Bullied to Death: Chris Mackney
Re-post of Bullied to Death: Chris Mackney's Kafkaesque Divorce by Michael Volpe:
Opinion Man commits suicide, blames ex-wife in suicide note; ex-wife takes control of copyright, tries to get note (and man’s other writings) removed from Internet
2. Dina Mackney got appointed administrator of Chris Mackney’s estate, presumably because his heirs are their underage children, and she is the guardian of the children. (I’m not a probate law expert, so I can’t speak to the soundness of this decision by a Virginia judge, applying Virginia law, but I will assume for the rest of the post that this appointment was legally valid.)
3. Dina Mackney then demanded that various sites take down Chris’s various writings, including his suicide note, on the grounds that she represents Chris’s estate, which owns the copyright in those writings.
Why the copyright twist? Dina might have plausible claims that Chris’s writings are libelous, or invade her or the children’s privacy, but given the federal 47 U.S.C. § 230 statute, Web sites that host user-posted writings are not liable for any defamation or invasions of privacy in those writings. (Chris would have been liable for them, and Chris’s estate might still be liable, but the sites would not be.) But under federal copyright law, the sites that host user-posted writings are potentially liable for copyright infringement in those writings. Taking control of the copyrights thus makes it much likelier that the hosting sites will indeed take down Chris’s works.
Note also that pretty much anything written down is presumptively protected by copyright; it doesn’t matter, for instance, that Chris’s works didn’t have a copyright notice on them, or weren’t registered at the time they were written.
4. Some sites, however, are refusing to take down the materials, arguing — soundly, I think — that their continued posting of the material is not a copyright infringement. (See Marc Randazza’s letter on behalf of the A Voice for Men site.) The main arguments are (a) fair use and (b) implied license.
a. The fair use argument, I think, is quite strong. The sites that are continuing to host Chris’s works aren’t deriving any material commercial advantage from them, and their continued hosting isn’t diminishing the commercial value of the works (which is nil). Moreover, Chris voluntarily published the works; these aren’t personal letters that were deliberately unpublished. As a result, I think the balance of the fair use factors is likely to cut in favor of the fair use (even though the site operators’ use is nontransformative, and reproduces the entirety of Chris’s work).
The strongest precedent for Dina would be Worldwide Church of God v. Philadelphia Church of God (9th Cir. 2000), which also involved the suppression of a dead author’s work by successors who didn’t endorse the work’s message. Herbert Armstrong had founded the Worldwide Church of God, and had written “Mystery of the Ages” (MOA) (some paragraph breaks added):
Armstrong wrote MOA, his final work, between 1984 and 1985. He completed it when he was ninety-two years old, shortly before his death. He copyrighted it in the name of WCG and published it in serial form in The Plain Truth magazine, distributed free of charge to approximately eight million people. In addition, WCG distributed over 1.24 million copies free of charge to employees and to viewers of WCG telecasts. In all, WCG put over nine million free copies of MOA into circulation.Two years after Armstrong’s death, WCG decided to discontinue distribution of MOA for several reasons, including the fact that the Church’s positions on various doctrines such as divorce, remarriage, and divine healing had changed. The Church hoped to “prevent a transgression of conscience by proclaiming what the Church considered to be ecclesiastical error” espoused in MOA and it considered that Armstrong, who was ninety-two when he wrote MOA, conveyed outdated views that were racist in nature. Its Advisory Council of Elders indicated that the Church stopped distributing MOA because of “cultural standards of social sensitivity” and to avoid racial conflict. The Council noted, “Insensitivity in this area is contrary to the doctrinal program of WCG to promote racial healing and reconciliation among the races.”WCG disposed of excess inventory copies of MOA and stopped distribution, but retained archival and research copies. WCG never sought to withdraw or destroy personal copies or copies held by public institutions or any public library, nor did it request that its members destroy their copies. WCG has indicated an interest in publishing an annotated MOA sometime in the future but has not yet begun work on it.
