JoePa Takes the Fall

by Bill Keisling

  Some days later Veon and I met again, this time in a small, out-of-the way tavern in midtown Harrisburg. Veon was well groomed and dapper, as always.

  We sat at a table drinking a few beers. Several appreciative and concerned patrons came up to shake Veon’s hand, and to wish him well at his coming trial. A city alderman or a committeeman came up to discuss some small neighborhood political problem. Veon was like a pol from the past, I saw. Ear to the rail, hand in the hand, eye to the eye.

  I’d visit Veon several more times at his home in Harrisburg. We sat out on his small shady back patio, listening to the traffic go by out front, on Second Street. You could almost smell and hear the muddy Susquehanna River flowing a block and a half away.

  I didn’t ask Mike Veon much anything at all of “Bonusgate.” I really wasn’t much interested in it. I told him I’d like to interview him in depth about how the legislative process really worked, and any reforms he’d suggest.

  My questions appeared strange to him, I could tell. It was as if I was speaking a foreign tongue in a foreign land. He spoke a little about the days when he first came to Harrisburg as a young lawmaker, about the blatant politicking he’d witnessed in those days in places like the offices of politicos such as Jim Manderino. Manderino was a beefy old-time legislative leader in the 1970s and 80s. The public won’t read these insightful and humorous stories in the pages of the Patriot-News. Veon also spoke lovingly of his wife, and the long hours he’d put in at the state capitol, often sleeping on his office couch to get things done.

  “If I had to do it all over,” he tells me at one point, looking me dead in the eye, “I wish I would’ve just spent the time with my wife.”

  Then, a flash in his eye, he spoke of his deep loyalty to the Democratic Party, and his blind trust in other Democrats.

  In a few months’ time, following a rock’em sock’em trial before a Republican judge (who himself was a former partisan DA), Veon would be convicted in “Bonusgate.”

  He’d be sentenced to state prison for six to fourteen years.

  Then, just as unexpectedly, as luck would further have it, in January 2012, as I sat writing this essay, my phone rang. On the other end was Mike Veon’s one-time boss, former Majority Leader Bill DeWeese. Rep. DeWeese rang me to complain about his own pending “Bonusgate” trial, and to offer up a few choice words for former prosecutor and Gov. Tom Corbett.

  “Corbett and the people around him are brutish, nasty, and are just bad people,” DeWeese says to me. He compares today’s Pennsylvania to Bavaria Germany in the 1920s. Everyone marching in lockstep.

  DeWeese complained to me of blatant politicking by Corbett’s own staffers during the 2010 gubernatorial campaign, and the inability of anyone to do anything about it.

  DeWeese doesn’t complain to only me, I should add. He gets on the floor of the state House and blows loud and long about it, like a solo trumpeter.

  A week later, on his way to jury selection on January 19, DeWeese pointed out to reporters that AG Corbett, from March 2009 to October 2010, “had 14 prosecutors and agents tearing my life and Sharon Rodavich’s life apart. He had one investigator on Jerry Sandusky.” Rodavich was a former staffer of, and co-defendant with, DeWeese, before she accepted a plea deal.

  But DeWeese is overly generous about the number of investigators assigned to the Sandusky non-investigation. It’s apparent that the “one investigator,” a state trooper, assigned to Sandusky’s pedophile case, wasn’t even actively investigating. The trooper was resigned to occasionally flipping through a dusty copy of Sandusky’s book, Touched, that was stashed at his desk -- when he wasn’t working on other cases.

  His is a “political trial,” DeWeese complains, brought over “petty” matters by his political opponent, AG and now Gov. Corbett. “Corbett had it out for me. He’s had a focus on me for a long time,” DeWeese tells reporters. Already, in opposition quarters, believe it or not, I’ve heard talk by some of seeking political asylum outside of Pennsylvania. That’s a measure of how bad and dangerous politics have become here.

  As for me, I was glad to lend an ear to Bill DeWeese’s complaints.

