{"id":24704,"date":"2020-04-26T23:05:39","date_gmt":"2020-04-27T04:05:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/?p=24704"},"modified":"2020-04-26T23:05:44","modified_gmt":"2020-04-27T04:05:44","slug":"irvin-muchnick-skype-interview-4-26-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/irvin-muchnick-skype-interview-4-26-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Irvin Muchnick Skype Interview 4\/26\/2020"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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How Jimmy Snuka Got Away With Murder. How the Allentown Morning Call Helped Cover Up the Historical and Ongoing Corruption in Lehigh County Criminal Justice. Here\u2019s the Story VICE TV\u2019s \u2018Dark Side of the Ring\u2019 Was Afraid to Tell. \u2013 Concussion Inc.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

PREVIOUSLY:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTime For a Deep Dive Into the VICE TV \/ \u2018Dark Side of the Ring After Dark\u2019 Censorship of My \u2018Live-to-Tape\u2019 Interview About the Ongoing Jimmy \u2018Superfly\u2019 Snuka Murder Cover-Up in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania,\u201d https:\/\/concussioninc.net\/?p=14399<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMuchnick on Irish Podcast \u2018Off the Ball\u2019 Pro Wrestling Edition, Discussing Jimmy \u2018Superfly\u2019 Snuka\u2019s Murder of Nancy Argentino and Other Topics,\u201d https:\/\/concussioninc.net\/?p=14403<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cVICE TV\u2019s \u2018Dark Side of the Ring\u2019 Producers: We\u2019re Not Responsible For the Train Wreck That Was VICE TV\u2019s \u2018Dark Side of the Ring After Dark\u2019 on the Jimmy Snuka Murder Case,\u201d https:\/\/concussioninc.net\/?p=14410<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat to Make of the Intriguing Testimony of Sam (Tonga Kid) Fatu in the \u2018Dark Side of the Ring\u2019 Episode on the Jimmy \u2018Superfly\u2019 Snuka Murder of Nancy Argentino?\u201d, concussioninc.net\/?p=14417<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMuchnick Discusses Jimmy \u2018Superfly\u2019 Snuka Murder Case on \u2018Hannibal TV\u2019,\u201d https:\/\/concussioninc.net\/?p=14437<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe One and Only Law Enforcement Voice in VICE TV\u2019s \u2018Dark Side of the Ring\u2019 Episode on the Jimmy \u2018Superfly\u2019 Snuka Murder Case Was a Local Police Chief Who Got Fired the Year I Broke the Story,\u201d https:\/\/concussioninc.net\/?p=14441<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

===<\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Irvin Muchnick<\/em>
Getting away with murder is a bit like being dictator of a banana republic: it can be a full-time job. Jimmy \u201cSuperfly\u201d Snuka\u2019s escape from responsibility for the seedy death of Nancy Argentino in Room 427 of the George Washington Motor Lodge in Whitehall, Pennsylvania, on May 10, 1983, would consume some unspecifiable amount of his mental and physical energy across the last 34 of his 73 years.The fabled pro wrestler slipped away for good on January 3, 2017, when Judge Kelly Banach of the Pennsylvania Court of Common Pleas declared him mentally incompetent to stand trial on counts of third degree murder and manslaughter. Snuka died a mere 12 days later of stomach cancer.Though controversial at the time, the judge\u2019s ruling had merit. Snuka\u2019s brain was not studied postmortem for strangled accumulations of tau protein \u2014 the sign of chronic traumatic encephalopathy. However, from a lay perspective, there is good reason to suspect that decades of bumps inside wrestling rings could have left him seriously brain-addled. Indeed, if Snuka had CTE, it might be a mitigating factor in the murder itself and in his pattern of domestic abuse against Nancy, his first wife Sharon, and other partners. As with confirmed CTE victim Chris Benoit, he of the heinous 2007 double-murder and suicide, so too might it have been with the once high-flying Fijian native James Reiher Wiley Smith.Snuka was indicted in 2015, in a too-little-too-late prosecution of what was popularly mislabeled a \u201ccold case.