JUSTICE DENIED: The Untold Story of Nancy Argentino's Death in Jimmy Superfly Snuka's Motel Room

by Irvin Muchnick

  JUSTICE DENIED

  The Untold Story of Nancy Argentino’s Death in Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka’s Motel Room

  a

  CONCUSSION INC.

  author Irvin Muchnick

  ebook short

  © 2013 Irvin Muchnick, Lorraine Salome, Louise Argentino-Upham

  “… I immediately suspected foul play, and so notified the district attorney.”

  WAYNE SNYDER

  Deputy Coroner, Lehigh County

  (in a 1992 interview, as coroner)

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE

  JIMMY SNUKA’S PATHETIC LIES

  THE SHORT, INTERRUPTED LIFE OF NANCY ARGENTINO

  OTHER UPDATED INFORMATION

  APPENDIX

  ABOUT AUTHOR IRVIN MUCHNICK

  INTRODUCTION

  IN A LONG AND UNORTHODOX CAREER as a freelance investigative journalist, my 1992 story on James Wiley Smith “Superfly Jimmy Snuka” Reiher and his companion Nancy Argentino – pro wrestling’s Mary Jo Kopechne – resonates like no other.

  In 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy, possibly inebriated as he left a party near midnight with Kopechne, drove his Oldsmobile Delmont 88 off a bridge on Chappaquidick Island, near Martha’s Vineyard – then abandoned the 28-year-old woman, who died from crash trauma and drowning.

  In 1983, then World Wrestling Federation superstar Snuka, possibly strung out on cocaine and other drugs as he left Room 427 of the George Washington Motor Lodge in Whitehall, Pennsylvania, for a television taping in Allentown, abandoned the 23-year-old Argentino in the culmination of what can reasonably be deduced as a case of, at minimum, unindicted involuntary manslaughter.

  Kennedy emerged with a two-month suspended sentence for leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury – along with irrevocably damaged presidential ambitions. Reiher emerged legally unscathed. The subject of this ebook is the similarities and differences between the reputational fallouts for a privileged Massachusetts politician and a calculatedly savage Polynesian-born entertainer with a jungle-boy gimmick.

  ***

  NINE YEARS AFTER THE SNUKA INCIDENT – then, as now, the source of underground fan gossip but little more – I was in the early stages of carving out a niche as a general-readership chronicler of the peculiar wrestling industry. My 1988 piece in Penthouse (r.i.p.) on the death-, drug-, and suicide-plagued Von Erich wrestling family was selected for an anthology of the year’s best magazine articles. The same year, a story for The Washington Monthly on WWF (now WWE) chief Vince McMahon’s efforts to get out from under state regulations and taxes landed me on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

  In ’92, WWF was coming off the federal steroid-trafficking conviction a year earlier of its Pennsylvania attending physician, Dr. George Zahorian, as well as newer reports that pedophile company executives and employees were preying on underage ring boys. New York’s Village Voice gave me a $4,000 contract to write a cover story tying together the scandals. The Snuka piece was a “sidebar” to the larger story. I traveled to Allentown (indeed, stayed at the George Washington Motor Lodge), talked to cops and to reporters for the daily newspaper there, the Morning Call, and interviewed others and probed records.

  I have a clear memory of knocking on the door of the Lehigh County Agricultural Hall, where WWF had recorded its regionally syndicated television shows prior to the historic cable TV wars and national expansion of the mid-eighties. I wanted to see the interior for a scene-setter, and I wanted to find out if anyone remembered anything about Snuka. The building manager closed the door in my face. “We know why you’re here and we don’t want any part of you,” he said.

  Thus, 18 years before the Jerry Sandusky-Joe Paterno scandal at Penn State University, which would unfold more than 150 miles west of Allentown, I had my first insight into what has become a cliché of national Election Night demographic analysis: “Pennsylvania consists of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh … and Alabama in between.”