The Philadelphia Church of God sought to reprint MOA, but Worldwide Church of God — as the heir of Armstrong’s copyright — sued to stop that, and the Ninth Circuit agreed.:
The first factor calls for consideration of “the purposes and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.” “The central purpose of this investigation is to see, in Justice Story’s words, whether the new work merely ‘supersede[s] the objects’ of the original creation [citations omitted] or instead adds something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning, or message; it asks, in other words, whether and to what extent the new work is `transformative.'” … PCG’s copying of WCG’s MOA in its entirety bespeaks no “intellectual labor and judgment.” It merely “supersedes the object” of the original MOA, to serve religious practice and education. Although “transformative use is not absolutely necessary for a finding of fair use,” where the “use is for the same intrinsic purpose as [the copyright holder’s] . . . such use seriously weakens a claimed fair use.” …[Moreover,] MOA’s use unquestionably profits PCG by providing it at no cost with the core text essential to its members’ religious observance, by attracting through distribution of MOA new members who tithe ten percent of their income to PCG, and by enabling the ministry’s growth. During the time of PCG’s production and distribution of copies of MOA its membership grew to some seven thousand members….The second statutory factor, “the nature of the copyrighted work,” turns on whether the work is informational or creative. While it may be viewed as “factual” by readers who share Armstrong’s religious beliefs, the creativity, imagination and originality embodied in MOA tilt the scale against fair use….The third factor directs us to consider “the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.” PCG copied the entire MOA verbatim …. [In the Sony case,] the Supreme Court held that reproduction of the entire work “[did] not have its ordinary effect of militating against a finding of fair use” under the unique circumstances of that case, to wit: copying of videotapes for time-shifting for personal use to “enable[ ] a viewer to see such a work which he had been invited to witness in its entirety free of charge.” No such circumstances exist here to justify PCG’s reproduction of the entire work….The fourth factor considers “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.” … [I]t cannot be inferred from that fact that the absence of a conventional market for a work, the copyright to which is held by a nonprofit, effectively deprives the holder of copyright protection…. The statute by its terms is not limited to market effect but includes also “the effect of the use on the value of the copyrighted work.” … “[E]ven copying for noncommercial purposes may impair the copyright holder’s ability to obtain the rewards that Congress intended him to have.” Those rewards need not be limited to monetary rewards; compensation may take a variety of formsWCG points out that those who respond to PCG’s ads are the same people who would be interested in WCG’s planned annotated version or any future republication of the original version. With an annotated MOA, WCG hopes to reach out to those familiar with Armstrong’s teachings and those in the broader Christian community. PCG’s distribution of its unauthorized version of MOA thus harms WCG’s goodwill by diverting potential members and contributions from WCG…. [U]ndisputed evidence shows that individuals who received copies of MOA from PCG are present or could be potential adherents of WCG. MOA’s value is as a marketing device; that is how PCG uses it and both PCG and WCG are engaged in evangelizing in the Christian community.PCG argues that WCG’s failure to exploit MOA for ten years and its lack of a concrete plan to publish a new version show that “MOA has no economic value to the WCG that the PCG’s dissemination of the work would adversely affect.” We disagree. Even an author who had disavowed any intention to publish his work during his lifetime was entitled to protection of his copyright, first, because the relevant consideration was the “potential market” and, second, because he has the right to change his mind….
I’m not sure the Ninth Circuit was correct here; but in any case, I think that, to the extent the Ninth Circuit’s position is defensible, it relies substantially on the commercial value of the work, both to the copier (there, PCG, which used the work to attract adherents and their tithes) and to the copyright owner (there, WCG, which at least plausibly claimed that it might at some point reissue an annotated version of the work and sell it). I don’t think this argument would prevail for commercially valueless works such as Chris’s suicide note and other writings, or for fundamentally noncommercial uses such as the host sites’ continued posting of those works.
