At today’s meeting of the DRJTBC in Solebury, Pennsylvania, i and other Easton residents testified that all of these political jurisdictions have misappropriated local, state, and federal funds to finance the Riverwalk scheme, including funds inserted in U.S. Senate appropriations bill as earmarks by Appropriations Committee Chairman, Arlen Specter, and his former Senate colleague, Rich Santorum.

Today’s historic DRJTBC meeting will ignite the Federal Bureau Investigation (FBI) of “white collar crime” in the “Lehigh Valley,” as reported in today’s print editions available on the newsstands but not on-line, and lead to a full-blown investigation beyond predatory mortgage lending and convictions of racketeering under the Federal Racketeering-Influenced Corrupt Organizations Statute (RICO).

BethWorks Now, consisting of the Sands Casino, Musikfest, ArtsQuest, and other venues, is Pennsylvania’s biggest fraud since the infamous Walking Purchase of 1737, when son Thomas of the commonwealth’s founder William Penn defrauded the Delaware and Lenape Indian tribe of hundreds of acres of land in Northampton County, including 315 acres in Forks Township, headquarters of the Binne & Smith Crayon Crayola Corporation.

Centuries later, Binney & Smith would later insult America’s indigenous people by creating a new crayon color it called “Indian Red,” a politically incorrect public-relatations disaster that forced the corporation to apologize publicly to all of America’s native population and to cease production of the new color line.

Also later, Binney & Smith relocated its Crayola Factory and retail Crayola tourist attractions from Forks Township to the Centre Square of Downtown Easton, wooed there by generous tax exemptions and the gifts of free public services such as police and fire protection.

In a classic “bait and switch” deception, the above-named officials from the public and private sectors - an oligarchy - used the prestigious institutions of MARCH (Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities; Rutgers University, Camden Campus; the University of California; the National Museum of Industrial History (NMIH); and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.; St. Luke’s Hospital; Northampton Community College; and the local mainstrream news media like The Morning Call and its today’s article by reporter Madeleine Mathias regarding Jeff Parks’ ArtsQuest.

The fact that the Pennsylvania Gam(bl)ing Control Board issued the Sands Casino a slot machine license (Class II) on December 20, 2006, is proof that the ogligarchy’s South Side Bethlehem was preselected long before that date - at least as early as January 3, 2005, when the author of this blog posting formally requested Northampton County Council to conduct public hearings on the proposed casino.

This preselection of the Sands and six other Class II gambling licenses and seven Class I licenses legalizing gambling at horce-racing tracks (called “racinos”) is going to be a major issue in Pennsylvania’s upcoming general elections in November.

This ambitious project, which the Sands BethWorks developers have already scaled back,  lies  within the flood plain of the Lehigh River and wetland and directly in the path of storm-water runoff from South Mountain and the Lehigh University campus..

The Morning Call and its sister print media, The Express-Times - whose distribution area coincides basically with the MC’s - have both failed to report the facts of the Sands BethWorks development.

On the contrary, these two print media, and the electronic-media Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) station WLVT-39 and  commercial station WFMZ-69, have aggressively  promoted Sands/BethWorks through their distorted reporting   favoring  the casino and its related projects.

This is in stark contrast to Monroe County, adjacent to the counties of Lehigh and Northampton, and the Mount Airy Casino and Resort gambling palace.  It has been the subject of extensive coverage in the media of  Lehigh and Northampton counties (referred to commonly as the “Lehigh Valley”).

Monroe County is also the home of the Pocono Record, whose reporters Eric Mark and Robert B. Smith have written factual and informative articles about the corruption in the Mount Airy Casino and Resort  and the Pennsylvania Gam(bl)ing Board (PGCB) that controls this nascent industry in the Keystone State..

Fellow blogger, Nazareth resident Bernie O’Hare III, in a post dated March 14, 2007, and featuring me, Bernie also makes references to the HOPE VI project.

