In our April 29, 2015 cover story, “Holy Reputations: In Danger of Imminent Collapse,” we reported at length on litigation involving a 2006 inspection by engineering firm O’Donnell & Naccarato (O&N) of the Belgravia Hotel in Center City. The firm also performed one of the inspections on St. Laurentius Church in Fishtown. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia contends this church is “in imminent danger of collapse.”

We conflated allegations in that story from one case with the outcome of a second case, both of which dealt with the same inspections by O&N at Belgravia. The first case was discontinued and never went to trial.

The same plaintiff joined the second case. Regarding that second case, we reported that O&N was “convicted of fraud-related charges.” In fact, the jury “held O&N liable” for “acting in a professionally negligent manner” in that they

• breached the Pennsylvania Uniform Condominium Act, and
• failed to uphold the fiduciary duty they owed their clients.

The plaintiffs in that case were awarded $350,000 in damages, according to a LexisNexis case summary. During the trial, a professional O&N engineer testified that although he signed off on the 2006 report, he didn’t inspect the Belgravia. An engineer-in-training at O&N did.

As we reported, the firm appealed this verdict. Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas denied the appeal. O&N appealed again to the Pennsylvania Superior Court and O&N has not as of yet paid out the damages pending the Superior Court’s decision.

We’d like to clarify that we didn’t use imprecise language out of malice, provoked or otherwise, borne by us against O&N. Rather, we conflated allegations from the first case with the verdict of the second, directly related case while sorting through the thousands of pages of legal documentation the two cases contain.

What first piqued our interest in this firm’s legal history was a series of articles published on O&N in the mid-1990s. The firm, according to The Morning Call of Allentown, was accused in court of

“…bribing a contractor when the new Bucks County Prison was being built in the early 1980s… Contractor Franklin Skepton had been fired from the job in 1983 for alleged breach of contract.”

Skepton claimed he was actually fired over

“his refusal to compromise on the quality of soil that would be the prison’s foundation… After refusing Naccarato’s offers of more county work in exchange for silence on the prison project, Skepton said, he was fired. After two days of testimony, the case was settled out-of-court for $360,000.”

In 1991, O&N donated $11,200 to the Bucks County Republican Committee. Bucks County that same year awarded the firm $373,750 in no-bid contracts. The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office investigated O&N and one other firm, then filed charges against both in Dauphin County’s Court of Common Pleas, alleging violations of the state election code.

The code requires that anyone who donates more than $1,000 to a political campaign publicly report those gifts, which O&N and the other firm didn’t, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer.

O&N settled out of the charges the Attorney General filed, agreed to pay fees and spend a short time on probation. We requested from the Attorney General’s Office a copy of that complaint against O&N, though it wasn’t immediately available. We’ve mailed a request for that document to the Dauphin County Court of Common Pleas and will publish their response upon receipt.

[UPDATE: May 26, 2015: We received a letter from the Dauphin County Court of Common Pleas]

In a response letter, the court clerk explains that the

“office does not have or is unable accommodate your request… No such records [were] located. The [Inquierer] article reads that the case will be ‘expunged’ upon successful completion. Therefore, if the case was expunged it would have been destroyed.”

These cases, which are all public record, then led us to the two Belgravia Hotel cases and the jury awarded.

Files pertaining to the two Belgravia cases may be downloaded from the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas website. Case ID: 130101614. Case Caption: ANOLIK ETAL V. 1911 BELGRAVIA ASSOCIATES, LP. Case ID: 100500946. Case Caption: THE BELGRAVIA CONDOMINIUM ASSOCIATION V. 1811 BELGRAVIA ASSOCIATES, LP. Information about O&N’s appeal in the Pennsylvania Superior Court is available at their website on docket #385 EDA 2014.