Beyond JoePa: A closer look at the second mile

[jerot]

Regarding my asking him about Lynne Abraham & Second Mile, watch Freeh step away from the lectern, effectively shutting down his press conference.

In fact, Freeh completely avoided Sandusky’s grooming charity - the Second Mile. For someone who claimed to continously interface with the state attorney general, he never cared to find out where former Philadelphia DA Lynne Abraham was with her parallel investigation into the charity. Abraham was to turn over her findings to the state attorney general. We now know that never happened, as Abraham simply closed up shop 6 weeks later in January 2011.

Freeh is either blissfully unaware, or is concealing that knowledge, that Abraham dropped from the radar when asked at his July press conference:

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It's clear now that his "mandate" was never to follow the facts. Because if he did, he would have scaled back his report to the "good governance" recommendations and told the Board that the problems all stemmed from 1998 and failures of oversight at Second Mile.

Any good INDEPENDENT investigator that was "continuously interfacing" with the AGs office, would have pulled AG/police interviews - noticed that Sassano concocted McQueary's bullshit "Rudy" story and laid down a timeline for that incident exposing Sassano. As a former prosecutor, Freeh should then have advised the Board about Feathers & Sassano and the AG's corrupt use of the 2011 grand jury presentment and how they wanted to proceed with that knowledge.

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Ganim has some different ideas. Freeh should read her take.

• Ganim's five-part series says the charity did not know about the 1998 investigation of Sandusky; the Pennsylvania attorney general's office says it did. Last November, Penn State outside general counsel Wendell Courtney denied that he had also represented The Second Mile back in '98, but the AG's office said it had evidence that showed Courtney did in fact work for the charity at the time. On the weekend Sandusky was arrested, Courtney told the New York Times he was aware of the '98 investigationwhen it happened. Yet the Freeh report turned up an email from the day Sandusky was charged, in which Courtney told Penn State's former senior vice president for business and administration Gary Schultz, "I was never aware that 'Penn State police investigated inappropriate touching in a shower' in 1998." All of which is just weird.
• Last November, in the wake of Sandusky's arrest, Jack Raykovitz, The Second Mile's executive director, resigned and The Second Mile launched an internal investigation to figure out who knew what and when. Raykovitz's wife, Katherine Genovese, was The Second Mile's vice president. She was laid off just after Sandusky's arrest as contributions to the charity dried up. According to Ganim, Raykovitz and Genovese have testified before the grand jury.
• Raykovitz's successor, David Woodle, abandoned that internal inquiry a month later so the foundation could plot its future instead, specifically by trying to transfer its assets to a charity based in Texas. That plan has since been postponed pending lawsuits against The Second Mile.
• Here's Ganim on how Raykovitz learned from Penn State athletic director Tim Curley about the 2001 incident in which a witness observed Sandusky in a shower on PSU's campus with a boy:
• According to the grand jury presentment, Curley told Raykovitz only that someone had witnessed something inappropriate, it was investigated and the result was to tell Sandusky not to shower on campus with kids.
  
  
• Raykovitz in turn told a few members of his staff and the board's executive members what Curley had told him.
  
  
• Bruce Heim was one of them.
  
  
• [...]
  
  
• Heim asked Raykovitz if anything inappropriate happened between the boy and Sandusky, and Raykovitz answered, "No."
  
  
• That's what Raykovitz believed, based on what Curley had told him.
  
  
• "They looked into it," Raykovitz told Heim, according to Heim's memory. "And nothing inappropriate happened."
  
  
• Raykovitz then asked Heim—a local real estate investor and someone who isn't shy about his loyalty to Penn State, the Paterno family and many of the key players in this scandal—if he should relay this to the full board.
  
  
• "And I said no," Heim said.
  
  
• "For five years, I worked out at the football facility, several times a week, and saw Jerry showering with children," he said. "I said I don't think it's relevant. It happens every day at the YMCA. I remember the conversation specifically because it seemed like a nonstarter because of what Penn State said went on."
  
  
• On that advice, Raykovitz didn't tell the board. He did have a talk with Sandusky, and told him to be more careful.
  