Projects like HOPE VI are again in the news, this time in today’s edition of The Washington Post, reporting the investigation of H.U.D. Secretary Alonzo Jackson for alleged “cronyism” and “favoritism,” and “influence peddling.”

This alleged official misconduct has infected the Easton, Pennsylvania, Housing Authority, which is rife with discord and corruption as H.U.D.

The city of Easton and its Housing Authority had to apply to H.U.D. for a $20 million grant no fewer than four times for the Delaware Terrace public housing renovations before getting approval for the project through political influence at the city, housing authority, state, and federal levels.

Delaware Terrace sits on the steep slopes of Easton’s South Side neighborhood that pitch down into the Delaware River.

This column is titled “The Mogul Who Bet on Vegas,” the mogul being Sheldon Adelson, the third richest man in America after Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and the owner of the Venetian casinos in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Macao, Communist China, the latter being the largest casino in the world.

Adelson is also owner of the Sands BethWorks Gam(bl)ing LLC casino proposed for the South Side neighborhood of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in the 100-year flood plain of the Lehigh River and scheduled to open in 2009, in anticipation of and intended to influence Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial election of 2010.

The article opens with the paragraph, “Like Roman centurions on Calvary, rolling dice for the possession of Jesus’ robe, the Council members of Northampton County [Pennsylvania] gamble over its tattered finances.  This Thursday, April 15, 2004, Council is scheduled once again to refinance the county’s illegal $111 million bond, after tabling this dangerously risky venture in each of its last two meetings - ignoring the pleadings of Blank, Rome, Comisky, and McCauley bond counsel Jeff Blumenfeld, and responding instead to the warnings of opponent [sic] of the refinancing scheme.”

“If interest rates are high,” the article continues, “by the time of the 2012 call date (Remember the 17% interest rate during the Iranian oil crisis of the late 1970s?), Blank Rome will make a killing on the bond refinancing scheme while bankrupting Northampton County.  Similar financial risk-taking bankrupted Orange County, California, during the 1990s.”

“The refinancing,” continues the article, “coincides with this spring’s Easter/Passover season, on the second anniversary of Northampton County Councilman Ron Angle’s crucifixion in the County’s Courtroom 1 for alleged anti-semitic [and racist] comments made on his Saturday morning WAEB-FM talk/call-in radio show.”

“Angle’s crucifixion,” the article continues, “was the pretext for removing him as chair of the County’s finance committee.  He was seen by his fellow County officials, including his five Republican [council] cohorts, as a threat to the $111 million bond.  Its issuer, the County’s General Purpose Authority (GPA), had already been exposed as violative of Pennsylvania’s Municipality Authorities Act of 1945 as amended and of the County’s Home Rule Charter - violations that invalidated the bond [and the GPA].”

The reader may link to the rest of the article with its allusions to the Easter/Passover season.

One year later, the billybytes publications’ creater and editor, Easton resident Billy Givens, was diagnosed in the U.S. Veterans Hospital in Wilkes-Barre with colon cancer with serious complications that imperiled - and still imperils - his life.
This diagnosis forced him to abandon his independent candidacy challenging incumbent Pennsylvania Governor Edward “Fast Eddie” Rendell in the November 2006 general election - a candidacy that he had announced the preceding February.

That announcement was published in The Express-Times, a leading mainstream newspapers with circulation in the Lehigh Valley and much of neighboring Warren County, New Jersey.

Though his challenge to Fast Eddie died in 2006 with his diagnosis of cancer, he has persevered in his challenge to what is arguably the most corrupt governor in the history of Pennsylvania - most notably in opposing his and the state legislature’s Act 71 “legalizing” slot machine gambling casinos and creating the corruption-ridden Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board (PGCB).

This opposition began on January 3, 2005, when Givens
asked Northampton County Council, meeting in the historic Jacob Bachmann Publick House in Easton, the county’s seat, to hold public hearings on the rumored siting of a Las Vegas Sands-owned Casino in the South Side neighborhood of Bethlehem.