  The Harrisburg Patriot-News certainly wouldn’t be listening, or looking, or speaking out much on DeWeese’s behalf, or his calls for fairness.

  The other side of the story wasn’t all that was not being told. A growing number of hard questions about Tom Corbett’s personal misconduct were, and continue to be, ignored by the Patriot-News, and other corporate media.

  What about the hypocrisy of Corbett using his AG’s staff and resources for political ends?

  Just how far did these political and prosecutorial abuses go? As the Romans used to say in their final days of Praetorian Guard corruption, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? “Who will guard the guardians themselves?”

  Who would call Tom Corbett on it? He’d thrown some of his most articulate political opponents of the Democratic caucus leadership in jail, some for draconian sentences. He was threatening other Democrats with the same. If they were to speak out, they would only be threatened with harsher sentences, for being “uncontrite.” Apparently his political opponents were supposed to be contrite and sorrowful that they were not members of Corbett’s own protected Republican caucus.

  So everyone mostly shut up and went along. There were no opposition newspapers left to speak out against what critics say was, and is, going on in Pennsylvania.

  In Pennsylvania, unfortunately, in the last decade, powers increasingly coalesced to one man and one party -- including the great power to throw personal or political opponents in jail. Dissenting voices found themselves drowned out, ignored, or threatened into silence.

  The bare bodkin we should consider, for the purpose of this essay, is the effect all this had -- not just on victimized children and others -- but on the Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General.

  The AG’s office would be converted into a political machine for Tom Corbett. The AG’s office would be transformed from a respectable and independent law enforcement agency into an election-day power base.

  Hidden somewhere in the bowels of that in-all-but-name political election machine was a pedophile complaint mentioning Jerry Sandusky and a few of his long-suffering young victims.

  ‘Arrest by news conference’

  The farcical yet ultimately tragic canard that the Jerry Sandusky pedophile investigation languished in the AG’s office for almost two years because it was before “a slow grand jury” is a disingenuous and ridiculous lie, associates of Tom Corbett say.

  The sad truth is it was before a slow attorney general who was running for governor.

  The reality is that, since 2007, a large percentage of grand juror time was devoted exclusively to “Bonusgate.” In Tom Corbett’s election playbook and timetable, there would be little grand jury time for anything else, including sodomized children.

  One way to look at it is as a simple matter of priorities.

  It was explained to me like this: There are only two statewide grand juries meeting at any time. And those two grand juries do not meet over the summer months, between May to September. When they do meet, it is only part time, most often only for several hours a week.

  Grand juries are furthermore disbanded after 18 months, when a new set of grand jurors must be sworn in to restart an investigation, basically from scratch. In other words, even the most earnest grand jurors have very limited resources of time. They may indict a ham sandwich, but they must do it like a short order cook: fast and greasy.

  From 2007 to 2010, the grand juries were almost completely saturated by witnesses and evidence involving Corbett’s “Bonusgate” legislative bonus prosecutions.

  During this period Tom Corbett was also running for governor, basing his campaign on the controversial theory that he was a “Bonusgate reformer.” So there had to be, if only for purely political reasons, “Bonusgate” results.

  There was little time for anything else but “Bonusgate,” save drug prosecutions, whi
ch also made Tom Corbett -- or any present-day prosecutor -- look good to voters.

  These “Bonusgate” grand jury sessions were scheduled purely to “Get Tom elected governor,” I’ve been told. Most everyone in the AG’s office knew this, but could not openly say it in order to protect their jobs, and their careers in Pennsylvania law enforcement.

  Instead, Orwellian-like Newspeak began to spill from the tongues of the AG staff.

  Phrases like, “We’re going to make another arrest by news conference today,” were commonly heard.

  “Arrest by news conference,” became a popular AG’s office euphemism. Rather than simply arresting someone and quietly having the suspect arraigned, the front office insisted on first scheduling a news conference with TV and newspaper crews present for a well-publicized “perp walk.” This was all done to make Corbett look good on TV and in the papers for election purposes. It is possible, after all, to arrest someone without a perp walk, and without news cameras in attendance.

