Free Milton Street

We need him on that wall, feds. So what's with the Al Capone treatment?

by Brian Hickey

It's gotta be his shoes. At this point, it can't be anything else.

For the past month, I've been trying to get T. Milton Street Sr. to spare a couple of hours, if not days, to sit down and talk about what his life's been like during these treacherous times. He was staring straight down the judicial barrel at what might be his Last Stand, a Philadelphia-variety Waterloo long in the making, and when you're backed into that proverbial corner, you're apt to bare your fangs and swing your fists.

It's a survival instinct, and more so than any other contemporary Philadelphian, T. Milton Street Sr. is a survivor. A survivor with some damn big fangs, too. And damn big fangs make for damn fun stories for the rest of us to tell.

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Phone tag was played with optimistic messages returned and left and returned. Since we'd spent a day trawling Center City to get signatures for his mayoral petition a year earlier, Milton said he really wanted to talk. But, he needed his attorney's clearance before he could go public. This is the guy who once told me he was going to hand-deliver "pig balls" to Dwight Evans' office, so a short leash may not be that bad of a legal strategy.

A week before jury selection was to begin, my cell phone rang. This time, it was Jeremy Ibrahim, Milton's legal counselor. He seemed to like the idea of his client, on trial's eve, having a platform to tell how his very essence has been turned upside down by the win-at-all-cost feds, to cull some public sympathy, to let Milton be Milton — just not in Milton's unfiltered words.

Ibrahim, a short, muscular guy, talked about how, before he was assigned to the case, he'd known nothing about his client beyond the media accounts, the Philly rumor mill and the exaggerations befitting a true character's legend. The whole casket-outside-City-Hall Cliffs Notes version, basically.

Thus, he didn't expect to be representing somebody who'd spend day after week after month sifting through the 120 boxes of discovery documents the government had dumped on him, figuring full well that nobody examines every last page. Well, Milton isn't everybody. Because, Ibrahim said, Milton tapped into that survival instinct and did just that, as if his life depended on it.

"He," the lawyer said that day, "is an amazing guy."

Ibrahim, who sounded like he really was in awe, then said he'd talk to his amazing client and one of them would call back to arrange a time they could both meet. But, with the trial bearing down in single-digit days, that call never came.

Which brings us back to the shoes.

White, low-top Reeboks, to be exact. Possibly cross trainers. Not that Milton, with tired eyes and slouched posture, looks as if he's cross-trained since his rabble-rousing Reagan-era days.

So yesterday, which was Ash Wednesday, Milton donned his court-appropriate best as 75 potential jurors filed into Courtroom 6-A at the federal courthouse at Sixth and Market streets. They were there to either submit to their duty of citizenship or pull the "extreme hardship" card to get out of a three- to four-week investment. More than half claimed they knew too much about the defendant already, a good number of whom also raised their hands to indicate they weren't sure they'd be able to render a fair verdict. They were saying they'd heard the Tale of Milton and already think he's a smooth criminal.

Through it all, he sat stoically, professionally, betraying little sign of the bullhorn Milton of old. It made me wonder whether we've had him wrong lately, whether the fire has gone out, whether he really wasn't still amazing after all these years.

But today, as seven women (six whites, one black) and seven men (five whites, two blacks) take their assigned seats in the jury box to pass judgment on someone who didn't resemble their peer, it seems as if appearance matters very little. Reality has clearly set in and, just like he always thinks he has, Milton's gonna keep it real.

It's arguably the biggest day in his 68-year life. Milton strolls across the blue carpets of U.S. District Judge Legrome Davis' court-dom sporting a funkadelic multicolored Phillies lid, overcoat, blue sweater, casual green pants and those Reeboks. There he is, the Milton that Philadelphians love to hate, hate to love or look upon with glee knowing that wherever he goes, absurdity follows close behind.

The message seems clear: Since you're sitting there in judgment of me, the least I can do is show you who I really am; hence the court-inappropriate sneakers.

