What will Fumo’s blueprint be for proving his innocence? We’ll go into that later.

allmusic

Sen. Fumo has actually beaten more federal charges than most rappers claim to have evaded in their lyrics. (Jay-Z, as I remember in ‘01, is responsible for my favorite description of how he would beat any government accusations: “like Rocky.”)

Anyway. Before this trial kicks off, it’s important to know that this isn’t the first time Fumo has been a defendant in U.S. District Court. It’s not even his second. Monday will actually mark this third go-around with the Feds.

Let’s go back to the 1970’s. Fumo went from being a high school biology and current events teacher at St. John Neumann (unnecessary disclosure, more like a shout-out: I graduated from there as well) to holding several positions in Harrisburg. (Fumo, over time, has earned degrees in biology, law, and business, and was very active in ward politics.)

As Bob Warner tells it in a Feb. 7, 2007 Daily News account (the link is dead):

In March 1973, Fumo was among eight people charged with vote fraud in an alleged conspiracy to help state Sen. Henry “Buddy” Cianfrani win re-election in South Philadelphia.

The charges were dropped without a trial – after the Republican district attorney who brought the charges, Arlen Specter, lost a re-election bid to Democrat F. Emmett Fitzpatrick Jr.

Fumo, who was Cinfrani’s protégé, went on to take his seat in 1978.

Two years later, he was indicted again.

This time it was with City Committee Chairman Peter Camiel and state Sen. Thomas Nolan for accusations of putting 36 people into “no-show” jobs on the taxpayer’s dime. After a four week trial, all three were convicted of mail fraud charges. Fumo was reelected to office after he was convicted, while the judge deliberated over several post-trial motions.

Fumo’s political career, at that point, should have been over. Judge Clifford Scott Green, though, didn’t think so.

Months after the conviction, Green ruled on one of those motions: the charges against all three men were acquitted, on grounds that prosecutors didn’t prove the case against them. “I let go a lot of emotion,” Fumo told the Inquirer after hearing about the decision. “I cried for a while.”

The rest is literally state history. Fumo became a power broker and kingmaker in local and state politics. I’ll be writing much more on that later, but one quote, from former Philadelphia state Rep. Gerard Kosinski in the Daily News in 1993, sums things up nicely: “If an extra-terrestrial came down here, it wouldn’t say, ‘Take me to your leader.’ It would say, ‘Where’s Vince?’”

Here’s the point: it seems highly unlikely that, as they have in the past, things will break in favor of Fumo this time around. The sheer number of the accusations — 139 — shows the extent to which the government expended massive amounts of time and energy to make sure Fumo will be nailed to at least one charge. In other words, unlike 1973, these charges, and all that work, won’t be discarded.

As for the 1980 case, it’s impossible to know what motions will be brought up, and implemented by the judge, during the course of the trial. But with today’s reform-conscious electorate (see: the campaigns of Nutter, Obama, and heck, even McCain somehow claims to be an agent of change) it seems hard to believe that a judge would so willingly reverse any jury’s decision.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Necessary Background. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.