  The office of attorney general would de-evolve, hand-in-hand with the Patriot-News, into a press office for the elevation of Tom Corbett to the governor’s office. It was a lot like the 1957 movie The Sweet Smell of Success, starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis: the preening press agent, the powerful, ill-tempered and mercurial Zeus who destroys with a bolt from his finger, and, thrown in for good measure, more than a dash of incestuous relations.

  For offenders already in jail, but charged with additional crimes, “arrest by news conference” became an obvious joke. Rather than simply handing the new arrest warrant to the prisoner already behind bars and arraigning him quietly, the unlucky prisoner, by order of Corbett’s front office, would now be driven to some judicial office for a perp walk and a specially scheduled “arrest by news conference.” Only then would the jailbird be given his new arrest papers, and driven back to jail.

  Did AG office employees know they were helping Tom Corbett get elected governor?

  “Hell yeah,” I’m told.

  “It was all political, and everyone knew it,” is also how I’ve heard these and other practices described.

  “Everyone in the AG’s office knew they were working to get Corbett elected governor with ‘Bonusgate,’ and with everything else they were told to do.”

  It was the truth that everyone knew, but no one could speak.

  The sad twist of irony is that, in late 2011, the Harrisburg Patriot-News decried the two years the Sandusky case had languished in the AG’s office.

  The complaint I’ve heard is that it was the Patriot’s own self-serving chest-thumping about the “Bonusgate” donnybrook that ate up an overwhelming chunk of the finite resources of the state AG’s office, and the limited time of the grand jurors.

  The political AG’s office had become media driven.

  This is where the media drove it.

  ‘Tom didn’t want to do it’

  Moreover, a limited number of deputy attorneys general are on staff to handle cases like Jerry Sandusky’s pedophile investigation. The deputy AGs are the lawyers who, at the ultimate direction of the AG, actually prepare and oversee the cases, and take them to court.

  Without an activated deputy AG pushing a case, and without the approval of the boss, the attorney general, even the most diligent state trooper or agent can go nowhere with a prosecution. A cop cannot take a case to court without a lawyer.

  The lack of prosecutor availability and oversight can also be seen as a method by which the AG’s front office came to control, slow, or otherwise obstruct a hot-potato case involving even the most diligent state trooper or AG’s office agent.

  In the old days, agents and troopers ran the cases. They would consult with the deputy AGs mostly for matters like legal advice and warrants. For the most part, back then, investigators were in the driver’s seat. They’d file charges, and the AG’s office would follow through.

  In 2003 all that changed. A new policy for criminal investigations required agents and troopers to consult closely with a deputy AG for what was called the direction, scope and flow of a case.

  Simply put, if a deputy AG was not allowed by superiors to push a case, or did not approve of its “direction, scope or flow,” the case would go nowhere, no matter how many cops or investigators were put on the job.

  As I say, an investigator or a cop can’t bring a case to court. That’s the job of a lawyer. That was the job of Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett.

  Look at the AG as a shepherd, or a traffic cop, if you’re so inclined. Without his say so, no one goes.

  The attorney general’s ultimate role is to establish priorities, allocate resources, and shepherd cases to court. Without a good shepherd, the sheep are lost.

  The attorney general himself seldom personally takes a case to court. (Although former AG Mike Fisher, as a rarity, did in the early 2000s personally plead a few cases in court on behalf of the commonwealth.) Instead, the AG, through his criminal and civil department heads, assigns cases to deputy AGs.

  AG Corbett’s job and public trust to the people in the Sandusky case was to assign priorities and resources to the deputy AG to ensure the job was done. That’s precisely what Corbett did not do, and where Corbett fell down on the job.

  As we see here, a politically elected attorney general let loose to plague society can easily misuse his public trust to control a political and social hot potato. That’s what happened to the AG’s Sandusky pedophile non-investigation for a year and a half, from 2009 to late 2010. It was put on ice. The slow boat to China. Given File 13, as cops say.

