Lawyer

In 1991, Msgr. William J. Lynn wrote a memo outlining his interview with a man who said he had been molested by the Rev. Michael McCarthy, a longtime teacher at Cardinal O'Hara High School. But Lynn made a mistake, at least in the eyes of his boss at the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Lynn had told the accuser that his was not the first complaint against McCarthy. "Unnecessary statement," the Rev. James E. Molloy, then the assistant vicar for administration, scrawled in the margins of the memo.

Joseph Alessandroni Jr., 89, of Overbrook Farms, who had thousands of clients as a Philadelphia lawyer, died Tuesday of pneumonia at home. Born in West Philadelphia, Mr. Alessandroni graduated in 1934 from Friends Central High School, where he was remembered for pitching a no-hitter. He earned a bachelor's degree in education from Villanova University in 1938 and a law degree in 1942 from Temple University. He was the fifth member of the Alessandroni family to become a lawyer. Before joining the Marines in 1942, he married Helen McSorley.

Erinn Cosby, who left a Rhode Island drug rehabilitation facility nine days ago, said she began a cocaine habit four years ago but her parents had no inkling of it until she told them in a letter six months ago. At that time, her habit had reached $200 a day. "People see Bill Cosby as a super dad," the comedian's 23-year-old daughter is quoted as saying in this week's National Enquirer. "But I'm proof that drug and alcohol tragedies can happen even in the most loving families. " The TV star is quoted as saying that he responded to her situation with "tough love" and advised her to seek treatment.

A former Port Richmond pastor is among the Catholic priests who will be permanently removed from ministry over child-sex abuse allegations, according to a lawyer for a man who said the cleric raped him. Archdiocese of Philadelphia officials notified the accuser on Thursday that Msgr. Francis J. Feret won't be reinstated, attorney Daniel Monahan said. Feret, 75, spent more than a decade as pastor of St. Adalbert in the city's Port Richmond section, and twice as long as a teacher and administrator at Cardinal Dougherty High School.

From a 400-acre campus tucked away in the Pocono foothills, spiritual leader Sri Swami Rama presided over a veritable New Age conglomerate. Founded in 1971, Rama's Himalayan International Institute of Yoga, Science and Philosophy in Honesdale offered holistic medicine retreats for weekenders, ran a publishing house, and opened branches in seven U.S. cities. Rama, who died in India last year, attracted a following of full-time institute residents - many of them young women - who saw him as a saintly figure.

TATTLE WROTE about the plight of Canadian sex-change beauty-pageant contestant Jenna Talackova and our readers responded. Now Donald Trump 's Miss Universe Organization has announced that it might reverse an earlier decision and allow the transgender woman to compete in the finals. Jenna was born with male Jenna-talia (a lack of Talackovaries), leading organizers to disqualify her last month as a finalist for Miss Universe Canada. You'd think the Donald would respect a self-made woman.

The day Dorleen Burklund pumped eight bullets into her estranged husband, their only child was outside the family's home in upper Bucks County. Gabriel Burklund heard the shots. The young adult watched as his mother left the nine-room house, walked to her car in the circular driveway, grabbed a box of .38-caliber bullets, and went back in, court records say. Then, as his father lay dead in a second-floor bedroom, he waited outside with his mother for the police she had summoned.

BELLEFONTE - Former Pennsylvania State University assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky's lawyer said after a short pretrial hearing Thursday that he expected the presiding judge to soon dismiss defense motions to have the child sexual abuse charges thrown out, but he hoped he would allow them to be refiled after more evidence is disclosed by prosecutors. During a 20-minute hearing attended by the retired defensive coordinator and his wife, Sandusky defense attorney Joe Amendola withdrew his attempt to prevent the Attorney General's Office from using at trial secretly recorded conversations between Sandusky and two of the 10 boys he is accused of sexually abusing.

THE LETTER ARRIVED ONE DAY last July, out of the blue. Cleo Priest didn't think much of it. The return address was David M. Weinfeld's. Her lawyer. Big deal, thought Cleo, opening the taped-shut envelope. Just another link in the long, confusing paper chain that had begun six years earlier, after her husband died from lung cancer and Weinfeld filed suit on her behalf against a group of asbestos companies. There had been affidavits, interrogatories - all sorts of paperwork that Cleo, being a teller at the Garden State racetrack and not a lawyer, did not really understand.

Remember the 1993 movie "Philadelphia"? A lawyer played by Tom Hanks is fired from a Philadelphia law firm after it is revealed he has AIDS. William J. O'Brien, one of the city's premiere trial lawyers, had a similar case in 1994. He represented the law firm of Kohn Swift & Graf, which was sued in federal court by a 30-year-old lawyer who contended he was fired by the firm because he had HIV. Both the real case and the movie case wound up being settled out of court. For a lawyer renowned for his work on commercial litigation, involving such fields as product liability, insurance fraud, malpractice claims, government relations and the like, Bill was involved in a number of high-profile cases that made headlines.

Q: I am an attorney. Several years ago I had a case in which my "adversary" was a nice, very attractive woman. In 2009, I friended her on Facebook. In 2010, she updated her Facebook profile to indicate she was in a relationship. But she has not posted any new photos of herself with her boyfriend in more than a year. She has also not made any mention of him at all on Facebook. For a couple of weeks recently, her relationship status disappeared. Then it was updated to indicate she is in a relationship — but no new pictures.