\u201d In fact, no significant new physical or narrative evidence, none whatever, emerged subsequent to the file of basic facts, clinical data, and wildly contradictory Snuka accounts assembled by a half-hearted Whitehall detective, Gerald Procanyn, and colleagues in the days immediately following the fatal incident.What happened, rather, was that a three-decade cover-up simply began unraveling at the arbitrary \u2014 and conveniently tardy \u2014 milestone of its 30th anniversary. This was thanks to some Freudian slips in Snuka\u2019s 2012 autobiography, as ventriloquized for the functionally illiterate author by his ghostwriter (and possibly sensationalized for vague gossip and commercial value), and to the persistence of Nancy\u2019s justice-seeking sisters, Louise Argentino and Lorraine Salome.The catalyst for calling new attention to this \u201ccold\u201d case, which in truth was merely something Lehigh Valley powerbrokers kept stored in a proverbial icebox, was a circulation-boosting decision by the Allentown Morning Call<\/em>. The newspaper had lent its own passive and decades-long assist to the ongoing deep freeze. But in 2013 the Morning Call <\/em>published a lengthy Sunday article by reporters Kevin Amerman and Adam Clarke; they had unearthed key documents whose existence and essence the public decision-makers and the local press actually knew from the get-go, all but chapter and verse.In the orchestrated thaw, James Martin, the district attorney, referred his 30-year-old \u201copen\u201d investigation to the county\u2019s Seventh Investigating Grand Jury. Martin had been an assistant DA under his predecessor, William Platt, in 1983. The Allentown Morning Call <\/em>\u201d forgot\u201d to point its hyped blowtorch in the direction of this clearly pertinent fact. Among several others.After the newly impaneled grand jury had been re-sifting the Snuka evidence for more than a year, Nancy sisters Louise and Lorraine submitted an opinion essay to the Morning Call<\/em>. The piece was accepted pending revisions to conform to the newspaper op-ed page\u2019s format. Louise and Lorraine made these changes and resubmitted the article, which was accepted for publication. But the Morning Call <\/em>refused to schedule it, and neither the op-ed editor nor the editor-in-chief responded to follow-ups. Finally, I arranged for the Argentino sisters to publish their piece at the Wrestling Observer <\/em>website and at Concussion Inc. See \u201cAfter 32 Years, \u2018Justice\u2019 in Our Sisters\u2019 Death Has Larger Meaning,\u201d February 17, 2015, https:\/\/concussioninc.net\/?p=9845<\/a>.Another thing happened in the interlude between overdue indictment and failed prosecution, something that foreshadowed the recent tip-toe episode about the case on VICE TV\u2019s Dark Side of the Ring<\/em>. In 2015 both NBC\u2019s Dateline <\/em>and CBS\u2019s 48 Hours <\/em>showed keen interest in full backgrounders on this celebrity murder narrative. The CBS team took it all the way into serious pre-production work; they met with the sisters on the East Coast and sent a producer to meet with me over coffee at Berkeley\u2019s French Hotel to break down the whole story. But they dropped it after Judge Banach issued a gag order.What\u2019s telling about the gag order is that these things are usually sought by the defendant <\/em>with the claim that particular elements of pre-trial publicity could prejudice a jury. Not so in this case. The gag was sought and obtained (without so much as a written opinion from the judge) by the district attorney<\/em>, whose (unarticulated) fear was that close scrutiny would focus criticism on the office\u2019s failure to prosecute from the same evidence that had been in hand for decades. Rather than challenge this bizarre court order, of course, CBS folded its tent; there were easier celebrity murder stories out there.*****
