By Ralph Cipriano

Prosecutor John Pease began his cross-examination of Vince Fumo today by giving the former state senator a stern lecture on ethics.

Adopting a schoolmarmish tone, Pease took the reluctant Fumo through a digest of recent rulings from the state Ethics Commission. The rulings that the prosecutor read to Fumo involved cases where public officials were fined, disciplined, and even criminally prosecuted for using state facilities and/or state workers for campaign purposes.

The two-hour cross-examination of Fumo, frequently interrupted by sidebars, took on the air of a kid stuck in detention. Prosecutor Pease kept reading case after case to Fumo, trying to get the former state senator to admit that he had to be aware of general prohibitions against state employees doing personal and political tasks in the office during work hours. And Fumo, like the kid who didn't do his homework, responded by saying he wasn't aware of many of the rulings. 

"I don't know anybody who reads it," Fumo said of the digest from the state Ethics Commission. "I operate under the rules of the state senate. I try to do things in a legal way."

And when he was aware of the ethics cases, Fumo drew frequent distinctions, in an attempt to show that what other public officials had gotten nailed for had nothing to do with his case.

Pease, in a tone dripping with moral censure, asked Fumo if he didn't have a responsibility as a public official to be aware of these rulings, as well as to be sensitive to them. The prosecutor was prodding Fumo, and the defendant took the bait.

"I don't feel an obligation to inform myself of anything," Fumo told Pease. All he was really obligated to do as a state senator, Fumo told Pease was "I have to go to Harrisburg and vote." That's about it. Fumo added if the voters disapproved of his actions, their remedy was to vote him out of office. The unspoken sentiment was that Fumo never lost an election.

"Fair enough," Pease replied.

"I'm glad you understand," Fumo said.

Pease cited the case of former state Sen. Jeff Habay, asking Fumo if he was aware that Habay was criminally convicted for using state workers to work on his reelection campaign during office hours.

"He was forcing employees to do something that they specifically didn't want to do," Fumo retorted. In Habay's case, Fumo said, it was Habay's own employees who brought the complaint against him. Fumo made a distinction with the employees in his office, saying that whatever campaign work they did was performed voluntarily, and on the employees' own time.

"Your employees routinely used state facilities," Pease sneered, to perform personal favors and political campaign work "on your behalf." Pease also argued that Fumo routinely had his workers doing personal and political favors during regular office hours, in his district office on Tasker Street.

Fumo argued that the concept of a work day for state senate employees is not spelled out anywhere. He also contended that all his employees worked way more than the standard 37 and a half hour work week so the taxpayers weren't getting gypped. Whatever personal and political stuff his employees were doing, Fumo insisted, was done on their own personal time, so what was the problem.

"It's also a violation to spit on the sidewalk, although I'm not sure it's enforced," Fumo said. Fumo told the prosecutor that if you followed all the distinctions the government was drawing to the extreme, technically, Fumo was wrong for "taking a personal call from my daughter" on a state phone. 

It was also wrong, Fumo argued, to talk to his son in his district office on Tasker Street about a personal matter. That discussion should have been held out on the street if we did things your way, Fumo told Pease.

"Are you finished with your answer?" Pease asked.

"I am, unless you have another question," Fumo replied.

"I do," Pease said.

Pease began his cross-examination by not even saying hello to the defendant before he began firing off questions. Within minutes, Pease's voice was rising and Fumo was telling him to "calm down."

When Pease asked Fumo if he was aware that the FBI had served a subpoena on the Dilworth Paxson law firm, where Fumo was employed as a rainmaker, Fumo shot back, "Yes I think you subpoenaed everybody every where."

Pease also upbraided Fumo for not keeping track of his employees during work hours, and for not quantifying how much time employees spent performing state work, personal favors for Vince, as well as political campaign work.

Fumo characterized Pease's criticism as "this type of microscopic scruitiny," and he added, "I couldn't and wouldn't monitor my employees to that extent."

The cross-examination resumes at 10 a.m. tomorrow. Here's the game plan. The prosecution has seen enough of Sensitive New Age Vince, as revealed in Fumo's surprising direct testimony from earlier this week. Prosecutors need to bait and bang away at Fumo, until they get him to snarl back. They need to bring back the old Vince, the arrogant, screw-you front man for Fumo Inc. That's the Vince the government wants the jury to see.

Prosecutors seethed during the first two days of Vince's direct testimony as their objections to Vince's speeches were frequently overruled by Judge Ronald L. Buckwalter. The government had to watch as Vince played against type, talking openly about how he was painfully shy, heartbroken about his estranged daughter, as well as that girlfriend who dumped him. How he needed medication and years of therapy to overcome his insecurities. In short, Sensitive Vince was a guy that jurors might be able to empathize with.

New Frontier Vince was also allowed to tell the jury, composed of several African-Americans and twenty-somethings, about his political idol, JFK, and how he was "our Barack Obama," because people had said a Catholic would never be elected president.

Worse, as far as prosecutors were concerned, Vince was also able to tell the jury his side of his infamous PECO caper. The government's version was that Fumo basically extorted the hapless utility out of $17 million. The money went to Vince's favorite nonprofit, the Concerned Citizens for Better Neighborhoods, which reciprocated by filling Vince's garage with shiny new power tools.

Vince's version of the story was that he was a modern day Robin Hood who not only got the evil utility to agree to a 10 percent rate rollback, but also a rate freeze that benefited every consumer in the Commonwealth. And Vince topped off that caper by fleecing the utility out of $17 million, which he promptly spent on good causes. He told the jury how he used $5.5 million of PECO's money to buy and rehab two buildings, including a closed Catholic school, to create a charter school run by a former nun that caters largely to minorities, as well as many former Catholic students who would have been out on the street.

Then Vince told the jury how he spent $1.5 million more to buy up eyesores and old abandoned buildings on three blocks of Passyunk Avenue that had fallen on hard times. Thanks to PECO, Vince told the jury he was able to bring about a commercial renaissance on the street.

"I felt terrific," Vince crowed to the jury. "I took on a giant utility and beat them."

So the prosecutor's job is to bang away until they bring back the Vince of Darkness ASAP, as the senator used to say.