  The Village Voice assignment didn’t work out. The Voice editors’ learning curve and agility proved inadequate, as other media outlets beat us to the punch on the various “Titangate” scandals (sans Snuka). I later collected on a court judgment in my favor, requiring the Voice to pay me the agreed-upon full fee. This Pyrrhic victory set the stage for my decades of work as a writers’ rights activist – as National Writers Union shop steward at SF Weekly, then as assistant director of the NWU, then as a class-action copyright litigation consultant. In 2005, I led a slate of objectors to a global class-action settlement with the newspaper, magazine, and electronic database industries (a settlement partially orchestrated by my old friends at the NWU). The tortured path of that case through the federal courts included the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision, Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick. At this writing, a satisfactory revised settlement was still being negotiated.

  Meanwhile, around 1999, I posted the Snuka sidebar (but not the main and longer Voice article draft) at a website collecting both previously published and unpublished wrestling articles. The Snuka turned into an Internet samizdat classic, getting passed around the virtual water cooler the world over. Pirated versions and inanely uninformed interpretations added the precise overlay of mystery and sensationalism so relished by the wrestling cult (and the world at large). The prose of “Irvin Muchnick’s Wrestling Journalism Archive” would become the foundation of my 2007 book from ECW Press, WRESTLING BABYLON: Piledriving Tales of Drugs, Sex, Death, and Scandal.

  Snuka’s own career had long been in decline, but that had nothing to do with whatever the public understood about Allentown ’83 (that is to say, very little). Drug-addled, physically spent in his forties, fifties, and sixties, Snuka devolved from one of the most popular stars in the game into the prototypical Mickey Rourke figure from the Darren Aronofsky movie: an itinerant at ring bookings and autograph shows of small, independent promotions, who continued to do the occasional nostalgia cameo for WWE, which inducted him into its Hall of Fame. Snuka will turn 70 later this year. His daughter Tamina, one of his four children, is a WWE female performer, or “diva.”

  ***

  AND THAT’S HOW THINGS MIGHT HAVE STOOD FOREVER, had Snuka and his handlers not decided to lie through their teeth, carny-style, about Nancy Argentino and related topics in his newly published autobiography, Superfly: The Jimmy Snuka Story. The foreword is by Rowdy Roddy Piper. The introduction is by retired wrestler and New York Times bestselling author Mick Foley, who modeled parts of his own wildly risk-taking performance style after Snuka, a childhood hero; and who today – with a gruesome irony Foley himself doesn’t seem to appreciate – promotes the work of the anti-sex assault organization RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network).

  Depending on how you keep score, Snuka has told between three and five-and-a-half different versions of what went down in Allentown. Only with the extreme enabling of softball interviewers can he hide the fact that he still can’t coherently retell even the version he is supposedly sticking with.

  Twenty-one years ago, I had spoken briefly with Nancy Argentino’s still-devastated surviving younger sister. Then, just weeks ago, I heard from Nancy’s older sister, who told me that an Allentown Morning Call reporter was working on a “cold case” story about Snuka for the 30th anniversary of the incident on May 10, 2013.

  Would I be interested in expanding, annotating, and updating my material? the older sister asked. The answer was obvious. Snuka and Foley took cr
azy plunges from the tops of cages; it’s what they did. I write the stories the mainstream media don’t want to publish about the unacceptable human toll of out-of-control bread-and-circuses American entertainment; it’s what I do. That Snuka-Argentino dovetailed with current themes of my work, in exposing the disgrace of widespread coach sexual abuse and cover-up in our national Olympic swimming program, was a bonus.

  (As we were going to press, at least one other newspaper, besides the Allentown Morning Call, was working on an anniversary story.)

  Together with the sisters, I resolved that every dime of royalties from this project would go in Nancy’s memory to an organization chosen by the family. They picked My Sisters’ Place, a battered women’s shelter and resource center in Westchester County, New York.

  ***

  THIS EBOOK HAS FIVE ELEMENTS:

   “THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE” reprints my 1,900 words from 1992 and provides the basic facts. No, ladies and gentlemen, Nancy Argentino did not jump out of a hotel window. Sorry, folks, but the episode three months earlier, when Snuka got arrested for a melee at a Howard Johnson’s motel outside Syracuse (for which he eventually pleaded guilty), was not just a little misunderstanding. It was a violent precursor of avoidable death.

