Jimmy Snuka Arrested For Murder

Monokne

If anyone hasn't heard the radio show Meltzer, Muchnick and Alvarez did on this on Wednesday night, it's an absolute must listen.

Itssoeasy

Monokne wrote: »

If anyone hasn't heard the radio show Meltzer, Muchnick and Alvarez did on this on Wednesday night, it's an absolute must listen.

How do we listen to it ?

Monokne

http://www.f4wonline.com/component/content/article/112-wrestling-observer/44367-wrestling-observer-radio-92-irv-muchnick-on-jimmy-snuka-plus-all-the-news-in-wrestling-and-mma

Mick Murdock

I've just subscribed to listen. A good excuse to check out f4w audio.

HeathenWolf

I suppose Undertaker is back down to 21-1 at WrestleMania then.

jaykhunter

Reganio 2 wrote: »

Is it to early to say Osw had a part in all of this?

Ha! You're a peach! Good riddence to baaad rubbish!

A Primal Nut

By the sounds of things, if the full truth got out it could be Vince McMahon's worst scandal yet. Unlikely we'll ever know for sure why the case was dropped though.

Stereomaniac

Has something else come out about Vince McMahon's involvement in the thing? I'm assuming that that briefcase was full of money. You'd think Snuka would've left that part out.

A Primal Nut

Stereomaniac wrote: »

Has something else come out about Vince McMahon's involvement in the thing? I'm assuming that that briefcase was full of money. You'd think Snuka would've left that part out.

Not sure if you heard the Wrestling Observer Radio or read the Newsletter but they were strongly insinuating that there was a cover up. The case was dropped after a meeting with Vince and Snuka, with Vince doing all the talking and the police wrongly believing that Snuka didn't speak much English (as in his WWE character).

The evidence that Snuka did it was very strong yet the case was dropped suddenly after two weeks. Nobody knows for sure what was in the briefcase but according to the newsletter:

"In those days, celebrities had a much easier time getting off on things. Cash talked when it came to both avoiding negative publicity and legal problems."

It seems hard to believe but who knows. There must be a reason the case was dropped.

Snuka may have been WWE's biggest babyface at the time (Hogan arrived the following year).

Stereomaniac

Without changing the subject too much, was Bob Backlund not that over with fans towards the end of his reign? I think I read somewhere before that Vince Sr. was trying to prove a point (like father like son) by keeping his reign going for so long, even though people weren't really that into him. I'm sure whatever it was it wouldn't be as hostile as today's environment. Anyway, I think it's pretty clear that there was some sort of cover up. I just can't understand what possessed Jimmy Snuka to include stuff like that in his book. I didn't listen to the Wrestling Observer Radio talking about it but what you outlined there sounds like what we could have all deduced from what we knew already.

Monokne

You have to remember Vince Jr was not running the company when this happened, - he was specifically dispatched to Allentown by Vince Sr to go and be the clean up man so Snuka wouldn't miss any shows. Look at the bare facts:

- When interviewed by Irv Muchnick in 1992, Detective Procranyn said that Snuka had one consistent story and had never veered from it - This despite the fact that there were at least 5 different versions Snuka had given to people at the hospital and the police station, which Procranyn knew as he was the primary investigator.

- There was a coroner saying it was a clear homicide

- The perp was changing his story over and over again.

- Vince McMahon, who's been sent to town to get Snuka out of trouble, goes into a meeting with Procranyn with a briefcase, comes out an hour later and the case goes cold for 32 years.

Hmm. Probably just a coincidence.

Monokne

Key to the story is the fact that Procranyn is still on the police force, and the DA at the time, William Platt is now a senior judge in the county:
http://www.pacourts.us/courts/superior-court/superior-court-judges/senior-judge-william-h-platt

So plain as day as the cover up is, there's little to no chance that the cover up will be exposed or Vince will get dragged into it, unless the media blows the story up.

Stereomaniac

So basically the people who were there when it was covered up never allowed it to be forgotten, and when they got into positions that wielded enough power to do so, they reopened the case? It's only right, after all. I hope her family feel some sort of resolution now.

Monokne

That literally could not be further from the truth.

The people in power left the case open deliberately as it prevented the evidence from becoming public record. Had they closed the case, then the fact the coroner said it was a homicide and the fact Snuka changed his story so much would all have been public record.

The case went cold for 30 years before the Allentown Morning Call did a piece on it on the thirty year anniversary. Crucially they had the coroners report which was the first time that had ever been made public. This made it clear Argentino had about 30 marks and bruises all over her body which meant the idea she'd slipped and fallen was completely ridiculous. With the advent of the internet there was a groundswell of support in the community for this to be looked into. This led to a grand jury investigating it and charges being brought.

Irv Muchnick - who wrote a book on the situation and has pursued the case for 20+ years - believes that between the time elapsed since the crime happened, and Snuka's likely 'diminished capacity' defence, the chances of a conviction are slim so the Argentino's & people who want justice should celebrate now and not wait for more later.

Stereomaniac

Is there a possibility that Snuka could get one of those convictions but then doesn't have to go to jail because he's going to die soon due to his illness? That happens sometimes I know.
From the sounds of things it's the reporters who have written about this story who are responsible for not letting it go away and trying to make sure that the truth comes to light eventually.
I didn't understand that the case being left open without any fresh information for so many years was probably just a tactic to keep people safe from the cover-up being discovered!
This whole thing sounds like it would make for a great edition of Serial. I'm sure there a lot of people having a hard time accepting this information about a childhood hero of theirs.

