By Ralph Cipriano

Vince Fumo had a vision for Spring Garden. He wanted the old city neighborhood to look like it did at the turn of the century, with authentic street lamps that would look like gaslights. And to really make that turn-of-the-century thing work, Vince wanted to get rid of those ugly hanging power lines by burying them underground.

Vince's vision was articulated from the witness stand today by Christopher Craig, who formerly served as Vince's chief legislative counsel. The vision became a political tool during "esoteric and hideously boring utility regulation," Craig testified, when he and Vince had to slug it out with PECO before the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission. 

"We were going toe to toe with the utility companies," Craig recalled, as if he was talking about standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Davy Crockett at the Alamo. To hear Craig tell it, every electric customer in Pennsylvania owes the former state senator a debt of gratitude, because Vince was able to pressure PECO into freezing utility rates at 1996 levels until 2010. The state senator was also successful in convincing PECO to put up $50 million for residents who can't afford to pay their utility bills.

But back to the vision thing for Spring Garden. As Craig described it on the witness stand, PECO execs called Craig and told him they wanted to live up to a promise they had made to the state senator during the state utility wars. But the cost of Vince's vision was going to br prohibitive, Craig said. In addition, the political process for getting approvals to bury power lines underground would also be bloody and lengthy, Craig said. Every resident on every street in Spring Garden would have to agree to the proposal, Craig said, and just one dissenter on a block would kayo the whole program for everybody on the street.

So, the president of PECO called Craig one day and asked if the senator would be willing to consider an alternate proposal, a donation to a charity of Vince's choice. A really big donation. So Craig asked Vince about it, and surprise, surprise, drum roll please, the charity Vince suggested was -- the Citizens Alliance for Better Neighborhoods. The non-profit founded by Fumo that has been identified by the government as the purchaser of more than $100,000 worth of power tools for Vince.

And that's how the Citizens Alliance received a $10 million gift from the state senator's friends at PECO, Craig testified. Craig was the fourth witness to take the stand this week as after more than 14 weeks of prosecution testimony, the defense in the Vince Fumo political corruption trial finally has a chance to present its case.

Craig testified how he had known Fumo since 1987, when he was an undergraduate college student and political science major who wrote to Vince, asking for a job. Vince put Craig to work, writing correspondence to constituents as a volunteer in Fumo's office. Craig later went to law school before going to work for Vince in Harrisburg.

"He's somebody that's very important to me, somebody I care about," Craig said of Fumo. Craig testified that he was a political junkie who followed politics with a passion that others usually reserved for football or baseball. He soon discovered that politics permeated the state legislature in Harrisburg. "Every move had a political calculus to it," Craig said. "Every communication had a political component to it."

Craig testified that he loved working for the state senator, and that whatever personal or political favors he did for Vince were done in addition to working his regular 37 and a half hour work week at the state Senate.

"I was never made to feel like I had to do something," Craig told defense lawyer Dennis Cogan. It was never a bother, for example, for Craig to pick up the phone and call a telephone company executive and ask if he could work out a phone problem for Dottie Egrie, who at the time was the senator's girlfriend. 

Craig said that before the state senator got involved in the PECO negotiations, somebody had tucked a sweetheart deal for the utility into a bill to regulate Philadelphia taxi drivers. What was really going on was that PECO was trying to get the state to agree to pick up 100 percent of PECO's "stranded costs," money the utility had blown on failed nuclear power plants. The plan was for PECO to get the recovery legislation through Harrisburg, and then use that legislation on Wall Street to negotiate lower rates for the utility's debt service.

To complicate matters, Craig said, the energy giant Enron Corp. got involved in the Pennsylvania utility wars. The chairman and CEO of Enron, Kenneth Lay, was flying to Harrisburg to lobby Gov. Ridge, and also spending lots of money on an advertising campaign to promote deregulation of state utilities. Craig testified that Enron also conned the gullible journalists at The Philadelphia Inquirer into believing "the myth" that deregulation would lower utility rates.

Craig said he filed a lawsuit on behalf of the senator as a utility customer and a Harrisburg legislator to get Fumo a seat at the bargaining table of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission. Craig said that in exchange for PECO getting its recovery legislation, Fumo fought for and got rate reductions for everybody in the state.

By the time Fumo was through, Craig testified, taxpayers were the winners, because PECO "ended up with $2 billion less than what they asked for "in terms of the bailout for the utility's stranded costs. And how good were those rate reductions? Well, according to Craig, when they expire in 2010, "everybody in the PECO service area is looking down the barrel of a 30 percent rate hike."

Craig said he also enlisted the help of Howard Cain, Fumo's political operative, to combat Enron in the utility wars. Craig, a lawyer from Mechanicsburg, PA., testified that he relied on Philly insider Cain "to sort of walk me through the jungle that is the city" of Philadelphia. Cain's contribution to the war effort: "Don't bail out PECO" stickers that Fumo staffers attached to water buckets.

Craig's appearance on the witness stand followed the appearance of Paul Dlugolecki, Fumo's former chief of staff in Harrisburg, who testified that the work ethic in Fumo's office was the envy of other legislators at the state capitol. But the defense witnesses who appeared in court this week were at best "table setters," in the words of one observer, that only served to whet appetites for the appearance of the defendant himself. If the press and courtroom spectators were allowed to speak during the trial proceedings, they'd be chanting "Vince, Vince, Vince."

Defense lawyer Cogan, however, has been cagey about whether he's going to put Vince up on the stand, saying he's made the decision, but that he's not ready to share it yet with the buzzards in the press. So in the absence of official word, the courtroom has been rife with rumor and speculation.

Vince's detractors say that after seeing the government's voluminous case, as presented over 15 weeks through 78 witnesses and more than twice as many courtroom exhibits, Vince is afraid to testify. Or, since Fumo was stricken in the courtroom, and had to be rushed by ambulance to the hospital, maybe Vince and/or his lawyers are afraid to put him up on the stand because they don't know if he's healthy enough to withstand the ordeal of direct testimony, and worse, cross-examination.

Maybe all the worry over whether to put Vince up on the stand is part of the reason why Dennis Cogan requested an early dismissal today, telling Judge Ronald L. Buckwalter "I'm just exhausted."

The judge told Cogan he felt the same way, and that it was a good idea to end court about 40 minutes early, so that everybody could get a head start on the slushy commute home. 

"I'll do it partly for you and partly for me," the judge said, in granting Cogan's request.