"I'm not in the know, just who was Bob Grubba ?"
Bob Grubba is very much alive and well. Indeed, his company, Broadway Limited Imports is one of the premier importers of high quality HO and N scale brass locomotives with DCC and passenger and freight cars. They also import some interesting sound systems. One of his partners is Ken Silvestri, who also worked for Lionel in the 1990s.
https://www.broadway-limited.com/
My own view is that Mr. Grubba has been the subject of slander by people in the O gauge hobby. Mostly people who are misinformed about the substance of the lawsuit against Lionel for allegedly "using MTH designs" back in the 1990s. In reality, the "crime," if any, was committed by Korean designers who worked for multiple companies and provided the same designs to both Samhongsa (MTH's partner) and Korea Brass (Lionel's partner). People were convicted in Korea, but never in the USA.
Was Bob Grubba, who was head of Lionel's engineering department at the time, aware that this was going on? Perhaps. But it was accepted and common practice in Korea, and continued until MTH decided Lionel was competing too effectively 
. It went on under the radar, so to speak. This lawsuit led to both Samhongsa and Korea Brass going out of business I believe.
However, Grubba was neither indicted nor involved in the actual "borrowing" of designs, was never named in the lawsuit and bears little or no responsibility for what was going on in Korea in my view. Our industry's contempt for him is misplaced. His success while at Lionel and K-Line and as the owner of Broadway Limited suggests he is both competent and without legal liability.
What happened was ugly and you can argue about who was to blame, but Grubba was, at worst, guilty of not knowing that contractors in Korea (MTH; Lionel) and the USA (K-line; Lionel) were using other people's intellectual property. Not an indictable offense, or even morally culpable in my view.
