The other lesson I took away from interviewing retired vice cop Walter Brohecker is that decades sometimes must pass before the true story emerges.
Attorney General Roy Zimmerman would not be seriously investigated nor prosecuted for any of the allegations leveled against him in the FBI documents, or other court documents mentioned here. He’d serve out the rest of his elected term, until 1989.
He would, however, be washed up in elective politics, and would never again run for office.
Dwyer suicide spells the end of Dick Thornburgh’s political career
Former Governor Dick Thornburgh, through his intermediaries, would spend years denying he’d played any part in the prosecution and suicide of his personal and political enemy, fellow Republican state Treasurer Budd Dwyer.
Trouble was, the voters didn’t believe him. Those bears are educated, and they do vote.
Budd Dwyer was one of the last moderate Republicans elected to high office in Pennsylvania. Dwyer was an old-fashioned retail politician. He’d never in his life taken a political contribution larger than $5,000. Moderate Republican voters were deeply offended at what they perceived to be Thornburgh’s unexplained role in the set-up, prosecution, and violent death of the likeable state treasurer.
When Thornburgh stood for election to U.S. Senate in 1991, his base deserted him, and even worked against him; Thornburgh too was retired from elective politics.
From this we see that political problems in Pennsylvania are solved in the political arena.
Attorney General Tom Corbett spent three years protecting Jerry Sandusky, and unjustly blamed and sacked Coach Joe Paterno.
These are strange lumps under the carpet, indeed.
These strange lumps under the carpet pose a political problem for Governor Corbett. In the real world, outside of Pennsylvania, they would also pose a legal problem for Corbett. But, like it or not, Corbett is protected by the legal system, as I’ve explained.
Tom Corbett’s problem now is political. Gov. Corbett’s convoluted, scapegoating stories about Jerry Sandusky simply are unbelievable. Voters know this.
By further striking out at revered Joe Paterno, and sacrificing Paterno in a rush to judgment to take the fall for him, Corbett has just as foolishly fired a missile into his own base of support.
He is attacking not just the Nittany Lions, but also the educated bears.
Elected AG Ernie Preate caught taking bribes from organized crime and gambling interests to run for elective AG’s office
Following LeRoy Zimmerman’s enlightening tenure as the state’s first elected attorney general, three Republicans attorneys general won election to succeed him: Ernie Preate, Mike Fisher, and Tom Corbett.
To varying degrees, by nature of the elected office, each of these three would be preoccupied with a toxic stew of elective and partisan politics, patronage, and the seeking and the receipt of tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions. Many of these campaign contributions come from lawyers and law firms having business with the AG’s office. I’d end up writing books about each of these AGs.
In 1995 Attorney General Ernie Preate would go to jail for selling his offices to gamblers in return for illegal campaign money. These bribery practices involving underworld figures started when Preate had been district attorney of Lackawanna County, in Scranton, in the 1980s. His corrupt practices continued while he raised money to run for state attorney general in 1988.
Attorney General Preate was brought down only because of the independent Crime Commission, established by Gov. Ray Shafer in the 1960s. In their report to the General Assembly dated April 8, 1994, Crime Commission members wrote:
“The Crime Commission has conducted an investigation into allegations that during 1987 and 1988, while serving as District Attorney of Lackawanna County, the present Attorney General of Pennsylvania, Ernest D. Preate, Jr., engaged in an arrangement to secure campaign contributions from persons who owned and operated illegal video poker gambling machines. It was further alleged that in return for such contributions, the then District Attorney would maintain a ‘hands off’ or non-enforcement policy. This investigative report reflects the conclusions of the Commission with respect to these allegations.”
Preate would carry this “hands-off” policy with him into the state AG’s office. In other words, in return for campaign cash, the attorney general simply did not investigate nor prosecute crimes. Many of these crimes, believe it or not, involved what is called “the Mafia.”
Let me restate this: organized crime figures, aka the Mafia, were now controlling the elected office of Pennsylvania Attorney General. They controlled it at least for several years. Perhaps they’re still controlling it.
Further, and perhaps just as important when we consider the mysteries of the long-running Sandusky grand jury(s), the Crime Commission explained that AG Preate had easily manipulated his staff in the AG’s office and the grand jury process to those same ends:
“The investigation also revealed that the foregoing contributions arrangement was not examined for possible criminal violations by the appropriate personnel of the Attorney General’s Office. Despite the fact that both prior to the incumbency of Ernest Preate, Jr., as Attorney General and thereafter, during his tenure, investigative leads for that purpose were available, these leads were not pursued. In fact, a statewide Grand Jury staffed by Attorney General Preate’s assistants was told explicitly about the scheme. Nevertheless the investigation of the arrangement involving the alleged quid pro quo was not pursued.
This raises serious questions about the administration of justice in the Commonwealth.”
In other words, if the attorney general’s office was itself converted into a political machine, whose secret doings now included the doling out of rewards for political tasks, and the protection of illegal activities perpetrated by friends and contributors, the AG’s staff could not be depended upon to blow the whistle.
The Crime Commission report sheds more light on the attorney general’s ability to manipulate, stall or otherwise terminate a statewide grand jury. A section of the report titled “Attorney General Preate Acts to Neutralize Grand Jury Evidence,” reads, in part:
“After Mr. Preate assumed office as Attorney General, an investigation by the Sixth Statewide Grand Jury into allegations that he improperly received campaign contributions from video poker operators was terminated.... The Commission determined that investigative leads concerning Mr. Preate’s conduct that developed during the Sixth Statewide Grand Jury’s proceedings were not pursued by the Attorney General’s Office....