  
• He told him to be more careful. Jack Raykovitz is a licensed psychologist.
• According to Ganim, The Second Mile took no action against Sandusky until November 2008, when a 15-year-old boy in Clinton County accused him of inappropriate touching. That boy is now known as Victim 1, and his complaint triggered the investigations that led to all the others. Raykovitz removed Sandusky from the charity's programs and urged him to stay away from children even beyond his work with the charity. By November 2009, Sandusky met with The Second Mile's board of directors to tell them he was resigning. Publicly, the spin would be that he wanted to spend more time with his family. But at that meeting, Sandusky told the board he was stepping aside because he was under investigation for molesting a child. Ganim reports that there was disagreement among individual board members about whether to stay silent. But that's ultimately what they decided to do.
• In January 2011, the Second Mile's development director, Bonnie Marshall, was served with a subpoena while Raykovitz and Genovese were on vacation. Here's Ganim:
• By then, it had been 18 months since board members were told about the investigation, and some of them were getting antsy. Many were hearing rumors that the investigation was expanding—it was—and that The Second Mile was under scrutiny.
  

 

[Nit16]

I thought didier posted that Joe had some real estate dealings with some people connected to TSM?

Quiet please! I’m trying something here.

 

[pandaczar12]

@demlion @pandaczar12

Seems about right no? MM was full of it and might have made it up. Also if I’m understanding here Penn State and Joe had nothing to do TSM so Sandusky was completely independent from all things Penn state or Joe. What else am I missing?

What are you missing? That's easy... you keep missing:

1) That nobody cares about your opinion.
2) That you routinely keep threads alive that you claim to dislike.
3) That I live rent free in your head.

 

[wensilver]

On that advice, Raykovitz didn't tell the board. He did have a talk with Sandusky, and told him to be more careful.

While I know this @jerot is a bot, and is just aggregating content - I have to respond to this sentence.

At Dr. Spanier's trial - Dr. Raykovitz explained that Jerry's role with Second Mile was that of Chairman, Fundraiser & Emcee at events. He was not providing any counseling or therapy to any Second Mile child.

So telling your charity chairman to "be more careful" is flagrantly irresponsible coming from a children's charity CEO who is also a licensed counselor. Once Curley is telling Raykovitz that Jerry is with a Second Mile teen, clearly outside of his prescribed role with the charity, Jack should have implemented a written safety plan.

That never happened and for some reason, no one in our Office of Attorney General cares to find out. I will make Kane & Castor the exception here - they tried, only to get shot down later on that summer of 2016 by the General Assembly and Bruce Beemer. Who then went on to destroy files.

Josh Shapiro personally assured me, while patting my arm, that he'd look into Second Mile once he took office. That hasn't happened - and Shapiro, just like Corbett, Ryan, Kelly & Beemer has gone silent.

At least Tim Curley implemented a plan, effectively banning ALL children from being accompanied into campus buildings with Jerry, which stopped incidents on campus.

Alas - Bruce Heim simply tossed Jerry the keys to his hotel pool so this charity chairman could interact and monkey around with Second Mile kids - clearly outside his role with the charity. And I have a HUGE problem with those bullshit sleepovers. But you all already knew that.

Just.Wear.Swim.Trunks

LMAO

 

[fizzyskittles]

Quiet please! I’m trying something here.

Sorry, I feel like I was caught talking in the movies,hahahaha!

 

[demlion]

First i wasn’t posting to you. You’re not above this joke thread so keep on keeping on haha.

Ok--you are one of the idiots.

 

[fizzyskittles]

Hahahaha!

 

[jerot]

While I know this @jerot is a bot, and is just aggregating content - I have to respond to this sentence.

At Dr. Spanier's trial - Dr. Raykovitz explained that Jerry's role with Second Mile was that of Chairman, Fundraiser & Emcee at events. He was not providing any counseling or therapy to any Second Mile child.

So telling your charity chairman to "be more careful" is flagrantly irresponsible coming from a children's charity CEO who is also a licensed counselor. Once Curley is telling Raykovitz that Jerry is with a Second Mile teen, clearly outside of his prescribed role with the charity, Jack should have implemented a written safety plan.

That never happened and for some reason, no one in our Office of Attorney General cares to find out. I will make Kane & Castor the exception here - they tried, only to get shot down later on that summer of 2016 by the General Assembly and Bruce Beemer. Who then went on to destroy files.