\u201cWrite this down<\/em>\u201d \u2014 those were the first words spoken, after the obligatory greeting, by Wayne Snyder, the Lehigh County coroner, when I met with him in 1992, on my very first stop of a reporting trip underwritten by New York\u2019s Village Voice<\/em>.\u201cWrite this down: \u2018Upon viewing the body and speaking to the pathologist, I immediately suspected foul play and so notified the district attorney,\u2019\u201d said Snyder, who had been deputy coroner at the time of the incident. Snyder went on to elaborate about the marks throughout Argentino\u2019s body and the strong suggestion of mate abuse.From there, I went to the Whitehall Township Police Department, where Detective Procanyn played aggressively dumb. The cop said Snuka told investigators, solely and consistently, that Nancy had slipped and struck her head on a roadside stop to urinate on the drive into town, they thought \u201csomewhere near the intersection\u201d of U.S. Highway 33 and State Highway 22. Procanyn also said the Argentino family was perfectly satisfied with these conclusions.At a conference room at the Morning Call <\/em>offices, I met with a group of reporters and editors. The reporter on the first-day story of Argentino\u2019s death, Tim Blangger, contradicted Procanyn. Blangger had a vivid recollection of the detective demonstrating to him, with a grab of the shoulders, the prevailing theory that Snuka had pushed Argentino in the motel room, causing her head to strike the wall or a blunt object.I spoke with Louise Argentino. I pored over records she provided of the family\u2019s two private investigations, and talked to the lawyer who conducted one of them. In fact, Snuka had given multiple explanations of the fatal event, as many as four to six of them, at locations ranging from a purported roadside pee stop to a stop at a gas station to the George Washington Motor Lodge, with agency ranging from \u201can accident\u201d to \u201chorseplay\u201d to a \u201clovers\u2019 quarrel.\u201d There was also a highly publicized domestic violence incident months earlier at a Howard Johnson\u2019s near Syracuse, New York (\u201ca nervous desk clerk\u201d fueled a misunderstanding there, the oily Procanyn had assured me). Finally, there was the Argentinos\u2019 default, and uncollected, $500,000 wrongful death judgment against Snuka in Philadelphia federal court in 1985.The family was satisfied by the Whitehall and Lehigh County investigation? My foot.*****Post-Snuka death commentary in the wrestling world took three forms. In descending order of volume, they were the disgustingly bad, the mostly right, and the almost completely on the mark.Jim Ross, the famous wrestling announcer and former WWE executive, was disgustingly bad. When WWE\u2019s flagship Raw <\/em>television show aired a hagiographic video package of Snuka tied to an immediate pitch for \u201cJimmy Snuka Collection\u201d merchandise, Ross derided critics of its tastelessness and greed. \u201c[J]ust let the [Snuka] family grieve,\u201d Ross wrote on his blog, \u201cbefore we go back on this Oliver Stone quest of proving Jimmy Snuka posthumously was a murderer. It\u2019s ridiculous. It\u2019s embarrassing.\u201dThe next week Ross apologized, noting that \u201cI have apparently upset some folks.\u201d Specifically, he said that \u201cmy inadvertently flippant remarks about the \u2018Oliver Stone\u2019 types\u201d were not intended \u201cto disrespect the Argentino family for their loss of their daughter\/sister Nancy Argentino.\u201dRoss\u2019s remorse didn\u2019t keep him from doubling down on \u201cconspiracy theories\u201d in the Snuka case in his next podcast conversation, with retired wrestler Mick Foley.Dave Meltzer, publisher of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter<\/em>, was mostly right. In a podcast interview with another wrestling personality, Jim Cornette, Meltzer made mention of my 1992 investigation. In the way of wrestling fan sheet writers, Meltzer put a lot of energy into speculating on the sequencing and motivations of Snuka\u2019s evolving accounts to hospital personnel, a chaplain, and the police; these are interesting and useful, in my opinion, but less important than the bedrock fact that he obviously couldn\u2019t keep his story straight, and the cops and prosecutor proceeded to act as though this, in combination with compelling circumstantial evidence of mate abuse, were not enough to arrest him and bring him before a jury. These shortcomings in Meltzer\u2019s take (along with a couple of trivial errors in reference to me) were insignificant. Of more concern was the