  Tom Corbett simply did not want to prosecute the Sandusky pedophile case.

  “Tom didn’t want to do it,” I’m told.

  “What do you mean, ‘He didn’t want to do it?’” I ask again.

  “He didn’t want to do it.”

  I have to keep asking the same question, and getting the same reply, before it begins to sink in.

  By assigning only a single trooper, yet not instructing or even allowing his prosecutor to push the case, AG Tom Corbett did the bare minimum he could do to cover his ass and to say that he was doing something about the Sandusky pedophile complaint(s).

  In actuality Tom Corbett was doing nothing, except, intentionally or not, protecting and shielding Jerry Sandusky, and Sandusky’s well-connected associates and institutions.

  This would be exactly the same excuse offered by Pope Benedict in Rome to explain why pedophile complaints had languished for decades in his old Vatican office, without a good shepherd, when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, before his election as pope. “Stavamo lavorando su di esso.” That’s Italian for, “We were working on it.”

  The cardinal’s inactions hurt the papacy.

  Just as Attorney General Corbett’s inactions now injure the governor’s office.

  The green-domed Harrisburg state capitol building, I should mention, is modeled after St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

  Candidate Corbett orders background investigations of 356 potential ‘Bonusgate’ jurors

  Over time it became all-too apparent to those working in the AG’s office that Tom Corbett’s “Bonusgate” investigation itself was political in nature. “Bonusgate” was used by AG Corbett as his main strategy and pillar in his political run for the governor’s office.

  It was stunning hypocrisy. AG Corbett was running for governor by prosecuting public employees for mixing elective politics with state work. Corbett was now openly doing the same thing: mixing elective politics with state work. The attorney general was prosecuting others, and jailing them, for doing what he was now doing, and making his staff do.

  No one seemed able to speak out about it. At least, no one could be heard.

  “The whole AG’s office knew we were helping Tom Corbett to get elected governor,” is one complaint I’ve heard. “Our focus from 2008 on was that. Everybody was working on ‘Bonusgate.’” And, “The whole office was political.”

  The AG’s office, now running its boss
for governor, simply had no time, or resources, for the Sandusky pedophile case -- even if there was the will to pursue the allegations, which there was not.

  There were instead growing bumps and harrowing potholes along the way to victory in prosecutor Corbett’s election road map to the state house. These problems caused candidate Corbett to further misuse the AG’s staff for political purposes and ends.

  An early jury acquittal in the “Bonusgate” prosecutions -- the December 2009 acquittal of former state Rep. Sean Ramaley -- caused gubernatorial hopeful Corbett to outright panic.

  Corbett feared that his simple political strategy would fail. Worse, he feared with apparently characteristic paranoia that his political opponents in the Democratic Party -- or even a potential primary opponent, former U.S. attorney Patrick Meehan -- might somehow have tampered with the acquitting jury.

  At one point, I’m told, candidate and AG Corbett ordered his entire Bureau of Criminal Investigations (BCI) staff of agents to “drop everything” to perform secret background investigations of all 350-odd people in the jury pool for the upcoming, and politically important, “Bonusgate” trials involving former General Assembly Democratic Whip Mike Veon, and other Democrats. (I’m told the exact number of names on the list of potential jurors who underwent secret backgrounds checks by BCI agents on candidate Corbett’s orders was 356.)

  “Everyone in the BCI had to drop whatever they were doing to do background investigations of the ‘Bonusgate’ jurors.”

  There would be no time for Jerry Sandusky or his young victims in the middle of all that political craziness.

  Poor ethics create more problems in the AG’s office

  The state attorney general’s Bureau of Criminal Investigations, like the other units in the AG’s office, is comprised of a relatively small and close-knit community of agents. At the start of the “Bonusgate” investigations, in the 2007 to 2008 time frame, about 74 agents worked in BCI around the state.