b. Sites to which Chris posted his works may also be licensed to keep the works posted. Some sites may specifically provide in their Terms of Use that anyone using the site gives a perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive license to continue displaying whatever the user posted. (This doesn’t block copyright claims by third parties who claim that the user posted matters that he was never allowed to post; but it does block copyright claims by the user himself, and by the user’s successors.) Even in the absence of such a provision, a court might reasonably conclude that such a license is implied by the act of posting something (just as sending a letter to a newspaper that begins “Dear Editor” implicitly licenses the newspaper to publish the letter, and keep the letter up on its web site indefinitely).
c. More broadly, even sites to which Chris didn’t post the items, but which are reposting them in order to keep the items available in the face of Dina’s attempts to get them taken down, might well be able to claim implied license. When someone writes and posts something that a reasonable person would perceive as an attempt to get the widest possible audience for his message, I think a reasonable person could properly assume that the author is allowing others to copy it in a way that maximizes that audience. (Even if I’m mistaken on this implied license point, of course, such mirror sites would still be able to claim fair use, which is one reason I started the discussion with the fair use defense.)
In any case, that’s my rough sketch of what seem to me to be the main legal issues. For more, see the TechDirt post, and the documents to which it links, and also this RawStory item.
Michael Volpe: I'm an investigative journalist and my definition of an investigative journalist is someone who inserts themselves in a situation someone somewhere wants kept hidden, and they report on that. While many on the internet have made Dina Mackney into the focus of this situation, that is not entirely accurate.
In fact, the center of power and influence in this situation, according to my investigation, is not Dina Mackney, but her father, Pete Scamardo. What he wants kept hidden is his involvement in the 1968 murder of his friend and business partner, Sam Degelia Jr. Scamardo paid $2,000 to have Degelia Jr. killed in order to collect on insurance money.
In fact, Scamardo, a very successful builder from Virginia, didn't reveal this information to Chris Mackney while Mackney dated his daughter, during their marriage, or during their divorce. Mackney found this out on his own in June 2008, when the divorce was several months old.
At that point, the tenor of the divorce changed. Dina Mackney fired her lawyers, Ain & Bank, and hired a law firm headed by Jim Cottrell, which advertises, "we're not the type to settle, so have your pocketbook open." (Cottrell, it should be noted, denied bullying Mackney to me, as Chris Mackney alleged)
The revelation of this murder, which is in fact public information but not well-known, was at the center of the calculus of everything going forward.
Many who read this will likely not be most interested in the murder, and that's because like everyone they approach this story through the lens of their own ideology, but if you want to understand what really happened, stripped of ideology, you need to start with this brutal murder, a murder actually committed by the hitman, Charles Harrelson, whose son is the actor Woody Harrelson.
Now, here's the tentatively titled chapter: The Murder of Sam Degelia Jr.
..........
On the evening of July 11, 1968, Jimmy Horn, a bookkeeper, was walking into a cafeteria in McAllen, Texas, the largest city in Hidalgo County, Texas, on the tip of the Rio Grande in South Texas. He noticed his boss, Sam Degelia Jr., a thirty year old grain broker, father of four children under ten, and owner, along with his business partner, Pete Scamardo (father of Dina Scamardo) of Commodity Marketing Corporation. Horn asked Degelia Jr. to join him for dinner but Degelia Jr. declined saying that he was waiting on some men regarding a business deal. Jimmy Horn was the last non-murder participant to see Sam Degelia Jr. alive.
Later that evening, Sam Degelia Jr. was picked up by two men, Charles Voyde Harrelson and Jerry O’Brien Watkins. Watkins was a career loser and criminal. According to a February 27, 1970 story by the Associated Press, Watkins had been released from a federal prison in El Paso, Texas in 1963 and the story described Watkins as, “a former convict” who “at one point was interested in selling machine guns to someone in Mexico.”
Harrelson, too, was a career criminal, degenerate gambler, drug addict, and described by his former girlfriend, Sandra Sue Attaway, as being charming and kind when they first met but turning violent and pressuring her into committing crimes including her participation in the murder of Allen Berg, months before the murder of Sam Degelia Jr.
