On a quest against injustice, McCaffery says

Fourth of six profiles of candidates for Philadelphia district attorney.

An animated movie character once famously said, "I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way." That about sums up Dan McCaffery's take on his sullied public image.

In the primary race for Philadelphia district attorney, he is not the only candidate to be roughed up by controversy. But arguably, his bruises are more apparent and his dudgeon higher than those of his four Democratic opponents.

"When I hear people asking questions about 'McCaffery's questionable ethics' - hey, I asked guys who were, like, legal ethicists, 'Did I do anything wrong here?' " he recounted recently. "And they all said, 'No, you got a hatchet job' " in the media.

The subject of his displeasure that day was the media's interest in a 2004 real estate deal in which he turned a quick $90,000 profit by buying a dilapidated house - apparently without a required appraisal - from an estate administered by his law firm and fixing it up for resale. Questions about the transaction's propriety, McCaffery said, left him feeling unjustly gored.

And that was before Tuesday, when the Philadelphia Board of Ethics accused him of violating the city's campaign-finance law. The chief allegation was "deliberate misreporting" of a $10,500 check that would have put him over the legal limit for contributions from political action committees in 2008. The board levied a $6,000 fine and said it would go to court to get the money from McCaffery, who contends the reporting was not illegal under federal election law.

At the same time it cited McCaffery, the board announced it was "pleased" to have reached a $3,750 settlement with district attorney candidate R. Seth Williams over "misreported expenditures" in his campaign financial records.

McCaffery was the first to bring those expenditures to light, in a lawsuit he filed two months ago challenging Williams' eligibility to be on the ballot. McCaffery won the fight in Common Pleas Court, then lost in Commonwealth Court.

"Why is Seth Williams being complimented for doing the right thing when we needed to drag him to court to do the right thing?" McCaffery campaign manager Josh Morrow asked, expressing his camp's exasperation yesterday.

Dan Fee, campaign manager for the front-running Williams, characterized McCaffery's complaint - plus a new TV ad attacking Williams - as desperation. "You don't shoot at people who are behind you," Fee said.

Still, on his first run for elected office, McCaffery, 44, is a formidable challenger. He is backed by the city's politically powerful building-trades unions. He has a war chest of $500,000. He lent himself $200,000 this week for TV ads in the final days before the vote on Tuesday. And he has name recognition: His oldest brother, Seamus, is a Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice.

Supporters say McCaffery, a rugby player and former competitive boxer, has the grit to take a hit. But he says attacks on his integrity are low blows.

"It feels demeaning," he said yesterday. "I'm a guy who made a reputation by being an ethical guy. . . . To hear this stuff? It's just absurd."

Whether campaigning at a Russian immigrant center in the leafy Northeast or a mosque on a blasted-out corner in Southwest Philadelphia, McCaffery is never far from his tough, tortured Irish heritage.

"I'm the son of Irish immigrants," he said, pushing back from a plate of fried chicken and macaroni salad at the North 22d Street headquarters of the Philadelphia Council of Clergy, a group of 500 black pastors who have endorsed him.

"My father was a printer. My mother was a cleaning lady," he said. "We know the value of hard work. More importantly, we grew up in the streets. . . . I know the difference between a good guy who had a bad day and a bad guy who needs to be put away."

The story of his ancestry centers on Seamus McCaffery Sr., his father. A Catholic boxing champ in Belfast, he was beaten into a coma with a mallet by a group of Protestants.

Awakening a month later, he and his wife, Rita, began planning to move the family out of Ireland, first to Canada and ultimately to Philadelphia. Dan was the youngest of their seven children, and the only one born in the United States.

"My father realized there was no possibility in Ireland for him to give his children the opportunities he wanted to give them," McCaffery tells audiences. "He left his homeland, much like you left your homeland, for reasons of your own."

And what does any of this have to do with the kind of district attorney he would be?

"I stress my family background because it's what I'm all about," he said. "My father and mother came here to escape crime, violence and injustice."

Those topics, he said, are at the core of a district attorney's mission.

A graduate of Father Judge High School, McCaffery served three years in the Army with the First Armored Cavalry Division and still wears the unit's pin in his lapel. He attended Temple University and its law school.

As a youngster, he had dreamed of being a police officer, like several family members. But he channeled his interest into a position as an assistant prosecutor. "The job," he said, "fit me like a glove."

George Shotzbarger, a former assistant district attorney, supervised McCaffery during part of his tenure.

"He was one of the better, if not the best, young assistants I had working for me," Shotzbarger said. "He was hard as nails, tough as could be, fair as the day is long. . . . When Dan handled a file, it was a better case when it left his desk than when it fell onto his desk."

McCaffery was an assistant district attorney from 1991 through 1996. Like all rookies, he started in Municipal Court. He moved to Juvenile Court and then to the Habitual Offender's Unit, ending in Major Crimes.

He convicted "more than 1,000 violent criminals," he said.

But it was "juvie" that left the strongest impression on McCaffery, the divorcing father of two daughters, ages 18 and 11. His experience in that unit inspired him to announce his candidacy on the steps of Family Court on Vine Street in February.

"In the juvenile system you can be very proactive," he said in an interview. "The kids who get swept into the system, it's eerie how similar they are . . . single-parent backgrounds, that kind of thing. They get passed through the system, and there is this kind of chronic creeping relativism: 'Well, he's only missing school . . . he's only broken into a car.' The kid doesn't hear, 'Hey, you committed a crime.' For him, it's 'Well, he only . . .' "

McCaffery stresses early intervention - even though his campaign's initial polls found the electorate much more concerned about illegal handguns and a "tough-on-crime" district attorney.

"If there's a 14-year-old kid who is dealing crack because his mom is a crack addict, I can lock him up for a year. But if he comes back and his mom is still addicted to crack, he's going right back to the corner," he told the North Philadelphia ministers as several nodded their assent. "We have to develop a holistic approach. To keep that kid in the community. To get that kid services. To get his mother off of crack."

McCaffery left the District Attorney's Office in 1996 to make more money in private practice.

After more than a decade as a civil litigator with the Elkins Park firm of Friedman, Schuman, Applebaum, Nemeroff & McCaffery, he decided to enter the race when Lynne M. Abraham announced she wouldn't run again. He said he had consulted several of his friends still on her staff.

"I had a long sit-down," he said. If any of them had expressed a desire to be district attorney, "I would have said I will do whatever it is I have to do to introduce you to the ward leaders. But they realized they couldn't raise the money. They didn't have the name recognition."

The District Attorney's Office, he said, must do a better job charging defendants based on the central facts of their arrests, and not heap on charges.

"You have to understand that your job is not just to get a conviction," he said. "Your job is to do justice, to get the right result for the right person."

Party: Democratic. Age: 44. Residence: East Torresdale.

Priorities for district attorney

As "gatekeeper" of the criminal-justice system, the district attorney should halt prosecutions if credible witnesses say the wrong person was arrested instead of automatically passing cases to the judiciary to sort out.

Reactivate the disbanded narcotics prosecution unit to target drug dealers more effectively.

Create a Web site to track activity in the city's courtrooms. Some judges, he says, have been "lazy, incompetent, and uncaring."

Rather than clog criminal courts, divert cases involving nonviolent, drug- and alcohol-addicted defendants to community treatment programs.

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The Race for D.A.: A Six-Part Series

Friday: Brian Grady

Saturday: Dan McElhatton

Tuesday: Seth Williams

TODAY: Dan McCaffery

Tomorrow: Michael Turner

Monday: Michael Untermeyer