naive belief of Meltzer \u2014 shared by most observers \u2014 that the 2015 indictment was some good-faith bombshell rather than an extension of a charade by the authorities.David Bixenspan, an independent journalist, was almost completely on the mark \u2014 and I say this even though his characteristically dogged research and analysis included only passing reference to me. In an article for the sports muckraking site False Start, published by the Vocativ media and technology company, Bixenspan wrote in his conclusive paragraph: \u201cSo here\u2019s what matters: Most anyone who has followed or researched the Argentino murder case agrees that Snuka would have been found guilty. Given that, Snuka could have been the world\u2019s greatest neurosurgeon and it still wouldn\u2019t matter much in the end. Murderers deserve to be remembered as such first and foremost.\u201d (Bixenspan didn\u2019t get to what a consider the indispensable additive of cop and prosecutor corruption.)*****Dark Side of the Ring <\/em>flew me to Las Vegas for an hours-long sit-down interview on October 12, 2019.Last month, after VICE TV called to book me for an interview on a pre-taped after-show panel discussion called Dark Side of the Ring After Dark<\/em>, I was given a peek at the DSOTR <\/em>episode a couple of weeks before its April 14 initial airing.Aware of executive producers Jason Eisener and Evan Husney\u2019s fanboy-friendly \u201ccomplicated legacy\u201d format (already ranging in past episodes on murder-suicide perpetrator Benoit and Elmer Gantry-Great Santini mashup Fritz Von Erich), I was not entirely surprised to find the guts of my remarks about the background of the deep-sixed Snuka investigation sliced and diced into oblivion. By and large, I was reduced to blabbing redundancies along the lines of Legendary promoter Sam Muchnick was my uncle\u2026. In his day, Jimmy Snuka was a star\u2026. A big star\u2026. A HUGE star\u2026.<\/em>Meanwhile, Amerman and Clarke, the Morning Call<\/em> writers, got copious run time to ooh and ahh, like Jimmy Olsen on steroids, over their feat in spurring a failed (and as they say in wrestling, perhaps even a \u201cworked\u201d) prosecution. I hasten to add that they did <\/em>deserve credit for unearthing the Argentino autopsy report and the Snuka police interrogation records from U.S. District Court archives of the family\u2019s aborted civil lawsuit. But they didn\u2019t name-check Procanyn, the crooked cop, or Platt and Martin, the crooked prosecutors. Reporter Clarke praised the unnamed district attorney for his 2015 act of putting his stale evidence in front of a grand jury (or as Clarke called it in a populist flourish, to \u201cthe people\u201d). Colleague Amerman gushed as though the consequent failed prosecution were the neatest journalistic coup since the Pentagon Papers.I anticipated a more level playing field for After Dark<\/em>: in securing the booking, the producers represented to me that the program would be shot \u201clive to tape.\u201d Even someone who was not the double-crossed party could see this was a lie.In my hot take for SLAM! Wrestling the day after the broadcast, I wrote of how host Chris Gethard, in a cut passage said invitingly, \u201cThe floor is yours,\u201d before I riffed my distaste at seeing the Morning Call <\/em>guys preen a story that properly should have focused on the \u201cjustice delayed, justice denied\u201d manipulation by the authorities. Gethard reacted: \u201cYou make a fair point.\u201d This was only one of the many edits of After Dark<\/em>. I was barely on screen except for attempts at correcting those PhD\u2019s in forensic analysis, Greg \u201cThe Hammer\u201d Valentine and Brian \u201cNasty Boys\u201d Knobbs, who averred that they had \u201cheard\u201d Nancy Argentino simply fell.In the subsequent social media blowback, VICE TV appears to have euthanized Dark Side of the Ring After Dark<\/em>. There was no post-show following the documentary episode last week and it is nowhere in published future program listings.Eisener and Husney, the faces of DSOTR<\/em>, protested that After Dark <\/em>was produced by a company unaffiliated with their own. The damage to their cheesy brand is done, however, and in my view it is