For better or worse, Harrelson is today known mostly for being the father of Woodrow (Woody) Tracy Harrelson, born July 23, 1961, who would first achieve fame as Woody Boyd on Cheers, and is now known as a movie star in movies like: White Men Can’t Jump, Indecent Proposal, Natural Born Killers, and No Country for Old Men, of which the book upon which the movie was based borrowed from Charles Harrelson’s alleged deeds. It’s been reported that Oliver Stone, when making Natural Born Killers encouraged Woody repeatedly to act like his father when Woody played a psychopathic serial killer in that movie.
Woody Harrelson would later say that his father disappeared from his family home in Houston in 1968, shortly before the murder, and Woody didn’t communicate with him until 1981.
At the time of the murder, Charles Harrelson was shacking up with Sandra Sue Attaway, who was in her early 20s, when she met Harrelson. Attaway was an attractive twice married, twice divorce, woman with few skills when she left her young son with her mother to move to Houston in 1967. She told a police investigator that she first met Harrelson on August 3, 1967 in Houston and by September 3, 1967, Attaway had become so taken that she took off with Harrelson to Las Vegas, where Harrelson proceeded to quickly lose the $5,000 he started with and just as quickly as they’d arrived in Las Vegas, she told Texas Ranger TH Dawson for a report he published on January 21, 1969, they were on their way to Des Moines, Iowa, where Harrelson claimed to have work available.
Attaway described to Dawson an existence like this which continued for about a year, where Harrelson would swoop into some area, run up debts, or otherwise get in trouble, and rush, with Attaway at his side, out to another town. Attaway also said that as the relationship progressed Harrelson became more violent and Attaway was beginning to learn more and more about the business he was in.
“I was not allowed to have any girl friends or go anywhere without him. I was beginning to find out what bad things he had done such as collecting bad debts for a booking organization run by Jack Strauss the previous summer. I asked him if he hurt people when he did this and he said, ‘Of course.’ I had no doubt that he would because he had hurt me too.”
By 1968, Attaway had tried and failed on multiple occasions to extricate herself from Harrelson. By April 1968, she was helping him commit a murder for hire. He told her that a carpet dealer named Allen Berg had cheated an associate of his, Frank DiMaria, out of $7,000, and that Harrelson had been tasked, for $2,000, with collecting the purported debt. Here’s what Attaway said happened next to Dawson.
On a Tuesday night, he came into the apt. and said he wanted me to make a phone call and he would tell me exactly what to say and that I was to repeat what Allen said so that he could me what was being said. He to me to talk the boy into meeting me somewhere which was done and he was to meet me at the Brass Jug Club. (author’s note, Attaway lured Berg, according to her testimony, with the promise of oral sex)
He had already bought the red Cadillac 1967 convertible with a white top at a used car lot on Post Oak Freeway from a man named Martin and we went in it. I drove and he told me how to go. We drove around the club and the boy into the club and drover around the block and stopped by the boy’s Cadillac as he walked back across the street. Chuck jumped out and forced Allen to enter our care by use of a gun and shove.
Attaway said they drove to a secluded area unfamiliar to her where she proceeded to get the car stuck in the mud. Harrelson proceeded to force Berg into the trunk and fixed up the car.
Attaway said they kept driving with Harrelson noticeably nervous when “he said to stop right where we were.” Harrelson then forced Berg out of the trunk while Attaway said she waited in the driver’s seat, and assumed that Harrelson was going to rough up Berg. Instead, she heard a shot.
“I jumped out of the car and looked behind the car. Allen was laying on the ground on his face.” Attaway said in the report. Berg wasn’t dead, and Attaway described how Harrelson later used a rope to suffocate him after he noticed him still alive as he was digging a hole for Berg’s body.
