US (PA) - Tapestry reveals a fourth branch of government
http://www.mcall.com/news/columnists/all-5tapestry-adec24,0,6219329.column?coll=all-news-col
December 24, 2006
Tapestry reveals a fourth branch of government
Paul Carpenter
Most of the pieces of the picture puzzle finally have come together, and they form a spectacular panorama of the complex network of sleaze that runs Pennsylvania.
At the center of this work of art are thousands of slot machines, all rigged to defraud suckers at more than a dozen casinos. (New state laws specifically allow the fraud.)
Licenses for five casinos were awarded the other day by the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board, after meeting behind closed doors to hide its skulduggery from the public.
One casino will be built in Bethlehem at the site of what was once a fairly honorable institution - the old Bethlehem Steel plant. Two will be in Philadelphia and one will be in Pittsburgh, joining those at places like Pocono Downs near Wilkes-Barre. A fifth new license went to the Mount Airy Resort in Monroe County, owned by Louis DeNaples.
Nothing illustrates the slots sleaze masterpiece better than DeNaples, who, as reported in The Morning Call just one day before the five licenses were granted, is being investigated for links to organized crime.
The probe involves William D’Elia, in jail on various charges and described by officials as boss of the Bufalino crime family of eastern Pennsylvania.
DeNaples also is a convicted felon, who got probation after copping a plea in 1978 to charges involving a $525,000 scheme to cheat on government contracts. According to the Pennsylvania Crime Commission, that deal came after he managed to get a hung jury at trial. Some gangsters in the Bufalino mob were convicted of jury tampering in that case.
All that, in my jaded view, almost guaranteed DeNaples a license from the PGCB. This is an agency, after all, that is run by somebody recruited from what was hitherto America’s most corrupt gambling regulatory body in Louisiana.
Scandals enveloping the PGCB are almost as fascinating as those at another of our corrupt agencies, the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission, which has had, as its public relations flack, a fellow named Kevin Feeley.
Feeley’s name jumped out at us the other day, when it was reported that he is now the spokesman for DeNaples.
Feeley also has worked as a flack for Steve Wojdak, a state legislator I got to know (while holding my nose) when I was a reporter in Harrisburg. Later, Wojdak became a lobbyist for the special interests he had served so well in the House.
Anyway, Feeley has worked as the flack for a number of unsavory establishments, including the Indian gaming industry, the tobacco industry and the DRJTBC. But his chief claim to fame was when he spoke for Ed Rendell, then the mayor of Philadelphia. (Later, it was Gov. Rendell who finagled Feeley the DRJTBC job.)
None of the interlocking parts of this picture puzzle would be possible, of course, without the legislation that created the slots juggernaut.
While that legislation was so clearly unconstitutional a child could see it, it passed and Gov. Rendell signed it into law, knowing the fix was in with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which winked at its brazen illegalities last June.
(The Supremes wanted a similarly illegal pay raise for themselves, and knew they would not get it unless they played ball with the slots law.)
All this would be difficult if this was not the only state in America without a disclosure law for lobbyists and other special interest harpies, but Pennsylvania’s three branches of government skillfully conspired to prevent such a law.
There is much more to be said about this putrid tapestry, but I have reached the bottom of the page. So I’ll just observe that it is a tapestry woven by a complex of symbiotic serpents in all three traditional branches of state government, plus what has become our fourth branch, the gambling industry.
paul.carpenter@mcall.com 610-820-6176
