Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Beth Grossman, GOP Candidate For D.A., Calls Larry Krasner's George Soros-Financed Campaign A "Grand Social Experiment"

Larry at his victory party ["F--k the FOP!"]
By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net

Only in Philadelphia where our incumbent District Attorney is currently under federal indictment for political corruption could the citizens be poised to make a worse choice as their next D.A.

That would be Larry Krasner, the George Soros-financed radical "progressive" who just won the Democratic primary for D.A. Now he's running for election this November in a town where Democrats outnumber Republicans 7 to 1.

Krasner is a longtime civil rights lawyer who has sued the Philadelphia Police Department 75 times, on behalf of drug dealers and protesters from groups such as Black Lives Matter, ACT UP and Occupy Philly.

Larry's the guy who talked our current corrupt D.A. into tossing more than 800 convictions of drug dealers, nearly all of whom had pleaded guilty after getting caught with drugs. For his next trick, Progressive Larry sued the city to gain cash rewards from the taxpayers that will ultimately benefit 300 newly emancipated drug dealers. The drug dealers are currently in magistrate court, eagerly awaiting those cash payouts arranged by their good friend Larry.

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Monday, May 22, 2017

Merlino Turns Down Plea Offer In Big Mob Case

Reprinted with permission from  Gang Land News.

By George Anastasia


Brad Sirkin has folded his cards.


The prolific, enterprising mob associate and sometime driver for Philadelphia Mafia boss Joseph (Skinny Joey) Merlino has agreed to cop a guilty plea in that sweeping but flawed racketeering conspiracy indictment in Manhattan Federal Court, and also to conspiracy to commit health care fraud in a more pointed and apparently airtight case against him and seven co-defendants in federal court in Tampa.

Merlino, on the other hand, is hanging tough and is prepared to go to trial in Manhattan where several other defendants also have opted to take deals. The insurance scam, the central charge in the Tampa case, is just a small piece of the broader New York indictment.

Sirkin, in a plea agreement filed in Florida, admitted his role in what authorities have alleged was a $157 million insurance fraud scheme that included kickbacks to doctors and pharmacist who knowingly wrote and filled bogus prescriptions for what authorities said were "compound medications, chiefly pain creams and scar creams, irrespective of medical necessity."

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Not-So-Bright Justice: Tom Bergstrom, Msgr. Lynn's Lawyer, Gets A Scolding; Prosecutors In The Corrupt D.A.'s Office Get A Pass

By Ralph Cipriano
Tom Bergstrom: Got In Trouble For Defending His Client
for BigTrial.net

On Friday, Judge Gwendolyn N. Bright held a hearing on legal misconduct in the case of Msgr. William J. Lynn.

If you haven't heard, it was a curious affair. So far in the seven-year history of the legal travesty known as the Lynn case, the only misconduct that we know of has been the rampant and intentional misconduct of the prosecutors.

But Judge Bright was holding Friday's hearing to decide whether she would find Thomas A. Bergstrom, Lynn's lawyer, guilty of contempt for violating the judge's gag order in the Lynn case. Because Bergstrom got upset when The Philadelphia Inquirer libeled his client.

Only in Philadelphia does this nonsense make sense. Where we have a D.A. still in office despite a 29-count federal indictment for political corruption. And prosecutors in that office who put innocent men in jail for imaginary crimes, as in the case of Msgr. Lynn, and don't get into any trouble for it. Even though we have it from inside the D.A.'s office that they knew their star witness wasn't credible.

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Friday, May 19, 2017

Sandusky's Lawyer Was Painfully Inept

Editor’s note:  Here is another excerpt from Mark Pendergrast’s forthcoming book, The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment. Again, Mark refers people to this petition at Change.org seeking a new trial for Sandusky.  Please sign the petition and leave a detailed comment, especially if you know Sandusky personally or have other reasons to doubt that he received a fair trial. To be "newsworthy" it is important that signers include high-profile people, such as former Penn State football players or coaches, who will explain who they are and why they are signing.
 
by Mark Pendergrast
For BigTrial.net
 
On Monday, June 11, 2012, Joe McGettigan opened the trial of Jerry Sandusky with an impassioned speech to the newly picked jurors about the “serial predatory pedophile” whom they should convict. 
 
