Bribery, biological clock fueled sperm-smuggling ring

HARRISBURG, Pa. -- It must have seemed like a bargain to New York mobster Antonino Parlavecchio and his wife.

For about two years, they paid a guard at Allenwood Federal Prison $300 or less per trip to smuggle Parlavecchio's semen from the prison, where he was doing time for racketeering, to Maria, who was desperately trying to get pregnant.

But guard Troy Kemmerer turned out to be not much of a bargain after all.

A woman who said she was the girlfriend of an inmate agreed to pay him as much as $5,000 -- a nice bonus on top of Kemmerer's annual salary of $35,799 -- to smuggle out her boyfriend's semen.

It would be the last smuggling deal Kemmerer would pursue at Allenwood -- and extinguished Parlavecchio's hopes of having her husband's child before she turned 40.

The "girlfriend" was a cop, the inmate was cooperating with federal prosecutors, and Kemmerer soon found himself, the Parlavecchios, and another man charged with running the most unusual of several different smuggling schemes that authorities were slowly unraveling at Allenwood.

Kemmerer pleaded guilty to bribery and is awaiting sentencing on up to 15 years in prison. The others pleaded to less serious charges: Maria Parlavecchio got one year's probation, her husband got six months in prison, and John Alite, of Voorhees, N.J., got three months.

To the government, the semen wasn't a big deal; prosecutors were more concerned with rooting out corruption at the federal prison in the rural north-central Pennsylvania town of White Deer.

"The whole case wasn't what was smuggled in, or what was smuggled out," said Michael Pinsky, a Westmont, N.J., attorney representing Alite, who met Parlavecchio while serving time in Allenwood. "It was important that there were guards for sale."

Guilty guards

The guilty guards, by and large, each served "a personal prisoner who manipulated them very well," said Wayne P. Samuelson, the assistant U.S. attorney who is prosecuting the cases.

Beginning with Kemmerer in October 2000, 12 people have been indicted -- including four guards, all of whom pleaded guilty.

Thermadrine bodybuilding pills, toiletries like soap and shampoo, Italian meats and cheeses, and a wristwatch were sneaked into the low-security wing of the prison, while the filled-up sperm kits -- test tubes containing the sperm and a freezing solution -- were smuggled out.

But the semen smuggling was not a profit-making enterprise like the other schemes, which were the brainchildren of a handful of imprisoned organized crime figures, defense attorneys said.

"There were certain prisoners who had girlfriends who felt their biological clocks were ticking and wanted to get pregnant," Pinsky said.

Samuelson said he couldn't comment on the report, but did say that it is unclear whether Kemmerer was the only guard to smuggle out sperm kits from Allenwood.

Maria Parlavecchio was indicted in December 2000 after at least three unsuccessful attempts to get pregnant through artificial insemination with the smuggled sperm.

Last chance

In 1992, when she was in her late 20s, she watched her husband Antonino, now 37, sentenced to as much as 14 years on racketeering charges and sent to Allenwood -- 145 miles away from her home in the New York City suburb of Garfield, N.J.

Conjugal visits are not allowed, and Parlavecchio was seemingly left with one option if she wanted to have her husband's child.

To get the sperm kits, Parlavecchio, now 38, explained to a Minnesota laboratory that her husband was stricken with prostate cancer and needed to preserve his semen before undergoing chemotherapy, court documents say.

Antonino Parlavecchio, who is eligible for release in September 2004, approached Kemmerer about the arrangement in the summer of 1998. His friend, Alite, acted as the go-between outside the prison, delivering the empty sperm kits to Kemmerer and paying him when he returned the filled kits, according to court documents.