Letter of complaint sent September 18, 2014 by Walter Krochmal, a Federally Certified Court Interpreter and Expert Witness. to Congressman Joe Crowley and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand reporting a raft of human rights violations against him including the illegal, abusive and malicious witholding of more than $31,000 in fees for his work in the matter of U.S. vs. Edgardo Cabrera and Perry Burns Crim. # 08-70 in 2008-2009, and which has persisted for these 5 years past.

1. from the desk of Walter L. Krochmal
The Honorable Joe Crowley
Congresssman for the 14th District of New York
2800 Bruckner Blvd., Suite 201 Bronx, NY 10465
E-mail: walterkrochmal@aol.com Mobile: (917) 549-7650 URL:
www.sonichoop.com
18 September, 2014
To Congressman Crowley and Local and National Elected Officials:
I request your most urgent intervention to remedy a raft of egregious human rights violations
committed against me by the United States Attorney’s Office of Newark, New Jersey, in the form of a
personal vendetta spearheaded by then-Assistant United States Attorney Mr. Andrew Carey and
related to the Expert Witness services I provided to the District as a freelance Federally Certified
Court Interpreter, in U.S. vs. Edgardo Cabrera and Perry Burns Crim. # 08-70, in 2008-2009.
Principal among the many violations, although not by far the only one or the gravest among them, is
the illegal, abusive and malicious witholding of more than $31,000 in fees for my work on
the case for these 5 years past. I seek through your intervention full and immediate payment of
this amount including any and all interests, late payment fees, penalties, additional charges and
other damages accruable to me by law. This is a particularly troubling incident that is part of an
overall abusive culture targeting freelance and independent contractors such as myself with a war
of financial attrition that has clearly been allowed to fester in this District as well as other federal
agencies where a variety of reckless, discriminatory and unfair payment practices deprive us of the
fruits of our labor and inflict extreme hardship on us and our families. I include more information
on this phenomenon at the end of this letter.
I seek your intervention having thoroughly exhausted resources of civilized dialogue including
compromise and the legal avenue. As regards the latter, the attorneys I sought out -- whose
professional ethics swore them to defend me from the predatory behavior of this power abuser --
abandoned my cause and should be deemed unfit to practice law in this or any state. I shall name
them forthwith. The events described above took place under Chris Christie as US Attorney for the
District of New Jersey in Newark. Mr. Carey, now Middlesex County Prosecutor, hired me then to
provide transcriptions and translations of a certain amount of recorded conversations between
several defendants in the case above. Shortly after I started, Carey began increasing the work load,
despite Mr. Christie’s written promise that the total amount of work would be less. I twice offered
Mr. Carey a revised estimate to reflect the change order, and twice he vehemently insisted that I not
worry about revised estimates, that we would square accounts once the extremely pressing
deadline had been met. I proceeded to work in good faith based on Mr. Carey’s assurances, and did
not sign or return the paperwork that he gave me early on because the order had changed.
Throughout the assignment Mr. Carey and his colleague, Brooke Elizabeth Carey, made ample
display of administrative bungling, wastefulness and incompetence which progressed to a pressure
cooker environment of constant harassment, denigration, and even bullying in an attempt to

2. from the desk of Walter L. Krochmal
influence my translation. Ultimately, the psychological coercion became so severe that I had to
aggressively warn both prosecutors to step back and respect my sworn neutrality.
Letter to Congressman Joe Crowley (page 2 of 3)
At the end of the assignment, my bill reflected a slight increase to somewhat compensate for Mr.
Carey’s 60% increase in the workload. Mr. Carey then seized on minor problems with a timesheet to
initiate a full-blown billing dispute based on patently fabricated accusations that I had defrauded
the federal government by overbilling it, a felony charge. Seeing Mr. Carey’s willingness to play dirty
and the deep personal animus he exhibited toward me, I began to seek redress elsewhere in the
system.
I wrote to Judge William Martini, who presided over the case, with a compromise offer that I asked
him to relay to Mr. Carey and which represented a financial loss to me while seeking to preserve
good relations with the District, as I had done work for several prosecutors there before this
incident. His Honor’s deputy informed me the judge could do nothing. I also wrote to Ralph Marra
and Paul Fishman, former and current US Attorneys at the District, who simply reiterated Mr.
Carey’s spurious accusations. I visited the Interpreters Office in the District. Nothing. I approached
law firms, scholars, lawyers, legal clinics and non-profit “legal service providers,” none of whom
would take my case on and some of which did not even bother to answer emails or telephone calls. I
then contacted attorney Dawn Cardi, who took me on as a client to great fanfare in the spring of
2009. Her call to Mr. Carey in my presence that day elicited a suddenly conciliatory tone from Mr.
Carey, who stated simply that he wanted an accurate invoice so he could pay me. Upon my return
from a trip abroad shortly thereafter, I followed up with Ms. Cardi, however she never responded.
Next Dan Johnston and Elise Gerontianos took my case on in the spring of 2010. Mr. Johnston had
me work on an extremely detailed affidavit, promising to get me paid and to “finesse it” so I could
work again in the District, while also promising a more contentious approach if Mr. Carey played
any games. Mr. Johnston made repeated promises to me that Mr. Carey would pay him and he
would then take out his fees and pay me the remainder. Mr. Johnston slowly and subtly turned
against me with repeated and very aggressive attempts to railroad me, working to advance Mr.
Carey’s campaign against me. I finally presented to him an affidavit for $31,000. In the end, Johnston
submitted me to what he knew was extremely injurious, cruel behavior by allowing Mr. Carey to
pay out an arbitrary amount to the Department of Education (half the amount that I submitted in
my affidavit, and much less than the amount Carey’s district approved for the original assignment),
which the Department applied in its entirety to outstanding student loan debts. When I complained
to Johnston that Carey was supposed to pay Johnston and then Johnston would pay me, Johnston
simply responded that “If that’s what he thinks he owes you, that’s what he owes you” and
abandoned my case. He continues to bill me to this day for his services. Both he and Ms. Cardi and
their associates will have much to say about what gave them the incentive to violate a fundamental
tenet of the law and abandon a client.
E-mail: walterkrochmal@aol.com Mobile: (917) 549-7650 URL:
www.sonichoop.com

