Fumo case has not changed much in the Senate - yet

INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS

For months, federal prosecutors have argued that former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo gamed the Harrisburg bureaucracy from top to bottom.

They say he turned his legislative staff into servants and political operatives - having them handle duties such as feeding his goats and cleaning his house - and lied about it to the Senate.

Fumo testified that he had gotten $1.5 million from a friend, money he did not disclose on his ethics forms because no state law said he had to.

So, in the two years since Fumo's indictment, what have Senate leaders done to tighten the rules and close the loopholes?

Not much - yet.

They have tinkered. They have beefed up oversight of outside contracts. They have hired a management consultant. And they are weighing a long list of recommendations.

"Over the years, practices were developed and customs were developed where there were no clearly articulated lines," Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R., Delaware) said in an interview. "And there has been an ongoing effort to try and establish those lines so everyone knows where they are."

To critics, the allegations alone were a road map for change, and the Senate's response has not been good enough.

"The indictment of Fumo was an indictment of the Senate as a whole," Tim Potts, cofounder of Democracy Rising Pa., a Harrisburg-area public-interest group, said Friday. "The Fumo case created a foundation for the Senate to build a better government. Each count against him was part of a new building, and so far they don't even have a basement."

The jury in Fumo's case began deliberations Thursday over 137 counts. Fumo, 65, is charged with defrauding the Senate and a nonprofit organization out of $3.5 million.

Tomorrow, the jurors will resume picking over 1,550 exhibits and testimony from 107 witnesses in a process that most say will take all week, if not longer.

Fumo has argued that he did not run afoul of any Senate rules because, in effect, there were no rules to break.

When asked, for instance, about using staff for personal tasks, he testified: "This is something that is not written. There are no guidelines."

Top officials in the House and Senate insist that recent high-profile cases of corruption - some proven, others alleged - have changed the culture in Harrisburg by putting lawmakers on notice.

In 2005, Rep. Jeff Habay, a Pittsburgh-area Republican, was convicted on conflict-of-interest charges for using his legislative staff to do campaign work. In the Capitol's ongoing Bonusgate scandal, a dozen House Democratic insiders were charged in July with carrying out a scheme to give huge government bonuses to aides who worked on campaigns.

But one senator insists more must be done.

Hoping to restore public confidence in the legislature sullied by the Fumo allegations, Sen. Jeffrey E. Piccola introduced a bill in the fall to create an independent inspector general to ferret out corruption.

The bill died last term, but Piccola (R., Dauphin) reintroduced it Thursday.

"There is nothing in place," he said, to prevent "another Fumo from coming along. In large measure, the lack of rules that existed allowed him to be left alone to do what he did."

To ensure the loyalty and labor of his staff, federal prosecutors allege, Fumo manipulated the state's new pay system, a process designed to make sure aides throughout the Senate get paid the same for similar work.

When he took the stand, a onetime top Fumo aide, Paul Dlugolecki, testified that Fumo had manipulated the entire process. Fumo would decide what he wanted to pay an aide, and Dlugolecki would try to pick a job description for that person.

For example, one person who Fumo had said "performed the most complex administrative duties" told jurors that his job had been to drive the senator - and stock the fridge with sodas.

Asked about this issue during the trial, Russell Faber, the Senate's chief clerk, admitted that he simply filed the job and pay forms but never looked into their accuracy.

In an interview last week, Faber said that to a large extent he relied on an "honor system" for legislators to report employees' job descriptions accurately.

In May 2007, three months after Fumo was indicted, Senate leaders hired Ernst & Young L.L.P. to look into the chamber's policies. After a six-month study, the consultants made recommendations, including requiring that legislative lawyers review all outside contracts and that vendors supply detailed invoices before getting paid.

Fumo is accused of using state money to hire a stable of government consultants who instead did campaign and personal work for him.

The Senate has adopted the new contracting policy, but it is reviewing other recommendations, such as creating a fraud hotline to field calls from whistleblowers and instituting internal auditing functions that could flag when a senator wrongly classifies someone's job duties.

The FBI's original focus in the Fumo case was the millions he raised from Peco Energy for the nonprofit Citizens' Alliance for Better Neighborhoods in South Philadelphia. With Fumo among a growing group of lawmakers with ties to charities, leaders in the state House adopted a rule more than two years ago to bar representatives from creating nonprofit groups that take in state funding.

The Senate has taken no similar step. Fumo has steered hundreds of thousand of dollars in state grants to Citizens' Alliance.

In an almost casual aside from the stand, Fumo unexpectedly cast light on another big Harrisburg loophole - gifts.

For three decades, lawmakers have had to disclose each year what gifts they have received and who provided them, but not if the gift was given by a "friend" other than one who is also a registered lobbyist.

Fumo had received a $500,000 boat and $1 million in cash from Stephen Marcus, a retired direct-mail mogul. Fumo had called Marcus, who died in 2005, "a surrogate father" and never disclosed the gifts on his annual ethics forms.

While Marcus is not known to have pursued any legislative agenda in Harrisburg, source say that at one time he explored seeking a stake in a casino. Nothing ever came of that.

Barry Kauffman, executive director of Common Cause of Pennsylvania, which advocates government reform, said the Marcus example might "be that silver bullet that shows the need to tighten up the disclosure or to even ban gifts."

"I am sure public officials want to think that these people want to be their friends because they are nice guys, but it could be to gain access to power in order to produce financial rewards," Kauffman said.