Brennan: Did Farnese's legal woes grow from Singer's downfall?

The Democrats who run Center City's Eighth Ward have been pondering one question for four weeks: Who set in motion the federal probe that resulted in State Sen. Larry Farnese's indictment?

Who dropped that dime?

Many think it must have been former City Commissioner Stephanie Singer, who led the ward before Farnese took over in 2011 and clashed with him over that last year.

Singer won't say.

But the timeline tells an interesting story.

Singer ran as a reformer for the three-member board that oversees city elections, defeating the formidable nine-term chairwoman Marge Tartaglione in the 2011 primary.

Her colleagues selected her as the new chairwoman but then deposed her 10 months later, relegating her to the sidelines, where she railed on issues but was frequently ignored.

Then things got worse.

Running for a second term last year, she fell four signatures short of the 1,000 needed on nomination petitions to qualify for a spot on the primary election ballot.

The spectacle of a city official who oversees elections tripping up on the most basic of political tasks provided chuckles for many of the people with whom Singer had clashed over the years.

That's a long list.

Then in April 2015 - just weeks after she was removed from the ballot - Singer sought to fill a vacant committee post in the Eighth Ward's Sixth Division. Here was a former ward leader volunteering as a party foot soldier.

Each division in a ward has two committee posts. The other committee person in the Sixth Division had nominated Singer.

Singer last week said it was "standard procedure under the rules of the Democratic Party, traditionally honored by the Eight Ward leader," to allow a committee person in a division to nominate someone for a vacancy.

That's not what Farnese did. Instead, sources inside the Eighth Ward say, Farnese, before a ward meeting in April 2015, told Singer that the vacant post would be dealt with after the primary election.

Singer showed up at the ward meeting anyway. She argued with Farnese and briefly refused to leave. She finally relented but stewed outside the conference room where the meeting was held - all the while visible through the glass doors.

The Eighth Ward met again in September, where Singer was rejected as a committee member in a 15-7 vote with two abstentions. She did not attend that meeting.

And then Farnese's federal trouble started.

Singer, who now lives in Portland, Ore., wrote in an email last week that she "spoke with the FBI at their request" about the 2011 election for Eighth Ward leader that is at the root of the case against Farnese - and against her former friend Ellen Chapman.

But she refused to answer when asked whether she had initiated the contact with the federal investigators.

A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment when asked about Singer's role in the probe.

Chapman served as treasurer for Singer's 2011 campaign. She was then Singer's first deputy city commissioner in 2012, but was ousted from that job in less than 10 months.

Farnese is accused of using $6,000 from his political action committee to help pay a college study abroad program for Chapman's daughter. He did this, the feds say, to win Chapman's support in the 2011 ward election.

The indictment has rattled some members of the Democratic City Committee, raising the question of whether the feds have just rewritten the rule book for ward politics.

If Singer was the source of all that, I suspect it tickles her to know the result is reverberating through the party structure she fought against. If that's true, she's not telling.

brennac@phillynews.com215-854-5973@ByChrisBrennan