IVAN RODRIGUEZ is guilty of stealing a motorcycle at gunpoint and Donta Craddock is guilty of the same robbery and of involuntary manslaughter or vehicular homicide, but neither murdered four people killed by the speeding getaway Pontiac Trans Am minutes after the June 2009 robbery, the two defendants' attorneys told a Philadelphia jury during opening statements Wednesday. Craddock, 21, who was behind the wheel and paralyzed from the waist down during the fiery crash, sped away not because he was fleeing the robbery but because he thought that a pursuing police officer was going to arrest him on a warrant for not returning to a juvenile-detention center after Easter break, defense attorney Michael Farrell said.

In 1991, Msgr. William J. Lynn wrote a memo outlining his interview with a man who said he had been molested by the Rev. Michael McCarthy, a longtime teacher at Cardinal O'Hara High School. But Lynn made a mistake, at least in the eyes of his boss at the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Lynn had told the accuser that his was not the first complaint against McCarthy. "Unnecessary statement," the Rev. James E. Molloy, then the assistant vicar for administration, scrawled in the margins of the memo.

The top lawyer for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia said Monday that key aides to Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua lied when they told him they did not know what happened to a secret list of 35 priests suspected of sexually abusing children. "Everyone I spoke to said they didn't know where it was, and they didn't have a copy of it," Timothy Coyne testified Monday at the landmark conspiracy and clergy sex-abuse trial. He later added, "Somebody lied to me — or a lot of people lied to me. " The list included diagnosed pedophiles and priests who remained in active ministry despite admitting or being accused of abusing minors.

Travolta accuser No. 2: Arbitration The second Anonymous Masseur who lodged a sexual battery complaint against John Travolta is willing to withdraw his lawsuit and enter arbitration, says his lawyer. "We can set up our own private trial. I'm willing to do that," Okorie Okorocha tells the New York Daily News, "and I've proposed that to [Travolta's lawyer] Marty Singer. " Adds Okorocha, "He hasn't agreed, but he hasn't said no. " Travolta has dismissed the masseurian claims against him as bogus.

Philadelphia lawyer Graham McDonald was friends with Mitt Romney and other boys who allegedly attacked a prep-school classmate in the 1960s for his appearance. And though McDonald did not take part in the attack, he recalls Romney as a tireless prankster who would take things to "the edge. " McDonald said he wasn't there and did not remember the episode described in Thursday's Washington Post: In 1965 at the all-boys Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Romney, then a senior, allegedly led a pack of young men who pinned down a classmate while Romney clipped off the crying boy's long hair with scissors.

GREENSBORO, N.C. - A federal judge refused to throw out campaign corruption charges against John Edwards on Friday, meaning the former presidential candidate will have to present his case to a jury. Lawyers for Edwards argued before U.S. District Court Judge Catherine C. Eagles that prosecutors failed to prove their client intentionally violated the law or that some of the alleged offenses occurred in the Middle District of North Carolina, the venue where he was indicted. After 21/2 hours of arguments from the defense and rebuttal from the prosecution, the judge ruled quickly from the bench that the government had met its basic burden under the law. "We will let the jury decide," Eagles said.

Philadelphia lawyer Graham McDonald was friends with Mitt Romney and other boys who allegedly attacked a prep school classmate in the 1960s for his appearance. And though McDonald did not take part in the attack, he recalls Romney as a tireless prankster who would take things to "the edge. " McDonald said he wasn't there and did not remember the episode described in Thursday's Washington Post: In 1965 at the all-boys Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Romney, then a senior, allegedly led a pack of young men who pinned down a classmate while Romney clipped off the crying boy's long hair with a scissors.

Robert Mongeluzzi, the Philadelphia plaintiff's lawyer representing families of two Hungarian tourists killed in the duck-boat accident, is known both for his surgically precise trial technique and for the hundreds of millions of dollars he has won in verdicts and settlements for clients. Mongeluzzi is a founding partner of his firm, Saltz Mongeluzzi Barrett & Bendesky P.C., of Center City, and chairs its workplace-accident and product-liability practice groups. His trial trademarks: preparing meticulously and putting complex issues of legal negligence into simple, emotionally accessible language that jurors can relate to. "He is able to be very diplomatic, but he is also very aggressive when it comes to causes that he believes in," said Steven G. Wigrizer, a plaintiff's lawyer with the firm of Wapner Newman Wigrizer Brecher & Miller who has known Mongeluzzi for decades.

Remember the 1993 movie "Philadelphia"? A lawyer played by Tom Hanks is fired from a Philadelphia law firm after it is revealed he has AIDS. William J. O'Brien, one of the city's premiere trial lawyers, had a similar case in 1994. He represented the law firm of Kohn Swift & Graf, which was sued in federal court by a 30-year-old lawyer who contended he was fired by the firm because he had HIV. Both the real case and the movie case wound up being settled out of court. For a lawyer renowned for his work on commercial litigation, involving such fields as product liability, insurance fraud, malpractice claims, government relations and the like, Bill was involved in a number of high-profile cases that made headlines.