   “JIMMY SNUKA’S PATHETIC LIES” reviews his book and recent public statements, and adds harsh comments on what I believe has been the timid and equivocal coverage of it in the “wrestling news media” (those three words, all too often, are oxymoronic).

   “THE SHORT, INTERRUPTED LIFE OF NANCY ARGENTINO” attempts, with the help of her loved ones, to put a real name and face, and flesh and blood, on the tragedy of “that woman Snuka was involved with in Allentown.”

   “OTHER UPDATED INFORMATION”

   “APPENDIX” has facsimiles of primary-source documents that show what Snuka and others said at the time of the incident, and allow readers to make final judgments for themselves.

  In the end, not every crime has a clean solution. Speaking strictly for myself, I don’t hold out for a miraculous thaw of the cold case and a turnaround by the public officials of Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, who in 1983 conducted themselves so cravenly. District attorney William Platt, now an esteemed senior judge in the state court system, simply exercised his discretion, and exercised it poorly.

  My goal is more modest, and I hope more effective: shining daylight on what happened – and in the process subjecting the D.A., WWE, and Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka to the full prosecutorial wrath of history and the court of public opinion.

  Irvin Muchnick

  May 2013

  THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE

  This was written for the Village Voice, but not published, in 1992. (You will notice that the article already had been edited in Voice style, which included heavy use of conversational-sounding contractions.) The piece was posted online years later before being collected in the 2007 book WRESTLING BABYLON.

  FOR VINCE McMAHON, THE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLAR MAN, wrestler Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka made for a challenging tag-team partner. The World Wrestling Federation’s second-most-popular star in the early eighties, Snuka was an illiterate immigrant from Fiji, prone to bouts with the law that threatened his green card, and a drug abuser who often missed bookings. During a Middle East tour in the summer of 1985, fellow wrestlers say, customs officials in Kuwait caught him with controlled substances taped to his body, and he was allowed to leave the country only after some fancy footwork.

  But Snuka’s near-Midnight Express experience in the Persian Gulf was child’s play compared to what happened on May 10, 1983. That night, after finishing his last match at the WWF TV taping at the Lehigh County Agricultural Hall in Allentown, Pennsylvania, he returned to Room 427 of the George Washington Motor Lodge in nearby Whitehall to find his girlfriend of nearly a year, Nancy Argentino, gasping for air. Two hours later, this 23-year-old wrestling fan – who’d worked as a dentist’s assistant in Brooklyn and dropped out of Brooklyn Community College to travel with Snuka – was pronounced dead at Allentown Sacred Heart Medical Center of “undetermined craniocerebral injuries.”

  “Upon viewing the body and speaking to the pathologist, I immediately suspected foul play and so notified the district attorney,” Lehigh County coroner Wayne Snyder told me on a recent trip to Allentown. In ’83, Snyder was deputy to coroner Robert Weir.

  Yet no charges were filed in the case, no coroner’s inquest was held, and no evidence was presented to a grand jury. Officially the case is still open – meaning Argentino’s death was never ruled either an accident or a homicide – though the original two-month-long investigation has been inactive for nine years. Under Pennsylvania’s unusually broad exemptions from freedom of information laws, the Whitehall Township Police Department has so far refused my requests for access to the file.

  Of particular interest would be two documents: the autopsy and the transcript of the interrogation of Snuka immediately thereafter. One local official involved in the investigation, as well as one of the Argentino family’s lawyers, told me the autopsy showed marks on the victim other than the fractured skull. And former Whitehall police supervisor of detectives Al Fitzinger remembered that the forensic pathologist, Dr. Isadore Mihalakis, confronted Snuka to ask him why he’d waited so long before calling an ambulance.