McGettigan, then 64, a native of Philadelphia, had carved out a reputation as an aggressive, successful prosecutor.  “He is smart, tenacious, and well-prepared,” wrote one journalist, who also called him a pugnacious street brawler.  “He will steamroll over anyone who gets in his way,” another lawyer observed, adding that McGettigan was a “true believer” who thought “all criminals deserve life sentences.”
 
 He was known as “Hollywood Joe McGettigan” because of his penchant for dark glasses, garish ties, and his serving as a legal consultant and writer for a one-season television series.  In the press, he had already called the Second Mile “a victim factory.”[i]

Now McGettigan told the jurors that the young men who would testify had endured “years of victimization,” and that, although the molestation had occurred years ago, “the past is never dead.  It’s not even past.”

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Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Inky, Rolling Stone Ignore Detective Walsh Bombshell

The Sounds of Silence
By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net

If you want a perfect illustration of what's wrong with the media, let's talk about The Philadelphia Inquirer and Rolling Stone, and their stubborn refusal to deal with how they blew to hell the "Billy Doe" fake rape story.

Last Tuesday on this blog, we printed a news story about a 12-page affidavit filed in Common Pleas Court by retired Detective Joe Walsh. In that affidavit, Walsh, the D.A.'s lead detective on the Philly archdiocese sex abuse scandal, detailed one lie after another that he caught Billy Doe/Danny Gallagher telling. Gallagher even admitted he lied and "just made stuff up," the detective says. Walsh repeatedly concluded that Gallagher wasn't telling the truth when he claimed he was raped as a 10 and 11 year-old altar boy in separate attacks by two priests and a schoolteacher.

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Lurching Toward Trial In The Sandusky Case

Editor's Note: Here is another excerpt from Mark Pendergrast’s forthcoming book, The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment. (Sunbury Press, paperback, $19.95, release date, Nov. 6, 2017; ISBN: 978-1-62006-765-9). The author is allowing it to be posted now to explain why people should sign the new Change.org petition to grant Sandusky a new trial. Please sign this petition ASAP, the author writes, and it's also important that you add a comment.

"This section, ‘Lurching Towards Trial,’ just gives you the flavor of how incredibly rushed the trial was, and how unprepared the defense lawyers were," Pendergrast wrote Big Trial. "The jury selection process was appalling, with several jurors indicating that they had already concluded that Sandusky was guilty. They were selected as jurors anyway. Defense attorney Joe Amendola gave the worst opening statement I’ve ever encountered, saying that the Commonwealth had ‘overwhelming evidence’ against Sandusky, when in fact there was no physical evidence at all, the victims’ stories were problematical in many ways, and the defense attorneys were utterly ineffective.  It’s a complex story, but the bottom line is that, at the least, it is abundantly clear that Sandusky deserves a new trial.”
 
 By Mark Pendergrast
for BigTrial.net
 
Joe Amendola and Karl Rominger, the attorneys for Jerry Sandusky, faced a virtually insurmountable task in preparing for the trial, which Judge John Cleland was clearly intent on holding as soon as possible.  Cleland was perhaps sensitive to media criticism questioning why it had taken three years from the time Aaron Fisher, “Victim 1,” first made allegations, to the time of Sandusky’s arrest.[1]  

The reason: it took those three years for the prosecutors to grow memories, find other alleged victims, and convince the Grand Jury and Office of the Attorney General that there was sufficient evidence to recommend an indictment, but in the hysteria over the case, no one acknowledged that reality.

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Friday, May 12, 2017

What WHYY's "The List" Got Right And What It Got Wrong

By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net

Tonight, at 10:30 p.m., WHYY is airing "The List," a 59-minute documentary on the sex abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

I'm one of the people who was interviewed for the film. For the first 50 minutes or so, the documentary is mostly successful when it deals with former D.A. Lynne Abraham's crusade to pry loose the archdiocese's secret archive files. That's the 45,000-page history of the clergy's sex crimes against hundreds of innocent children dating back to the 1940s.

