Protection in the Legal System for Another Salamanca Police Officer

This post concerns the issue of preferential treatment in the case of a former police officer guilty of a serious crime in Salamanca, N. Y.  As made clear in this blog, on the very day before my brother Mark’s truck suspiciously went up in flames in the field across from his house in nearby Great Valley on September 23, 2003, then Salamanca police officer Mark Marowski called in to have my brother picked up for DWI following an argument they had at a local club.  Marowski himself was never investigated, even though he had publicly shown hostility to my brother on numerous occasions and reportedly was having an affair with my brother’s wife Susan.

The specific case at hand concerns a retired police officer who appears not to have received punishment appropriate to the crime he committed.  An article on the case, which came to my attention only recently, was written by respected journalist Dan Herbeck, who co-authored a book on the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, and was posted in the online Buffalo News in August 2012.  According to Herbeck’s article, Donald John, the owner of an internet smoke shop with its office in Salamanca, "illegally sold millions of dollars of tax-free cigarettes to New Jersey businesses."  John’s company, All-American Tobacco, which seems to have opened in 2003, came under federal investigation at some point.  John apparently became a confidential informant, and the manager of his business, Rita Roosa, became the focus of the investigation.  She and her husband Joseph Roosa ended up being charged in 2008.

Herbeck’s article reports that, according to Joseph Roosa and the lawyers for both Roosas, Donald John asked Mr. Roosa to provide office space for the business he intended to start and hired Mrs. Roosa as the manager, and John made most of the profits himself.  According to Rita Roosa’s attorney, she "asked Don John again and again if what they were doing was legal, and he kept assuring her that it was legal."  All charges against Joseph Roosa were subsequently dropped.  But, as the article observes, since Rita Roosa "was actively involved in the company's day-to-day transactions, she decided to plead guilty to conspiracy and contraband cigarette trafficking.  A judge sentenced her to nine months in prison in January 2011 and ordered her to make $3.9 million restitution to the State of New Jersey."

Here is what Joseph Roosa states in Herbeck’s article about their earnings from John’s business: "I got $10,000 from them for ten months' rent, and that was all I got"; his wife, as manager of All-American Tobacco, was initially not paid very much, but at a later point got "$80,000 to $100,000 a year."  As Mrs. Roosa’s attorney put it, "She is a very sweet, hard-working woman who did what she was told and absolutely did not deserve to go to prison in this case."  Joseph Roosa himself was required to surrender "over $2.5 million in business properties to the federal government as a partial settlement of a $3.9 million restitution case against his wife."

As Herbeck indicates, it wasn’t until March 2011 that Federal prosecutors changed their minds about Donald John and charged him "with two felony counts - conspiracy and trafficking in contraband cigarettes."  Like Rita Roosa, John pleaded guilty to conspiracy and contraband cigarette trafficking.  But, as the article makes clear, his sentence was very different from hers: three years on probation, eight months with an electronic monitoring device on his ankle, a $250,000 forfeiture, and about $2.4 million in restitution ($1.5 million less than Rita Roosa).  In addition, as Herbeck indicates from court documents, John was required to pay New Jersey his $2.4 million in restitution at the rate of only $200 a month.  At that rate, explains Herbeck, "it would take him almost 990 years to complete those payments."

As Mrs. Roosa’s attorney surmises in the article, it likely wasn’t "any coincidence that the leniency was shown to Donald John because he is a member of the Seneca Nation's Tribal Council, the Indian tribe's highest governing body.  Or that he is a former Cattaraugus County sheriff's deputy.  Or that he agreed to act as a government informant."

It is not noted in the article that Donald John was also a Salamanca police officer, as documented by a photo of the police banquet in the Salamanca Press back in 2003.

With his long history as both a Cattaraugus County deputy sheriff and a Salamanca police officer, justice was obviously not meted out to Donald John with anything like the same kind of severity as it was to his employee.  But look at the treatment given to Salamanca policeman Mark Marowski.  He should have been a person of interest during the investigation into my brother’s death in 2003.  But his name doesn’t even appear in the police report.