This particular murder for hire was recently documented by Berg’s brother, David Berg, in the book, Run, Brother Run, released in 2013. Though Harrelson claimed to Attaway that the murder had to do with money owed to DiMaria, in Run, Brother, Run, the motivation for the murder was payback. DiMaria had worked briefly for Berg, running his carpet business in San Antonio, until Berg accused him of stealing. Berg’s father then spent the next year telling any banker in Texas not to loan any money from “the thief who stole us blind”.
“Leonard (the investigator hired by the Berg’s) had told Dad that Frank DiMaria was behind Alan’s death and that the motivation was spite: he wanted to destroy Dad. He had paid someone else to commit the murder: Charles Harrelson, a thirty-one year old contract killer whom the Texas Rangers suspected of having murdered a dozen men or more.”
After describing the murder of Allen Berg in excruciating detail, Attaway next told Dawson about how she met Pete Scamardo, who she apparently first met at around the time that Harrelson committed the murder for hire of Berg.
“Meanwhile, I had met a man from Hearne, Texas named Pete Scamardo who was introduced as an old friend of Chuck’s from Huntsville and Chuck told me, not in Pete’s presence, that Pete had some business they were discussing. About the same time that Allen was killed Chuck came home with some white powder packaged in a prophylactic which he told me was heroin and that Pete had brought it back from Mexico and considered himself completely unsuspicious because he was a businessman and had never been in any trouble Chuck was to try and sell the stuff for Pete as Chuck had more contacts. I remember now that Chuck had picked the heroin up from Pete while he was staying at the motel on South Main near the Domed Stadium and I believe that it was the Rodeway Inn but I am not sure…Then, Chuck told me that there was no place in Houston that he could find to sell the heroin and that he had gotten the name of a contact from Frank Dimaria so we went to K.C.”
Things didn’t go as planned in Kansas City and instead of selling the heroin Harrelson got arrested and was forced to get rid of the heroin he intended to sell for Scamardo.
So, Attaway told the investigator, now Harrelson owed Scamardo.
“Sometime around June or July (1968) Chuck told me that he had to pay Pete Scamardo a favor owed him and that he and Jerry (Watkins) were going to fly to the Valley and kill a man for Pete so that he could collect some insurance on a business partnership on a policy they had on each other.”
By the summer of 1968, Scamardo was facing financial difficulties, according to trial testimony at his trial, and since Harrelson now owed for the heroin he lost, Scamardo came up with a plan. He would pay Harrelson $2,000 to kill his business partner and best friend since they were in second grade, Sam Degelia Jr., because as business partners, according to Run, Brother Run, he’d collect $100,000 in life insurance, “$50,000 that went directly to a bank to pay off their business loan, and $50,000 Scamardo would pocket by stiffing their other creditors. For his part, Harrelson would receive $2,000.”
Berg continued later quoting Harrelson as saying that even he, a contract killer thought that Scamardo was depraved. “Isn’t it hell when your best friend kills you to collect the insurance?” said Harrelson to Jerry Watkins who helped him kill Degelia Jr.
The murder of Sam Degelia Jr. didn’t end the financial troubles of Scamardo so on September 13, 1968, Scamardo, along with his attorney Owen Stidham, went to the office of Bob Musser, a local polygraph expert. According to an Associated Press story published in the Big Spring (Texas) Herald on March 6, 1970, Scamardo was visiting Musser’s office because he was trying to borrow more money to clean up debts in his business and he couldn’t get the loan.
The reason he couldn’t get the loan was because Scamardo approached Sam Degelia Sr., the father of the man he’d just had murdered, and Degelia Sr., suspecting he had his son killed, refused to lend him any money until he was cleared of his son’s murder.
If Scamardo thought that visiting Musser would clear his name, he would soon be in for a rude awakening. After a series of questions, Musser suspected that Scamardo was indeed the killer and Musser testified at Scamardo’s trial, “I told him it sounded like he had a very good motive for having Degelia killed.”
Musser continued in his testimony, “You’re right,” Musser recalled Scamardo saying, “I had Sam shot.”
