By Megan Guza
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
PITTSBURGH — Fellow police officers said they were appalled by the sentence handed down Monday for a former McKeesport detective who pleaded guilty to stealing more than $1 million from his police union to prop up his failing restaurant.
Joseph Osinski, 56, siphoned roughly $1.2 million from the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 91 — the union representing law enforcement officers in Allegheny County — from 2019 until his arrest in 2024. The hit to FOP funds left the union in somewhat dire straits for a period, and dues had to be raised to recoup the loss.
Osinski was sentenced to nine to 18 months in the Allegheny County Jail, although he will be allowed work release and to serve the sentence in alternative housing.
Much of the money went toward a restaurant Osinski opened called Puzzlers. It was a way, his defense attorney said, for his autistic adult son to have a “sense of life.” Eventually, it became a place for special needs groups to bring students and adults to learn skills like wiping down tables and pouring fountain drinks.
“I think it’s a travesty of justice,” said Matthew Feldmeier, the FOP’s recording secretary and a retired police sergeant. He dismissed the idea that Osinski stole for the benefit of his son and for others who used Puzzler’s as a place to learn life skills.
"[He] made over 1,100 trips to the bank to steal and deposit money — he had 1,100 times that he could have stopped, and he didn’t,” he said. “He was purely doing this for his own benefit.”
Such a sentence for that level of theft, he said, “is despicable.”
Osinski was financial officer for the union for years, which gave him access to the group’s finances. An anonymous letter in January 2024 led to an investigation by the state Attorney General’s Office . Charges were filed nine months later.
“Most of us have family, some have businesses, we all have bills,” said Anthony Biulus, a retired police officer and treasurer of the union. “The thing we don’t do, though, is steal. He’s not sorry he did it. He’s only sorry he got caught.”
Common Pleas Judge Jill E. Rangos called the situation a difficult one, noting that Osinski wasn’t the type of criminal who needed to be incapacitated or rehabilitated — two of the core tenets of incarceration.
Osinski, who is disabled because of a motorcycle crash several years ago, relies on disability benefits, his wife’s income, and the roughly $1,000 a month he makes delivering newspapers. He was stripped of his pension at a recent pension board hearing.
Restitution, Judge Rangos said, is a pipe dream.
It was a reality that all involved agreed upon: “But for winning the lottery,” said Assistant District Attorney Alex Cashman, “restitution will never be paid.” Defense attorney Lee Rothman said his client could pay $200 a month.
She mused on her options: a state prison sentence, which is generally reserved for violent felons; house arrest, which comes with its own fee that would ultimately cut in to any attempt at restitution; probation, which the judge said would be “a slap in the face to all the other men and women who were his colleagues that he stole from;" or a term in the Allegheny County Jail.
She opted for a jail term with the potential for it to be served in alternative housing — that is, somewhere that isn’t the Allegheny County Jail.
Mr. Rothman asked the judge to consider Osinski’s 30 years of otherwise unblemished law enforcement service: “He did a bad thing for what he thought were the right reasons.”
He likened his client to the Medieval English folklore character Robin Hood .
But Robin Hood, Judge Rangos said, stole from the rich to give to the poor.
“Mr. Osinski stole from his colleagues, working men and women, for the benefit of [his son and his business],” she said.
She noted “very little expression of remorse” from the former detective, and pointed out that he had paid nothing toward restitution in the five months between his guilty plea and sentencing.
Mike Slawianowski, president of the union from which Osinski stole, called the comparison to Robin Hood “pathetic ... utterly ridiculous.”
“We’re entrusted by the public to do our jobs, not be corrupt — not steal, not commit crimes — and we’re held to a higher standard,” he said after the sentencing hearing. “He was not held to a higher standard. A regular person probably would have gone to jail.”
© 2025 the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Visit www.post-gazette.com.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