Monokne

I'm a big fan of true crime movies and when I read the book a couple years ago by Irv Muchnick I thought this would make a good one - but even more so now that he's been brought to trial.

Snuka has had the surgery for his cancer and by all accounts should be cancer free so it seems that the diminished capacity stuff is just a tactic. Both Dave Meltzer and the Torch's Bruce Mitchell made mention that they've spoken to friends of Snuka who said the idea he can't carry on a conversation or is not aware of exactly what is happening is bullsh*t.

A Primal Nut

Monokne wrote: »

You have to remember Vince Jr was not running the company when this happened, - he was specifically dispatched to Allentown by Vince Sr to go and be the clean up man so Snuka wouldn't miss any shows.

Actually Vince Jr. bought WWE in 1982, about a year before this happened, so he was very much in charge.

Monokne

A Primal Nut wrote: »

Actually Vince Jr. bought WWE in 1982, about a year before this happened, so he was very much in charge.

Right you are. My mistake. I either misheard something Muchnick said to Meltzer, or he misspoke.

This, incidentally, is what Muchnick had to say in this weeks Observer.:

Irv Muchnick wrote:

Snuka Murder Indictment Asks Some of the Right Questions -- Also Begs a Few Big Ones


by Irvin Muchnick



The indictment of Jimmy Snuka in the Nancy Argentino death finally -- as in after 32 years, finally-- brings the criminal justice system of Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, into some alignment with reality.

Whether Snuka is guilty of third degree murder and involuntary manslaughter is for a trial to determine. But no one in charge of law enforcement should ever have been making the preposterous argument that there wasn’t a triable case here. Now, to the relief of everyone not stubbornly planted in an alternate universe, no one is.

Though the case against Snuka was circumstantial, the defendant incriminated himself by heaping lies about this mysterious incident atop a disturbing and substantial record of violence against women. Nancy’s injuries were anything but incidental and accidental. And there was no semblance of a third-party assailant or a claim of one -- only Jimmy and her in Room 427 of the Whitehall’s George Washington Motor Lodge prior to May 1983 syndicated TV tapings in Allentown for the then-WWF.

One of the byproducts of three-plus decades of justice denied is that what we wind up with a grotesque spectacle at the back end: in this instance, deciding the fate of a 72-year man with cancer who banks on sympathy wherever he can find it, as well as on the selective memories of those easily mesmerized by celebrity, wealth, and power. I could find myself persuaded by either side of the argument as to whether a prison term for such a broken figure, with such a broken legacy, meaningfully meets the definition of Justice with a capital J.

As a journalist, I am content to declare victory with the process that was the county’s Seventh Investigating Grand Jury. District Attorney James Martin tackled the Snuka-Argentino scenario -- pro wrestling’s answer to Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick Bridge -- way too late, but at least he got it right.

Where I would like to turn the public’s attention next is to remaining questions that the grand jury artfully dodged: What is the accountability of local public officials, including some of the very ones participating in Tuesday’s press conference to explain the presentment of the charges?

DA Martin’s predecessor in 1983, William Platt, is now a senior judge. Snuka’s autobiography goes to the trouble of highlighting that Vince McMahon carried a briefcase into a climactic meeting with Platt and others. They decided not to prosecute. Yet they never officially closed the case, either -- which meant that the records of their “open police investigation”could remain sealed from the prying eyes of, first, me in 1992 and, then, the Allentown Morning Call’s Adam Clark and Kevin Amerman on the 30th anniversary in 2013.

An even more malodorous specimen of the smell test is Gerald Procanyn, who is still working as an investigator in the DA’s office.

In 1983 he was a Whitehall police detective. In 1992, as chief of detectives, he told me one untruth after another in Snuka’s favor. The core lie -- demolished by my reporting and later the Morning Call’s, and ultimately exposed in devastating detail in the indictment attachments -- was that Snuka was consistent in maintaining that Nancy had slipped, fallen, and hit her head during an impromptu roadside urination. Procanyn’s serial lies, which in turn covered those of his eternal “person of interest,” were as gratuitous as they were outrageous.

But the 2015 prosecution proceeds by pretending that only the defendant’s happened.

From wrestling fans, the most frequently asked questions of me are “Did McMahon actively cover this up? and “Will evidence along these lines be introduced? The continued presence of Procanyn as a face for the prosecution suggests that the answer to the latter is “No.”

On June 16, 2008, in the course of a long email complaining about my reporting on the Chris Benoit double murder-suicide, WWE lawyer Jerry McDevitt wrote, “[Y]our insinuation that Mr. McMahon in some unspecified way kept the authorities from charging Jimmy Snuka for murder in 1983 is an odious lie.”

What I wrote was that McMahon sped back to Allentown and, in the observation of an investigator at the time (whom I named, by the way), served as Snuka’s “mouthpiece” during the wrestler’s interrogation -- while Snuka, essentially, worked his naive jungle-boy gimmick.

I also quoted Richard Cushing, the Argentino family’s first attorney, saying this: “The D.A. seemed like a nice enough person who wanted to do nothing. There was fear, I think, on two counts: fear of the amount of money the World Wrestling Federation had, and fear of the size of these people.”