Then again, the shoes could represent the quintessential Milton move. As in, what jury's going to believe I'm anything but a bankrupt pauper if I can't wear anything better than this? If it takes fashion nonsense to convince them that I didn't pocket scads of money and burn it at the OTB; Bailey, Banks & Biddle; and Neiman Marcus, fashion nonsense it is.

Say what you will about him, but if you say he's stupid, you're wrong.

Yep, this is the Milton I wanted to write about. And this is the Milton who — after Davis sends the jurors home for the night, urging them in a soothing voice unbefitting his grizzly-bear frame, to get a good night's sleep to rest their minds for what's to come — strolls up Market Street toward City Hall, old-school CD player in hand.

Anonymous amid a rush-hour pedestrian crowd that takes zero notice of him, he's breaking down the entire case, explaining how there's no question that he's going to beat this rap. Tax code by tax code, city regulation by city regulation, witness by witness, using heretofore-unreleased pieces of evidence condemning his accusers as criminals to support his side of things.

He has a plan and he sayeth his plan will work. And, might I say, a good chunk feels plausible even if — get this — he has a penchant for talking over your head.

"But," he says, grabbing my forearm while crossing 11th Street, "this is all in confidence. You can print anything I told you, the whole story, later. But for now, it's between us. Confidential."

Great. Time to throw those notes out.

"OK, I gotta grab the bus here," he continues at the covered SEPTA stop outside the Gallery. "This guy I know shot himself in the head. It's horrible. Just horrible. I gotta get to the funeral."

Fresh off hearing Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams eviscerate him as a leech who pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars on the strength of his last name without paying into the federal coffers, Milton shakes my hand and waits for the next SEPTA bus.

And when it arrives, you just know he'll pull his senior-citizen discount card out of the same pocket that, hours earlier, prosecutors claimed has been known to contain a roll of enough hundreds, fifties and twenties to buy Reeboks for the entire courthouse a few times over.

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Seventy-nine years ago today, the Chicago gang wars reached an apex when seven mobsters were machine-gunned down by assassins posing as cops. The bloodbath would come to be known as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

Federal investigators would blame Al Capone, a violent mobster who turned Prohibition and illegal-gambling operations into what the FBI deemed "growth opportunities" offering an unrivaled opportunity for profit. Yet for all their investigative prowess, Capone wouldn't go down for the countless murders attributed to his dirty hands.

Fast-forward to Philadelphia, 2008, and you'll hear Capone's name being bandied about the federal courthouse. For that, you can thank Alton Coles, a Southwest Philly "entrepreneur" on trial in Courtroom 8-A. For the past five weeks, the feds have been trying to prove that Coles was no mere rap promoter who parlayed a barely noticed New Jack City sequel into street cred and deep-pocket cash. Rather, before Coles took the stand in his own defense this past Monday, they claimed he was a big-time dealer using a record company as a front for a multimillion-dollar coke ring. They said "Ace Capone" represented more than his nickname; it was an abbreviation for his lifestyle. And, who knows, the jury may ultimately agree.

But listen closer and find closer ties to Coles' nickname-sake two floors down, in Davis' courtroom. For there, the federal government has taken the lessons learned in their pursuit of Al Capone and put them into action.

You see, the mob's "Omertà" code of silence rendered the FBI unable to saddle Capone with responsibility for the droves of crimes they suspected him of committing. Instead, in 1931, they finally got to him with income-tax-evasion charges. Investigators did their due diligence and found that he'd spent money at racetracks in Miami and dropped cash on extravagant vacations.

Taking a new investigative tact — if you can't get a violent offender on the big charges, hammer away at the small ones — they argued that Capone earned wad after wad of hundreds, fifties and twenties and didn't pay taxes on any of it.

