Dave Davies: Trial lessons: Pros & cons of the Fumo mold

TODAY, Gov. Rendell takes the stand in the corruption trial of former state Sen. Vince Fumo, the latest episode in a fascinating miniseries on power politics in Philadelphia.

After listening to many hours of testimony, a question keeps throwing itself at me. Not the one the jury has to decide, which is whether Fumo committed crimes.

It's a tougher one: What kind of people do we want in elected office?

I realized at some point last year that, even knowing all the troubling charges against Fumo, I'd probably rather have him in Harrisburg than any of the three candidates running to succeed him.

Not that I'd vote for him, because to re-elect someone accused of those abuses would amount to saying we don't care about such conduct, that we'll tolerate it. And we shouldn't.

But the truth is that this very flawed and complex man had a talent for government. He's smart, and he hired smart people, paid them well and worked them hard.

He knew how to manage budgets, make deals, exert pressure and get bureaucracies to work at a pace they aren't accustomed to. He could think creatively about problems, and wasn't afraid to move aggressively for solutions.

He had, former state House Speaker Bob O'Donnell once told me, "a healthy disregard for the world as he found it."

Fumo did much for the public good, though he was always playing a sophisticated game that left you wondering which of his friends would benefit and which enemies would be punished before the good was accomplished.

Steve Hershey, now a vice president of the Philadelphia Gas Works, was a Community Legal Services lawyer in the '90s when he and other consumer advocates took on Peco Energy in a massive rate and regulatory battle.

He remembers being shocked to discover one day that Fumo had decided join him in taking on the giant utility. Fumo threw his political weight into the fight, hiring top technical experts and committing to the fray his talented staff attorney, Christopher Craig, a man who felt such passion about the case that he twice wept while talking about it at Fumo's trial.

Hershey will tell you Fumo's intervention yielded enormous benefits for consumers.

On the other hand, it was in that Peco battle that Fumo extracted $17 million from the utility for Citizens Alliance, the neighborhood nonprofit he controlled.

And there's really no dispute that Fumo then used Citizens Alliance credit cards to buy himself tens of thousands of dollars worth of stuff, items from mahogany doors to a meat saw.

But even a prosecution witness like Fumo's estranged son-in-law Christian Marrone acknowledged that Citizens' Alliance spent millions on worthwhile projects, like revitalizing an aging commercial strip, and renovating a building to house start-up technology firms.

And when police commanders needed things like computers and patrol bikes, they called Fumo, because he could do with a single phone call to Citizens Alliance what would take the city bureaucracy months.

"We get s--- done," was the Fumo staff motto.

The trouble was that while Fumo was doing the people's business, you were never quite sure what other agendas he had. In 1993, years before the Peco case, consumer lawyer Hershey made some trouble for a city commission headed by a friend of Fumo's. Soon after, state funding for Hershey's agency - Community Legal Services - was eliminated for a year.

Hershey didn't know what to make of it. A Fumo aide said at the time that Fumo had argued to keep CLS funding. Another press report said he was against it. Somehow with Vince, you were never sure.

The truly puzzling part of the Fumo story is why, if prosecutors are right, he was so anxious to use his office to enrich himself.

He had family money, and a salary from a law firm listed in a trial exhibit at $925,000 a year. That's in addition to income from corporate boards as well as his Senate salary and expense account. Why would he need more?

One longtime associate told me Fumo had the notion that how much money you had was a measure of how smart you were.

"He couldn't understand anybody smart not wanting to be rich," the Fumocrat said, "and when he got to know [power lawyer] Dick Sprague and saw he had this mansion, with a butler and chef, he wanted that, too."

It's just one theory, and no doubt psychologists could have a field day with Vince.

All I know is that if Fumo squandered his gifts and sacrificed his career because he felt he needed to live, or look like, a king, that's a tragedy.

I've gradually come to accept the fact that many who succeed at high levels in politics are abnormal in some way. For a citizen, casting a wise vote sometimes amounts to deciding which abnormalities you can live with.

I watch Fumo in court, and I still wonder. *

E-mail daviesd@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2595.