Ex-con and political hanger-on Sam Kuttab caught up in probe of judges

After he served his time in federal prison for cheating on his taxes, Sam Kuttab vowed that his days of skating close to the edge were over.

"I made a promise to family, my kids," Kuttab said last year. "I do not plan to make another mistake."

Now Kuttab is under federal criminal scrutiny again, a decade after he spent 22 months behind bars for a scheme to evade $1.2 million in taxes.

And this time, the Wyncote man is smack in the middle of the FBI's latest probe of Philadelphia judges.

In pleading guilty Wednesday to corruption charges, former Municipal Court Judge Joseph C. Waters admitted he had helped fix a civil case as a favor to a friend and political ally - Kuttab.

The money at issue was almost trifling, especially compared with Kuttab's past tax case. Federal prosecutors said he had reached out to Waters to get help defeating a small-claims suit over a $2,700 debt.

In the charges against Waters, federal prosecutors did not name Kuttab, identifying him only as "Person #1." But sources and court records make clear that person is Kuttab.

Gregarious grocer, self-made entrepreneur, and self-described politics addict, Kuttab, 55, has been a Zelig-like figure in Philadelphia politics for decades, both before and after his stay in federal prison.

In the 1990s, he raised $35,000 for John F. Street's first run for mayor, and tens of thousands for campaigns of U.S. Rep. Robert Brady, the longtime chairman of the city Democratic Party.

Before his conviction, Kuttab ran a 300-employee security-guard firm with millions of dollars in contracts to guard locations for Philadelphia Housing Authority sites and other government clients.

In those days, too, he went year after year without filing federal tax returns, making disguised campaign contributions to keep his real wealth hidden, prosecutors said at the time.

"This is the most broad-reaching and substantial tax-fraud scheme I have ever seen," a federal judge told Kuttab during his 2002 sentencing.

Along with Kuttab, his wife, sister, and brother-in-law pleaded guilty in the tax case. The brother-in-law received a 10-month sentence; the women got probation.

In more recent years, Kuttab has operated a large grocery in Kensington.

He had to regroup after a freakish episode in 2009 when a man dashed inside Kuttab's store and barricaded himself in its basement. Fire broke out, heavily damaging the business. The man was found dead in the rubble, a crack pipe nearby.

While running his store, Kuttab also got back into politics, helping stage a number of dinners that drew a cross-section of political figures, including City Controller Alan Butkovitz and Sheriff Jewell Williams.

Also among the guests was then-Judge Waters.

As it happened, Kuttab said one person who attended some of the dinners was another shadowy political hanger-on who burst into headlines in recent months.

That would be Tyron B. Ali.

Ali, 41, a former lobbyist, has been identified as the undercover operative who secretly taped five Philadelphia elected Democrats pocketing cash, or, in one case, an expensive bracelet, as part of a "sting" by the state Attorney General's Office.

Once the FBI began interviewing participants, the dinners came to a halt.

Born an ethnic Palestinian in Jordan, Kuttab arrived in the United States at about age 10 and went on to become a naturalized citizen. As an adult, he has championed Palestinian rights - he took part this summer in a Center City protest over the death toll in Gaza.

"Rather than quieting the extremists," Kuttab told The Inquirer that day, Israel's bombing "fuels them. And who suffers? Civilians."

On Wednesday, as part of the guilty-plea proceeding, Waters admitted what prosecutors had written in the charges against him: that Kuttab twice contacted the judge in 2011 to fix a case brought by Houdini Lock & Safe Co., a Montgomery County business.

In a suit, Houdini said Kuttab owed it $2,700 for monitoring a fire-alarm system in a Kuttab warehouse on North Broad Street.

Prosecutors said that Kuttab and Waters worked together to "devise a scheme" to defraud Houdini, that Waters called two other judges on Kuttab's behalf, and that Houdini ended up losing its case.

On Thursday, Larry Schwalb, owner of Houdini, minced no words about Kuttab.

"He's deadbeat," Schwalb said. "He's a no-good guy."

In a second major part of the Waters FBI investigation, the judge pleaded guilty to helping fix a firearms case.

Waters, who quit the bench the day before his guilty plea, admitted he reached into the gun case at the urging of a friend - who, unbeknownst to Kuttab or the judge, was an FBI informant, and who had given Waters $1,000 cash, ostensibly as a campaign contribution. Kuttab introduced that person to Waters, but otherwise played no role in the gun case.

There is no allegation that Kuttab gave Waters cash in connection with the Houdini civil suit.

Luther E. Weaver 3d, Kuttab's lawyer, said he had gone over that case with Kuttab.

"I've talked to my client about that," Weaver said, "and he denies that he was involved in any type of wrongdoing with the judge. He denies being involved in any kind of quid pro quo to fix a case."

As for Kuttab, he didn't return messages seeking comment Thursday. Earlier in the week, as news of Waters' plea was breaking, Kuttab said he was stunned at the news.

"Oh, my gosh," he said.

He insisted that he had not asked Waters for help with the Houdini case.

"Absolutely not. I would never put him in a position like that," Kuttab said of Waters. "I think that would have tarnished my relationship with him."

Kuttab described Waters, 61, as a very close friend with whom he once talked "three, four times a day."

More recently, though, their friendship seemed to cool.

Kuttab said he invited the judge to the wedding of one of his five daughters three weeks ago. Waters did not attend.

215-854-4821 @CraigRMcCoy

Inquirer staff writers Mark Fazlollah and Michael Matza contributed to this article.