Scamardo’s lawyer, Percy Foreman, attempted to keep this testimony out of the trial, arguing it was hearsay evidence, but the judge ultimately allowed it.
On December 7, 1968, Scamardo was arrested and charged with the murder of Sam Degelia. Watkins was arrested on the same day and Harrelson was already incarcerated in neighboring Brazoria County after being arrested for the murder of Allen Berg.
Curiously, both Scamardo and Harrelson retained Percy Foreman as their counsel. Foreman is considered among the greatest lawyers in the history of the USA. Foreman, in his career, lost only 50 out of more than 1,500 cases in which his client was charged with murder. His clients include James Earl Ray, the killer of Martin Luther King Jr. and the socialite Candy Mossler. In fact, Foreman has his own Wikipedia page where Harrelson is singled out as one of his famous clients, but in 1968, Woody Harrelson wasn’t yet famous making Charles Harrelson a curious client for someone of Foreman’s stature.
Whatever the reason, Foreman was worth every penny. In Harrelson’s first trial, Foreman put on a nightclub singer who claimed that she had been with Harrelson at the time of the murder. The trial ended in a hung jury: 11 for conviction, one for acquittal.
In Run, Brother, Run David Berg said that this particular stunt was standard operating procedure for Foremen, whose ethics trailed his effectiveness.
“Foreman’s second step (the first being character assassination of the victim) was not just backup: it was bulletproof. In case character assassination alone might fail, he reached into his stable of 'reserve witnesses,' as he called them: former clients and others who repaid his favors by wearing to have been with his defendant at the time of the crime. It wasn’t just opposing prosecutors who knew that Foreman operated this way: his colleagues and even attentive laymen understood that he would do anything, no matter how dishonest, to win at trial.”
Foreman died in 1988 and obviously couldn’t be interviewed for the book.
As a result, Scamardo was tried without the benefit of a conviction of Harrelson. The sensational trial included testimony by Musser and Attaway, who detailed the story of how Harrelson lost Scamardo’s drugs and how this led Scamardo to manipulate Harrelson into killing Degelia Jr.
The trial was a true battle of the legal titans with the defense putting on 26 witnesses and introducing 81 items into evidence and the prosecution calling 62 witnesses and introducing 80 items into evidence.
Though the Hidalgo County District Attorney, Oscar McInnis, asked for the death penalty for Scamardo, the jury only convicted him of being an accomplice to murder and sentenced him to seven years’ probation, and no jail time.
In the book, Run, Brother Run, David Berg said this was tantamount to getting away with murder.
“As in the case in Brazoria County against Harrelson and DiMaria, Foreman represented the accused murderer and the man who was alleged to have hired him- in this case, Pete Scamardo, who did not remain alleged for long. On March 31, 1970, Hidalgo County veteran DA, Oscar McInnis obtained a conviction against Scamardo for being an accomplice to murder-an astonishing victory for any prosecutor facing Foreman. But Foreman never stayed down for too long: during the punishment phase, Foreman introduced evidence of Scamardo’s otherwise clean record and his devotion to church and family- and convinced the jury to probate every day of his seven year sentence.
“Probation for murder! Thank you Percy.”
In fact, the idea that Scamardo had an “otherwise clean record” only meant he’d never been convicted of any other crimes. In fact, in a Texas Department of Public Safety report from August 30, 1968, Scamardo admitted to Texas Ranger, TH Dawson, that murder was only the most recent of his crimes.
“Deputy Sanchez and I went back to Hearne on Thursday, 8-15-1968 and contacted Scamardo at 8AM the next morning. He confessed to me that he and Sam Degelia Jr. had been involved in smuggling heroin from Mexico and that he could not afford to take a polygraph test.”
Foreman, it should be noted, was also no angel. According to Run Brother Run, Foreman repeatedly got himself in legal trouble but defended himself to acquittals.
