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

by Irvin Muchnick

  Nancy’s family insists – and I concur upon further examination of the record – that her relationship with Snuka was monogamous from her end. To be sure, she was enjoying an interlude of adventure, travel, and party life, but she did not center her universe around banging wrestlers. And contrary to Snuka’s assertions, she might not even have known that he was married. At the time of their death, she and he were looking at townhouses in New Jersey, where they planned to live together.

  Nancy became a wrestling fan through her childhood friend Ellen, wife of WWF undercard wrestler Johnny Rodriguez (known as “the unpredictable Johnny Rodz”). Ellen took Nancy into Manhattan a few times for the matches at the Garden and introduced her to wrestlers.

  Prior to Snuka, Nancy had dated only one of them: Florida bodybuilder Terry Bollea, who had just been brought into WWF as a bad guy under the handle “Hulk Hogan.”

  At the time, 1979-80, it was already apparent that Hulk enjoyed a special look and charisma that had him headed straight to the top. His breakthrough would come with Verne Gagne’s Minneapolis-based American Wrestling Association, before the McMahon family hired Hogan away in late 1983 and launched “Hulkamania” in the WWF. Bollea/Hogan, of course, became one of the biggest gate attractions, and by some measures still the single most successful crossover star, in the industry’s history.

  The Argentino family remembers Terry as a classy and dignified suitor when Nancy introduced him to them. The couple dated around three times. Nancy broke up with Hogan, though, when she learned he had other girlfriends. In one of his own books, Hogan makes reference to Nancy, his fondness for her, her unfortunate demise, and Snuka’s “dark side.”

  ***

  “NANCY WAS TRULY MY MOTHER’S FAVORITE CHILD,” her older sister says.

  Pretty, smart, skillful at making friends, she attended Catholic school through eighth grade. In junior high, she got mugged once walking home. After that, she developed “Brooklyn street smarts.”

  The older sister says: “Nancy had a great sense of humor and an infectious laugh. I never met a person who did not like her. She was charming and everyone wanted to hang around with her. Even some of my friends who were older and some of our younger sisters’ friends befriended her.”

  Dad was a typical Italian-American man of his time and place. He drank and gambled. He liked nice cars, good clothes, and a big meal at a fancy restaurant.

  Mom worked part-time and later full-time as soon as the girls were old enough. Ralph and Caroline argued, often loudly but never violently. Following a screaming match, he would simply sleep off his drunkenness, and he would be apologetic the next day. So fundamentally decent and well-liked was Mr. Argentino that he wound up working as the personal chauffeur for a wealthy Manhattan businessman and mover and shaker.

  A therapeutic history of Nancy might note two things about why she was drawn to Jimmy Snuka and why she was overconfident in her safety with him. Like her father, Snuka offered a ticket to the fast lane and fantasy. Like her mother, Nancy took on the task of keeping her man under control. Unlike the men of her previous experiences, however, the Superfly under the influence was not someone who could be controlled.

  In her teens, Nancy took a job in a dental office in a tough neighborhood. She was prompt and reliable, and had a good touch with people; she nurtured patients who were afraid of dentists and she consoled those in pain. But Nancy also was said to take no crap. She called out, even threatened to call the cops, on those who tried the scam of passing around others’ Medicaid cards in order to get free care.

  The dentist and his wife encouraged Nancy to go to nursing school. She took three semesters of classes at Brooklyn Community College. Then she decided to take a break and go on the road for a while with Snuka. Johnny Rodz had introduced them a half-year or so after she broke up with Hulk Hogan.

  ***

  SOME TIME BETWEEN THE MELEE IN ELMIRA and the fatal trip to Allentown, there was a bizarre series of confrontations involving Snuka on a stop at the family home in Flatbush. Nancy and Jimmy had gone there to pick up some of her clothes. Nancy’s parents were away. The only one in the house was the younger sister.

  While Nancy was retrieving things from her upstairs bedroom, Snuka conversed with the younger sister in the dining room. To her shock, he pulled a stash of cocaine from his pocket, laid it out on the table, and proceeded to snort a line and invite the sister to join him.

  When Nancy came back downstairs, she exploded at Snuka. How dare he do drugs in her parents’ home and expose her kid sister to that behavior? A screaming match ensued.

  Things calmed down and they ordered Chinese takeout food. But while the three of them were eating, another argument broke out over something vague. It was then that Snuka gestured and said to the sister, coldly and ominously, “I could kick you and put my hands around your throat and nobody would know.”

