JUSTICE DENIED: The Untold Story of Nancy Argentino's Death in Jimmy Superfly Snuka's Motel Room

by Irvin Muchnick

  In 1985 the Argentinos obtained a $500,000 default judgment against Snuka in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. The family never collected a dime; Snuka’s lawyers withdrew from the case, stating that they hadn’t been paid, and Snuka filed an affidavit claiming he was broke and unemployed and owed the Internal Revenue Service $75,000 in back taxes. Since ’83, the 49-year-old Snuka has been in and out of rehab centers and has wrestled off and on both in Japan and throughout this country. His original WWF stint extended two and a half years past Argentino’s death; his most recent ended earlier this year. According to the wrestling grapevine, he’s now trying to promote independent shows in, of all places, Salt Lake City, but my efforts to track him down there were unsuccessful.

  Proving negligence, of course, is different than proving involuntary manslaughter or murder. But critics of the criminal investigation find fishy the failure of the police to examine seriously Snuka’s history of drug abuse and violence against women. Former wrestling great Buddy Rogers, who’d been hired by McMahon to serve as Snuka’s TV “manager” and to get him to important matches on time, said he stopped driving with the Superfly after he brazenly snorted coke when they were in the car together.

  “Jimmy could be a sweet person, but on that stuff he was totally uncontrollable,” said Rogers, who was also Snuka’s neighbor on Coles Mill Road in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Snuka’s wife, with whom he had four children, befriended Rogers’ wife. “Jimmy used to beat the shit out of that woman,” Rogers said. “She would show up at our house, bruised and battered. But she couldn’t leave him – he had her hooked on the same junk he was using.”

  Nancy Argentino’s younger sister remembered once being threatened by Snuka when they were alone at the family’s home in Flatbush. “I could kick you and put my hands around your throat and nobody would know,” he allegedly said. After Nancy’s death, family members said, they received a series of phone calls from a woman who identified herself as a former Snuka girlfriend who’d tried to warn Nancy away from him. Snuka, said the woman, had once broken her ribs, and had a thing about pushing women back against walls.

  Finally, there was the incident involving Snuka and Argentino at a Howard Johnson’s in Salina, N.Y., outside Syracuse, just three months before Allentown. The motel owner, hearing noise from their room, called the police, who found Snuka and Argentino running naked down the hallway. It took eight deputy sheriffs and a police dog to subdue Snuka. Argentino sustained a bruise of her right thumb. Snuka pleaded guilty to violent felony assault with intent to cause injury, received a conditional discharge on counts of third-degree assault, harassment, and obstruction of a government official, and donated $1,500 to a deputy sheriffs’ survivors’ fund. Whitehall police later decided this was all the result of “a nervous desk clerk,” Detective Procanyn told me.

  * * *

  ACCORDING TO ATTORNEY CUSHING, McMAHON MADE A REMARK at one point in their discussions that was at once insightful and chilling. “Look, I’m in the garbage business,” the promoter said. “If you think I’m going to be hurt by the revelation that one of my wrestlers is really a violent individual, you’re mistaken.”

  Six months after Nancy Argentino died, the Village Voice ran a prescient article entitled “Mat Madness” by the late columnist Arthur Bell, weather vane of the lower-Manhattan gay-arts demimonde. After attending a Madison Square Garden show headlined by a bout between Superfly Snuka and the Magnificent Muraco, Bell, who knew next to nothing about wrestling, commented on the spectacle’s graphic references to bodily functions and on its barely sublimated undercurrents of sexual dominance and sadomasochism. “Take my word,” Bell declared, “by the end of 1984 wrestling will be the most popular sport in New York since mugging.”

  He concluded with a vignette at the Garden stage exit, where a swarm of fans, led by a woman named Bea from West Orange, converged to taunt the wrestlers as they emerged in their street clothes.

  “Hey, Superfly,” Bea shouted to Snuka. “You goddam fuckin’ murderer. When are you gonna kill another girl?”

