Ex-sheriff’s clerk gets day in jail for tip about raid
A former clerk in the Allegheny County sheriff’s office who tipped off gang members in the West End about an FBI raid was sentenced Monday to a day in prison and three years of probation.
U.S. District Judge Arthur Schwab ordered that Erika Romanowski, 41, must serve half a year of home detention after her day in the lockup. She also has to do 100 hours of community service.
Romanowski, who lives in Knoxville, had pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice.
She had worked in a secure sheriff’s office space at the county courthouse and was privy to some aspects of a federal investigation of the Greenway Boy Killas, a violent gang operating in the former Greenway housing project.
When agents from the FBI and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration were planning a raid on the gang last year, Romanowski leaked information to two accused members, reputed ringleader Jewell Hall and his girlfriend, Joelle Harris.
Her motive was to protect Hall from the raid, prosecutors said.
The U.S. attorney’s office said she heard an officer at the sheriff’s office talking about the raid and relayed that information to her friend, Joelle Harris, and to
Hall in calls from February through April 2018.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Olshan argued for prison for Romanowski, saying she knew that what she was doing was wrong and did it anyway, placing law officers with whom she worked at risk.
He said her actions “were borne of cold opportunism and, as she has admitted, a corrupt desire to help Hall evade federal law enforcement. In this regard, the defendant acted in real time to thwart the important and commendable work of her own colleagues to dismantle a notorious narcotics operation.”
She also lied repeatedly when the FBI confronted her.
Mr. Olshan asked the judge to give her 18 to 24 months behind bars.
Romanowski’s lawyer, Stanley Greenfield, said probation was warranted. He argued that his client was merely calling a longtime friend to alert her to the presence of law enforcement, as is common in her community, and had no connection to the drug conspiracy.
“It is important for the court to understand that in the culture of Ms. Romanowski’s community, it is common for friends and neighbors to make others aware of the presence of police, or investigators of any stripe, even in the absence of any specific knowledge as to why the police had come,” he said in court papers.
He said she shouldn’t have lied to the FBI, but she did because she was afraid.
Fourteen reputed members of the Greenway Boy gang were indicted in June. The case is pending.