  ***

  BY THIS TIME THE FAMILY NOTICED that Nancy was carrying a Bible around. Catholics don’t tend to keep Bibles on their persons. Nancy seemed to be turning to evangelical Protestantism. After a lifetime of sibling rivalry with her younger sister, Nancy told her she was sorry for whatever bad things she had ever done to her. In that ultimate of big-sister kindnesses, Nancy invited the sister to go through her closet and pick out any cool clothes or accessories or jewelry the sister wanted.

  After the upstate New York episode, Mrs. Argentino was becoming very concerned. Everyone hoped Nancy would come to her senses and get away from Snuka.

  On May 9, 2010, Nancy called her mother to tell her she would be returning to Brooklyn the next day to stay for a while. Mrs. Argentino was thrilled: the next Sunday was Mother’s Day.

  But Nancy didn’t arrive on the tenth. Her mother went to bed worried. It wasn’t like Nancy not to call and explain she had been delayed.

  Around 3 a.m. Mrs. Argentino was awakened by a call from the hospital in Allentown. Nancy was dead.

  OTHER UPDATED INFORMATION

  CHARACTER DISPOSAL

  Wayne Snyder resigned as Lehigh County coroner in 1996 and retired altogether in 2004. After WRESTLING BABYLON was published in 2007, I called Snyder, offered to send him a copy of the book, and invited his further comment. He said to send him the book, and I did, but I never heard back from him. When I tried calling Snyder again for this ebook, the number I had for him was no longer in service.

  Gerald Procanyn, chief of detectives for the Whitehall police, later became an investigator in the Lehigh County district attorney’s office. I was unable to determine Procanyn’s whereabouts as this ebook was being published.

  Wrestling great Buddy Rogers died at age 71 in 1992, just after the article intended for the Village Voice was completed.

  William Platt, the county district attorney, now 72 or 73 years old, spent 14 years as a county judge, ultimately the presiding judge. In 2010 the state Supreme Court named him a senior judge in Superior Court.

  VINCE McMAHON’S ROLE

  Wrestler Don “The Magnificent” Muraco recalled the Allentown incident in Snuka’s new autobiography. In 1983 Muraco and Snuka were locked in the hottest “feud” on the WWF circuit, for which they shot “angles,” or storylines, at the Allentown TV tapings. As Muraco notes in the following passage, May 10 was chaotic in more ways than one: that was also the night another wrestler, Eddie Gilbert, suffered a broken neck in an auto accident in Allentown. (Gilbert would die of a heart attack in 1995, at age 33; like many wrestlers, he abused painkilling drugs.)

  “I was at the hospital [with Gilbert] all night,” Muraco said. “The next morning, the homicide detectives got to the hotel. They were knocking on Jimmy’s door, and I guess he was confused or was not understanding who they were, so I spoke to them, and they informed me Nancy had passed away the night before. I spoke to Jimmy, and called Vince Jr. to tell him what was going on with Eddie Gilbert and Jimmy. He jumped in a car, drove to Allentown, and that was it. I had no part in any meetings or anything. It was just three weeks after the promo w
here we went at it, when I spit at Snuka and he tore off my clothes and hit me with a microphone.”

  In those days, Vince McMahon was the television announcer as well as the executive producer. I presume he drove from Allentown to his home in Connecticut at the conclusion of the TV taping, then turned around and drove back to Pennsylvania after Muraco called. WWE did not respond to my email seeking clarification.

  On June 16, 2008, during the research for my second book, CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, WWE lawyer Jerry McDevitt had a long email exchange with me on a variety of matters. In the course of the exchange, McDevitt wrote, “[Y]our insinuation that Mr. McMahon in some unspecified way kept authorities from charging Jimmy Snuka for murder in 1983 is an odious lie.“

  THE $25,000 OFFER

  According to the Argentino family, Nancy’s mother got a call from someone at TitanSports/World Wrestling Federation shortly after the funeral. She does not remember the name or company title of of the person. The family says the conversation was very brief, with the caller offering the Argentinos $25,000 not to talk further about the incident. The mother snapped, “You think my daughter’s life is worth $25,000 to me?” She hung up.

  WWE did not respond to my email requesting confirmation or comment.

  THE UNPREDICTABLE JOHNNY RODZ

  In 1992 I called Ellen Rodriguez, Nancy’s childhood friend. A couple of minutes into the conversation, someone grabbed the phone from her. “Who are you?” the voice demanded. It was “the Unpredictable Johnny Rodz,” now operator of a wrestling school and training center. Rodz told me to go away.

  While preparing this ebook, I emailed Rodz directly. I did not receive a response.