  JIMMY SNUKA’ S

  PATHETIC LIES

  IN HIS NEW BOOK, JIMMY SNUKA ATTEMPTS TO EXPLAIN both the Syracuse and Allentown episodes in ways no objective observer could begin to find convincing.

  In the January 1983 incident at the Howard Johnson’s in Elmira, Snuka said he was drinking but not doing cocaine, “and the women were all over the place.”

  Nancy Argentino was “my girlfriend,” who “understood” that he had a wife to whom he was not faithful on the road. (More on this aspect in the ebook’s next chapter.)

  They were just having “a good Superfly time when all of a sudden, the police burst into our room. I don’t know why they chose my room – maybe mine was the first one they passed …”

  “I was in my underwear, and they were all confrontational. They beat me up with their batons….”

  “Nancy was screaming at the cops when they came into our room. I was so angry. I didn’t need to be handcuffed with German shepherds barking at me. I was drinking some beer, and maybe smoking some pot. But that was it. I remember they yelled at me to put my clothes on so they could take me to jail. I refused. I don’t mind being in my underwear — I wrestle in tights, brudda! To this day, I’ll mow the lawn in a Speedo. They hauled me out in my underwear and took me to prison. I tried to explain to them that we were just having fun and apologized for waking people up.”

  Multiple contemporaneous newspaper accounts tell it differently. According to those reports, Nancy said Snuka got angry with her when “she ignored him while he spoke about ‘the truth of God.’” Covered only by a sheet, she screamed that she wanted to leave the room. Snuka would not let Nancy out or the police in. The brawl ensued when a total of eight or nine deputies forced the door open and, with the help of K-9 dogs, eventually subdued Snuka.

  That night Nancy’s older sister got a series of messages from the hotel desk clerk, stating that Nancy was wrapped in a sheet in the hallway and needed to speak to her. By the time the sister caught up with the messages, Nancy said everything had calmed down and she was OK.

  To her mother, Nancy would admit that Snuka initially went berserk because he couldn’t find his drugs and blamed the hotel housekeeping staff.

  ***

  WITH RESPECT TO ALLENTOWN, SNUKA has fallen back on veritable free-association fiction. The basic settled version is that Nancy took a tumble while she was urinating by the roadside before they reached Whitehall. Yet even this version became part of a composite – as when he said they had a “lovers’ quarrel” and a pushing incident when peeing at the side of the road. At other times, Snuka had the two of them in a lovers’ quarrel or horsing around later in the motel room.

  In his embarrassing radio interviews promoting his book, Snuka requires prompting to remember whether he is supposed to say he called an ambulance as soon as they reached the motor lodge on Monday evening the 9th, or not until the next day. (Examples of others hand-holding Snuka through a story for which he is the only possible living authority are viewable on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmI2IGQ4unQ and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6BS1J1IIRU.)

  In fact, Snuka called the front desk for an ambulance just before midnight on Tuesday, May 10. Nancy was pronounced dead at the hospital shortly after 2:00 a.m. Wednesday. District attorney William Platt would justify not charging Snuka by determining that Nancy’s head injury came not from a blow, but from impact when she fell. In public statements at the time, Platt acknowledged that there was an altercation.

  Snuka wrote in his book:

  “[W]e were drinking some beers, and she asked me to stop so that she could pee. I pulled over to the side of the road and I waited in the car for her, drinking. When she came back, she told me she slipped on the way and hit her head. I didn’t see it happen, but I remember she told me she was jumping over a little river or stream that was there and she slipped. She seemed okay, and when I asked her if she was feeling all right, she said yes. I di
dn’t see any blood anywhere, so neither of us was concerned and we kept driving to Allentown.