But during the last 10 minutes, the film fails when it attempts to reconcile Abraham's righteous crusade with the witch hunt staged by our current D.A., Rufus Seth Williams.

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Wednesday, May 10, 2017

The Repressed Memories Of Victim No. 7 In The Sandusky Case

Editor's Note: On May 11, 2017, Dustin Struble is scheduled to testify in a hearing before Judge John Foradora in a Bellefonte, PA, courthouse.  He is known as “Victim 7” in the Jerry Sandusky case.  

Investigator and science writer Mark Pendergrast is near completion of a book on the Sandusky case, The Most Hated Man in America: Jerry Sandusky and the Rush to Judgment, which will be published late in 2017.  Because he thinks that some of the information he has unearthed is important to reveal now, he has allowed BigTrial.net to publish excerpts from it. 

By Mark Pendergrast
for BigTrial.net

Dustin Struble (eventually to be labeled “Victim Number 7”), born on October 10, 1984, was two years older than Zachary Konstas [the boy in the 1998 Sandusky shower incident].  The two had been friends since their Second Mile days.  The police contacted Struble in January of 2011, and after his second interview with police, he told them that he was entering psychotherapy on February 22, 2011.  Konstas would subsequently ask about Struble’s counseling experience during phone calls.  He wanted to know if he had “remembered anything more”, indicating that Struble was in the process of recovering memories during therapy.[1]  From the context, it is likely that Konstas was also trying to “remember” more during therapy sessions of his own.

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Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Detective Joe Walsh In Bombshell Affidavit: "Billy Doe" Admitted That He Lied And "Just Made Stuff Up!" But The D.A.'s Office Covered It Up!

Alleged "Victim" A Complete Fraud
By Ralph Cipriano
for BigTrial.net

Detective Joe Walsh wasn't buying the BS that Danny Gallagher was peddling.

Back in March 2012, Walsh was prepping Danny Gallagher, AKA "Billy Doe," for his role as the D.A.'s star witness in the child endangerment case against Msgr. William J. Lynn, scheduled to go to trial in just a few weeks. Walsh was quizzing the former altar boy  about his claim that he was high on drugs when he told two social workers "graphic details" about violent rapes and beatings he  supposedly suffered at the hands of two priests and a Catholic schoolteacher.

But Walsh had interviewed Gallagher's father, a Philadelphia police sergeant, who said his son wasn't high on drugs the morning he talked to the two social workers. Because just a few minutes earlier, the father had driven his sober son home from the drug clinic. Danny Gallagher had also told many of those same graphic details the day before to his drug counselor, who told Walsh that Gallagher wasn't high when he made those same accusations.

"I asked" Gallagher about "all those graphic details," Walsh wrote in a blockbuster, 12-page affidavit filed Monday in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court. Those graphic details included allegations of brutal anal rapes, death threats, getting tied up naked with altar sashes, strangled with a seatbelt and being knocked unconscious by his assailants.

In his affidavit, Walsh said he asked the D.A.'s star witness: "Did he just make all that up?"  According to the detective, that's when Gallagher admitted, "He just made up stuff and told them anything."

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Case Closed: Detective Joe Walsh's Bombshell 12-Page Affidavit



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Friday, May 5, 2017

The Godfather Movies And Mafia Myths


By George Anastasia

The Tribeca Film Festival ended last month with a screening of The Godfather and its sequel The Godfather Part II. The tribute marked the 45th anniversary of the release of one of the best movies ever made.

The Don Corleone saga has been hailed as one of the greatest pieces of cinematic story telling in American history. But the impact of the movies went far beyond the silver screen. It helped solidify an image or perception of "men of honor" and a code of conduct -- omerta -- that gave nobility to a group of outlaws. If those men and that code ever existed, they disappeared two generations ago.

For more about Mafia myths read here in The Washington Post.



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