Federal agents search home of Mellow aide

FBI and IRS agents investigating Pennsylvania's highest-ranking state Senate Democrat, Robert J. Mellow of Lackawanna County, have searched the home of a longtime aide tied to a property the senator co-owned and rented to himself, sources close to the investigation said.

Federal agents, the sources said, are scrutinizing a deal in which Mellow located his district office in the building owned at various times by aide Gabriel J. Giordano; the aide's wife, Celestine P. Giordano; the senator's wife; and ultimately the senator himself.

The Senate spent more than $200,000 in taxpayer dollars in rent, The Inquirer revealed last year.

Federal agents raided Mellow's home and district office on Friday, the day they searched the Giordano home. The couple could not be reached for comment Monday.

Mellow has repeatedly said he has done nothing wrong and that details of the property at issue are "fuzzy."

The Giordano home is in Jefferson Township, along a road that borders Lake Spangenberg, northeast of Scranton.

Giordano served as an aide to Mellow from 1973 to 2004.

In 1990, the Giordanos bought a two-story property on Main Street in Peckville for $90,000. Months later, Mellow moved his district office there.

In 2001, Celeste Giordano and Mellow's then-wife, Diane, formed a corporation called Brad Inc. that purchased the Main Street property for $1.

Diane Mellow, who has since been interviewed by the FBI, has said that Brad Inc. and the Main Street property purchase were something of a mystery to her. "I just signed what [the senator] put in front of me," the former wife told The Inquirer last year.

The senator's divorce lawyer, John J. Cerra, has described her FBI interview as a by-product of a "sour grapes" effort to obtain more alimony.

When the Mellows divorced in 2006, the senator assumed his ex-wife's share in Brad Inc., to which the Senate continued to pay rent for the district office.

The senator sold the building in 2008 for $350,000 but still occupies rental space there.

FBI spokesman J.J. Klaver yesterday confirmed that federal agents "were present" at the Giordano home last week, but declined to comment further.

In addition to the federal investigation, the state Ethics Commission, which has barred legislators from renting space from themselves at state expense, has been scrutinizing the deal.

Following Friday's federal raid, Mellow's press secretary, Lisa Scullin, said that he was cooperating with authorities.

He is the Senate's longest-serving member, having been elected in 1970, but announced this year that he would not seek reelection.