richly deserved. It might even amount to a taste of the rough justice they wimped out on directing toward Jimmy \u201cSuperfly\u201d Snuka \u2014 the man who murdered a 23-year-old woman \u2014 and the local law enforcement thugs who let him get away with it.William H. Platt, the prosecutor who didn\u2019t prosecute Snuka, while so helpfully leaving the case file \u201copen\u201d so that it couldn\u2019t be touched by public information law requesters, became a senior state judge. (Platt\u2019s son, William H. Platt II, was the lawyer who represented the pathetic former Whitehall police chief, Frederic Conjour, who was the only cop interviewed or named<\/em> in Dark Side of the Ring<\/em>. Platt Jr. represented Conjour after Whitehall fired him, just months before my \u201892 reporting trip \u2014 yet another little factoid DSOTR <\/em>didn\u2019t share in the context of putting the irrelevant and evasive chief on camera.)Platt\u2019s assistant district attorney and successor as DA, James Martin, is still there and still keeping a lid on the office\u2019s m.o. of crony justice. Martin is years into a \u201cprivate\u201d harassment defamation lawsuit \u2014 a First Amendment-chilling \u201cSLAPP,\u201d or Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation \u2014 against a local advertising guy, Bill Villa, whose daughter Sheena was killed in 2006 by a drunken binge-drinking driver, Robert LaBarre, son of a prominent Allentown lawyer, whom Martin gave a slap on the wrist. Detective Gerald Procacyn retired from the Whitehall force, kicking in his municipal pension, then immediately took a double-dipping job as an investigator for the district attorney. Last year Procanyn retired again, which means that he now may be eligible for two <\/em>public pensions for jobs well done.Jobs that included timely help on two ends in the systematic cover-up of the murder of Nancy Argentino by Jimmy \u201cSuperfly\u201d Snuka.===Chapter 9 of the 2007 book WRESTLING BABYLON: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal <\/em>is the first published investigative account of the death of Jimmy Snuka\u2019s girlfriend Nancy Argentino. (The article had been published online in the 1990s.) Order the book on Amazon here<\/strong><\/a>, or order an autographed copy direct from the author for US $17.95, postage paid. (PayPal to paypal@muchnick.net<\/strong><\/a>, or money order to Wrestling Babylon, P.O. Box 9629, Berkeley, CA 94709. Canadian orders, add US $5.00 for postage; all other foreign orders, add US $10.00 for postage.)The 2013 ebook JUSTICE DENIED: The Untold Story of Nancy Argentino\u2019s Death in Jimmy \u201cSuperfly\u201d Snuka\u2019s Motel Room<\/em>, which was published prior to the Allentown Morning Call<\/em>\u2019s famous article of the same year, supplements the original story with updated analysis, primary source documents, and photos. Order it here<\/a>.The Concussion Inc. blog archives include our more than 150 articles referencing Jimmy Snuka. Most of them involve aspects of the Argentino murder case and the related vagaries of the Lehigh County district attorney\u2019s office and other institutions of the local criminal justice system. Enter \u201cSnuka\u201d into the search bar at Irv\u2019s Blog \u2013 Concussion Inc. \u2013 Author Irvin Muchnick<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How Jimmy Snuka Got Away With Murder. How the Allentown Morning Call Helped Cover Up the Historical and Ongoing Corruption in Lehigh County Criminal Justice. Here\u2019s the Story VICE TV\u2019s \u2018Dark Side of the Ring\u2019 Was Afraid to Tell. \u2013 Concussion Inc. PREVIOUSLY: \u201cTime For a Deep Dive Into the VICE TV \/ \u2018Dark Side […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"video","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[108],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-24704","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-video","6":"category-sport","7":"post_format-post-format-video"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24704"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24718,"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24704\/revisions\/24718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}