“Foreman himself has been charged with several crimes, from using foul language in the presence of a minor girl to subornation of perjury (knowingly putting on false testimony). Representing himself, he won them all, only burnishing his unbeatable image.”
The author, David Berg, it should be noted has been long-time practicing attorney in the same area.
Harrelson was tried again in 1972 in Brownsville, Texas. Texas Ranger Tol Dawson, the lead investigator on the Degelia case, was in the courtroom with a perjury arrest warrant for the nightclub singer, but she had learned of it and fled to Aruba. Without the help of her testimony, Harrelson was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years in prison. With time off for good behavior, he was free in five years. He was found not guilty of the Berg murder.
At Harrelson’s trial, Scamardo testified on behalf of Harrelson and claimed the $2,000 he’d paid Harrelson to collect on a series of bad debts in his business. In Run, Brother Run, David Berg details how McInnis destroyed this narrative when he was able to cross-examine him.
“As a matter of fact, you didn’t get any bad checks in your business to amount to anything, did you?”
“Yes sir, we got a number of checks that did not clear the bank.”
“All right sir. Then can you give me a list of the people that he collected bad checks from you and Sam?”
“No sir, I cannot at this time.”
“Well, can you name just one person that he ever collected a check for, for you or Sam?”
“I don’t recall at this time, no sir.”
“So out of forty-five checks over the past three years, you can’t tell the jury just a name of one of those people so that we can get him down here and see whether or not this man collected a check from him?”
“I’m sure I could check and find out.”
“Well, think about it a little right now. Can you give us one right now?”
“No, sir, not that I can recall.”
McInnis tried on a number of occasions to have Scamardo’s parole recalled for perjury, including this particular exchange but each request was denied and Scamardo never served any time for murder or perjury.
Harrelson would go on to be convicted of the 1979 killing Sam Wood, a federal judge, in 1981, and die in prison in 2007. The murder of Wood was the only murder of a federal judge in the history of the USA. In 2005, Matthew Hale killed the husband and mother of Chicago federal judge, Joan Lefkow, but the murder of Sam Wood is the only one involving the judge themselves.
Hidalgo County has a long history of corruption, which includes the 1979 conviction of Oscar McInnis in his own kidnapping plot as well as the 1994 conviction of Hidalgo County Sheriff, Brig Marmolejo, for taking bribes from drug dealers.
In a December 1994 Texas Monthly story on Marmolejo’s conviction, a lawyer in the area was quoted saying this:
“There’s more corruption in South Texas than Brig Marmolejo and Brig’s not necessarily the most corrupt among them.”
Meanwhile, Pete Scamardo moved with his family, including young daughter Dina, to Fairfax County in Virginia, where he reinvented himself as a fine upstanding citizen and real estate developer and investor. Taking advantage of the real estate boom centered around the building of Tyson’s Corner Center, a mega mall first built in 1968 in unincorporated Fairfax County between McLean and Vienna, Virginia, which boasts of having more visitors yearly than Disney World. After it was built, extensions to the local highway, Virginia State Route 7, caused a real estate boom in the area. In 1988, both Tyson’s Galleria, an upscale mall built across the street from Tyson’s Corner Center, and Fairfax Square, an upscale mixed use development. Scamardo was in a position to take advantage of the boom and became a multi-millionaire, possibly worth as much as $100 million.
He’s been the subject of a number of profiles including one in the Washington Post on August 23, 1990.
“Fifteen years ago, Pete T. Scamardo was shingling roofs and putting up aluminum siding in Northern Virginia. His small contracting company had two full-time employees.
“By the mid-1980s, his real estate interests were valued at more than $80 million, according to sources, and his enterprise, the Centennial Cos., was on its way to becoming one of the half-dozen largest commercial developers in the Washington metropolitan area.”
That particular puff piece failed to mention anything about Scarmardo’s role in the murder of Sam Degelia Jr. Mackney reached out to the Washington Post on a number of occasions asking that they run his story but the paper declined. They had no on the record comment for me on for this book. The author of the puff piece in the Washington Post is David Hilzenrath and he currently works for the Project on Government Accountability, a watchdog group, and he also didn’t respond to my email to explain himself.
