By Dick Miller
WE.CONNECT.DOTS: Cover-ups have winners and losers, even the Penn State-Sandusky scandal. Former assistant PSU football coach Jerry Sandusky is currently serving a 45-year prison sentence for molesting several boys. Non-disclosure of the probe on Sandusky clearly benefited then Attorney General Tom Corbett while running for governor in 2010.
Losers in this cover-up are Penn State student-athletes, all PSU students, alumni, the memory of Joe Paterno, the surrounding community and certainly all who deserve to know what went on.
Winners – at least so far and besides Corbett – include PSU the institution, former Supreme Court Judge Cynthia Baldwin, NCAA and others unknown because the cover-up hides their identities and benefits.
Some are in a gray area, yet to be determined. Three administrators charged with helping delay the discovery of Sandusky come to mind. Will the withholding of evidence in forthcoming trials now delayed until after Corbett’s run for re-election benefit or hurt them?
The mystery begins with the strange disappearance of former Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar in April, 2005. Gricar had a mother’s complaint against Sandusky in 1998. He said Sandusky had showered with her son, a story later corroborated by the victim when questioned by investigators. For unknown reasons Gricar never followed through, according to a 2011 article in the NY Times.
No trace of Gricar apparently exists and he has long since been declared legally dead. Penn State hired former Federal Judge and FBI Director Louis Freeh to rush publish an “independent report” vindicating the school. In the report, for which he was paid $6.5 million, he used Gricar’s refusal to prosecute as substance to support the University’s delay in exposing Sandusky’s sordid behavior.
Corbett, PA Attorney-General from 2005 to 2010 and, now governor with still more investigative resources, paid no attention to Gricar’s disappearance. Even Gricar’s fellow county district attorneys did little to motivate law enforcement resources to solve the mystery.
Officially, Gricar’s disappearance is now in the hands of PA State Police.
Some say Corbett was too busy bottling up the Sandusky investigation while he was running for governor. However, current Attorney-General Kathleen Kane squelched any obstruction charges against Corbett with another yearlong whitewash by a special counsel with no subpoena powers and only paid $70 per hour.
Baldwin has continued to get special treatment by judges involved in the Sandusky prosecution during the period she was a PSU trustee and then chief legal counsel for the University.
Two of the three PSU administrators now awaiting trial for obstruction claim she said she represented them when she accompanied them and Paterno in appearances before the grand jury. Having legal representation inside the jury room is very rare.
Later, she claimed she was representing the University with the approval of the judge but also extremely rare. Still later, Baldwin returned voluntarily before the same grand jury and gave testimony against the two administrators and Paterno.
Recently some good investigative work by reporters at the Pittsburgh Tribune Review revealed that “racy” emails were flying about within the attorney-general’s office while Corbett reigned and the Sandusky probe was a priority.
Now the Trib has been stymied by a court order that says the newspaper cannot get access to the emails. The order was issued in secret, leaving the reason unknown. Corbett first denied he knew anything about the inner office emails. He later retracted the denial.
Neither Kane nor Freeh reports of the Sandusky crime spree mention this discovery. Apparently, they believe prosecutors can view pornography without compromising their ability to apprehend child molesters.
In the meantime, now AG Kane has paid $15,000 to a female agent when Corbett was boss. She claims “racy pictures were part of the culture in an office where men held power,” according to the Trib.
Could the pending cover-up of Ron Tomalis’s little work, but big paying job under Corbett be connected to the PSU-Sandusky cover-up? Tomalis, by virtue of being Corbett’s secretary of education was on the PSU Board of Trustees. Right-to-Know requests revealed Tomalis had only five emails and no phone or other correspondence logs during a recent three-month period. The revelations preceded his resignation from the $140,000 position last month.
The NCAA, resisting calls to slap the “death penalty on PSU football,” instead levied a $60 million fine. Spokespersons for the state-supported institution claim no tax payers’ funds were used to pay the fine.
Bottom Line: The NCAA recently lifted several sanctions against PSU. The football team is eligible to go to a bowl game this year. This makes all the people in Happy Valley happy and less likely to be concerned with the cover-up. For a more detailed look at the aspects of this sordid chapter in state history read Bill Keisling at www.yardbird.com.
