Meehan quits. Will he run for guv next?

U.S. ATTORNEY Patrick Meehan, whose tenure was marked by high-profile public-corruption prosecutions, announced yesterday that he will be resigning next Tuesday.

Political observers now expect Meehan to run for governor in 2010.

Meehan gained national recognition for his prosecution of corrupt public officials in Philadelphia and its suburbs.

He won almost two dozen convictions stemming from a federal probe of City Hall that became public when an FBI bug was discovered in October 2003 in then-Mayor John Street's office.

Street was never charged, but several confidants, two bankers and the city treasurer were sent off to prison.

Former City Councilman Rick Mariano and former Norristown Mayor Ted LeBlanc were convicted in other cases.

Meehan's office is prosecuting the most powerful state lawmaker from Philadelphia, state Sen. Vince Fumo, whose trial is set for September.

The high-profile convictions have long prompted speculation about Meehan's political future, but he refused to speculate yesterday about a run for governor.

"I do not know what the future will hold," Meehan said. "Right now, it is time for me to decompress from this office."

Later, in response to a second question about running for governor, Meehan said that once he is settled into private law practice he will be "better positioned" to decide on his future.

One Democratic analyst said that he expects Meehan, 52, a Republican from Delaware County and former district attorney there, to run for governor, and that he will be a formidable candidate.

"He's not the person I'd want to be running against," said Larry Ceisler.

"He's a good candidate, he understands the political process, he has the resume and he's not going to come across as a right-wing ideologue," Ceisler said.

Meehan headed U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter's re-election campaign in 1992 and former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum's 1994 upset Senate victory.

Specter said in a statement yesterday that Meehan had established himself as "one of the best" in a long line of distinguished U.S. attorneys here.

Another political analyst, G. Terry Madonna, of Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster, said that Meehan's Delaware County roots also make him a formidable candidate.

"If you want to win the governorship and you're a Republican, you have to stop the hemorrhaging of votes in the southeast," Madonna said. "You have to win the Philly 'burbs to be successful."

Ceisler speculated that one of the reasons that Meehan is resigning now and not at the end of the year - just as Fumo's corruption trial is expected to be winding down - is the sensitivity of his political antennae.

"He's leaving now because he didn't want to come off the Fumo trial and then announce for governor," Ceisler said. "He can take the high road and leave now and make a clean break."

Meehan was sworn in as U.S. attorney for the eastern district of Pennsylvania six days after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and he is the second-longest-serving top federal prosecutor in the region.

Former colleagues said that one of Meehan's strengths was in not politicizing the U.S. Attorney's Office.

"His marching orders to the career people were to follow the facts wherever they lead, and he would back us up," said Mike Schwartz, who headed the office's public-corruption unit from 2002 until February, when he left for private practice.

Mayor Nutter has since hired three of Meehan's former prosecutors, all of whom prosecuted city corruption cases, to lead ethics-reform efforts at City Hall.

Meehan's interest in ferreting out public corruption was not surprising.

"The conduct of a public official acting on his or her own interest rather than the interest of those he or she is dedicated to serve erodes the people's confidence in government," Meehan said yesterday.

Schwartz also said that Meehan didn't just prosecute corrupt public officials, but also those who bribed them.

"That was a different take on prosecuting public corruption than in the past," Schwartz said. "No longer were the businessmen who paid off the officials simply victims of extortion but actually corrupting-influences themselves."

Meehan also focused his efforts on prosecuting Internet child-porn predators, operators of substandard nursing homes, predatory lenders and identity-theft schemers.

District Attorney Lynne Abraham said that it would be a "terrible oversight" if Meehan were remembered only for his high-profile public-corruption prosecutions.

She said that Meehan's efforts to crack down on gun violence, for example, helped to make the city a better place.

Meehan's office prosecuted many gun and robbery cases under a federal program to protect neighborhoods from gun violence.

"Those prosecutions helped to solve a lot of other crimes," Abraham said. "When somebody realizes that they are facing 30 years in federal prison, with no parole, they sing, sing, sing."

She also said that Meehan made coordination and cooperation among federal, state and local law enforcement a top priority, particularly in the area of gang violence.

Critics said that some of Meehan's corruption investigations had been politically motivated.

Fumo's former defense lawyer, Richard A. Sprague, blasted Meehan after Fumo was indicted on corruption charges in February 2007. He said Meehan had pursued Fumo to further his political ambitions, a charge Meehan denied at the time in a terse one-sentence statement from his spokesman.

Meehan will be succeeded by First Assistant U.S. Attorney Laurie Magid. Meehan didn't disclose which Philadelphia law firms he had been talking with about his next job, but said he hopes to make a decision shortly. *