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It's almost as if there's a magnetic force attracting Mahoning County Clerk of Courts Michael Ciccone to controversy.
The remarkable thing is Ciccone has been in office for only about 19 months.
Ciccone first garnered attention back in December 2023 when he served as the attorney for 28 voters of Jennifer Ciccone who contested the results of the Struthers Municipal Court election that she lost by 10.28%.
Michael Ciccone's complaint claimed, without providing details, that there was massive fraud in that race that James Melone convincingly won. A week after filing the lawsuit, Ciccone dismissed the case.
He then ran for clerk of courts in 2024 and, like a number of other Republicans, he successfully rode President Donald Trump's coattails to elected office.
What Ciccone has done since he started serving in January 2025 is what's received so much negative attention.
Ciccone fired key employees and others left, supposedly because of having to deal with him, leaving a number of the office's responsibilities in chaos. That included the title office and its finances.
The financial issues were kept quiet until I reported July 28 that Ciccone's office had failed to file routine monthly reconciliation reports for more than a year with the last one submitted in March 2025, during his third month in office.
Based on the recommendation of county Auditor Ralph Meacham, the county commissioners voted April 28 to pay up to $25,000 to the Canfield accounting firm of Schroedel, Scullin & Bestic LLC to do the work.
When SSB discovered how bad the situation was in the clerk of courts' office -- which included numerous bounced checks of more than $1 million because money was put into the wrong accounts -- the commissioners voted July 18 to amend the agreement by an additional $50,000, paying the firm a total of $75,000 to clean up the clerk's books.
The day after last week's article ran, Ciccone emailed me a response contending the issue predated his administration, other county departments used the same accounting firm "to address similar reconciliation concerns," and Meacham took eight months to notify his office that the reports were late.
Meacham called Ciccone's written response "false and completely inaccurate. This is all nonsense. Any representations to the contrary are erroneous."
County commissioners also said there was never an issue with the finances at the clerk of courts' office until Ciccone took over and it was Meacham that brought the problems to their attention.
Geno DiFabio said the "books are bad. They didn't inherit bad books. They created this situation. To me, it shouldn't have been necessary. It's unprecedented."
But in his email, Ciccone wrote the financial situation dates back to 2022 and "we remain confident that the independent audit process will document when these deficiencies originated and provide a complete factual record."
Meacham pointed out that if there were problems for that long, the county's finances couldn't have been audited by the state and the supposed issues would have been reported by the state auditor. That didn't happen.
When I asked Ciccone to respond to Meacham's statements and explain the bounced checks, he didn't.
Ciccone's initial email was a surprise as he has repeatedly ignored numerous requests by me for comments since Oct. 19, two days after firing Jennifer Ciccone as his chief deputy and chief of staff. On Oct. 17, she posted several incriminating and embarrassing text messages from and photos of her former boss and once close friend on Facebook.
Among the Michael Ciccone texts were racial slurs and insults about elected officials.
Since then, Ciccone's been in the spotlight for a series of issues stemming from Jennifer Ciccone's posts.
Leaders in the county Republican Party, including DiFabio and Meacham, called on Ciccone, a fellow Republican, to resign Oct. 18. Ciccone sent me an email statement a day later, writing that he wouldn't resign. Until last week, that was his last correspondence to me.
The two political parties announced Dec. 19 it would seek to remove Ciccone through legal action that started in January. There has been little movement on that effort.
The political parties accuse Ciccone of repeatedly abusing the authority of his office, using "discriminatory and degrading language," and failing to "perform core statutory duties and administered the clerk's office in a manner that undermined fiscal integrity, employee safety and public confidence in the judicial system."
The Ohio Clerk of Courts Association censured Ciccone in November and then removed him from all committees and asked him to resign from the organization a month later. Ciccone has refused to resign.
The commissioners suspended Ciccone's access privileges in December to the courthouse entrances, except the main one, for what they said were violations of security rules and protocols. At the time, DiFabio said that was an "unprecedented" decision.
Thais Scott of Girard, a former clerk of courts' administrator who is black, filed a lawsuit July 21 against Ciccone and his office contending he fired her after she reported to the human resources department that he called her a racial slur. Scott is suing Ciccone for racial discrimination, retaliation and having a hostile work environment.
Ciccone fired Scott on Dec. 4, less than a year after she started working for him, without providing a reason or explanation for her termination, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit contends the firing was "racially motivated and without just cause and was made in bad faith." The lawsuit included text messages from Ciccone to Jennifer Ciccone that the latter provided to Scott.
Ciccone owes $1,385.53 in delinquent property taxes for his house at 18 S. Edgehill Ave. in Austintown, which is co-owned with Patrick W. Ciccone.
Ciccone's wife, Emily, filed for divorce Oct. 7 and then dismissed it two weeks later. Ciccone then filed for legal separation on July 27, four days after an alleged incident occurred between the two. But Emily Ciccone on Tuesday dropped her request for a domestic violence protection order against her estranged husband.
David Skolnick covers politics for the Tribune Chronicle and The Vindicator.