Roddy's Soap Opera Script: As The Dice Tumble

Dennis Roddy's mastery of understatement is paraded at the Post-Gazette front page today, leaving enought breadcrumbs to intrigue political junkies for months, yet spelling out enough to identify several questions to be answered as events unfold over a course of months.

Among those questions to be answered is one that might appear, to the untrained eye, to have been answered already: Has the vacancy in the office of the United States Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania been filled yet?

Other questions Roddy deftly raises:

• Why would big Pennsylvania casinos a former Supreme Court Chief Justice the district attorney's dad wish to sue small Pennsylvania casinos?


• How many Zappalas did the funders of the Pennsylvania Casino Association hire?


• Did the district attorney disqualify himself from more than one prosecution by labeling people targeted by then-current investigations (targets with whose family his extended -- and complicatedly so -- family is engaged in a long-running political feud) as "evil" and mean" ?


• Are there any other ties -- other than money -- that associate the Zappala family with the Pennsylvania Casino Association industry?


• What the heck does "whatever the heck that is" mean?

UPDATE (8:30 a.m.): For the moment, change the first sentence's "is" to "was." Mr. Roddy's article appears to have departed the P-G website. (It might not have vanished completely, however.)

Orie-Zappala go-between has central role in probes
Thursday, September 09, 2010
By Dennis B. Roddy, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

UPPERDATE: The report is back at the P-G website.