Street 'wouldn't recognize' big donor

LOUIS DeNAPLES and John Street couldn't pick each other out of a lineup.

DeNaples in 2006 told investigators from the state Gaming Control Board: "To me, black people all look alike."

Street told the Daily News yesterday that DeNaples had given him campaign contributions, but "I wouldn't recognize him or anything like that."

But a federal probe into corruption in Street's City Hall administration linked the two men and helped lead to DeNaples' being charged yesterday with perjury.

Street, while running for mayor in 1999, traveled upstate with his close friend and fundraiser, Ron White, to meet with DeNaples.

DeNaples, who donated $50,000 to Street's campaign for a second term in 2003, told the Gaming Control Board in a sworn statement that he had never done business with White.

Street, in an interview last year with the Dauphin County District Attorney's Office, said he remembered White coming along for the trip. And local labor leader Sam Staten Sr., another political ally of the former mayor's, last year told a Dauphin County grand jury that at a meeting with DeNaples, he complained about Street and White.

"DeNaples ranted about how he had given $50,000 to Ron White and could not get a return telephone call from White or Mayor Street," the grand jury report said.

White was indicted on corruption charges but died before trial. The White investigation grew from yet another probe of a Street political ally, Shamsud-din Ali, who is serving an 84-month federal sentence for fraud and racketeering.

Federal investigators had tapped Ali's phone and listened in on a July 2002 conference call he had with DeNaples. They discussed shipping debris from homes being torn down in Philadelphia - an apparent reference to Street's signature Neighborhood Transformation Initiative - to landfills DeNaples owns.

DeNaples lamented that Street's staff had not contacted him about the debris. "In fact, we never got one ounce of material or business from that city of Philadelphia at all," he said.

FBI agents later alerted DeNaples that he had been recorded on the phone with Ali.

DeNaples told the Gaming Control Board in 2006 that he might have met with Ali "and another black person" who wanted to talk about taking sludge from waste- treatment plants but that his landfills didn't accept sludge.

Ali testified to the grand jury that he had met DeNaples three or four times and that "he was receptive to their proposal to receive waste from Philadelphia." *

Daily News staff writer Dave Davies contributed to this report.