Categories: Courtroom Buzz
      Date: January 20, 2009
     Title: Dog Days at the Fumo Trial

The Daily Dispatch

By Ralph Cipriano

The prosecutor eyed the FBI agent on the witness stand. "Are you out of exhibits?" he asked.

Yes, the agent said. So Prosecutor John Pease strolled over and handed another fat stack of manila folders to FBI Special Agent Vicki Humphreys.

"Oh, God," exclaimed a weary spectator in the back row of the courtroom, as the prosecutor began asking a new set of questions designed to admit a new stack of documents as government exhibits in the case of the United States of America v. Vincent J. Fumo.

The government's case, now in its fourteenth week of testimony, has hit the dog days, as the prosecution uses its last witnesses to fill in the remaining blank spots in the 139-count indictment against Fumo. 

The few remaining courtroom spectators are anxious for the government's case to end, in anticipation of watching Fumo take the stand in his own defense. Meanwhile, a sympathetic Judge Ronald L. Buckwalter gave jurors a gift today, a two hour lunch break so they could watch Barack Obama be sworn in as president.

Fumo is charged in the 139-count federal indictment with using state contractors and employees as servants, allowing the former state senator to lead a lavish lifestyle and defraud the state Senate and two nonprofits out of goods and services worth $3.5 million. Fumo, who served three decades in Harrisburg, has pleaded not guilty to charges of fraud, obstruction of justice and filing false tax returns.

As the government reaches the bottom of its barrel, the case has a myopic feel. Fumo was never charged with any crimes for the most serious offenses that Agent Humphreys was originally dispatched to investigate, namely Fumo’s alleged extortion of white-collar executives at PECO and Verizon.

Fumo, who, as a legislative titan in Harrisburg, had the authority to regulate utilities, demanded and got $17 million from PECO for his favorite charity, the nonprofit Citizens Alliance for Better Governments. Fumo then demanded more than $50 million from Verizon, but phone company officials declined to pay up.

Humphreys told the prosecutor last week that the extortion case against Fumo was hampered by a lack of emails regarding the Peco and Verizon affairs. Humphreys told the prosecutor how she searched through more than 80,000 Fumo office emails looking for anything that mentioned PECO and Verizon. "There was nothing," she told the prosecutor last Thursday.

Why were the emails missing? Vince's guys were working overtime, deleting office emails off blackberrys, laptops and office computers. Humphreys testified that when she and FBI agents arrived to serve a subpoena on Fumo’s district office on Tasker Street in 2005, they found that a Fumo aide, Leonard P. Luchko, was running a sophisticated "wipe" program on his computer.

So Humphreys and Prosecutor Pease spent today reading documents into the record such as a 2005 letter from the Dilworth Paxson law firm that notified Fumo that he was getting a $30,000 raise on top of his annual salary of $875,000 as a rainmaker. Fumo, ever the detail guy, wrote back officials at the law firm, complaining that they had screwed up the math on his raise. Fumo claimed he was owed $1,000, and wanted officials at the law firm to correct the mistake by cutting him a check "ASAP." The senator got his wish; the check was promptly cut.

Another document that Humphreys was asked about involved 2005 emails sent between Fumo and his ex-wife. The exchange showed how far the mighty had fallen. In one email, Fumo had to explain to his ex-wife that he could not accommodate a request from their daughter, namely to have a Fumo staffer chauffeur the daughter to school in the morning.

In the old days, this would have been no problem, but now the heat was on the senator. "Since the Inquirer and the Feds are all over my ass," he wrote his ex-wife, he had to keep requests like this for staff help to "an absolute minimum."