for BigTrial.net
As a Penn State student, Mark Dambly wound up in jail for five days in 1979 after he pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. Then he got mixed up in an infamous multimillion dollar cocaine ring, a retired investigator says, but beat the rap by wearing a wire and cooperating with the government.
These days, Dambly is campaigning to become chairman of the Penn State Board of Trustees, an election scheduled for Friday.
But Dambly's most recent legal problems include getting hit with a subpoena last year in the federal probe of Allentown Mayor Ed Pawloski. Pawloski's being investigated for bribery and kickbacks; Dambly's connection is he's the Allentown mayor's top financial contributor.
With all the problems at Penn State, the question is, do they really need a guy with as much baggage as Mark Dambly as board chairman?
No, says Maribeth Roman Schmidt, executive director of Penn Staters for Responsible Stewardship.
"I think it's common sense," she wrote in an email, to favor candidates "who haven't been associated with scandal or illegal activity."
Blogger Ray Blehar agrees.
"Mark Dambly, if elected chairman of the board, will do nothing but perpetuate the poor university governance that the Penn State community has experienced since November 2011," Blehar wrote in an email.
Dambly, the president of Pennrose Management, could not be reached by email or telephone for comment on this story. A spokeswoman this afternoon said that Dambly had been in meetings all day and might be able to respond in a week.
Presumably after the election on Friday.
The Dambly file begins in 1979, on the weekend of a Penn State-Temple football game, with an incident where three students got beaten up during a fight in the Pugh Street parking garage.
Dambly was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. If convicted, he faced a fine of $2,500 and a year in jail. That's when Dambly hired R. Bruce Manchester of Bellefonte, PA as his lawyer.
On Nov. 17, 1979, Manchester sent Dambly a letter telling him that he had been offered a plea bargain by the Centre County District Attorney's Office that included pleading guilty to disorderly conduct, spending five days in jail, and paying a $200 fine.
"By pleading guilty you will have a police record which may have to be disclosed on various occasions in the future," Manchester wrote Dambly. "You stated to me on Wednesday the 28th that your career goal is to be a real estate broker."
Manchester informed Dambly that he would have to disclose his criminal record in order to apply for a real estate license. But Dambly wasn't forthcoming about the arrest when confronted in recent years by a TV reporter.
In 2012, Dambly was a Penn state trustee who had supported criminal background checks for university employees. Reporter Gary Sinderson of WJAC Johnstown Channel 6 confronted Dambly in a video posted on youtube.com and asked if Dambly had been arrested in 1979.
"I'm not aware of that," Dambly responded twice on camera. As he was walking away, in unreleased video recorded by the TV station, Sinderson asked Dambly about his alleged association with members of the cocaine ring.
"I don't recall that either," Dambly said.
When asked by his fellow trustees during an executive session about the disorderly conduct arrest, Dambly replied that it was "undocumented."
In 2013, Dambly filed an application in Centre County to have his 1979 guilty plea for disorderly conduct expunged.
TV reporter Sinderson asked Dambly about the infamous "Dr. Snow" yuppie cocaine ring run by Larry Lavin, then a student at the University of Pennsylvania dental school. The ring operated between 1978 and 1984.
In 1986, a judge sentenced three dentists to jail for their roles in the ring that the FBI said at the time was the largest known cocaine distribution enterprise in the history of the Philadelphia area, grossing up to $5 million a month.
A retired investigator who worked the Lavin case and sought anonymity said that former FBI Agent Leo Pedrotty, who died last year, was Dambly's handler after he decided to wear a wire to get himself out of a legal jam.
"Pedrotty was responsible for placing the recording equipment on Dambly and monitoring the results as Dambly secretly recorded conversations about the massive drug operation," the investigator wrote. "In exchange, Dambly would not be prosecuted and there would be no asset forfeiture action."
In the Dr. Snow case, Lavin, convicted of not paying $545,000 in taxes, served nearly 20 years in prison before he was released in 2005.
The judge also sentenced Brian Cassidy, like Dambly, a graduate of Conestoga High School and Penn State, to 12 years in prison. The other Conestoga/Penn State alum implicated in the cocaine ring was Kenneth J. Kasznel, who pleaded guilty and became a cooperator.
One of Dambly's former customers wrote TV reporter Sinderson a letter, saying that Dambly "used to supply me and dozens of others with pot and cocaine."
"Mark graduated from PSU a mid level pot and cocaine dealer, then went back home in the Phila burbs and got his masters degree in large quantity drug dealing," wrote the former customer, who was subsequently interviewed by the investigator.
"If we needed a 1/4 or half pound of the white . . . Dambly was our guy," the former customer wrote.
Dr. Snow himself did not remember Dambly.
"I really do not recall a Mark Dambly," Lavin, the star of a recent National Geographic channel documentary about his Dr. Snow days, wrote in an email.
But people keep asking him about Dambly, Lavin said.
"This is the third time over the years that someone has asked this," Lavin wrote. "Obviously there is always the possibility he [Dambly] did things under someone involved with me, but I have no knowledge of him."
Dambly rankles many Penn State loyalists because of the way he ripped Joe Paterno in a TV interview, after the Jerry Sandusky scandal hit, and Paterno was fired.
"Although legally, I believe he [Paterno] did what he had to do," Dambly said, "Morally, I don't believe the standards he set for his own student athletes, he didn't live up to those standards for himself."
As far as Dambly's critics are concerned, he doesn't live up to the standards for chairman of Penn State's board of trustees.
"His apparent failure to recall a five-day period of incarceration in the Centre County prison for a violent crime casts great doubt on his credibility, and appears to be just the tip of the iceberg," wrote former NCIS Special Agent John Snedden, also a Penn State alum.