The jury convicted Capone at the federal courthouse in Chicago. He got 11 years in federal prison. Seven and a half years, $272,692 and a bunch of good behavior later, he was released as a syphilis-ridden shell of what he once was, never regaining enough mental acuity to return to the mob life before dying of a stroke in 1947.

If the feds have their way during the next three weeks, this, too, will be Milton's fate. (Minus the syphilis, presumably.) Most people have always assumed he'd go down on something shadier than tax woes, no?

So, here's the government's case: Buoyed by the inherent juice that comes with having one's brother elected as mayor, Milton hired himself out as a high-paid consultant who told people he knew he had a "small window" to profit handsomely. A company that wanted a multimillion-dollar contract to run maintenance at Philadelphia International Airport bit. In part, they did so because Milton's company, with zero airport-maintenance experience, would help it satisfy the city-mandated and John-Street-supported Minority Business Enterprise Council requirements that ensure minorities get a piece of the financial pie.

Philadelphia Airport Services (PAS) brought him into the fold, ostensibly to mentor his Notlim Services Management Co. and develop it into an independent entity. To that end, deals were made. Starting in November 2002, Milton would be paid $166,000 a month. He'd return $133,000 of it, pocketing a cool $33,000. (Not that he returned it all, of course.) It's a tricky financial equation meant to make it appear, among other things, that his company was solvent enough to earn bank loans.

And though the deal had a clear no-public-disclosure clause, the media got a hold of the story and would not let go. Considering he was up for re-election at the time, then-Mayor Street told his brother to knock it off. And his brother knocked it off — to a point. He allegedly lined the pockets of company official Matthias A. Schwabe, who — also indiscriminately tapping into his company's petty-cash bin — bought a $400,000-plus home, took his family on vacations and dinners at places like Bennigan's.

On the stand last Friday, Schwabe, a rotund fellow who pronounced his "r's" as "w's" while Ibrahim skewered him, admitted to his crimes as per his plea agreement with the feds. These include pocketing a finder's fee for procuring six grand worth of sound equipment for Milton's brother's re-election campaign (a check from the Friends of John F. Street payable to Milton has been entered into evidence), and helping get $22,000-plus worth of renovations for Milton's lady friend's hair salon in Pennsauken, N.J. (It must be noted, however, that Milton is wearing a ring where a wedding band belongs these days.)

All of that earned Milton an additional charge of defrauding PAS of "its tangible right to the honest services of [an] employee," a controversial statute that also reared its head in Rick Mariano's corruption case.

Milton, along with co-defendant John Velardi, formerly of PAS, then allegedly tried to sell the troubled subcontract, which had already been canceled, to another minority business owner who happily paid $80,000 in cash at a couple of Center City meetings for the potential right to earn $3.2 million off it. But meanwhile, prosecutors say, Milton hid all of this income from the taxman.

"Instead of paying the IRS," Williams said, "he lined his own pockets. He used the appearance of influence to get money, and money to get real influence."

In the eyes of the feds, this represented tax evasion and fraud. And considering that the fraud was perpetrated involving AOL e-mails and interstate phone calls, it was big-time fraud to the tune of, according to a November 2006 press release, "89 years imprisonment and a $1.275 million fine." (Due to federal sentencing guidelines, a two-year sentence is the likely outcome should he be convicted.)

"Milton Street wanted the IRS to believe he was a humble street vendor selling hot dogs and soda," U.S. Attorney Pat Meehan wrote. "What he didn't tell them was that he was making millions on nothing more than his last name."

In other words, he may not have currently been a politician, but he used one in his family for financial gain. And, goes a defense theory, if a bug weren't enough to help us get the defendant's brother on any corruption charges, we'll fight for another type of victory. Hence, the Capone-esque evasion charges that are always difficult to beat.

"Milton Street is not charged with how he got the contracts," said Williams, a polite, rail-thin prosecutor with long, curly blond hair and a quick smile, in her opening arguments last Thursday. "It's what he did next."

