Ronnie Polaneczky: End looms, at last, to Fumo's living large on Other People's Money

"LET'S USE OPM!"

That's what Vince Fumo used to say while wining and dining one of his old flames. Whether it was around town or down the Shore, using OPM made their evenings that much sweeter.

OPM, as we now know, is Other People's Money.

It paid for 19 Oreck vacuum cleaners at various Fumo homes. It paid for the lavish renovations at his Spring Garden mansion. And it paid for the Senate staffer who oversaw those renovations.

OPM paid Fumo's Senate lackeys to drive his summer-vacation luggage to Martha's Vineyard. And it paid for yachting excursions with friends, business buddies and political cronies.

Yesterday, a dozen of those Other People delivered Vince Fumo his long-overdue bill for using Other People's Money: 137 guilty verdicts.

It took a years-long, wide-ranging investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office to remind Fumo once and for all that we faceless Other People are sick and tired of having our hard-earned money stolen by politicians abusing their power.

We, the Other People, are sick that we paid for laptop computers used by Fumo's girlfriend, his daughter and his butler.

We're sick that we paid to equip Fumo's farm outside Harrisburg - and then paid for a Senate staffer to run it.

We're sick that we paid for a private investigator to spy on Fumo's ex-galpal, and for political consultants who helped Fumo keep his Senate seat.

No task was too menial for we, the Other People. We actually paid to send printer paper overnight via FedEx to Florida, because the vacationing Fumo was too lazy to go pick up a ream at the local Staples.

Then, when a flag - a flag! - got tangled at Fumo's shore house in Margate, we, the Other People, paid to drive a cherry-picker all the way down there to set the flag free.

Prosecutors say that Fumo made off with $3.5 million of Other People's Money, but really, we'll never know how much he truly lightened our wallets and purses: Once he caught wind that the feds were on to him, he had thousands of his e-mails deleted from numerous computers.

That was hard work. Wiping all those hard drives and memory cards had to be done thoroughly, sometimes to Defense Department standards.

And guess who did it? Senate staffers paid by - well, you get the point by now.

What I still don't get, what I'll never get, is why Fumo did it.

Most people who get caught tapping the public till are strivers trying to live a little larger than the public payroll allows.

I'm thinking of Councilman Rick Mariano, who did favors for a businessman in exchange for having some of his bills paid. And Corey Kemp, the disgraced city treasurer, who divvied up city contracts according to who built him a backyard deck or bought him Super Bowl tickets.

Vince Fumo, on the other hand, could afford to pay for every single thing he bought with Other People's Money.

He was a lawyer, ringing up $1 million a year in fees from Dilworth Paxon.

He was the well-paid chairman of his own bank, which he sold in 2007, earning himself $19 million in the deal.

He had other business interests and friends so wealthy, one of them bought him a $500,000 boat and gave him a million bucks in cash.

So why steal from us, all those Other People?

In the coming days and weeks, Fumo's lawyers will seek to paint their client as a man who did so much good for Philly that his acts of public-spiritedness ought to be taken into account at sentencing.

I'm not buying it.

If anything, all those well-publicized deeds illustrate how badly Fumo betrayed us. He used them as a smoke screen to conceal how he was really operating and whom he really served.

Himself.

He ran the racket for years. Finally, yesterday, he couldn't outrun its consequences.

We, the Other People, have finally spoken. *

 
E-mail polaner@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2217. For recent columns:

http://go.philly.com/polaneczky. Read Ronnie's blog at http://go.philly.com/ronnieblog.