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Despite jail term, Fumo's fiancee still in love with him

Carolyn Zinni is still in love with the Senator, which is what she continues to call her fiancé, Vincent J. Fumo, even though he is no longer a state senator and, in fact, is serving a prison term.

Former Pennsylvanian State Senator Vincent Fumo and fiance Carolyn Zinni arrive at the U.S. Courthouse in Philadelphia on the first day of closing statements in his corruption trial. (Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer)
Former Pennsylvanian State Senator Vincent Fumo and fiance Carolyn Zinni arrive at the U.S. Courthouse in Philadelphia on the first day of closing statements in his corruption trial. (Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer)Read more

Carolyn Zinni is still in love with the Senator, which is what she continues to call her fiancé, Vincent J. Fumo, even though he is no longer a state senator and, in fact, is serving a prison term.

"Always the senator," she says, sipping tea in a café along East Passyunk Avenue on a recent afternoon of torrential rain.

It's prom season, and Carolyn Zinni, a dress shop owner in Springfield, Delaware County, wants to talk. A production company recently came to her shop, Zinni's on Baltimore Pike, and filmed what they called a "sizzle" to shop around a reality show about her store.

"There was so much drama [in the shop that day], you would have thought it was staged," she says.

Despite the drama in her own life - her father passed away, her fiancé went to prison, a marriage proposal just weeks before sentencing - Zinni, 52, the mother of three grown sons, projects the same confident and casual beauty she showed on those Mondays when her shop was closed and she attended trial, walking hand in hand with Fumo outside federal court.

She adores Fumo, even from a distance.

"I miss his cooking so much," she says. "We're very simple. Our favorite thing to do is to get some fabulous ingredients and put a fabulous meal together."

Once a month, she gets in her black Ford pickup truck with the pink piping and pink script CZ monogram and, with her girlfriend Liz usually along for the ride, drives 1,000 miles round-trip to the federal prison in Ashland, Ky.

There, for seven hours, between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m., she sits opposite Fumo in a cafeteria-like room and they talk.

"I pull my chair alongside him and hold his hand," she says. "I go to the vending machines, get a coffee. I stay all day. His mind is so phenomenal. We have a very good conversation. We don't talk about the past."

She doesn't want to talk about the future either. Fumo, who will be 67 in May, is serving a 55-month sentence for 137 counts of corruption and related charges, a sentence the prosecutor's office is appealing as too lenient.

With so much dishonesty in relationships, so many men who end up being less than what they promise, she says, Fumo stands out, even with a prison sentence. As for dating a man with a somewhat peculiar history in relationships - using a private eye to tail one girlfriend, rigging computers to spy on others, trying to get new boyfriends arrested - that's just not the Fumo she knows.

"He's just familiar," she says. He reminds her of other men in her family, her dad, her sister's husband, men who will make chicken soup for their women when they're under the weather. "It was solid from day one," she says.

In prison, she says, Fumo has "a group of men he walks with" and gets lots of visitors. She says he's not bitter. "He's a courageous man, going through it with as much dignity as he can," she says.

On this day, at the Black'N'Brew café, she is dressed in jeans and bright yellow heels, a black tank top, long chain necklace, and a rain jacket Fumo bought her. He called it her "foul weather gear," and urged her to wear it, which she found amusing.

What she really wants to talk about is her shop, and how good she is at helping girls pick out dresses, using her combination of honesty and compassion, her sense of style and modesty, to leave any girl feeling like royalty. The daily dramas at Zinni's - the parents who won't let their daughters have any say, the girls who can't decide - make it a natural for TV, she says.

"I'm known to be a little bit hard in the store," she says. "I say open your jacket, turn around. I know what dress fits like a sixth sense. They only want Carolyn to pick out the dress."

Fumo, too, only wants Carolyn. After decades of failed relationships, Fumo, by all accounts, struck gold when he finally asked Zinni out, in a meeting brokered with the help of Councilman Frank DiCicco. She took the stand at his sentencing and fiercely defended him, criticizing the press and the prosecutor for turning him into "a monster."

Zinni had known Fumo for years but took another look one Christmas season on Passyunk when she lit a tree and Fumo led people in a spontaneous "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer," conducting with his fingers. "That is so stinkin' cute," she remembers thinking.

She says she was stunned by Fumo's last-minute proposal to her, just a few weeks before he went to prison, on the porch of his beach block home on Kenyon Street in Margate. "He went into the car and got a bag and handed me the bag," she says.

Inside was a ring with a brilliant cut diamond in a classic setting that she proudly wears around the old South Philly neighborhood, where her mother and sister both have dress shops. Her parents started their shop in the 1940s, and people stop her all the time to ask her, "How's the senator?" She's moving back to an apartment on Passyunk Avenue, whose revitalization she credits to Fumo, to be closer to her family, including her 85-year-old mother, Jean.

She starts a lot of her sentences with "Vince was telling me," or "the senator says" and jots down notes of things she wants to remember to tell Fumo later on the phone. By the end of the conversation, she is worried she talked too much Vince, not enough prom.

One thing she doesn't do on the phone or in person, or even at home alone at night, is cry. "I would never do that, leave him like that," she says. "When I dropped him off, I blew him a kiss and gave him a smile, like thumbs up. When I turned the corner, I was sad. I don't stay stuck in sadness. I just think of tomorrow, and the shop."