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Case research · C064
Tufano v. Nelson et al
3:26-cv-00542 · U.S. District Court, Middle District of Pennsylvania
Closed; Tufano appealed to the Third Circuit on September 9, 2026 (No. 26-3303), eight days after the closing order.Report and recommendation adopted; motions to dismiss granted; case closedPennsylvania
CourtU.S. District Court, Middle District of Pennsylvania
FiledMarch 4, 2026
StatusClosed; Tufano appealed to the Third Circuit on September 9, 2026 (No. 26-3303), eight days after the closing order.
OutcomeReport and recommendation adopted; motions to dismiss granted; case closed
Final dispositionDismissed with prejudice on adoption of the Aug. 12, 2026 report and recommendation; both motions to dismiss granted and the case closed Sept. 1, 2026. The grounds are judicial immunity, the absence of a private right of action under the criminal statute pled, and claim preclusion; leave to amend was denied as futile.
JurisdictionPennsylvania
Pro seYes
Current / transferee court—
Transferred case—
Last researchedOctober 3, 2026
About this case
Evidentiary treatment: This summarizes the plaintiff's own allegations as stated in the complaint or docket record cited below. It reflects what was filed, not a court finding, and is not a determination that the allegations are true.
Plaintiff Frank Tufano, pro se, brings claims for fraud/fraudulent concealment (42 Pa. C.S.A. § 5524) and civil conspiracy, plus a claim under 18 U.S.C. § 241, against former S.D.N.Y. judge Roman Stephen Nelson, Judith C. McCarthy, his own former attorneys Jeffrey Davis, Esq. and David D. Lin, Esq., Paul Saladino, MD, and “White Plains Lodge #473” (a Masonic lodge). He alleges these defendants — fellow Freemasons bound by oaths of secrecy — conspired to obtain a fraudulent default judgment against him in the earlier Saladino v. Tufano federal case, denying him due process and a jury trial.
He seeks roughly $3.3 million for lost business, $2.3 million for pain and suffering, and $330,000 reimbursing the challenged judgment, plus a jury trial.
This page separates court/ruling records, party filings, research classifications, secondary sources and public statements. Unknown or unresolved fields remain labelled as such.
Outcome reason: Notice of Removal from Lackawanna County case 2026-CV-637 was filed March 4, 2026. Latest accessible snapshot showed a motion to dismiss and service proceedings, with no final disposition verified.
Update 2026-09-03: The case was dismissed and closed on Sept. 1, 2026. Judge Julia K. Munley entered an order adopting Magistrate Judge Leo A. Latella’s report and recommendation of Aug. 12, 2026 in its entirety, granting the motions to dismiss filed by Roman Stephen Nelson and Judith C. McCarthy (Doc. 3) and by White Plains Lodge #473 (Doc. 11), construing the plaintiff’s motion to strike (Doc. 16) as an objection and denying it, and directing the Clerk of Court to close the case. The operative language is recorded verbatim in GovInfo’s docket text for the order. The order PDF itself is an image-only scan with no text layer, so the court’s reasoning was not read and this is recorded as a docket snapshot rather than a court finding.
Update 2026-10-03: The grounds of dismissal are now established. GovInfo has since published a package for this case, and the adopted report and recommendation (Doc. 15, thirty-one pages, Magistrate Judge Leo A. Latella, Aug. 12, 2026) was read in full. It recommends dismissal on three grounds: the two judicial defendants are protected by absolute judicial immunity; the criminal statute pled affords no private right of action; and the claims against Paul Saladino, Jeffrey Davis, David D. Lin and White Plains Lodge are barred by claim preclusion. It recommends that all claims be dismissed with prejudice and that leave to amend be denied as futile. The closing order of Sept. 1, 2026 adopted that recommendation in its entirety. That order’s own PDF remains an image-only scan, but its reasoning is no longer unestablished, because the document it adopted can now be read.
Research status: Source-backed (the adopted report and recommendation of Aug. 12, 2026 read in full via GovInfo; the Sept. 1, 2026 adopting order read as docket text, its PDF being an image-only scan)
Research notes: Same action as C030 after removal. Latest accessible public docket snapshot runs through April 28, 2026.
Record labels distinguish final orders/opinions, reports and recommendations, non-final orders, and tentative/indexed ruling records.
Report and recommendation (adopted in full)
Report & recommendationAugust 12, 2026
Recommended that both motions to dismiss be granted and every claim dismissed with prejudice, on three grounds: the judicial defendants are protected by absolute judicial immunity; the criminal statute pled affords no private right of action; and the claims against the remaining defendants are barred by claim preclusion. It further recommended that leave to amend be denied as futile. The recommendation was adopted in its entirety by the order of Sept. 1, 2026 that closed the case, so these are the operative grounds of dismissal.
Taking an appeal is a party’s filing, not a ruling — only an appellate court’s own disposition is a finding, and a disposition recorded here is a docket fact rather than reasoning unless the order itself was read. An appeal continues the action it arises from, so appeals are never counted as additional lawsuits: the case and originating-action counts published elsewhere on this site are unaffected by this section. Where a docket number or a current status is not recorded, that is a stated gap in the research, not a finding that none exists. See Methodology.