The Commission determined that Mr. Preate appears to have breached a duty to recuse himself from the investigation. The attorney assigned to the Seventh Statewide Grand Jury’s video poker investigation, Dennis Reinaker, testified ... ‘it is just not realistic to think that we in that office were going to be asking questions about our boss.’”
In the early 1990s, Deputy Attorney General Anthony Sarcione, Director of the Criminal Law Division, was asked by the Crime Commission, “Did it never occur to you that the issue of the possible or perhaps criminal behavior of the Attorney General should be explored?”
“I will be frank,” Deputy AG Sarcione testified. “The Attorney General hired me. I didn’t know him. He showed a lot of faith in giving me such a position.... I didn’t see him as a potential criminal.”
Again, this shows how and why these political prosecutors create a patronage network for the purposes of protection and concealment of criminality. (Of course, not all relationships are criminal. AG Preate was actually popular among agents in the Bureau of Criminal Investigations. The agents felt that Preate “took care of them.” Preate would sometimes show up at BCI headquarters in running shoes and go jogging with the agents. Preate was also responsible for creating many of the task forces in the AG’s office.)
The Crime Commission also found that it was “not unusual” for attorneys not assigned to a particular grand jury investigation to kno
w details of its workings:
“The fact that Michael Kane, a Deputy Attorney General not assigned to the video poker case, would be aware of the workings of the Sixth Statewide Grand Jury was not unusual,” the report explains. “Dennis Reinaker, the Deputy Attorney General in charge of the Seventh Statewide Grand Jury investigating video poker testified before the Commission that, ‘...We in the office, particularly those who work in the prosecution section, generally knew about cases that other attorneys were working on, at least those of some significant nature.’”
Simply stated, everybody knows what’s going on, but no one can do anything about it.
As for AG Corbett’s phony 2009-to-2011 Sandusky grand jury investigation(s): lots of people in the office knew what was, and what wasn’t going on, and why. It was hardly a state secret in the AG’s office that Tom Corbett was protecting alleged pedophile Jerry Sandusky.
When Corbett left the AG’s office to become governor in 2011, he would leave behind, under the carpet, the telltale strange lumps of a corrupt and dishonest prosecutor.
All this would mystify the rest of the world. Just like my father was mystified when he discovered the cache of granite blocks hidden away up at Fort Indiantown Gap. What was the game they all were playing?
This time, the rest of the world would call their mystification by this name: the Jerry Sandusky case.
AG Preate was indicted in 1995 and sent to jail thanks mostly to the subpoena power of the independent Crime Commission, and its published report, which became the basis for a federal mail fraud conviction. (Preate was prosecuted by U.S. Attorney David M. Barasch, a former Pennsylvania Consumer Advocate, and relative of the great independent American journalist I.F. “Izzy” Stone.)
Even so, before he was indicted by the feds, AG Preate loudly denounced the Crime Commission and successfully campaigned to have it abolished by the state legislature in 1993.
At the time, The Philadelphia Inquirer noted that the Crime Commission’s “Freewheeling ‘Reports’ Helped Prove Its Undoing.”
“Preate has denied any impropriety and his supporters have called the probe a political witch hunt. The controversy underscored both the commission’s strength and its weakness,” the Inquirer reported.
“Influence and access are certainly part of the political process and are not, inherently, improper or illegal. So when should questions about appearances of impropriety, while not in themselves criminal offenses, be examined and presented to the public? And by whom?
“The crime commission’s power came not from its ability to indict, but from its mandate to inform.... Proponents of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission say what will be missing is an agency that focuses on the process and those involved in it.”
At the time, in 1994, when the Crime Commission released its report, Attorney General Preate was using his office as the state’s chief law enforcement officer to seek the Republican nomination for governor.
Without Crime Commission corruption flourishes in all branches of state government
With the abolition of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission, no other independent state agency would be in the position to examine the state attorney general’s office, or the courts. This continued and accelerated under elected Attorneys General Mike Fisher, and Tom Corbett.
Each of these attorneys general have not been predisposed or inclined to fight corruption in an even-handed, thorough manner, “following the evidence wherever it may lead,” as they say.
What AGs Fisher and Corbett have been predisposed to do is to protect their entrenched party interests and cronies, raise money, win their party’s nomination, and run for governor. That’s the conflict.
There would be increasing party patronage, and increasing corruption in the AG’s office, and the state courts. With the elections of AGs Fisher and Corbett, and the election of Gov. Tom Ridge in 1994, the ranks of political cronies in the courts and in the AG’s office would swell. These highly partisan appointees were by nature more interested in, and predisposed to, protecting each other and their patrons, rather than protecting the public.
Political friends and supporters would be installed as federal and state judges, and others would take control of the disciplinary offices of the state courts. You’d toe the party line, you play ball, or you’d be gone.
As retired Harrisburg vice police officer Walter Brodhecker told me in 1987, “You want to live, you want to retire, you play ball.”
These politicians were occupied with putting their party friends in: they were not inclined to take any of them out. Across the state, in many diverse cases, there was a blatant tendency to protect political supporters, donors, and judicial and political patronage hires alike.
And so Tom Corbett would protect Jerry Sandusky, and his Second Mile charity.
Then Gov. Tom Corbett would be forced to protect himself.
Left unprotected would be an unknown number of victimized children. It would always be a matter of priorities.
‘JoePa’ Takes the Fall
A slow Tom Corbett throws Joe Paterno under the bus
Behind the Tom Corbett, Jerry Sandusky and Penn State scandal
An essay by Bill Keisling
yardbird
JoePa Takes the Fall Page 14