JoePa Takes the Fall

by Bill Keisling

  The leaked FBI documents bear this out.

  Another FBI document suggests elected AG Zimmerman was earlier protected by subordinates and cronies in the state justice system

  At the time I was given the above-mentioned FBI documents concerning the CTA case, I was handed another enlightening FBI document. This FBI document implicated Zimmerman in an earlier public corruption investigation from the late-1970s that had been covered up at the time by Zimmerman’s local cronies, presumably so that he could run for state attorney general.

  The FBI document given me was a transcript of a secretly recorded conversation between the Harrisburg chief of police and his assistant police chief. The Harrisburg police and their supervisors were under investigation for taking money from gamblers. The FBI had secretly recorded the conversation on December 7, 1979. At the time, Zimmerman was district attorney of Dauphin County, in Harrisburg, and was about to launch his ultimately successful campaign to become the state’s first elected attorney general.

  In the FBI recording, the Harrisburg police chief is heard to say, “I can’t see it. I mean, Jesus Christ, they can get LeRoy Zimmerman, they can get any of them guys, if they want to. Look at the money them guys took from gamblers and everything else. Christ, Gekas, look at that money he took from gamblers. Paul Grant and that gang.” George Gekas, alluded to in the recording, at the time was a sitting Republican U.S. congressman.

  So, it turned out, the Harrisburg FBI agents and their supervisors in the U.S. Attorney’s office had planted a listening device on the chief of police and had dug up a very hot potato. How hot? The recording wasn’t even transcribed by the FBI agents for nearly two years, until November 1981 -- almost a year after Zimmerman had been elected state attorney general.

  Zimmerman’s cronies would then prosecute the police chief and the assistant police chief.

  The chief prosecutor would be one of DA Zimmerman’s former assistant DAs, Andrew Smyser. Smyser by this time was an Assistant U.S. Attorney. AG Zimmerman, it should go without saying, would not be investigated nor prosecuted by by his crony, AUSA Smyser, for the same offenses for which the police chief and the assistant chief were prosecuted. Today, in 2012, Smyser is a magistrate judge in the federal court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, where he continues his function of fixing cases and protecting other party elite.

  The retired investigator who handed me the FBI transcript simply told me, “You are young and clean. Don’t fall in with these guys and turn out like them.”

  Sounded like good advice to me.

  This incident was interesting for several reasons. It sheds light, and has bearing, on the current political environment and mentality of the state’s elected attorney general’s office from 1980, all the way to the present. It also shows how the protective crony system assembled by Thornburgh and other prosecutors works.

  It would also be the first time I’d be contacted by a frustrated public investigator unable to bring corruption to light, or the bar.

  I suspected at the time that I’d been handed the FBI transcript because my father was the governor’s chief of staff. The frustrated investigator presumed I could do something to bring this troubling matter to light.

  For the next quarter century I’d be contacted by frustrated public investigators.

  And I’m always willing to lend an ear.

  Back in 1987, when I was given this cache of leaked FBI documents, I was young Mike McQueary’s age. My impulse was to do what Mike McQueary did: I told my father.

  When my father learned I had been handed the FBI transcript(s) he hit the roof. I wrote about it at length in my 1988 book The Sins of Our Fathers, which I co-wrote with my collaborator Rick Kearns.

  “You’ve only been on this story for a week and already you’ve got a restricted FBI document!” my father fumed at me.

  Here I’d come to my father with a transcript of an FBI bodytap in which a former chief of police alleged that the state attorney general had received money from gamblers, and was being protected by cronies in the justice system. My dad hurriedly scanned through the FBI document. He noted with alarm that the cover sheet said it was FBI property and “not to be distributed.”

  “Look,” my father tells me, “I don’t think we should be talking about this. I’m telling the governor’s counsel we’ve spoken about this but we’ve agreed not to talk about it anymore.” My father told me to seek legal advice.

