A Reporter's Rogues Gallery Featuring Tony, Rufus & Larry K.

Dear readers. I've recently updated my website at ralphcipriano.com. It's a reporter's rogues gallery that features some pretty disreputable characters.

The leadoff hitter is none other than His Eminence, the late Cardinal Tony Bevilacqua, who was the leader of a criminal enterprise formerly known as the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. 

While the cardinal's pedophile priests were out molesting and raping innocent children, His Eminence, as he insisted on being called, ran a systematic cover-up that kept his priests out of jail and the church out of the media spotlight, and the courts. 

Brian Tierney, the future publisher of the Inquirer who would bankrupt that newspaper, makes a guest appearance on my website as Cardinal Tony's loyal and devious spinmeister. 

There are plenty of other targets to lampoon. I pay tribute to Rufus Seth Williams, our former corrupt D.A., who, before he went to jail, ran a sex abuse crusade against the Catholic Church. What a great idea. Except that Williams picked as his star witness a lying, scheming altar boy dubbed Billy Doe, who turned out to be a complete fraud. 

But I don't just pick on Philadelphia's corrupt officials. On my website, I've outed all the bad actors in the Commonwealth who completely botched both the civil and criminal investigations at Penn State. It's a toxic waste dump of a case that the Pennsylvania judiciary and the state attorney general's office and the media are still actively engaged in covering up, because they all have their own shameful malpractice to hide.

But the brightest star of my personal rogue's gallery is our current corrupt D.A., Progressive Larry Krasner. On my website I honor Philadelphia's "reform" D.A. with his very own web page. It's a place where I've gathered more than 50 Big Trial scoops documenting Krasner's failures, incompetence and downright malfeasance in office. 

So please feel free to take a look. 

On Krasner's page, I highlight many of the armed and dangerous criminals that he let out of jail. I also list many of the criminals and the corrupt, ethically-challenged people who work for Krasner in his completely lawless D.A.'s office.

Sadly, the Krasner page also features many innocent people who have lost their lives as a result of the D.A.'s progressive reforms, which I describe as "toxic justice."

To finish off the Krasner page, I pay tribute to the work of The Philadelphia Inquirer, which has faithfully functioned as Krasner's main apologist in covering up his horrendous record. 

What we're doing over here at Big Trial isn't brain surgery. The Larry Krasner is a complete disaster as D.A. story is all laid out in police reports and court records that anybody could find. But at the Inquirer, they're willfully ignoring those facts because they agree with Krasner's politics. 

So the ideology-driven editors and social justice reporters at the Inky continue to cover for the D.A. while people in this town are getting murdered in record numbers.

It's a journalistic sin that's a personal affront to me, because I used to work at that paper. I came to town more than 30 years ago as a reporter for the Inquirer, and soon discovered how bizarre Philadelphia can be.

One of my first assignments for the Inky was to stake out a row house that once belonged to the depraved Gary Heidnik. I watched for hours as the cops carried out buckets containing dirt and body parts from the women that Heidnik had raped and tortured, before he killed and dismembered them. 

But if you're crazy enough to be a reporter, Philadelphia's a great place to work. Because everything is so corrupt and everybody who's stealing money is so brazen about it.

Take Philadelphia's infamous DROP plan, an ongoing municipal scandal that was the brainchild of former Philadelphia mayor and governor Ed Rendell, another Democratic pol that the Inquirer faithfully flacked for. 

When Rendell was running for governor, he wanted to buy off the labor unions. So he hatched a scheme to loot the city's pension fund by routinely paying six-figure cash bonuses to retiring municipal employees just for showing up for at work during their last few years on the job.

At last count, the great municipal giveaway known as DROP had cost taxpayers more than $1.5 billion in wasteful cash bonuses paid out to more than 12,000 retiring civil servants, bonuses that averaged more than $120,000 each.

If that wasn't bad enough, the crooks at City Hall figured out a new way to fleece the taxpayers -- the DROP Triple Dip. This was another scam to waste money by rehiring workers who had already taken the DROP and were collecting their regular pensions. But thanks to the Triple Dip, a select group of generously-compensated civil servants could now come back on the municipal payroll as private consultants. 

If you're tired of corrupt pols, and you prefer depraved murderers like Heidnik, on my website I  profiled Cosmo DiNardo, the young man from Bucks County who went on a killing rampage that made international news. My angle, however, was all the efforts that his long-suffering mother made in a futile crusade to save her son from mental illness, before he descended into madness.

Sadly, as I look back, there's a common thread among all these stories. In every case, they were stories that my brethren in the mainstream media wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.

An archbishop who lied to his parishioners about church finances while orchestrating a systematic cover-up to shield pedophile priests.

A politically ambitious D.A. who claimed to be staging a righteous crusade against sex abuse in the Catholic Church, but wound up arresting the wrong people. 

A lying, scheming altar boy who made up a story about serial sex abuse that sent four innocent men to jail, one of whom died there, handcuffed to a hospital bed. 

Another big sex abuse scandal at Penn State that turned out to be botched at every level.

A popular mayor and governor who, to further his own political ambitions, looted a municipal pension fund with the DROP.

A "reform" D.A. whose progressive policies are responsible for killing people.

All these stories exposed uncomfortable truths that the mainstream media didn't want to tell. 

There's a reason why the media in America was recently rated the lowest out of 46 countries in a global study conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. 

Once upon a time, journalism was supposed to be a search for the truth. And reporters were supposed to follow a story where ever it led. But today, a new generation of journalists believe they know the truth before they ever leave the office, because they're enlightened members of the media. 

So the mission is of the media elite has become to go out and prove something that they already know to be true in their heads, according to their own world view. No matter where the facts may lead.

At every media outlet in the country, the buzzword is diversity. But regardless of color or sexual orientation, my fellow reporters are the most single-minded group I can think of. To an alarming degree, they're all card-carrying progressive Democrats and committed social justice warriors who think alike and share the same beliefs. 

They always operate from the same moral and political universe, with the exact same progressive viewpoint.

No independent thought is tolerated.

And that's why I'm still blogging past retirement age at bigtrial.net.

-- Ralph Cipriano