"You got the wrong guy," State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo said, scuffing the floor with his toe. He looked like an awkward, lonely kid on the playground.

"I should quit while I'm ahead," he said. "I'm basically a shy guy."

Yet the man who blushed at District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham's praise during his 2004 reelection campaign gives bobblehead dolls of himself to women he dates. He is also famous for launching red-faced, neck-vein-popping curses at people who get in his way.

That's just one of the contradictions of Fumo, the rowhouse Machiavelli who was indicted last week on federal charges that he used Senate employees and cash from a charity he helped found for his personal and political gain.

The trial will put an X-ray on the multiple facets of Fumo's personality, with prosecutors conjuring a greedy tyrant and the defense highlighting his many civic accomplishments. The Republican-controlled Justice Department wants Fumo's scalp, his lawyers argue, because he's an effective Democrat.

Everybody agrees on one thing: At 63, Fumo has amassed unparalleled political power in Pennsylvania because he's brilliant, creative, secretive and ruthless.

He works the system like an octopus playing a pipe organ. He's everywhere, pushing every key, pulling out all the stops - even ones that lesser politicos couldn't find with a GPS device.

Fumo has an interlocking network of allies, proteges and patronage employees stashed throughout government and in business. He lends his fund-raising machine and stable of political consultants to chosen candidates so he can draw on a bulging account in the favor bank.

"Vince's philosophy is he wants to own you," a person who has known him since childhood said on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

When you cross him, Fumo can be vicious, mowing you down. Late last year, he muscled former City Controller Jonathan Saidel out of the mayor's race by persuading powerful Democrats not to donate to his effort. Fumo favored U.S. Rep. Bob Brady.

And Fumo has a long memory: A consultant who tangled with him in a political dispute more than a decade ago said he still couldn't get government work in the Philadelphia area.

Fumo can be so combative that, even as he faces trial, many powerful people in Pennsylvania are unwilling to talk on the record about him. A wounded Vince Fumo, they believe, can still bite you.

Fumo's clout extends to the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission; City Council; SEPTA; the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority; the Delaware River Port Authority, which operates the PATCO trains and regional bridges; and all levels of the state judiciary. (He resigned from the port authority board last week after the grand jury charges but still has friends there.)

Fumo is also entwined in the nonprofit, arts and corporate worlds with directorships, and he is a dominant power on the Board of City Trusts, the ultra-secretive group of insiders that controls a portfolio of city stocks and real estate worth about $400 million.

For all his power, Fumo does not appear to have an overarching political ideology. He calls himself a pragmatist, adept at seizing fresh opportunities to do the right thing for people as he sees it.

"Vince Fumo plays politics in three dimensions while everyone else plays in two," said Ted Hershberg, a professor of public policy at the University of Pennsylvania who runs the Center for Greater Philadelphia. "He's several moves ahead."

In recent years, Fumo branched out to build a network of at least five nonprofit charities to which he has steered more than $40 million, some of it taxpayer money. He took legal action against Peco Energy, the electric utility, over its deregulation plan and then, as part of the settlement, leveraged $17 million for Citizens' Alliance for Better Neighborhoods, which he helped found and which has supported dozens of improvement projects in his South Philadelphia district.

Allies call that creative constituent service; after all, Fumo's action won Peco customers significant rate reductions.

Critics say the little-noticed charities amount to incumbency insurance for him and form an unaccountable proto-government: Fumo World.