Surrogate’s Court Judge Arnold Ciaccio brings intelligence, compassion to court

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For one thing, he shares the third floor of the Hall of Justice with Family Court.
So it actually is a rare day when Surrogate’s Court Judge Arnold Ciaccio merely has to referee spitting contests of the rich and bereaved.
Last week, for example, he opened his courtroom to shelter refugees from a riot in the waiting area.
Only two people maced, Ciaccio reports, straight-faced.
“They took them out on stretchers right through there,” he says, pointing to the hall outside his judicial chambers.
For another thing, as Surrogate’s Court judge, he shares jurisdiction over adoptions with the Family Court judges.
He hooks up some 200 children with families each year.
Ciaccio now is on his third photo album: the judge and the kids; the parents and the kids; the judge and the parents and the kids.
“Adoptions are my favorite,” Ciaccio says. “They make it tough to be cynical.”
Harder to deal with are the medication hearings he holds when patients in state hospitals challenge their psychiatric treatment.
“Only occasionally do I get feedback on how things turn out,” Ciaccio says. “They come here; they’re frightened and confused. I get reports after the hearings. But I wish I could see for myself how the treatment works.”
And finally, everything under the law –and some that is not–tends to slide through Surrogate’s Court at one time or another.
Criminal matters impinge on parental-custody issues, civil rights come into play with the allegedly incompetent, and, of course, business law walks through almost everything that turns up.
Surprises are regular when Robert Lamb, public administrator, cleans up the affairs of the indigent, or apparently indigent.
In addition to the occasional bag of hoarded cash, the office that tidies up after those who die alone and penniless has found rare treasures. A stash of art works behind a partition in a riverfront shack brought more than $300,000 from a collector in New York City.
One thing that has yet to cross Ciaccio’s path is a will naming the deceased’s financial planner or investment adviser as executor of the estate.
But the judge has an eye peeled. Such situations are ripe for conflict.
“Of course, there is nothing inherently illegal in naming a financial planner as executor,” Ciaccio says.
“But this court does react to objections. If the widow or the children comes in and tells me there is a problem, something can be done.”
Double-dipping by attorneys–lawyers who collect a fee as attorney for the estate and a commission as executor–is “frowned on,” Ciaccio says, “but there are times when it is not inappropriate, as long as it is not abused.”
He recalls cracking down repeatedly on one chronic abuser.
The attorney had himself named executor in every will he drew up. As executor, he got a cut of the estate and power to hire the attorney of his choice to handle the estate’s legal affairs. He hired himself.
Ciaccio unhired him, time and again.
“Some of those wills had been written back in the 1940s and ’50s,” the judge recalls. “The heirs had never heard of this guy who was all of a sudden in charge of the estate.”
Family plus money plus business is the equation that usually gets a case before Ciaccio. Routine estate administration runs its course without him. But there is no lack of twists.
Even the most amicably managed business can blow up after the death of a principal brings simmering family feuds to a boil.
In fact, the companies that run smoothly and successfully for years may be the ones most likely to wind up in Surrogate’s Court.
“People are getting along; everything’s going well. Who thinks to put things in writing then?” Ciaccio asks.
Then death disrupts the family-business dynamic, a fight breaks out, and everybody runs to court.
And even the most professionally managed affairs can lead to problems.
Like the problem Ciaccio had with how Chase Manhattan Bank’s predecessor handled the estate of Rodney Janes.
Then Lincoln First Bank, it administered an estate that included securities worth more than $3.22 million at the time of Janes’ death. More than 71 percent of those shares were in Eastman Kodak Co. stock.
During the eight years the bank held the stock in the estate’s portfolio, Kodak plunged from $148 a share to $45 a share. Charities meant to benefit took exception.
There was no dispute the bank kept a heavy concentration of Kodak stock in the Janes estate portfolio. In fact, Lincoln stamped documents “CONCENTRATION” in big red letters.
The fight was over whether it was prudent for Lincoln to let the Kodak concentration sit for years, while the stock tanked.
“What appealed to me the most was the difference between what the bank had done with the Janes portfolio and what it had done with its own investment fund,” Ciaccio says.
Lincoln dumped its own Kodak stock as the price fell, but held on to Janes’ shares. That cost Chase more than $6 million, under Ciaccio’s ruling, one of the few trial court decisions to make it into the published volumes.
The decision, a landmark in establishing a measure of damages for such cases, is now on appeal.
Ciaccio’s legal background is in litigation. The Lincoln-Janes fight was far from his first.
His personal background lies in the sector of northeast Rochester that produced a crop of rough-and-ready judges that defies explanation.
Son of a union business agent and a working mother, he attended Rochester public schools, including Franklin High School.
“We thought it was a prep school. Actually, for us, it was,” Ciaccio recalls.
“We” includes U.S. District Judge Michael Telesca, another Franklin alumnus and a long-time friend of Ciaccio’s.
Ciaccio, Telesca will tell you, sounds like an Italian name. Actually, his old friend is Swiss.
“That’s part of the transformation that takes place when you go to Harvard Law School. If you start out as a working-class Democrat, you come out of Harvard, go to Wall Street, make millions and become a conservative Republican,” Telesca explains.