Josh Shapiro personally assured me, while patting my arm, that he'd look into Second Mile once he took office. That hasn't happened - and Shapiro, just like Corbett, Ryan, Kelly & Beemer has gone silent.

At least Tim Curley implemented a plan, effectively banning ALL children from being accompanied into campus buildings with Jerry, which stopped incidents on campus.

Alas - Bruce Heim simply tossed Jerry the keys to his hotel pool so this charity chairman could interact and monkey around with Second Mile kids - clearly outside his role with the charity. And I have a HUGE problem with those bullshit sleepovers. But you all already knew that.

Just.Wear.Swim.Trunks

LMAO

Blehar thinks otherwise.
The recent conviction of former Pennsylvania (PA) Attorney General (AG) Kathleen Kane will go down in history as another instance of the PA Corruption Network (PACORN) using a prosecution to deflect attention away from its own wrong-doing.
Kane was alleged to have leaked grand jury information regarding the case of J. Whyatt Mondesire.
Unlike the previous cases in PA where the media was "all in" for writing stories from leaked information -- her alleged grand jury leaks were treated as the crime of the century.


There were numerous leaks (to the Philadelphia Inquirer) from the Montgomery County grand jury that investigated the Kane case, but neither the PACORN's media arm nor prosecutor Kevin Steele nor former prosecutor Lisa Vetri Ferman seem the least bit concerned over the Montco leaks/leakers.


The Patriot News won journalism awards for its coverage of Bonusgate and the Sandusky cases -- both of which were plagued by grand jury leaks. Interestingly, both cases were prosecuted by Frank Fina -- but he is never mentioned in association with leaks.
How about that?
Fina grand jury cases leak -- no problem.
Montco grand jury leaks - no problem.
Kane's alleged leaks -- crime of the century.


claims it was retaliation, there is evidence indicating he was asleep at the wheel or otherwise ignoring leads about the leaks.
Of course, PACORN's media arm didn't have any interest in learning the facts about Barker's failures to plug the leaks.
Some of the Sandusky leaks are rather obvious, but have yet to be identified or discussed by the media.

 

[jerot]

Ganim has some different ideas. Freeh should read her take.

• Ganim's five-part series says the charity did not know about the 1998 investigation of Sandusky; the Pennsylvania attorney general's office says it did. Last November, Penn State outside general counsel Wendell Courtney denied that he had also represented The Second Mile back in '98, but the AG's office said it had evidence that showed Courtney did in fact work for the charity at the time. On the weekend Sandusky was arrested, Courtney told the New York Times he was aware of the '98 investigationwhen it happened. Yet the Freeh report turned up an email from the day Sandusky was charged, in which Courtney told Penn State's former senior vice president for business and administration Gary Schultz, "I was never aware that 'Penn State police investigated inappropriate touching in a shower' in 1998." All of which is just weird.
• Last November, in the wake of Sandusky's arrest, Jack Raykovitz, The Second Mile's executive director, resigned and The Second Mile launched an internal investigation to figure out who knew what and when. Raykovitz's wife, Katherine Genovese, was The Second Mile's vice president. She was laid off just after Sandusky's arrest as contributions to the charity dried up. According to Ganim, Raykovitz and Genovese have testified before the grand jury.
• Raykovitz's successor, David Woodle, abandoned that internal inquiry a month later so the foundation could plot its future instead, specifically by trying to transfer its assets to a charity based in Texas. That plan has since been postponed pending lawsuits against The Second Mile.
• Here's Ganim on how Raykovitz learned from Penn State athletic director Tim Curley about the 2001 incident in which a witness observed Sandusky in a shower on PSU's campus with a boy:
• According to the grand jury presentment, Curley told Raykovitz only that someone had witnessed something inappropriate, it was investigated and the result was to tell Sandusky not to shower on campus with kids.
  
  
• Raykovitz in turn told a few members of his staff and the board's executive members what Curley had told him.
  
  
• Bruce Heim was one of them.
  
  
• [...]
  
  
• Heim asked Raykovitz if anything inappropriate happened between the boy and Sandusky, and Raykovitz answered, "No."
  
  
• That's what Raykovitz believed, based on what Curley had told him.
  