Another article from the website Bis Now said Scamardo has developed “more than one million SF (square feet) of office condos in the region.”
Bis Now didn’t mention Scamardo’s murder conviction and they didn’t respond to my email for comment to explain the omission. The author of the article, Stacey Pfarr, also didn’t respond to an email for comment. She is currently a realtor in Delaware.
The three realtors featured in the Bis Now story are, Barbara Bechtle, Ellie Bechtle, and Ken Traenkle who all work at Verity Commercial Real Estate in Reston, Virginia and none responded to emails for comment on their business relationship with Scamardo.
Scamardo owns a home in McLean, Virginia and a farm in Upperville, Virginia, one of the wealthiest cities in the country.
The charity, Charity Works, featured Scamardo’s wife, Andrea, as one especially dedicated individual to charity in their August 2003 issue.
“Andy Scmardo is our ‘Steel Magnolia’- you wouldn’t believe how tough and hardworking this quiet Texas lady can be. Her organizational skills, quiet charm and wonderful laugh are legendary and served her well in co-chairing the 2002 extravaganza. This was not a gala, but a huge production- everything had to be contracted for separately, and on the day of the Gala, had to arrive on time and in the proper sequence. At midnight, when the guests left, Andy rolled up her evening gown and coordinated removing all the equipment. At 3:30 in the morning, we found Andy, broom in hand, sweeping the National Building Museum to insure that was in perfect shape.
“Andy grew up on a cotton farm in Hearne, Texas. She attended the University of Texas and worked for IBM and Paine Webber. She met her future husband Pete in Austin and married him 39 years ago. Andy and Pete now split their time between their home in McLean and their Sunnyside Farm in Upperville (Virginia) where they raise horses and cattle. The Scamardos have two daughters. Stefani is married to Warren Haynes, and Dina who is married to Chris Mackney.”
That charity also didn’t respond to an email for comment for this book.
Warren Haynes, it should be noted, is the former guitarist for the Allman Brothers Band and has played with the Grateful Dead. Stefani is a disk jockey for SiriusXM Radio, according to Haynes’ Wikipedia page, as well as the manager of Haynes current band, Govt. Mule.
Though Andrea Scamardo is presented as fine and upstanding citizen in the charity newsletter, a March 24, 1970 story from the Associated Press suggested she may have lied during testimony in her husband’s trial.
"Sam Degelia Sr., the victim’s father, was put on the stand to dispute testimony given Monday by Andrea Scamardo, the defendant’s wife. Degelia testified that he did not have a brother named Ben Degelia.
"Mrs. Scamardo said that Harrelson, the alleged triggerman, was a cousin-in-law of the victim. She said this relationship existed because Glenda Watson, a niece of Harrelson, married Anthony Reina, a nephew of Ben Degelia."
All wasn’t always good for Scamardo and on May 10, 1991, he was featured in the Washington Times, and this time it was due to an $80 million lawsuit filed against him by the Virginia bank, Chevy Chase bank. That story too failed to mention the murder of Sam Degelia and Scamardo’s role in it.
Since the 1970s, Scamardo has been a defendant or plaintiff in more than one hundred lawsuits just in Fairfax County, Virginia.
Chris Mackney also accused Scamardo of doing an end run around Virginia laws and using his daughter as a front in order to get a horse racing license in an email to Dr. Samenow.
“I wanted to bring to your attention the fact that my wife and her father were involved in a felony conspiracy, during the course of the marriage when Mr. Scamardo used his daughter to obtain a Virginia horse racing license.”
Mackney’s claim about the horse racing license raises another question…how did Pete Scamardo, a convicted accomplice to murder, get a real estate license? I posed that question in an email to Amanda Pearson, the media relations person for the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development, but she didn’t respond to the email.
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