“Now in Arnie’s case, he was a Sicilian all his life, until he went off to school and joined a fraternity where they had all these rugs. It was called the House of Rugs. They wouldn’t let anyone but White Anglo-Saxon Protestants wash those rugs, let alone walk on them. That was the end of Arnie the Sicilian. Now he’s Swiss.”
There may be more affection than truth in Telesca’s tales of Ciaccio’s Swiss origins.
Telesca also loves to hold forth on how Ciaccio, “because his father had a steady job,” went to Harvard, while Telesca, who had it really tough, could afford only Buffalo Law School.
In truth, Telesca remembers watching Ciaccio slide, with apparently effortless brilliance, through years of undergraduate school, one year ahead of him.
“He is one of the brightest people I know. And the lawyers know it, too,” Telesca says. “He doesn’t take any nonsense.”
Ciaccio did get his degree from Harvard, after earning a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Rochester.
By that time, 1954, he had been married for three years to the former Victoria Merlini, and the first two of six children had been born.
All six now are graduates “of the most expensive universities in the country,” he says.
They include two doctors, one lawyer, a veterinarian, a lobbyist for the insurance industry and a Rochester City Council liaison.
And they have produced 13 grandchildren, with another on the way to son Christopher, a Rochester lawyer and father of two.
Over the course of 28 years in private practice, Ciaccio did a little bit of everything, mostly litigation.
For part of the 1960s and all of the 1970s, he also was town attorney in Irondequoit, then the biggest town of its class in the state.
“I didn’t know it at the time, but that was invaluable experience,” Ciaccio says of his stint in public law.
Going from lawyer to judge, he says, “just seemed like a natural progression. Like if you’re a priest, you want to be a bishop.”
But the surrogate’s bench, where he has spent the past 13 years, was not the seat upon which he had set his sights.
“I didn’t think I’d wind up as surrogate because Judge Telesca was here. He was here for 10 years. He was entrenched. Who would budge him? He was a legend,” Ciaccio says, only half-joking.
Then Telesca was named to the federal bench, and Ciaccio made his move in 1982.
“It looked like it was going to be a very tough campaign, but, as things turned out, it was a walk,” Ciaccio recalls.
A lifelong Democrat who had become active during the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy, he knew the odds were that he would be elected.
Telesca urged him to run: “Running on the Democratic ticket was like buying a lottery ticket. It’s not much, but it’s a chance.”
Ciaccio’s opponent had been Surrogate’s Court clerk for years, and knew all the ropes.
In fact, he knew too much. During the course of the campaign, Ciaccio’s opponent was accused of practicing private law out of the court chambers.
Those charges cost him Republican Party backing and handed the win to Ciaccio.
In 1992, Ciaccio ran unopposed, endorsed by Republicans and Democrats. Campaign contributions flowed in. He gave most of the money back.
“I didn’t need it. It was embarrassing. There was a news story about what a great thing I had done,” Ciaccio says. “Judges, unlike other campaigners, have to give back what they don’t spend. I only did what was legal.”
He took a pay cut to take the bench. So do most judges, he says. In New York City, lawyers straight out of school make more than county court judges.
That may change, if a Judges Association proposal to key judicial raises to the pay hikes given other court employees makes it through the Legislature.
“Judges would get annual increases geared to what other people in the courts are getting,” Ciaccio says. “The money would still be nowhere near private practice, but at least the judges would not have to go hat in hand to the Legislature every year.”
Most judges are in it for the satisfaction, not the money, he says.
“I think I got out of practicing law just in time,” Ciaccio observes. “Things were starting to change for lawyers. The fun started to go out of it. Normal courtesies were going by the board.”
Why is that?
Maybe because there are more lawyers fighting for the same amount of business. Maybe because legal professionalism is slipping as the public takes a dimmer and dimmer view of the profession.
“I don’t know why,” Ciaccio concludes. “But the camaraderie is gone.”
From the legal profession, perhaps, but not from Ciaccio’s life and times.
Every Monday for years, he has had lunch with Monroe County Sheriff Andrew Meloni, a friend of 30 years.
“We stay out of fancy restaurants. In good weather, we walk up Main Street to Midtown and get a slice of pizza,” Meloni says. “It’s a great time, to walk around downtown with him. He is a dear person. But all he talks about is golf.”
Pressed, Meloni admits there is some talk of courts and government, and lots of laughs at the Monday lunch table.
In the drear of February, Ciaccio is looking forward to 1996’s continuation of a tradition started by Telesca–“the traditional Italian midwinter feast for the homeless and poor, which happens to coincide with the Festival of St. Joseph, except that it’s not the Festival of St. Joseph because that’s religious and this is a public building.”
Anyway, Ciaccio, “a wonderful cook” (his words), will bring his specialty greens and beans to the table as the courtroom doors open “to feed the destitute trusts and estates lawyers,” court staff and other friends of the Surrogate’s Court.
Last year, he recalls, more than 200 people showed up. “This may be the year we have to move it to the War Memorial,” he thinks.
Turn people away, and there could be another riot on the third floor.