Hiring practices at the state's gambling control board should be reviewed after an agency employee was charged with dropping his girlfriend from the window of his 23rd-floor apartment, industry observers said Tuesday.
The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board's chairman, Tad Decker, defended the board's hiring practices yesterday, but said in light of the incident, the agency is considering a pre-employment drug-screening test for all job applicants.
Kevin P. Eckenrode, 25, a newly hired press aide who is related to a member of the state board that hired him, remained in jail yesterday on a homicide charge for allegedly dropping Rachel M. Kozlusky, 23, from the window of his Harrisburg apartment Saturday after a two-day drinking binge.
It's the latest -- and most serious -- in a string of arrests and investigations involving state gambling board employees. As a result, the agency faces intense scrutiny over its hiring practices and operations. The seven-member board, appointed by Gov. Ed Rendell and legislative leaders, will implement and regulate the state's slots industry.
"It's been one in a series of what one might describe as a comedy of errors, except the results are not really a comedy," said Michael Geer, president of the Pennsylvania Family Institute, a Harrisburg nonprofit opposed to expanded gambling.
Eckenrode passed a preliminary criminal background check, and even though he started his $33,000-a-year job in January, his employment was contingent on the outcome of an in-depth background check by state police, Decker said. Eckenrode was suspended Sunday.
He told police Kozlusky wanted to sit on the window ledge, and when she couldn't touch the window in the apartment below with her feet, she asked her boyfriend for help.
"He grabbed (her) under the armpits from behind with his hands and lowered her to the window below," Detective Donald Heffner wrote in an arrest affidavit. "During this time she slipped out of his hands and fell to her death."
Eckenrode is related to William P. Conaboy, a Scranton lawyer and health care executive appointed to the board by Senate Democratic Leader Robert Mellow, of Lackawanna County. Conaboy once served as Mellow's legal counsel.
Decker, who said Eckenrode's mother is related to Conaboy's wife, defended Eckenrode's hiring.
"If Bill Conaboy weren't here, we would have hired this guy," Decker said after a board meeting in Harrisburg. "He had done a terrific job for the board. Everybody really liked this guy."
State Reps. Paul Clymer, R-Bucks County, and Greg Vitali, D-Delaware County, said they are concerned about politics and nepotism influencing the hiring of control board employees.
"I just suspect there's politics that's going along with the various appointments," Vitali said.
Conaboy was one of Eckenrode's references, but Decker said the hiring did not smack of nepotism since the board also has rejected applicants who were referred by board members.
"This guy graduated with honors from Penn State in communications," Decker said. "We were very lucky to get this guy."
In addition to homicide, police charged Eckenrode with possession of drug paraphernalia, but his attorney, William Costopoulos, said he believes drugs were not a factor in the incident.
"I can't imagine foreseeing this happening under any circumstance to anybody, in the public or private sector," Costopoulos said. "Should they have had a heads-up this would happen⢠I don't know where it would have come from."
Eckenrode had never been in trouble with the law, his lawyer said.
Gambling opponents linked Kozlusky's death with other problems within the agency, saying they raise questions about its hiring practices:
= Two gambling control board lawyers were arrested last year for drinking-related scuffles.
= The agency's deputy director of investigations, Thomas Sturgeon, a former Allegheny County Police superintendent, was questioned by the FBI in connection with a DUI ticket-fixing case. Sturgeon's lawyer said he was told his client was not the subject of the investigation.
= In November, Louisiana's state inspector general said the Pennsylvania control board's executive director, Anne L. Neeb, falsified attendance records and collected pay for hours she didn't work while heading Louisiana's gambling agency. Neeb denied the allegations, calling them retaliation for her reporting of possible corruption.
"Are they doing the background checks as they claimed they are supposed to be doing?" Clymer said. "I'm just wondering whether or not they're doing the job as thoroughly as they should."
Mike Long, the chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Robert Jubelirer, R-Altoona, said Jubelirer had predicted problems from the outset when the Legislature approved slots gambling.
"He thought it was not a good thing for Pennsylvania," Long said. "And he predicted bad things would happen, overall, with the expansion of gambling."
The control board should not let employees start working until they have passed a background check, said Dave Grusemeyer, a retired New Jersey state police trooper who headed the Garden State's gambling unit. Otherwise, confidential information could be compromised.
"I think it would give them pause to say, 'How are we screening these people and how are we supervising them?'" he said. "It's just kind of weird the problems they've had."
Control board employees might start working on a probationary basis until their background checks are complete, spokesman Nick Hays said. He could not say whether employees can access confidential information before then. The agency has about 160 employees.
The background checks can take months, Hays said.