The rest is history, well documented on both the www.billybytes.com website and the Billy Bytes blog (http://www.billybytes.com/blog/).

Northampton County, of which Easton is the seat, has assumed the bankrupt landmark building’s $550,000 debt through its General Purpose Authority (GPA).

The www.billybytes.com website and blog have been exposing the illegality of the GPA since December 18, 2001, when it issued its $111 million megabond, also illegal, for the county’s courthouse and prison expansions and county-wide “economic development,”

The county’s administration of Glenn Reibman floated the fraudulent megabond while the issue was still in litigation in the courtroom of Northampton County Court of Common Pleas with Senior Judge Isaac Garb presiding.

The confused, frantic, and desperate purpose of a conspiracy that involved the county’s Court of Common Pleas, the Administration, the GPA, and Northampton County District Attorney was to salvage the illegal $111 million megabond - just as Northampton County is now trying desperately to save the Jacob Bachmann Tavern and the reputation of the Easton Heritage Alliance (EHA), the non-profit organization that held the deed to the tavern on whose mortgage it defaulted through mismanagement.

Read the article published in yesterday’s The Easton-Express exposing this fraud here.

At the January 3, 2005, county council meeting, I asked that body to conduct public hearings on the proposed Sands BethWorks Gaming LLC in the South Side neighborhood of Bethlehem on the site of the defunct Bethlehem Steel Corporation.

Council agreed and its president, J. Michael Dowd, who represents the county’s District 2, directed council member Ann McHale, who represents District 1 (the city of Bethlehem and Hellertown Borough) to schedule the time and the place of the first public hearing.

McHale, who officially and on the public record dragged her feet and managed to delay the first public hearing until June 28, 2005, in Foy Hall of Moravian College in the city of Bethlehem’s historic center.

Meanwhile, McHale and her co-conspirators on county council, city of Bethlehem officials like its Mayor John Callahan, Las Vegas Sands Casino executives and principals including Phillipsburg, New Jersey, native and developer Michael Perrucci, were holding ex parte meetings on the proposed Sands BethWorks Gaming LLC project.

These meetings also included Bethlehem City Council President J. Michael Schweder and Pennsylvnia Legislative District 144 representative T. J. Rooney, as well as former state Senator and later Harrisburg lobbyist Joe Uliana.

Schweder and Rooney traveled frequently to the City of Industry, California, where they met with executives of Majestic Realty, which purchased approximately 500 acres of the former Bethlehem Steel Corporation tract known as Bethlehem Center Commons, adjacent to the 126 acres purchased by Sands BethWorks Gaming LLC.

The first expenditure from the illegal $111 million megabond that Northampton County’s equally illegal General Purpose Authority was $13.1 million for the construction of Commerce Center Boulevard between Pennsylvania State Route 412 and the Majestic Realty-owned property.

Schweder, the president of New Jersey and Pennsylvania AT&T is a registered lobbyist in New Jersey, as required by that state’s law, but not in Pennsylvania, which has no law requiring the registration of lobbyists.

Schweder thus occupies conflict-of-interest positions that enable him to influence the installation of AT&T equipment in the entire 1600- to 1800-acre Bethlehem Commons Center/Sands BethWorks Gaming LLC complex.

The FOS Report concludes by telling “[Michael] Perrucci we have faith he will choose the right developer,” meaning the Las Vegas Sands Casino.

Bethlehem City Councilman Robert Donchez, that body’s swing vote approving the zoning changes needed for the Sands casino, signed a “Memorandum of Understanding” with Perrucci that the Pennsylvania Gaming Control board will self-police the casino obviating any need for independent, outside oversight by the Northampton County District Attorney’s office, the Pennsylvania Attorney General, the Pennsylvania State Police, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, or the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

This despite the fact of overwhelming evidence of egregious violations of the federal Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute.