint disputes this: “This is not true. Howell represented Rosina Cordaro, Charlmaine’s daughter in connection with the estate dispute” (Am. Comp. fn. 2, Doc. 4 at 3).
And the claim that she “couldn’t find a buyer” contradicts the record. The AutoZone contract for $570,000 was signed in April 2022 — a year before this broadcast. Either the deal had already collapsed by 2023, which undercuts the criminal complaint’s claim that Joe’s April 2024 actions caused “$500,000, plus or minus, in expected profits” in damages — or the deal was alive and Rosina misrepresented the situation on camera.
The criminal case was framed as protecting Charlmaine from Joe. This 2023 clip shows Rosina making unilateral decisions about Charlmaine’s property, on camera, a year before anyone accused Joe of anything. The earliest documented evidence of Charlmaine’s cognitive impairment is Dr. Bennett’s letter, dated March 20, 2024. In 2023, when Rosina was announcing the closure and demolition, there was no documented incapacity, no triggered springing POA. Under what authority was Rosina deciding to shut down Charlmaine’s restaurant?
The evidence the case was built on
The criminal charge was Securing Execution of Documents by Deception — premised on the theory that Charlmaine lacked capacity and Joseph exploited her confusion. The prosecution’s evidentiary foundation rested on two pillars: a doctor’s letter and the observations of nursing staff. Both have problems the record documents.
On March 20, 2024, a letter from Dr. Paula Bennett was faxed to Fred Howell’s office. It stated Charlmaine was “cognitively impaired and unable to make decisions in her best interest.” The fax header shows the transmission time: 12:43 PM. The electronic signature reads: “Electronically signed by PAULA R BENNETT MD on 03/20/2024 at 03:13 PM.”
The letter arrived at Howell’s office two hours and thirty minutes before the doctor signed it.
A medical letter that reaches an attorney’s office before the doctor signs it suggests coordination. Whether Charlmaine authorized a HIPAA release directing Dr. Bennett to disclose her health status to Howell is unknown. What prompted the fax is unknown. What is known is that this was the prosecution’s sole medical documentation of incapacity, and two to three months before it was written, Charlmaine had allegedly signed an AutoZone Sale Agreement extension in her own capacity — not through Rosina’s power of attorney.
The second pillar was the nursing staff. The Affidavit of Probable Cause cites “the observations of Rosina Cordaro and the observations of many other people in the community and staff at Ellen Memorial” as the basis for believing Charlmaine lacked capacity. Those staff members reported to Tammy Altemier, the Director of Nursing at Ellen Memorial Healthcare Center. She held positions at the facility for 38 years. The facility’s own Facebook post celebrating her retirement said she “hired and trained so many of our great nurses that are still here today.” Her son wrote the Pre-Sentence Investigation that recommended Joseph Cordaro’s sentence.
The federal complaint alleges one more thing about the evidence. On April 19, 2024, Joseph allegedly videotaped his conversation with Charlmaine at Ellen Memorial. According to the complaint, the video captured Charlmaine answering questions correctly, explaining why she was signing documents, and telling a notary “because I love my son.” If the video exists and shows what the complaint describes, it directly contradicts the prosecution’s theory of incapacity.
Joseph’s phone was confiscated after his arrest. The DA’s office examined it closely enough to identify a call-recording app from 2016 and file 19 felony counts from it. Whether the DA’s office also found the April 2024 video, reviewed it, or disclosed it to the defense is a question the record does not yet answer.
Part 1 of 2. In Part 2: the nineteen time-barred felony charges filed seven days before the plea, the billing breakdown, who got paid, the post-conviction attorney whose sister billed the hours, the nolle prosequi that undid a conviction without anyone having to say why, and what the DA wrote to the Attorney General six days later.
Continue to Part 2: The Extraction →
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.