  Gerald Procanyn, the current supervisor of detectives, who worked on the case nine years ago, maintained that Snuka cooperated fully with investigators after being informed of his right to have a lawyer present, and was accompanied only by McMahon. Another investigator, however, saw things differently; he said Snuka invoked his naïve jungle-boy wrestler’s gimmick as a way of playing dumb. “I’ve seen that trick before,” the investigator said. “He was letting McMahon act as his mouthpiece.”

  Another curious circumstance was the presence at the interrogation of William Platt, the county district attorney. According to experts, chief prosecutors rarely interview suspects, especially in early stages of investigations, for the obvious reason that they may become witnesses and hence have to recuse themselves from handling the subsequent trials.

  Detective Procanyn gave me the following summary of Snuka’s story: On the afternoon before she died, Snuka and his girlfriend were driving his purple Lincoln Continental from Connecticut to Allentown for the WWF taping. They’d been drinking, and they stopped by the side of the road – the spot was never determined, but perhaps it was near the intersection of Routes 22 and 33 – to relieve their bladders. In the process, Argentino slipped on mossy ground near a guard rail and struck the back of her head. Thinking nothing of it, she proceeded to drive the car the rest of the way to the motel (Snuka didn’t have a driver’s license) and, after they checked in, picked up take-out food at the nearby City View Diner. Snuka had no idea she was in any kind of distress until he returned late that night from the matches at the Agricultural Hall. Procanyn said Snuka’s story never wavered, and no contradictory evidence was found.

  Curiously, contemporary news coverage, such as the front page of the next day’s Allentown Morning Call, made no mention of a scenario of peeing by the roadside; it focused, instead, on the question of whether Argentino fell or was pushed in the motel room. Nine years later the reporter, Tim Blangger, vividly recalled that at one point in his interview of Procanyn, the detective grabbed him by the shoulders in a speculative reenactment of how Snuka might have shoved the woman more strongly than he intended.

  Procacyn also claimed to have no knowledge of any subsequent action by the Argentino family, except for a few communications between a lawyer and D.A. Platt over settling the funeral bill. In fact, the Argentinos commissioned two separate private investigations, and it’s difficult to believe that Procanyn was unaware of them.

  The first investigator, New York lawyer Richard Cushing, traveled to Allentown, conducted extensive interviews, and aggressively demanded access to medical records and other files. “It was a very peculiar situation,” Cushing told me. “I came away feeling Snuka should h
ave been indicted. The police and the D.A. felt otherwise. The D.A. seemed like a nice enough person who wanted to do nothing. There was fear, I think, on two counts: fear of the amount of money the World Wrestling Federation had, and physical fear of the size of these people.”

  Even so, Cushing declined to represent the family in a wrongful-death civil suit against Snuka. The lawyer cited the fact that Snuka and Argentino weren’t married, that they didn’t have children, and that she wasn’t working, which would make it difficult to establish loss of consortium. “Moreover, Vince McMahon made it clear to me that her reputation would be besmirched. As a lawyer, I had to determine if a contingency [fee] was in order; my business decision, not my moral judgment, was no. The family wasn’t pleased. They had a typical working-class family’s anger that justice wasn’t done.”

  Through the generosity of Nancy Argentino’s father’s boss, the family then retained a Park Avenue law firm. The report filed by its private investigator shows that Snuka was as creative outside the ring as he was inside it.

  To the Whitehall police officer who responded to the first emergency call, Snuka said “he and Nancy were fooling around outside the motel room door when he inadvertently pushed Nancy and she fell striking her head.”

  An emergency room nurse heard him state that “they were very tired and they got into an argument resulting in an accidental pushing incident. Ms. Argentino fell back and hit her head.”

  In the official police interrogation, Snuka first floated the peed-on-the-roadside theory.

  Finally, in a meeting with the hospital chaplain, he said he and Argentino had been stopped by the side of the road and had a lovers’ quarrel: “He accidentally shoved Ms. Argentino who then fell backwards hitting her head on the pavement. They then arrived at the motel and went to bed. The next morning Ms. Argentino complained that she was ill and stayed in bed…. When he came home from the taping, he observed that Ms. Argentino was clearly in bad shape.”