  OTHER MARKS ON NANCY’S BODY

  According to the Argentino sisters, the funeral home manager told them that preparing Nancy for viewing was a very difficult job. They said that, even with the undertaker’s heavy makeup, discoloration could be seen on Nancy’s throat area.

  SNUKA AT THE FUNERAL HOME

  Italian-American wakes are often three-day-long affairs. On the third afternoon, Snuka finally showed up at the Andrew Torregrossa & Sons Funeral Home in Brooklyn. The family remembers that Snuka was accompanied by Buddy Rogers. Snuka did little talking. He deferred most of the talking to Rogers, who offered the family condolences.

  Nancy’s older sister says: “There’s nothing wrong with dressing casually, but Snuka was so dressed down that he looked sloppy and disrespectful. He was wearing sandals. He looked insane. And he was doing that routine where he pretended that he didn’t speak much English.”

  Snuka’s behavior turned weird. The family says he went to view Nancy and started “talking to” and touching her as if she were alive. He leaned into the casket and kissed her passionately, in the process messing up her hair and makeup.

  Then he went up to Nancy’s mother and said, “She looks terrible.”

  Snuka’s whole visit lasted 20 or 25 minutes.

  SNUKA AT THE PUB IN FLATBUSH

  Once Nancy’s father took Snuka with him to his favorite hangout in Flatbush, a pub called Eddie’s Cabin. In a flash of anger during an exchange with another customer – no one remembers much of the details – Snuka picked up a chair and hurled it at the mirror behind the bar. Mr. Argentino made Snuka apologize and pay for the damage.

  CALLS FROM OTHER WOMEN

  After Nancy’s death, the family received a series of phone calls over a period of years from a number of women who said they had been with Snuka prior to Nancy. The family believes the most persistent of these callers might have been Snuka’s wife at the time, Sharon Reiher. If so, her motives were likely complex: combining confessions of Snuka’s history of violent behavior toward her with attempts to pump the Argentinos in return for information on a possible lawsuit.

  Unquestionably, the woman identified herself as Snuka’s wife the first time she called Nancy’s mother. Mrs. Argentino simply said, “Tell Snuka he’s going to rot in hell,” and hung up.

  There were additional calls, perhaps from another woman who said she had had a relationship with Snuka when he wrestled in the Carolina territory, prior to his big WWF run. She said he beat her up all the time and broke her ribs. She was the source who claimed that Snuka liked to push women backward against walls. The family says this woman had an accent and described herself as a Pacific Islander. It is not clear whether this was the same woman as the purported wife, or a second woman.

  Nancy’s older sister says, “My mother was at a vulnerable point and grieving for Nancy, so she talked to this woman for years. The woman was kind and sympathetic, and consoled my mother. She even sent her a picture of herself.”

  APPENDIX

  PRIMARY-SOURCE DOCUMENT

  FACSIMILES

  ABOUT AUTHOR IRVIN MUCHNICK

  IRVIN MUCHNICK is the author of WRESTLING BABYLON: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal (2007) and CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death (2009). His next book, THE CONCUSSION INC. FILES, will be published in 2014.

  Muchnick is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Sports Illustrated, The Washington Monthly, People, and many other major magazines and newspapers. He has been interviewed on forums as diverse as National Public Radio’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, ESPN’s Up Close with Roy Firestone, CNN’s Nancy Grace, and Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor. A former assistant director of the National Writers Union, Muchnick was also the named respondent of the landmark 2010 Supreme Court decision Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick – part of what Publishers Weekly called “the central rights dispute of the digital age.”

  Muchnick has become a foremost writer on the concussion crisis in American football, through his website and blog Concussion Inc. (http://concussioninc.net) and the Concussion Inc. series of ebooks: DUERSON (November 2011), UPMC: Concussion Scandal Ground Zero (January 2012), and OUT OF MY HEAD: My Life In and Out of Football by George Visger (February 2012).

  With Anthony Roberts, Muchnick also co-authored the ebook THE CHINA SYNDROME: How Athletes and Celebrities Get Their Performance-Enhancing Drugs – How a Rogue Prosecutor Bungled Their Bust (February 2012).

  In association with Tim Joyce, Muchnick most recently has led the reporting of the national scandal of coach sexual abuse and its cover-up in the youth programs of the U.S. Olympic Committee’s national governing body, USA Swimming. In 2012, Muchnick authored the ebook PENN STATE IN THE POOL: The Cover-Up of the USA Swimming Youth Coach Sex Abuse Scandal.