In Order to Take Down the Amateur Athletic Union, ProPublica / Washington Post Investigation Has to Puff Up the U.S. Center for Safe Sport. That’s the American Way.
August 13, 2026Turns Out Pennsylvania DID Enact an Anti-SLAPP Statute – in 2024, in Virtual Stealth (and Needless to Add, Unreported Altogether by the Corrupt Lehigh County News Media)
September 1, 2026by Irvin Muchnick
James Martin, district attorney of Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, from 1998 to 2023, has died at 81. The obituary in the Allentown Morning Call, which was complicit in Martin’s office’s decades-long cover-up of the 1983 murder by WWE star Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka of his girlfriend Nancy Argentino, has characteristic audacious holes that the historical record needs to fill in.
In its lead audacity, a true howler, the Morning Call lists Martin’s equivocally failed prosecution of Snuka as the DA’s most prominent case. See https://www.mcall.com/2026/08/15/jim-martin-longtime-lehigh-county-da-dies/.
The truth is that Martin, following his former boss – later Pennsylvania judge – William Platt, whiffed on the prosecution of Snuka for more than 30 years, even though the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming.
Lehigh County’s deputy coroner, later coroner, Wayne Snyder, immediately flagged Argentino’s death for foul play in the aftermath of her autopsy. She had suffered a traumatic head injury when she was stricken in a motel room in Whitehall, just outside Allentown. There were body markings consistent with systematic mate abuse, of which Snuka had a history, with Argentino and with other women. He gave cops up to half a dozen conflicting accounts of what happened; one of them amounted to a veritable confession.
Yet Platt, and then Martin, failed to prosecute. Conveniently, they held the criminal investigation “open,” the effect of which was to thwart my public records requests during a 1992 reporting trip for New York’s Village Voice, and thereafter. The Whitehall chief detective, Gerald Procanyn, lied through his teeth during our interviews. Procanyn eventually retired from the Whitehall force, to kick in his public pension, then took a double-dipping job as an investigator for Martin.
The Morning Call’s courthouse reporter, Debbie Garlicki, graduated to the position of Martin’s media spokesperson.
In 2013, at the 30th anniversary of the Argentino death, the Morning Call published an exhaustive – and exhaustively incomplete – “cold case” package. There was nothing at all cold about the case: the article mostly recycled information it had in its grasp from the get-go. A key tell was that this so-called newspaper never even clued in readers to the fact that Martin had been Platt’s deputy DA. Indeed, didn’t name Martin at all.
Martin responded to the Morning Call’s reopening of attention to the case by convening a special grand jury. Or, as the newspaper’s callow reporters put it in hyping their work for a 2020 episode of VICE TV’s Dark Side of the Ring, Martin “put it to the people.” The grand jury indicted Snuka in 2015, but he never went to trial. The judge dismissed the case on grounds of his mental incompetence shortly before his death from cancer in 2017.
Along the way, the DA secured from the judge a gag order that scared off CBS’s 48 Hours. The gag order was prompted not by concern over pre-trial publicity prejudicial to Snuka, but by fear of scrutiny of the prosecutorial and police corruption that had engineered the long delay.
The Morning Call’s Martin obituary also mentions in passing his outrageous, First Amendment-chilling “private” defamation lawsuit against a local blogger named Bill Villa, who wrote in depth about the DA’s coddling of drunk drivers. Villa’s daughter Sheena had been a vehicular homicide victim of a privileged local brat who would have gotten off with a slap on the wrist but for Villa’s persistent writings and activism. The defamation suit is easily labeled a “SLAPP,” or “strategic lawsuit against public participation” – something illegal in many states but not in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
I realize that the SLAPP concept seems quaint in the Trump era. One of this site’s many articles about this angle is “Allentown Morning Call, After Botching Coverage of Jimmy ‘Superfly’ Snuka Murder Case, Botches Coverage of Prosecutor James Martin’s SLAPP Suit Against Critic Bill Villa,” September 1, 2017, https://concussioninc.net/?p=12181.
Readers interested in the full background of the Snuka-Argentino murder case can peruse the Concussion Inc. coverage over the years. The most comprehensive treatment is “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’s the Story VICE TV’s ‘Dark Side of the Ring’ Was Afraid to Tell,” April 26, 2020, https://concussioninc.net/?p=14447.