  My colleague Kearns and I called an attorney who said that the law was vague about possessing the leaked FBI transcript. One thing seemed clear: somebody had handed us what appeared to be a legal case. And, once again, it felt like I had been left to do the thinking.

  In an inspired moment of youthful idealism and naivety, Rick Kearns and I decided to turn the transcript in to the Pennsylvania State Police.

  State Police ask me to take back evidence of corruption in AG’s office

  Penn State’s Mike McQueary has been widely criticized for not calling the police. In Pennsylvania, here’s what happens when you go to the police with sensitive information about a prominent person:

  In 1987 my collaborator Rick Kearns and I made an appointment with Captain Joseph Blackburn, the director of the Internal Affairs Division of the Pennsylvania State Police. At the appointed hour we arrived at Blackburn’s office in state police headquarters with the FBI transcript. We explained the situation. Blackburn immediately picked up the phone and called Major Francis Lynch, Chief of Criminal Investigations. Blackburn accompanied us over to Major Lynch’s office.

  Major Francis Lynch of the Pennsylvania state police was a straight shooter. He was a tall, serious looking man in a blue pinstripe suit. He got up from behind his desk, shook hands, and I dutifully handed him the FBI transcript in which the chief of police implicated the state attorney general in illegal activities.

  We showed Major Lynch the place in the transcript that read, “they can get Leroy Zimmerman, they can get any of them guys, if they want to. Look at the money them guys took from gamblers and everything else.”

  I went on to tell Major Lynch and Captain Blackburn that I couldn’t rule out the possibility that I’d been given the transcript because I was the son of the governor’s chief of staff.

  Major Lynch seemed to freeze. Here was the son of the governor’s chief of staff turning in an FBI transcript accusing the state’s attorney general of possible criminal activity. At the time I didn’t realize the bind in which I’d placed Major Lynch. The state police, you see, report to both the attorney general and the governor. Major Lynch stood there for a moment holding the transcript out away from himself.

  “Reading about the CTA case,” I told Major Lynch, “you have to wonder why somebody just didn’t pick up the phone and call the police.”

  Major Lynch and Captain Blackburn had to shake their heads to that. Lynch promised to get back to us as soon as possible, and with that we bid him a good day.

  The next morning I heard back from Major Francis Lynch of the Pennsylvania State Police. He phoned to say he had discussed the matter of the FBI bodytap with a state police deputy commissioner. They could find no indication of wrongdoing on the bodytap. So what if Harrisburg’s chief of police said the attorney general took money from gamblers? But there was another problem.

  The transcript of the bodytap was FBI property, Major Lynch said. It was illegal for anyone outside the bureau, even the state police, to possess the transcript, he said. Possessing the transcript kind of put the state police in an awkward position, he said. The deputy state police commissioner wanted to know if Rick Kearns and I would kindly take the evidence back. I got the impression I was asked this only because I was the son of the governor’s chief of staff. Lynch seemed to be saying that all this could be kept among family if only we would come and pick up the stinking FBI transcript. We could all pretend the whole thing never happened. He obviously didn’t want to log in the receipt of the transcript.

  We were outraged. It didn’t seem very normal f
or the police to ask someone to take back evidence. Did they have other evidence they wanted us to have? Perhaps stolen cars, or maybe a house?

  We refused to take back the transcript. We’d given the damn thing to the state police, and now it was the state police’s problem what they did with it. Lynch suggested that he would take the transcript to Acting US Attorney James West. Lynch warned us that he would have to tell the acting US attorney that Kearns and I had supplied the transcript. Fine, I told him. We asked Lynch to give our regards to Mr. West.

  In other words, we placed ourselves at risk because we went to the police. And, when you go to the police, someone could be tipped off. Someone, in fact, likely will be tipped off.

  In fact, not long after I turned the transcript in to the state police, my father, the governor’s chief of staff, mentioned an unusual encounter he’d had with LeRoy Zimmerman. The attorney general had come to the governor’s office on unrelated business and, on his way out, had stopped to ask the chief of staff about his eldest son, Bill. And what was Bill up to these days? AG Zimmerman wanted to know.

