Trial details Fumo's rage over reporters

State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo could get plenty annoyed when reporters asked questions he didn't like.

Consider his reaction in 2005 when a Philadelphia Daily News reporter began digging into the links between Fumo and a South Philadelphia nonprofit.

According to an e-mail shown at Fumo's federal corruption trial, he immediately ordered his press secretary to call reporter Erin Einhorn's editor to "ask why this . . . bitch is on our ass." Fumo used an F-bomb before the B-word.

His aide warned that calling the Daily News' editor might only redouble the paper's interest, and the call wasn't placed.

Still, there was nothing very unusual about Fumo's angry response.

Just as the trial has shed light on Fumo's obsessive persona and his backroom politics, so it is revealing much about his contentious dealings with reporters.

While the powerful Democrat loved news coverage that highlighted his effectiveness and smarts, quoting some of it in his official biography, he and his aides raged at reporters who asked uncomfortable questions. For Fumo, media relations could be warfare.

Indeed, in one e-mail dealing with press strategy, Fumo's legislative counsel, Christopher B. Craig, seemed almost to be quoting from Sun Tzu's The Art of War. "When weak, pull back and confuse the enemy, and attack elsewhere," Craig advised.

It was Craig who wept on the witness stand last week when discussing news coverage of Fumo's negotiations with Peco Energy, an effort that led the utility to freeze rates - and secretly donate $17 million to the South Philadelphia nonprofit Fumo backed, Citizens' Alliance for Better Neighborhoods.

"I was proud of the litigation," Craig told jurors through tears. "I was upset that The Inquirer was taking years of my work and crapping all over it."

For much of the last three months, news articles have been displayed to the Fumo jury - often on TV monitors - as prosecutors sought to show the former senator's reaction to the coverage, especially the news that he was under FBI investigation.

But e-mails introduced into evidence show that Fumo was concerned about what reporters were examining long before the investigation.

In 2000, he rejected a suggestion from another aide for changes in Citizens' Alliance after a series of critical articles in the weekly Philadelphia City Paper. Fumo dismissed the idea that the articles raised legitimate questions.

"No," he responded, according to a government trial exhibit. "The articles have been written because we have many enemies who are jealous and love to rat on us to try and get to me."

In an interview last week, Noel Weyrich, who wrote those pieces, said that soon after he had begun his reporting, Fumo's aides had asked him: "Why do you have it in for the senator?"

He said he had replied, "Look, it's nothing personal. I'm just doing my job, asking questions."

In fact, Weyrich said, before becoming a journalist he worked with Fumo's staff as an advocate for bicyclists' rights. He began his work as a fan of the senator's, Weyrich said.

Einhorn, who is now with the New York Daily News, said she was surprised to hear about Fumo's behind-the-scenes talk about killing her story. Nonetheless, she said, she, too, had a job to do, and the story ran in 2005.

"Reporters for a long time were the only ones asking the questions," she said last week.

Randall Miller, who teaches political science at St. Joseph's University, said Fumo sought to win through intimidation.

He said Fumo's concerns suggested the "Nixonian flaw of political paranoia."

Years before the news broke about the secret funding funneled to Citizens' Alliance, the trial has revealed, Fumo was worried that reporters might find out how he had extracted the donation.

"With the newspapers all over our asses I do not think we should give them the slightest bit of information if we don't strictly have to," Fumo wrote in a 1999 e-mail to staffers.

The Inquirer, he wrote, "will go absolutely BALLISTIC" if it determined the source of some of the money.

Fumo's secret was safe for years.

Finally in late 2003, The Inquirer broke the news that Fumo had struck confidential side agreements under which Peco Energy gave $17 million to the charity.

In the public part of the deal, Peco agreed to freeze customers' rates and Fumo agreed to drop legal challenges to its business plans.

As reporters continued to explore Fumo's web of nonprofits, Fumo grew angrier, especially at The Inquirer.

"NO MORE INFORMATION IS TO BE GIVEN OUT TO THESE GUYS!!!" Fumo wrote in another e-mail to staffers in early 2004. "That is an ORDER!!!"

Two weeks later, the newspaper reported that Fumo was under FBI investigation.

According to testimony at the trial, the news jolted the Fumo organization.

"It was like a ship that had taken a torpedo hit," Howard Cain, Fumo's former political consultant, testified early in the trial.

"The day my life changed," testified Craig, summarizing the impact of the news article.

In light of the article, Fumo told a friend, millionaire Stephen Marcus, it was essential that he use the jet the two owned to fly from Florida to attend a meeting in Philadelphia to buck up his campaign workers.

Even though they were seeking to economize on plane expenses, Fumo reminded Marcus that his friend had a saying: "No one that I love is going to fly commercial."

Joking aside, Fumo told Marcus that the news of the FBI probe had been "devastating."

The Inquirer, Fumo wrote, "is not going to let go."

"I didn't even want to go out to dinner last night because I didn't want to run into people who might have read it," he added.

Five days later, Fumo legislative counsel Craig urged a multipronged counterattack - dispatching famed lawyer Richard A. Sprague to meet with The Inquirer's lawyers, demanding the placement of a Fumo statement in the paper "without edit," and reiterating that information should not be given to the newspaper's reporters.

"They are on a mission and we should not be in a position to help," Craig wrote in an e-mail to Fumo and others.

According to the sprawling Fumo indictment, the news of the FBI probe prompted yet another Fumo response: a massive cover-up.

The government alleges that Fumo greatly accelerated a program to delete e-mails and cleanse computers after he read the article.

As the FBI probe continued and as reporters kept digging into Fumo's activities, including his free cruises on a museum yacht, Fumo tried to change his conduct.

In early 2005, according to another e-mail exhibit, he wrote his former wife that he could no longer use aides to drive their daughter - because "the Inquirer and the Feds are all over my ass."

At the same time, his allies kept telling Fumo that it might all blow over.

In November 2005, private eye Frank Wallace, a taxpayer-paid consultant to Fumo, sent him an encouraging e-mail. Wallace told him not to worry about what had been written in the "Stinquire."

"Boss," Wallace wrote, "I keep telling people 'twenty non-crimes don't add up to one crime, no matter how you twist the facts.' "

Wallace testified against Fumo as one of the prosecution's first witnesses.