Authorities in Pennsylvania are still shaking their heads in amazement as word broke of the arrests of 14 people who ran a cocaine dealing ring out of two Penn State frat houses. The ring that redefined the term “higher learning” managed to turn frat house pledges into unwitting drug dealers, telling them that cutting and repacking the coke was part of their fraternity initiation. Two of the ring leaders under arrest are from Long Island, including one recent Penn State alum who is considered “at the very top of the food chain," according to Pennsylvania’s state attorney general. 710 WOR’s Curtis Sliwa and Larry Mendte in the Morning program looked into what went on in Happy Valley, and, more importantly, wondered how the group carried out its nefarious mission unchecked for several years.
Larry described the planning behind the organization and wondered out loud how nobody official saw this going on in the open: “It was a huge operation. They would go and they’d buy a kilogram in Philadelphia or buy a kilogram in New York City and then take it back to the frat, and they had a whole operation going. They were chopping it up and selling little bags of it all around campus. Everybody on campus knew about them. Everybody on campus talked about him. He was known as the number one coke dealer in Happy Valley, which leads me to go, well, who are the other coke dealers? If he’s number one, who’s number two, who’s number three- and also, if everybody was talking about this, why did it take so long to bust this ring?”
Curtis then explained the code of silence that probably enabled the dalers to operate in the open, at least until the first arrests happened: “Once the authorities stated moving in, and they pinched one guy or another guy, then they decided, man I ain’t gonna be doing eight to ten years in some prison in Pennsylvania, and that’s when they started coughing up the ladder, because, you know, you get the small fish first… [Also] Sigma Chi, which had their house off-campus, wasn’t a recognized frat by the university, and I’ve seen that when I do my speeches at universities… they’re like Animal House; they’re wild and crazy.”
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