Karen Heller: Reorientating Fumo to life on the outside

Welcome home, former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo. Or halfway home.

On Tuesday, after four years in a Kentucky prison, you are scheduled to be transferred to the Kintock Erie Avenue facility in North Philadelphia, six miles but a world away from your 33-room, Oreck-filled Green Street mansion with the heated sidewalks.

At Kintock, you will bunk in a dorm with 40 fellow federal residents. Most likely, you are the only resident who owns four homes. The rules are many. Cellphones and Internet are prohibited - a challenge, since your technological prowess once earned you the nickname "Senator R2D2," and you won fame for your emphatic electronic correspondence and exclamations!!! You are prohibited from having more than $50 in cash and from consuming alcohol (even mouthwash) or poppy seeds. You are to leave only to meet your many lawyers, physicians, attend religious services, and work.

Congratulations on securing a $10-an-hour position with your principal attorney, Dennis Cogan. That's $2.75 more than minimum wage, though you must contribute a quarter of earnings to the halfway house.

Consider it Kintock's version of your OPM policy - Other People's Money.

While you have a Temple law degree, a Wharton M.B.A., and belong to Mensa (the society for high IQs and questionable self-esteem), you are barred from offering legal advice. You surrendered your law license upon your 2009 conviction on 137 counts of defrauding taxpayers and two nonprofits of $4 million. Cogan said you "will answer the phones, take basic interviews, do research." Also, as Cogan pointed out, you have become "quite the expert in honest services fraud."

Once driven by a livery of state employees, will you now be riding SEPTA?

Much has changed in your city since you left and, then again, not.

Municipal service workers remain without a contract, a situation that you might have fixed in days but that Mayor Nutter appears intent on bequeathing to his eventual successor. Despite a change in leadership, the public schools remain in a state of chaos. The Sixers still stink.

The enemies you left behind remain your enemies, becoming more numerous than your Oreck vacuums.

Once at war with only one child, you legally battled the two others who had dutifully attended your trial. The matter involved money. Also power. As you wrote in a 2010 letter to your second ex-wife: "My goal is to become as judgment proof as possible. I want to 'own nothing but control everything.' . . . I never want to be this vulnerable to the Government or any creditors again in my life!"

Last week, you lost in court, one of many in a Papelbonian streak of losses.

What has changed in Philadelphia? Bikes abound. Hipsters are everywhere, even in your ancestral baronial duchy of South Philadelphia. Now, the Phillies stink, too.

Philadelphia has no power in Harrisburg, where you once ruled as the sultan of Appropriations and where lesser legislators - and who wasn't? - had to grovel in your presence. Citizens Alliance for Better Neighborhoods Inc. your pet project and piggy bank, has a new life as the Passyunk Avenue Revitalization Corp. Your legislative office, home of your famed bunker and command center, has been sold.

Eventually, perhaps in a few days, you will be allowed to complete the remainder of your sentence's final six months in the luxury of your Fairmount villa, complete with a shooting range, though your more than 200 firearms were also surrendered to authorities. However, you are permitted to have multiple guests in your home; your movements will remain limited though your legal battles remain many.

The IRS is seeking $2.9 million in taxes. The feds are seeking an additional $800,000 in restitution, on top of the $3.5 million already paid. Your home, once assessed for $250,000 (though you tried to sell it for $7 million), is now valued at $2.6 million.

We understand you have become interested in cooking and healthy food. You may wish to grow fruits and vegetables at your Dauphin County farm, the one with the tractor, bulldozer, and other equipment that you once billed to Pennsylvania taxpayers.

Perhaps, after your six months completing your service and you are free to roam, you will become former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo, gentleman farmer. But we're not betting on it.

Contact Karen Heller at 215-854-2586 or kheller@phillynews.com, or follow at @kheller on Twitter. Read the metro columnists' blog, "Blinq," at www.inquirer.com/blinq.