  
• "They looked into it," Raykovitz told Heim, according to Heim's memory. "And nothing inappropriate happened."
  
  
• Raykovitz then asked Heim—a local real estate investor and someone who isn't shy about his loyalty to Penn State, the Paterno family and many of the key players in this scandal—if he should relay this to the full board.
  
  
• "And I said no," Heim said.
  
  
• "For five years, I worked out at the football facility, several times a week, and saw Jerry showering with children," he said. "I said I don't think it's relevant. It happens every day at the YMCA. I remember the conversation specifically because it seemed like a nonstarter because of what Penn State said went on."
  
  
• On that advice, Raykovitz didn't tell the board. He did have a talk with Sandusky, and told him to be more careful.
  
  
• He told him to be more careful. Jack Raykovitz is a licensed psychologist.
• According to Ganim, The Second Mile took no action against Sandusky until November 2008, when a 15-year-old boy in Clinton County accused him of inappropriate touching. That boy is now known as Victim 1, and his complaint triggered the investigations that led to all the others. Raykovitz removed Sandusky from the charity's programs and urged him to stay away from children even beyond his work with the charity. By November 2009, Sandusky met with The Second Mile's board of directors to tell them he was resigning. Publicly, the spin would be that he wanted to spend more time with his family. But at that meeting, Sandusky told the board he was stepping aside because he was under investigation for molesting a child. Ganim reports that there was disagreement among individual board members about whether to stay silent. But that's ultimately what they decided to do.
• In January 2011, the Second Mile's development director, Bonnie Marshall, was served with a subpoena while Raykovitz and Genovese were on vacation. Here's Ganim:
• By then, it had been 18 months since board members were told about the investigation, and some of them were getting antsy. Many were hearing rumors that the investigation was expanding—it was—and that The Second Mile was under scrutiny.

Ganim at least had a clue.
Here are some of the key points presented in Ganim’s series:

• The charity was run by the husband and wife team of Jack Raykovitz and Katherine Genovese, but some board members didn’t know they were married and others say they were put off by their closed management style and lack of transparency.
  
  
• Contrary to reports and statements from Genovese that Sandusky retired, Ganim reports that Raykovitz forced Sandusky to resign in 2010 after allegations regarding his behavior in 2009.
  
  
• Second Mile’s leaders kept most of the board and other key staff out of the loop on the Sandusky investigation, according to some board members.
  
  
• According to Bonnie Marshall, who was Second Mile’s development director, Raykovitz acknowledged that he had been informed by Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley about allegations against Sandusky in 2001. Marshall says that Raykovitz’s response was, “At that point, I didn’t particularly want to know any more and he didn’t volunteer anything else.”
  
  
• A Children and Youth Services official informed Genovese that she needed to sever a relationship with Second Mile because of the situation with Sandusky. According to “several people with knowledge of that conversation,” Ganim writes, Genovese responded by telling the official that, “We’ve had to tell him to back off certain kids before.”
  
  
• Gov. Tom Corbett, who was attorney general during the first couple of years of the Sandusky investigation, benefitted from hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Second Mile staff and board members, both before and after Sandusky was under investigation.
  
  
• Although replacement CEO Woodle had indicated that the Abraham investigation “would bring answers that board members, employees and the community longed for,” Abraham was reportedly redirected to focus “on whether the charity could move forward.” The result has been a plan to close down and shift the assets to Arrow Child and Family.
  

 

[Misder2]

Contrary to reports and statements from Genovese that Sandusky retired, Ganim reports that Raykovitz forced Sandusky to resign in 2010 after allegations regarding his behavior in 2009.

That has some truth to it but it is distorted. Sandusky was forced out/fired but that had nothing to do with a resignation. His resignation letter on TSM letterhead caught many off guard, it was supposed to just go away. That letter was a catalyst in the public breaking of this story.

 

[didier]

That has some truth to it but it is distorted. Sandusky was forced out/fired but that had nothing to do with a resignation. His resignation letter on TSM letterhead caught many off guard, it was supposed to just go away. That letter was a catalyst in the public breaking of this story.

Not sure if you can answer but were you involved in TSM?

 

[Misder2]

Not sure if you can answer but were you involved in TSM?

No, I was never involved in TSM.