Christine M. Flowers: La Tragedia di Vincenzo

WITH A NAME like Flowers, you wouldn't think I was Italian.

Don't be fooled. While only half my DNA qualifies me for paisana status, it's the dominant part of my personality.

Which, in simple terms, means every emotion I've ever had has been pumped up on steroids. Italians don't feel, we emote. We don't hate, we despise. We don't love, we adore. And we don't steal. We plunder.

To us, life is an opera.

And quite frankly, Verdi would have loved to build a masterpiece around a man, who, depending upon your predilections, has been a valued and effective public servant or one of the most corrupt pols to ever grace the Philadelphia stage.

I'm talking, of course, about former state Sen. Vince Fumo.

The spectacle unfolding down at 6th and Market over recent days is as dramatic and heart-wrenching as any vocal masterpiece at the Met.

The only thing missing is the fat lady with the high notes.

For those who've been living under a rock for the past year and a half, Fumo is on trial for corruption.

He's facing 139 counts of unsavory activities involving boats, women and vacuum cleaners (not necessarily all at the same time).

HE DODGED a bullet once before as a newly elected state senator, but this time it's unlikely he'll emerge unscathed.

The feds have a strong case, and even though Fumo's defense has done a crackerjack job attacking the credibility of government witnesses, few observers believe that the former senator will avoid conviction on at least some of the charges.

But I'm not as interested in the legal technicalities as I am in the flesh-and-blood aspects of this case.

And there is so much flesh, blood, betrayal, revenge, jealousy and pulsing testosterone in this sordid tale that it qualifies as an opera on the grandest of scales.

Can't you just see Vince as Otello, writhing in pain at the betrayal of his various Desdemonas, women who loved him and left?

Here he is hiring that private detective, the one he considered a "friend," saying, "Trail that faithless wench, the one who broke my heart and emptied my bank account!

"And when you find her in the arms of another, make a report, take some pictures, and have the boyfriend arrested for drunk driving!"

All that's missing is the handkerchief.

Or maybe he's more like Rigoletto, the father who loses his beautiful daughter to a man he despises.

Vince's relationship with his eldest daughter, Nicole, is famously strained, to the point that one of the main prosecution witnesses is her husband, Christian Marrone, his own son-in-law.

Nicole, like Rigoletto's daughter Gilda, loves a man who is her father's sworn enemy.

It doesn't get worse than that. Imagine the family dinners.

Or could he be like Pagliacci, a man so consumed with jealousy that he stabs both his wife and her lover?

Fumo's no murderer, of course, but he has destroyed his political enemies by knifing them in the back on numerous occasions, including the time he supported Bob Casey over his old friend Ed Rendell for governor. No one wielded a political blade more efficiently than the senator.

On the other hand, maybe he's just a victim of circumstance, like Radames in "Aida," a man forced to choose between his own feral passions and loyalty to duty.

It didn't end too well for the Egyptian, who was buried alive, so Vince should look on the bright side: at worst, an ill-fitting orange tunic and three squares.

Of course, to someone who is used to living in a million-dollar mansion with dozens of Oreck vacuums, burial alive might be preferable to mac and cheese.

Ironically, though, the opera that most closely tracks the destiny of South Philly Vince isn't even Italian.

IT'S A FRENCH one called "Faust."

You know, the one about the guy who sold his soul to the devil.

While Fumo did a great deal of good during his decades in office, he may have also made some pacts with Mephistopheles, thinking that the day of reckoning would never actually come.

Well, it's here.

Was that the fat lady I heard singing on Market Street? *

Christine M. Flowers is a lawyer.

E-mail cflowers1961@yahoo.com.