  Writing. The same as usual, the chief of staff said he told the attorney general.

  “Mighty peculiar,” the elder Keisling said, describing the encounter.

  Congressman: ‘People like us are never investigated’

  There were several important lessons I took away from this. First, in a politically corrupt environment, suffering as we do in Pennsylvania from systemic corruption, going to the police is not the remedy that most people suppose it to be. In the Sandusky case, I personally understand why going to the police might not have been young Mike McQueary’s best option. It may in fact not have been an option at all.

  Second, and this is important, and is difficult for most people to understand. When you’re dealing with important people who have connections to the politically prominent, you are no longer talking about the law. You are talking politics. And strange things that seemingly defy comprehension have a habit of happening when politics interferes with upholding the law, as it often does these days in Pennsylvania, and as it did in the Sandusky case.

  The most important thing I took away from this incident was that the entire system was going bad. Government officers, particularly in the courts and the justice system, are no longer governed by the rule of law, but by the protections and machinations of the old boy network. Options to turn these guys in get smaller and smaller. Soon there is no place to turn.

  As a young writer, I wanted to get into the heads of these public servants to try to understand their mentality, and to try to comprehend how and why they end up protecting each other.

  On the FBI transcript we had been given, Harrisburg Police Chief Bruno Favasuli is heard to complain that they could not arrest a known gambler in his place of nefarious business because Congressman George Gekas was often present in the establishment playing pool.

  “They tell me... (Congressman) Gekas is... in there playing, shooting pool every day. Gekas. They just shoot pool in there every afternoon. You go in there at 12:00 and you’ll see Gekas in there shooting pool. But they had to brick up the one side. And here they’re playing poker. On Saturday nights, when ever the poker games starts, he makes sure everybody’s out of there. And if he doesn’t know you, he won’t let you in the game.”

  So, as I recount in The Sins of Our Fathers, we called Congressman George Gekas to ask him for his take on this mystery. The congressman met me at the food court of Strawberry Square, in downtown Harrisburg.

  At the time, in the late 1980s in Republican central Pennsylvania, Republican George Gekas was a popular politician. While I interviewed the congressman men came over and shook his hand and women pecked his cheek. I got right to the point. I asked the congressman if he had been interviewed by the FBI concerning the police chief’s allegations that, by playing pool in a downtown pool hall, he’d prevented the Harrisburg police from arresting a known gambler.

  The congressman at first seemed puzzled.

  “The FBI? Why should the FBI interview me?” he asked.

  Con. Gekas dismissed Police Chief Favasuli’s recorded assertions as “Bald allegations.”

  I pointed out that all allegations remain bald until they are investigated. Again I asked whether the FBI interviewed the congressman. Two veteran cops were ruined over the bodytap and if the feds took the information on the recording seriously enough to ruin the lives and careers of two lifelong cops shouldn’t they have at least looked into what the recording said about the attorney general and others?

  The congressman was growing angry. He said he didn’t know why the FBI should have interviewed him. “I don’t know why they should have,” he said. He said he didn’t know what this was about.

  I said he didn’t know either.

  Congressman Gekas repeated his assertion that the FBI bodytap contained only “bald allegations.” He said that the investigators probably dismissed the chief of police’s allegations “out of hand.” As had the state police officials I’d encountered.

  Then came the interesting part: Congressman Gekas said people like himself and the attorney general are never investigated. Their reputations prevented them from being investigated, he explained. Their reputations would be besmirched if there was even any hint they were being investigated, he said. So all allegations against them, it followed, naturally had to be dismissed out of hand, he said. He said he was sure that’s what had happened in this case, that the prosecutors and the FBI agents, knowing himself and Roy Zimmerman as well as they did, simply dismissed the chief of police’s bald allegations out of hand. The crux of his argument seemed to be that investigations are never conducted against people like AG Zimmerman and himself, that as administrators of the law they were above it.

