Before Allegheny County Sheriff Pete DeFazio took office in 1997, his predecessor, the late Eugene Coon, warned him not to promote Lt. Dennis Skosnik to be his second in command.

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The outgoing sheriff said the lieutenant could be Sheriff DeFazio's downfall, sources in the office recall.

Sheriff DeFazio ignored the advice, but it remains to be seen if Mr. Coon will be proven right.

Chief Deputy Skosnik is among three top sheriff's officials charged in a federal corruption probe; one of them has been convicted. More are expected to be indicted soon, but sources inside and outside of the sheriff's office say Sheriff DeFazio might not be one of them.

The investigation has focused on Chief Skosnik, although his attorney, George Bills, said prosecutors offered his client a deal to cooperate against others. He wouldn't say whom.

But with government witnesses portraying Chief Skosnik as the leader of an office cabal involved in case-fixing, bribery, forcing deputies to make campaign contributions and other abuses, two questions hang over the investigation:

Did the sheriff know what was going on? And if not, why not?

U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan won't comment on the investigation except to say that it is continuing. Sheriff DeFazio won't talk about the case, nor will his attorney, Martin Dietz, but the sheriff's former attorney, Anthony Mariani, has said the sheriff is the not the target of the federal grand jury.

Several sources likened the situation to that of President Ronald Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s.

While some insiders said Mr. Reagan had to know that his appointees were selling weapons to Iran and using the proceeds to finance the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, others portrayed him as an amiable overseer who didn't sweat the details. A third theory was that Mr. Reagan's top aides kept him only loosely in the loop so he could claim "plausible deniability."

Similar camps have emerged among those following the sheriff's office investigation. Deputies and other witnesses, many of whom testified in the trial of former Capt. Frank Schiralli, won't comment for the record.

But in private, several have said the sheriff was in the office every day, often huddled with Chief Skosnik and his executive assistant, Michael Mullen Jr., and that he seemed aware of many details of the operation.

One former staffer, who said she was fired after complaining of harassment, said the sheriff knew all the specifics of her dispute with her supervisor.

Deputies said the sheriff also knew they were being squeezed for campaign contributions, at least to some extent. Once, when Capt. Schiralli was urging a young deputy to donate, the sheriff came out of his office and angrily told Capt. Schiralli to leave the man alone, according to one deputy.

Capt. Schiralli was convicted of perjury for denying that he kept lists of deputies' donations to the sheriff's campaigns, but he was acquitted on a charge of pressuring them to pay.

Testimony at Capt. Schiralli's trial revealed he had admitted giving Sheriff DeFazio $200 in exchange for a "longevity bonus" of more than $4,000 that he and other managers had received.

The sheriff didn't seem to consider asking employees for campaign contributions all that serious, some deputies said. The tradition began under Sheriff Coon, although Sheriff DeFazio has held even more fund-raisers and built a formidable campaign fund.

When it became clear that the FBI was investigating allegations that employees had been pressured, deputies said, the sheriff couldn't understand how they could let Capt. Schiralli, a small man of slight build, push them around.

"Why are all you guys scared of that little [expletive]?" a deputy recalls him saying, partly in jest. "Why doesn't someone just take him out and beat his ass?"

On the other hand, many deputies and others close to the sheriff's office portrayed Chief Skosnik as the true head of the department and Sheriff DeFazio as a figurehead who was somewhat detached, perhaps a touch naive, and presiding over a staff where loyalty and "chain of command" was everything.

So while the sheriff often talked and joked with deputies, he also was insulated from what they were doing by a layer of "white shirt" command staffers. Much of the information the sheriff received was filtered by Chief Skosnik and Mr. Mullen.

An example was when the FBI, long before the indictments, showed up one day to interview a deputy at the Family Division of Common Pleas Court. Word arrived from Mr. Mullen that Sheriff DeFazio didn't want the agents interviewing anyone on duty.

The agents stopped the interview. But they knew that Sheriff DeFazio previously had told the head of the Pittsburgh FBI that he would cooperate fully and that "anything you want you can have."

So the agents asked the sheriff about the order Mr. Mullen had relayed.

"What are you talking about?" the sheriff asked. He then turned to one of his staffers, Capt. Joseph Rizzo, who was standing nearby. "Whatever these guys need," he said, "you get it for them."

Another example of the sheriff's detachment is the allegation in the federal indictment of Chief Skosnik that the chief stole some of the money that he had collected for Sheriff DeFazio's campaigns. To the extent this was taking place, some deputies said, the sheriff could be seen as a victim of his own staff.

Some in the office said the sheriff found it convenient to wall himself off at times, particularly by letting Chief Skosnik play the "bad cop" in dealing with the staff while he remained the "good cop."

Chief Skosnik dealt with unfavorable assignments and transfers, for instance, the threat of which, deputies testified, was used as leverage to get them to contribute to the campaign fund.

Deputies said Sheriff DeFazio would sometimes see a deputy at a certain post and ask why he wasn't working at his assigned job. On such occasions, the sheriff would intervene and remind Chief Skosnik or other top brass, "I'm in charge of this office."

But some said he really wasn't.

While Chief Skosnik did the administrative work behind the scenes, they said, the sheriff would be the public image of the office, getting his shoes shined every day, keeping himself fit to look sharp in the uniform he had redesigned, conspicuously going to church every morning at 10, plastering his face on billboards and marching in parades.

Ego aside, many said Sheriff DeFazio is an honest straight-shooter. In addition to being extremely religious, he is devoted to his parents in an old-world Italian way, to the point where he would never want to dishonor their name.

"You know why I'm good?" he told the Post-Gazette in 2003. "Because I'm honest, I don't lie, and I tell it like it is."

One sergeant who has known him for decades agreed.

"He's a fine and decent man," he said. "He wants to be a good, honest cop."

Yet during Mr. Schiralli's trial in August, the sheriff invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself when he was called to testify as a defense witness. Mr. Mullen and Sgt. Daniel Stehle did the same.

Those familiar with federal investigations, particularly perjury cases, caution that no good attorney would have let his client testify in that situation.

But as a result of the sheriff's continuing silence, those two nagging questions remain: Did the sheriff know what was going on? And if not, why not?