26-3303
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third CircuitPendingVerified
Notice of appeal September 9, 2026 · Docketed September 9, 2026
Found 2026-09-10 by a party sweep of the Third Circuit; the appeal was not previously recorded and had been docketed the day before. Captioned 'Frank Tufano v. Roman Nelson'. Its first entry reads 'CIVIL CASE DOCKETED. Notice filed by Appellant Frank Tufano in District Court No. 3:26-cv-00542', which is this row's case, and a motion to proceed in forma pauperis was filed the same day. The district court closed the action eight days earlier, on 2026-09-01, by an order adopting the report and recommendation and granting the motions to dismiss.
Verified 2026-10-07 by re-reading the district docket below the appeal, which is where a federal circuit's order or mandate is entered when it returns. That docket's entry list is complete for the appeal and its last entry remains the 2026-09-01 closing order: no mandate, dismissal order or other disposition has come back, so the appeal is confirmed still pending rather than merely unverified. The circuit's own mirrored docket carries only its case-opening entries and a null termination date, which is true of every federal appellate docket in this dataset and is not evidence either way.
Sequence does not by itself prove motive or causation.
Report and recommendation issued
A magistrate judge recommended dismissal of every claim with prejudice on grounds of judicial immunity, the absence of a private right of action under the criminal statute pled, and claim preclusion, and recommended that leave to amend be denied as futile. The recommendation was adopted in full on Sept. 1, 2026.
The removed federal action (M.D. Pa. 3:26-cv-00542) was dismissed and closed. The order adopted the Aug. 12, 2026 report and recommendation in its entirety, granted both motions to dismiss, and denied the plaintiff’s motion to strike as an objection.
Public statements are displayed separately from court findings. Quotations are transcribed from the video’s own YouTube auto-generated captions and timestamped from the caption cues covering the passage quoted. The Strong / Moderate / Context tier is this project’s research classification of how closely a statement bears on the documented filing patterns — it is not a judicial finding. Any second badge names the filing-restriction factor the statement’s own words describe; it records what the speaker said, not that a court found it.
How quotations are marked: An ellipsis (…) inside a quotation marks words left out between two passages of the same video, which can sit some minutes apart. The omitted wording is not reproduced here, and a clip on the statement supercut plays the whole span from the quotation’s first word to its last — so it includes the omitted material. Quotations without an ellipsis are continuous speech.
These quotations can no longer be checked at their source. Every quotation on this site was transcribed from the speaker’s own YouTube channel. That channel was removed in October 2026; on 23 October 2026 all 980 catalogued video ids returned “not found”, and the channel address itself no longer resolves. YouTube’s own basis for removing it is not part of any record this project can verify, so none is asserted here. Nothing was withdrawn by this project.
What survives is the evidence, not the link. The verbatim caption transcript each quotation was read from was archived, dated, at the time the video was catalogued, and the timestamp on each card is the moment in that transcript where the words appear. The transcripts are held unaltered and are not republished. What a reader can no longer do is open the original and hear it, and nothing on this site can restore that. Seventy-four statements — those whose own words name a core filing-restriction factor — survive as clips in this project’s own compilation, and those cards link into it at the right moment. Nothing else is re-hosted. See Methodology.
Some of you guys are joking to sue the judge, and I've done that, but what do you expect? They just throw out the case. This is what happened when I sued the judge in the Saladin lawsuit, Nelson Staffen Roman. It was just thrown out last week.
The speaker states, in his own words, that he sued the judge who presided over the Saladino action and that the suit was dismissed "last week." Both halves are independently corroborated by the dataset: C030/C064 (Tufano v. Nelson) names Roman Stephen Nelson (D0230) as a defendant, and its closing order was entered 2026-09-01, nine days before publication. It cannot reach Strong because neither factor is one of the three core filing-conduct factors — confirming a filing and reporting a ruling against himself are a docket fact and an announcement, not repeat-filing conduct.
And I didn't know that these judges could deny your right to a jury trial. And every single lawsuit I filed, I've always requested a jury trial. It's your amendment right, but I guess Frank Tufano isn't entitled to one.
This restates, on camera, the same jury-trial theory that C030/C064's claims summary records as pleaded — that the defendants denied him due process and a jury trial. It is the speaker's characterisation of how courts have treated his filings, not a court's finding, and it gives no count of filings, so Self-reported filing volume does not apply despite the phrase "every single lawsuit I filed."
Transcript-verified verbatim quote
Source removed. Quoted at 00:13 in the archived transcript.
Related video research
Each video has its own research page with its verified publish date, timestamped statements and case links. A researched link between a video and a docket record is not a finding of causation in either direction.
I already SUED THE JUDGE!!!Direct case reference · Short · September 10, 2026 · link confidence MediumSource removed
Cite this page
Frank Tufano Litigation Research. "Tufano v. Nelson et al (3:26-cv-00542)". Research last verified October 3, 2026. https://suedbyfranktufano.com/cases/3-26-cv-00542-tufano-v-nelson-et-al/