3. from the desk of Walter L. Krochmal
Mr. Carey has carried out this campaign against me through multiple breaches of contract, deceitful
statements, broken oral and written promises, administrative irregularities and violations,
defamation and character assassination and actions that raise more than a suspicion of financial
impropriety. He showed outright contempt for federal law, his own District rules, my attorneys, the
legal process itself and the standards of my profession which he can reasonably be expected to
know. He blacklisted me in his District in an attempt to interfere with my present and future
economic opportunities there. I suspect that Mr. Carey unbeknownst to me may have also
undertaken covert actions using his ample resources
Letter to Congressman Joe Crowley (page 3 of 3)
and clearance as a government official to inflict further pain on me now and in the future. He
availed himself of accomplices, witting and unwitting, throughout government, all of which merits a
full investigation. I have in my possession an extensive and voluminous paper trail to substantiate
all of the above statements which will shock the conscience of those among us who believe citizens
have a reasonable expectation to be treated with respect when providing good and valuable
services to the federal legal system, particularly as an Expert Witness in charge of providing
testimony essential to his case.
The well-oiled machinery and calculated callousness of this process suggests Mr. Carey and others
in the Newark District have done this many times before, and I believe that bringing this incident to
light will encourage others who have suffered similar problems to seek some level of justice. I did
observe similar behavior as an Expert Witness to Ms. Marion Percell at the same District
immediately before Mr. Carey’s assignment, and in fact I believe Mr. Carey hired me based on her
recommendation. Ms. Percell was at the time Senior Litigation Counsel. Because of my complete
näiveté regarding the sinister side of some government officials and the fact that this was my first
large independent job directly with a District, I was eager to establish a good working relationship
and thus did not document her operational practices. The parallel behaviors, however, included
offering me a certain amount of work at the beginning for a certain amount, then bombarding me
with additional work by e-mail, regular mail and even delivered by an agent to my house; not
offering me additional pay (as Carey did) and flatly refusing to pay more when asked to do so. Ms.
Percell also micromanaged my translation, in a similar attempt to subtly seize control of it. She has
much to say about the procedures in her District because as Senior Litigation Counsel, she hired
translators to provide this line of work to the District. I can point out other irregularities I observed
as her Expert Witness, and our e-mail communications can be retrieved to reveal what transpired.
Although these behaviors gave me misgivings about Mr. Carey, his promises to square up afterward
assuaged them. He clearly played on my good faith and ignorance of this predatory culture.
This, as I said before, is not an isolated case. In 8 years as a freelance Federally Certified Court
Interpreter I have complained repeatedly to the CJA Office and the USAO in the Southern District of
E-mail: walterkrochmal@aol.com Mobile: (917) 549-7650 URL:
www.sonichoop.com

4. from the desk of Walter L. Krochmal
New York about onerous billing procedures, routine witholding of payment for months (up to a
year), the reckless loss of vouchers, surly attitudes and reprisals against those who dare to
complain. I also have extensive documentation of this. These offices also owe me penalties and late
payment fees that I hope to somehow collect.
People are frightened to denounce this for fear of losing work as “troublemakers,” and my actions
may endanger my contractual opportunities, too, however I cannot condone this injustice. The time
has come to end these practices and protect the rights of a highly vulnerable class of workers whose
ranks are swelling in the New Economy. I urge you to join this struggle to purge the federal
government of those unfit to serve and help my colleagues and I enjoy the monies we work so hard
for. Thank you.
Walter Krochmal
Federally Certified Court Interpreter
E-mail: walterkrochmal@aol.com Mobile: (917) 549-7650 URL:
www.sonichoop.com