In which "what he did next" meant not paying taxes on some $2 million in income between 2000 and 2004.

And with that, the Capone strategy had been reborn to use on an apolitical person in a very political case in which the old way of governmental business could be publicly buried once and for all. In fact, you could argue that this is the expensive end result of a grudge being shifted from one brother, who never got slapped with federal charges, to another, who everybody's long thought was ripe for prison time.

Milton, it seems, could be John's Capone-tax-evasion charge.

Make no mistake about it: The first week of Milton Street's trial has been an exercise in tedium. It's not like upstairs, where "Ace Capone" took the stand in what had to resemble a scene from a mafia movie. And it's not like your semi-regular mob cases, where television satellite trucks line both Sixth and Market streets, their wires snaking across the pavement, their reporters vulture-gaggling around anybody who might offer a good comment. And while his name was mentioned countless times, the former mayor is nowhere to be found.

Except for a handful of U.S. Attorneys Office interns, reporters, a pair of regular court watchers and an occasional visit from a friend, the gallery is empty. This is because, for the most part, technical testimony in unbearable.

Tax documents, budgetary spreadsheets and photocopied checks make up the bulk of the exhibits entered into testimony to date. The witnesses are as undynamic as you'd expect controllers and paving-company execs to be. From an excitement standpoint, it's as bland as Milton has long been colorful. (Which makes it more soothing when considering that Davis declined a philly.com request to live-blog the proceedings.)

This may be because, from the outset, even before jury selection started, a government that covertly photocopied documents behind the defense's back wanted to ensure that Milton's "historical background" not be called into play. Milton may be like the ringleader of a three-ring circus, they seemed to be saying, but we can't let this case devolve into chaos. Lucky for Philadelphia's reality-courtroom aficionados, they may not have a choice.

Etched into the wall outside the courthouse's Market Street exit is the phrase, "Justice is the guardian of liberty." Milton was standing in front of this phrase immediately after the first week's testimony ended. Graciously stopping to pose for a City Paper photographer, Milton tried balancing two boxes of that discovery evidence that he and Ibrahim would study over the weekend. Having nearly dropped one of the boxes into a windstorm that would've sent what Ibrahim calls Milton's "exculpatory evidence" all over Center City, he still managed to put on that quintessentially goofy, ear-to-ear Milton smile.

From there, he walked up Seventh Street to wait along an alley where his counselor would pick him up and give him a ride home. He passed the 20 minutes talking about how Schwabe had been torn to shreds on the stand, breaking down whether he had any members of the jury on his side already and telling a friend who'd come to watch the day's proceedings that "things are going great."

We got into the tedium aspect of it, how it's unbefitting a character like him to, potentially, go down on a boring tax case with few people around to see it even happen. Again, he brought up hints as to what would be coming; in short, he feels that his accusers will be made to look more criminal than he's alleged to have been.

Across the alley stood the back end of the federal lockup, but not once did he look up at what could potentially become his home. Urging me not to betray his confidence, he grabbed onto his boxes as Ibrahim pulled up. It was time to take his leave and try to get some down time. But before he could, I had one last question for Milton, the answer to which would restore my faith in his ability to take a predicament and turn it into a spectacle.

Considering that he's long been considered a lovable showman, albeit one with a rumored greedy side, I wanted to know whether he'd be taking the stand or whether he'd uncharacteristically hide behind his Fifth Amendment rights. I prayed it wasn't the latter, because he stands as one of the last bastions of old loud-mouth Philadelphia, the type of guy who makes up for countless hours of boring tax testimony, who leaves me to wonder whether the feds have wasted way too much money on a fish-in-a-barrel vendetta.

"Oh," he said with a laugh, tilting his Phils-cap-adorned head away from the prison, "you can't win against them [feds] over here unless you get up there on the stand and talk. You gotta make the people like you or you don't have a chance."

For his sake, Milton had better hope I'm not the only one left who does.

(hickey@citypaper.net)