for BigTrial.net
If you're a Penn State trustee, and you're going to talk to Mark Dambly about his impending election tomorrow as chairman of the board, should you pat him down first?
Yes, say two former investigators.
"My first question [for Dambly] would be, 'Hey, you still wearing a wire?'" said John Snedden, a former NCIS and FIS special agent who's a Penn State alum.
"Once a snitch, always a snitch," said another former investigator who worked the infamous "Dr. Snow" cocaine ring of the 1980s and said that Dambly wore a wire to get himself out of trouble with the feds.
With Dambly currently the subject of a federal subpoena in the Allentown pay-to-play corruption case, Snedden said, there are only two remaining possibilities left in the investigation where nine people have already copped pleas.
"At this stage of the investigation it is very likely that he is either THE subject or he is cooperating with the investigation," as in wearing a wire, Snedden said.
"Penn State needs to determine his specific involvement in all his alleged criminal endeavors so they can specifically identify the LOSS EXPOSURE he brings to Penn State," Snedden said.
Dambly has not responded to requests for comment about his alleged involvement in the Dr. Snow cocaine ring, and the five days in jail he spend back in 1979 as a Penn State student after he got nailed for disorderly conduct.
But Dambly is all ready for his impending coronation tomorrow as the new chairman of the Penn State board of trustees.
Meanwhile, a new arrest involving Dambly has surfaced. Dambly was arrested on May 27, 1987 and charged with driving under the influence of alcohol, driving at an unsafe speed, failure to keep right, and possession of marijuana. He was released on $500 bail.
The 1987 arrest, as well as his earlier 1979 arrest, have been expunged.
The other mystery in this latest Penn State scandal -- besides the insanity of why Penn State would want somebody with as much baggage as Dambly as the face of the franchise -- would be why The Philadelphia Inquirer is sitting on this story.
Every scrap of information your Big Trial correspondent published on Monday about Mark Dambly was in the possession of a couple of reporters at the Inquirer, but they haven't written a word. Maybe they're waiting for an editor to give them permission to write about Dambly.
After he becomes chairman of the board.