As Bill white considers this year’s nominees for his Hall of Fame, I find myself weighing the identify of Northampton County Council’s most corrupt president.

The choice is difficult.  I personally have suffered the abuse of Jerry Seyfried, Rich Grucela, Glenn Reibman, Wayne Grube, and J Michael Dowd, all Democrats except Dowd.

I probably have to case my vote for Reibman, though he had plenty of help in being corrupt from fellow Democrat Grube and Republican Dowd.

When Grube wanted to abolish the Northampton County Prison Commission authorized by the county’s Home Rule Charter, he amended the charter to abolish it.

Then, when he decided that County Executive Bill Brackbill was wielding too much power over prison administration, Grube threatened Quo Warranto legal action and Brackbill backed off.

Next, when Grube wanted to remove Republican Council Member from council or Angle’s position as president of the Bangor Area School District - arguing that Angle couldn’t hold two elective positions, what did Grube do?

Why, he simply threatened Quo Warranto and succeeded in forcing Angle to resign his position as president of the Bangor area School District.

In either case, Republicans Brackbill and Angle, Democrat Grube was fully prepared to go to court.

Not so with Council President Grube and fellow Democrat County Executive Glenn Reibman when I discovered that the county’s General Purpose Authority was a fraud, and that its chairman Reibman was a fraud, violative of the Home Rule Charter, who came to Reibman’s rescue?

Not Grube directly because he was no longer council president: Republican J. Michael Dowd was.

On January 10, 2002, I asked county council to pursue the legal remedy of Quo Warranto, and council voted unimously to do so.

Then, later that night, Dowd convened an illegal council meeting in violation of Pennsylvania’s Open Public Meeting Law, or Sunshine Act, and council rescinded its legal vote cast only hours earlier, to pursue Quo Warranto, in the courts, for the removal of all seven GPA members - all of whose terms of office were illegal, violative of the Municipality Authorities Act of 1945 as Amended - and rescission of the fraudulent 2001 $111 million bond.

The meeting that evening of January 10, 2002 and the fraudulent ordinance drafted and introduced by Republican Councilmen Timothy Merwarth and Nicholas R. Sabatine III, Esq., on February 21, 2002, marked the beginnning of the most scandalous crime in what today is Northampton County since the notorious Walking Purchase of 1737.

This was the build-up to March 7, 2002, when the crucifixion of Republican Councilman Ron Angle was staged in Courtroom One by the Jewish, Catholic, and evangical leadership of Northampton County, in collusion with the county’s executive, district attorney, and mainstream media - print and electronic - to remove Angle from his positions as council vice-president and chairmanship of council’s Finance Committee.

Dowd and his fellow council Republicans - and, of course, Democrats Grube, Ann McHale, and Michael Corriere - wanted to replace Angle with the more malleable Tim Merwarth.

The purpose of the staged crucifixion, as I have documented in literally hundreds of articles on the www.billybyte.com website, e-mails, and now the Billy Bytes blog, was to divert the crowded courtroom’s exhausted audience (350 members of the public attended) from council’s adoption that evening of the fraudulent ordinance introduced by Messrs Merwarth and Sabatine on February 21, 2002, only 13 days following Angle’s February 23, 2002, Sunny WGPA-AM 1100 on-the-radio-dial when the county’s established religious leadership and mainstream media set Angle up and recorded his broadcase that Saturday morning accusing his of anti-Semitism and racial bias.

TheNorthampton County’s Jewish community even arranged to have Angle investigated by the Philadelphia Office of B’nai B’rith.

This was reminiscent of when Easton Attorney Daniel Cohen rallied a boycott against the owner of a Palmer Township restaurant who with his neighbors on Parker Avenue, College Hill, protested a real estate development by Daniel and his brother Arnie across the street from the restaurant’s owner, at 107 Pennsylvania Ave.

The development would have subdivided the large lot of 107 Pennsylvania Avenue and the construction of several new houses not in character with this historic architectural quality of the neighborhood.

This dispute led to Easton City Council’s creation of an Estate Zone to protect the distinct character of the neighborhood, but this protection has since been eroded by corrupt Easton city councils, planning departments, zoning administrators, zoning hearing boards, and “fixed” deals between Easton and the Northampton County Court of Common Pleas.

Examples are Abraham Atiyeh’s Cinema Paradiso and federal General Services Administration/Social Security Administration developments fixed by Easton Mayor Philip A. Mitman, city council, Northampton County Judge Emil Giordano, DA John Morganelli, and Atiyeh’s paid political guru Pat Vulcano, Jr., former Easton councilman, treasurer, controller, and mayoral candidate, and currently a director of the Easton Area School District.

Another example is the residence at 179 Pennsylvania Avenue, approved by Easton Zoning Administrator Robert O’Neil as a poltical favor to Easton Attorney and now Assistant City Solicitor Joel Scheer.

Yet another example are the houses owned by Lafayette College for student housing that stood at the corner of Cattell Street and Clinton Terrace.

The City of Easton allowed the college to demolish these houses for the construction of a parking lot for the Louis B. Farinon Student Center a block away.

When I, my wife Kathy Parker, and March Street resident and Lafayette Cleaner’s owner Barbara Groner objected, in an action filed in Northampton County Court of Common Pleas, Lafayette College General Counsel Daniel Cohen and Judge Robert Simpson put them under something like a $500,000 or $1 million performance bond.

The fraudulent 2001 $111 million bond included an $880,000 insurance policy that the county couldn’t exercise because it knew the bond was a fraud, another $800,000-plus disbursement to A.H. Butz Inc. for renovations to the State Theatre, $13.1 million for the construction of Commerce Boulevard for development of the former Bethlehem Steel tract to accommodate the Sheldon Adelson-owned Las Vegas Sands Casino, $2.5 million for the construction of a road to the Waste Management/Grand Central Sanitation Landfill in the Slate Belt, and another $2.5 million for the construction of a parking deck for the Koehler-Kheel Realty-owned former Hotel Easton, rechristened The Eastonian. 
This is what Atiyeh did when I and other Easton residents filed a an appeal in Northampton County Court of Common Pleas against the City of Easton’s Zoning Officer, Planning department, and Zoning Hearing Board opposing the Cinema Paradiso and federal General Services Administration/Social Security Administration buildings and Easton’s S. 3rd and S. 4th streets, respectively.