Leaflets spark anger in S. Philly

A day before the polls opened, the street war in South Philadelphia had already begun.

Leaflets supporting state Rep. Bill Keller and state Senate candidate John Dougherty were distributed yesterday afternoon in various divisions of Ward 39-A with misleading information.

The fliers directed voters to the wrong addresses for polling places, gave the wrong names for Democratic committee people and misled voters about which candidates the committee people were supporting, according to ward leader Rosanne Pauciello.

"It's a mass effort to confuse people," said Pauciello, who is supporting Larry Farnese in the Senate race. "I've got the most senior group of voters in the city and I'm really concerned about it."

City Councilman Frank DiCicco, whose son Christian is running against Keller, stopped two teenagers who were distributing the leaflets and confiscated the material, according to Dave Mellet, a spokesman for the DiCicco campaign.

Mellet said that the two teenagers identified themselves as nephews of Shawn Doyle, a Keller volunteer. Doyle later visited DiCicco's office and asked for the literature to be given back, but left without it "when we explained to him that the wrong polling places were on the fliers," Mellet said.

Doyle declined comment to the Daily News, referring a reporter to another individual with the Keller campaign, Carmen D'Amato, who did not return a call from the Daily News.

"Anything we put out came from the Committee of Seventy or some official source like that," Keller said last night. "If it's a bad address, it came from someone else. . . . This is nothing, and I don't want anything made of it."

"We had nothing to do with that," said Dougherty's campaign manager, Brian Hickey. "We know nothing about it, other than what you told us." *