Jimmy Snuka’s Dementia Deathlock Is Lehigh County District Attorney’s Shame

Headline links to our 24 years of coverage of the Jimmy Snuka-Nancy Argentino homicide investigation are at https://concussioninc.net/?p=10501.

Concussion Inc.’s 2013 ebook in association with Snuka victim Nancy Argentino’s sisters, JUSTICE DENIED: The Untold Story of Nancy Argentino’s Death in Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka’s Motel Room, can be purchased from Amazon at http://amzn.com/B00CPTP6VM, for $2.99. If you don’t have a Kindle-compatible reader, you can get an emailed PDF file by sending $2.99 via Paypal to[email protected]. All proceeds benefit the projected women’s shelter of the church Centro Evangelical dei Fratelli, under development in Salerno, Italy.

by Irvin Muchnick

William Penn, founder of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is credited by most legal historians with being the first to utter the maxim “To delay justice, is injustice.” This was 323 years before a judge in Lehigh County, Kelly Banach, yesterday ruled that Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, now 73 years old, was not mentally competent to stand trial for the mysterious 1983 death of his girlfriend Nancy Argentino — most likely an involuntary manslaughter, at minimum, or wanton mate abuse, at maximum.

“Unfortunately, justice suffers when it’s delayed,” Judge Banach said from the bench at a hearing whose date had been swerved, without informing the Argentino family, so that Nancy’s sisters were unable to attend. They were already under the judge’s unconstitutional gag order, which had been imposed by the court not at the behest of the defendant, as usual, but in accord with a motion by the prosecutors.

And it is those prosecutors — Lehigh County district attorney James Martin and his long-entrenched gang of fixers and municipal mutual back-scratchers — who stand most exposed by the dictum that was amended, by British Prime Minister William Gladstone in 1868, to the now-familiar “justice delayed is justice denied.”

Martin was an assistant to then-D.A. William Platt — now a state judge — in the original scenario 33 years ago, when the county botched the prosecution of Snuka even though it already had essentially all the evidence it would finally produce for his indictment in 2015. The detective for Whitehall Township, Gerald Procanyn, is still on the county payroll, too — double-dipping as a detective for Martin’s corrupt office while also drawing a pension check from Whitehall, scene of the fatal incident, and subsequent fatally flawed investigation of it, at the now-defunct George Washington Motor Lodge.

In typical corporate media fashion, the Allentown Morning Call hogs all the credit for the revival of the Snuka cold case, while failing to mention that the newspaper itself led the community conspiracy of silence for three decades. Two Morning Call reporters, admirably, dug up case records on which I had been stymied years earlier. But there is no serious doubt that the work of this reporter — published in my 2007 book Wrestling Babylon after getting spiked by the Village Voice in 1992 and floating on the Internet, in samizdat fashion, ever since — was what provided the blueprint for the Morning Call’s gimmicky, and now pointless, front-page treatment.

And when Nancy’s sisters, Louise Argentino-Upham and Lorraine Salome, penned an op-ed article in between the newspaper’s 2013 story and the distrtict attorney’s better-late-than-never 2015 Snuka indictment, the Morning Call refused to publish it. Obviously, this Tribune Company property cares a lot more about splashy celebrity murder of the month headlines than it does about basic justice.

Sarah Cassi of Lehigh Valley Live has a good breakdown of Judge Banach’s decision. See http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/lehigh-county/index.ssf/2016/06/judge_rules_superfly_snuka.html.