  “I think we stopped drinking after that — she did, at least. I asked her over the next few hours if she was feeling better, and she just kept telling me she had a headache. When we finally got to Allentown and checked into our hotel, I told her to lie down and rest. I left her alone for a little bit to hang out with Mr. Fuji and the boys, and she was sleeping when I came back. She seemed fine so I went to bed. The next morning, I got up and headed out for the TV shoot. She was still breathing, and I was not concerned that this was a life-or-death situation. At worst, I thought she might have a concussion, and I figured I’d take her to the doctor if she needed to go when I got back. When I got back to the hotel, I remember being very surprised that she was still in bed. I woke her up, but she could hardly breathe. I called the front desk, and asked them to call an ambulance. I followed the ambulance to the hospital. Two hours later, they told me she had passed away. I think she died of a fracture to her skull. I was devastated.”

  Detective Procanyn had told me that Nancy, not Snuka, was driving the car because Snuka didn’t have a license. It’s just one more detail told with more care by someone covering up for the suspect than by the suspect himself. Another is the supposed takeout food order from City View Diner.

  All these contradictions do not even include the unlikelihood of a professional athlete’s not knowing that leaving someone alone to sleep was exactly the wrong way to treat a concussion.

  As for the legal maneuverings:

  “… I was questioned by police and let go. At one point, I went with Vince McMahon Jr. to either a court or law office, I don’t remember which because I was still in shock. All I remember is he had a briefcase with him. I don’t know what happened. I think Vince Jr. picked me up from the hotel and took me there. He didn’t say anything to me. I don’t know if he gave Nancy’s family money or anything. The only thing I know for sure is that I didn’t hurt Nancy. I couldn’t believe what had happened. Some people have written that I was just playing stupid, but I really didn’t know what was happening around me.”

  ***

  THE WRESTLING FAN MEDIA SHARE RESPONSIBILITY for the relative invisibility of the Allentown story over the years. Proof that they aren’t unique in such lapses comes from the story of retired Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis, who is making a smooth transition from Super Bowl star to ESPN commentator 14 years after he obstructed justice in a murder investigation stemming from a fight in which he was involved – after which he paid a six-figure settlement to the family of the murder victim.

  The unique argument of wrestling journalists for their own selective diligence is that the general public and media do not take wrestling seriously. The wrestling media seem to alternate between approving and disapproving of this phenomenon, depending on convenience. In the context of domestic violence and death, this is a cop-out.

  The dean of wrestling writers, Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, provided this appalling quote to the ghostwriters of Snuka’s book:

  “[The Allentown incident] affected [Snuka’s legacy]. People romanticize him a lot. I don’t think it tainted his career, though. I think there was an awareness about it. It was covered in the paper, but it wasn’t like big headlines — not like how it is today with TMZ. It’s not like fans would go out to the arenas and boo him. People wanted to like him. He was a natural babyface. He just stood out everywhere. I remember the [arrest] with the dogs more. There was follow-up in the papers on that one.”

  When I confronted Meltzer for an explanation of how he could possibly say he remembers the farcical sequence in Elmira better than the controversial death of Nancy Argentino, he doubled down in denial in an email:

  “Say what you want. Because of it being in a larger market and more covered in New York, there was far more publicity over the incident in Syracuse at the time. In the long run, no of course the Argentino story was bigger. But at the time both happened, among wrestling fans in Madison Square Garden and in the territory everyone knew one story and only insiders knew the other.”

  After the publication of Superfly, here’s how Meltzer reviewed Snuka’s account of Allentown in the January 14 Observer:

  “The book does bring up the death of Nancy Argentino, his girlfriend during his 1983 heyday, who died while they were together in a case that was heavily talked about in stories in the early 90s that insinuated it was a murder cover-up.

  “Snuka claimed they were driving from Connecticut to Allentown and she asked him to stop the car so she could pee on the side of the road. When she got back in the car, she told him she slipped on the way and hit her head. She said she was okay. He said he saw no blood and wasn’t concerned. But later she said she had a headache. She went to sleep it off and he went to the tapings. When he got back to the hotel, she was in bed and could barely breathe. He said he called the front desk, asked to call an ambulance and two hours later, he said she passed away in the hospital, he believed from a fractured skull.

  “He said he was questioned by police and let go. Her family later filed a wrongful death lawsuit against him and won a judgment, which may have been a default judgment. Even though Snuka was earning big money at the time, he was broke, and they never collected.”