  I became angry. “You’re not saying you’re above the law, are you?”

  The congressman and I sat staring at each other, both angry. Gekas thought about it for several seconds longer than I would have preferred.

  “No,” the congressman finally said.

  This exchange goes a long way to explain why it took investigators almost a decade to get around to investigating Mike McQueary’s troubling allegations against Jerry Sandusky, and his Penn State and Second Mile associates.

  Jerry Sandusky would not be seriously investigated by the state attorney general’s office for alleged pedophile activities because, in this mentality, even a hint of an investigation would ruin Sandusky, sink the Second Mile gravy train, and likely as not destroy the Penn State athletic department in the bargain. And the resulting blow-up would damage the attorney general’s chances of being elected governor, and collecting contributions.

  The reputations of these insiders, and their associates, become more important than any law, or crime they may have committed, no matter how heinous.

  As well, underlings in the justice system naturally fear their careers will be destroyed if they dare investigate their higher-ups and patrons. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

  So they aren’t investigated. In recent state history, this category of uninvestigated offenders includes state judges, and a supporting cast of go-alongs who’ve committed terrible crimes against children.

  Their untested integrity and reputations are more important than laws, reporting rules, children, or any one child.

  More skeletons in closet of elected AG Zimmerman

  It would turn out that AG Roy Zimmerman had an interesting skeleton in his closet that I think also sheds light today on the AG’s office failure to investigate Jerry Sandusky.

  When he was growing up, I’d learn, Zimmerman had an infamous uncle, Johnny Magaro, who’d been arrested multiple times for gambling and prostitution offenses. When Zimmerman got into the county district attorney’s office in the 1960s as an assistant DA, the vice arrests of his uncle stopped, even though it was known by the vice cops that the uncle was actively selling numbers from the family peanut shop.

  A retired city vice detective, Walter Brodhecke
r, explained it to us like this (in The Sins of Our Fathers):

  Johnny Magaro, Brodhecker tells us, sold numbers in the family store through the 1960s. He did so with what amounted to the protection of his nephew, LeRoy Zimmerman, who as district attorney worked a block and a half away at the courthouse. Beginning in the early 60s the city vice unit started receiving complaints from neighbors about Magaro’s numbers operation. “We’d get complaints,” he tells us. But, “we knew the connection” the uncle had to the DA’s office. Brodhecker says it was customary -- an unwritten rule -- that whenever the police had evidence on a relative of a politician that the politician would first be told about it to prevent “embarrassment.”

  We ask him why this was done. He laughs at us. “You want to live, you want to retire, you play ball,” he laughs. “Whenever we got evidence we thought we could do something with” they went to the DA’s office. At the time Zimmerman was still an assistant DA working for DA Marty Lock but “we knew the connection.” They knew there’d be no sense arresting Johnny Magaro if the DA’s office would not press charges. DA Marty Lock told them “lay low, we’ll take care of it,” Brodhecker remembers. But Johnny Magaro kept selling the numbers. Then, when Lock died and Zimmerman became DA, “we just gave up” trying to stop Magaro, since they knew Zimmerman wouldn’t lift a finger against his uncle. “When Zimmerman got in there we knew he wasn’t going to do a thing about Johnny Magaro,” Brodhecker says. Brodhecker laughed, sitting in his cozy retirement home. That was why Johnny Magaro’s lifelong appearance on the police rap sheet ended when LeRoy Zimmerman got into the courthouse, Brodhecker points out.

  When the top dog in a prosecutor’s office doesn’t want to actively pursue a case, the investigators working for him damn well know it. The investigation, for all intents and purposes, stops.

  In the case of Jerry Sandusky, Penn State, and the Second Mile, investigators knew AG Tom Corbett was impeding an investigation. So the investigation stopped. Later, Gov. Corbett would falsely and desperately blame the investigators, the grand jury(s), and Coach Joe Paterno.