  After I complained to Meltzer that his review was sorely lacking – I called it “a joke” – he added this in the next week’s issue:

  "In the story on Jimmy Snuka and his version on the death of Nancy Argentino, Irv Muchnick, who researched the story in one of his books, noted that the story that she went to the bathroom on the side of the road, slipped, and fell on her head, was one of three completely different stories Snuka gave to police and the hospital chaplain at the time. The Argentino family sued him on a wrongful death claim, and won a judgment, but he claimed he had no money and never paid it. Nearing 70, Snuka has said that he’s going back in the ring now that he’s recovered from ankle replacement surgery."

  (Regarding the last, Meltzer could have added that Snuka’s surgery was underwritten by donations to a dubious charity for old-timers called Wrestler’s Rescue.)

  In April, after I alerted Meltzer to upcoming media surrounding the 30th anniversary of the Argentino death, he wrote:

  “I want to bring this up, based on the story when reviewing the Jimmy Snuka book months ago on the death of Nancy Argentino. People who have studied the story have never accepted Snuka’s version as being true, and noted so many contradicting statements at the time of the death. The Argentino family won, via default judgment (meaning Snuka never hired a lawyer nor fought the case) wrongful death lawsuit against Snuka and a $500,000 verdict in 1985 in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. The family never received any money as Snuka claimed to have been broke when the verdict came in over the death of their daughter, coming up on 30 years ago, on May 10, 1983, at the George Washington Motor Lodge in Whitehall, PA. No charges were ever filed, no coroner’s inquest was held, and no evidence was ever presented to the Grand Jury even though Wayne Snyder, deputy to the Coroner at the time, said in an article written years later by Irv Muchnick that upon viewing the body and speaking to a pathologist, he suspected foul play. Snuka’s story in the book, and the one he told police at the time, was Argentino had to go to the bathroom while they were on the road, and they stopped the car, she went out, slipped and hit the back of her head. He told police she appeared fine immediately afterwards, and they continued to the motor lodge in Whitehall. After returning from matches in Allentown that night, he found her near death. The local newspaper, the Allentown Morning Call, when talking to police on the case, reported the death as whether Argentino’s fractured skull was caused by being either pushed or falling in the motel room. Another police officer claimed at the time Snuka told him the two were fooling around when he accidentally pushed her and she fell, landing on her head. An emergency room nurse, according to the investigation by the law firm that represented the Argentino family in the lawsuit, c
laimed Snuka said they were tired, got into an argument, and he accidentally pushed her and she landed on her head. Their investigation also claimed that the hospital chaplain was told by Snuka that when they stopped on the side of the road, they had a fight, and he accidentally shoved her, and she fell backwards, hitting her head on the pavement, and they went to the motel to sleep and the next morning she wasn’t feeling well and stayed in bed while he left to wrestle, before returning and finding her in bad shape. While not the champion, Snuka was the hottest star at the time in the WWWF, and Vincent Kennedy McMahon, who had purchased the company from his father and his father’s partners the year earlier, did most of the talking to police at the time."

  Meltzer’s more complete comments in the Observer do soften his reprehensible one in the Snuka book. However, they do not excuse his rhetorical hairsplitting, which boils down to, “Of course I understand that allegedly beating a woman to death is important. It’s just that they don’t.”

  THE SHORT, INTERRUPTED LIFE

  OF NANCY ARGENTINO

  NANCY ARGENTINO WAS AN ATTRACTIVE, VIVACIOUS working-class girl from Brooklyn. She had the poor judgment to get involved with the wrong guy, which is common enough. She paid for her mistake with her life – still far too common, though I suggest worth more than a shrug of resignation.

  The one regret I have over my 1992 article was the title’s provocative tabloid word “groupie.” On the plus side, the sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll obsession of the wrestling grapevine contributed to whatever has kept the story alive at all. But rushes to typecast victims of domestic violence also contribute to re-victimizing them, along with impeding public understanding of both the circumstances of a particular case and the larger societal problem.