Funny, isn’t it, how the leaders of this overwhelmingly Democratic town — “Moscow on the Delaware,” our founding chairman Jeremy Nowak used to say — is rightfully so enraged by Trumpian acts of corruption … but strangely silent when it comes to the same or similar committed by those wearing their team colors? Ah, the blinding powers of hypocrisy.
One area politico not given to such Ethics For Thee, But Not For Me rationalizations is former Democratic Congressman Patrick Murphy, who called it like he saw it on Fox News this week when asked about President Joe Biden’s blanket pardon of his convicted felon son. “It’s a slap in the face to our Constitution and particularly the rule of law,” said Murphy, who spoke at our Ideas We Should Steal Festival last month. “Nobody is above the law, no matter if you’re the president’s son or not, and I’m really disappointed.”
Kudos, Murph, for realizing this is precisely why folks tune out and don’t vote: Why bother? The system is rigged, as not one, but now two presidents are telling us. Here in the birthplace of American democracy, public officials like our DA specialize in justifiable outrage at Trump’s egregious law and norm-breaking, but are complicit when it comes to the same type of behavior committed by their own allies.
The silence was deafening when, just before Thanksgiving, The Inquirer touched on the slew of convicted former elected officials who have mystifyingly shown back up on the public payroll. We knew Mayor Cherelle Parker was no reformer, but the litany can only make you wonder: Is she running a government or a halfway house? Should we officially adopt this truth in advertising slogan: Philadelphia. Where Nothing Is Disqualifying?
The litany of offenses is … long
Let’s roll through the list, just to make your stomach churn:
There was former State Rep. Vanessa Lowery Brown, who was convicted of taking bribes in 2018, landing a gig with the Register of Wills last year doing community outreach. More recently, Councilmember Jimmy Harrity hired Marita Crawford as his legislative director. Crawford was convicted labor leader John Dougherty’s political director at Local 98, allegedly his mistress, and his partner in crime. She pleaded guilty to wire fraud and stealing from the union and spent 15 days in prison — a sentencing slap on the wrist. “She did her time,” Harrity, a longtime Democratic party apparatchik, told The Inquirer. “Sometimes when you work for different people, you have to do what you have to do.”
Silly me, I wrote upon the public utterance of such moral relativism. I thought we were way past the time when “just following orders” could be offered up as some type of justification for illegal or unethical acts. Last year, Philly was found to be the nation’s eighth-most corrupt city, which has to make one wonder just what’s going on in the top seven. (Chicago is the dubious champion for four years running. Talk about your dynasties; the 90s Bulls pale by comparison.) We’ve had Bobby Henon. Kane. Williams. Fumo. McCord. Estey. Tartaglione. Fattah. (For a complete list, check out our Public Corruption All-Star Cards — trade ’em with your friends!)
Oh, but we’re not done. Remember Willie Singletary, the former Traffic Court Judge? You may recall that he was kicked off the bench amid allegations that he showed photos on his phone of his, uh, gavel to a female court employee — did I mention dude’s a pastor? — and served prison time after being convicted of lying to the FBI as part of a ticket-fixing scandal,. He’s now pulling down $90,000 a year in Mayor Parker’s managing director’s office.
Philadelphians should be pissed off when their elected leaders talk about “second chances” when hiring ex-convicts in City Hall because such excuse-making is an insult to our collective intelligence.
Then there’s State Rep. Leslie Acosta, who ran for election — get this —without disclosing to voters that she’d been convicted of money laundering in an embezzlement scheme that involved ripping off a North Philly medical clinic servicing low-income patients. And now she’s at Mayor Parker’s Commerce Department, earning $70,000 per year for performing “community outreach.” (Those low-income victims at that North Philly medical clinic may have had quite enough of Acosta’s community outreach.)
And, of course, there’s former State Representative Movita Johnson-Harrell, whom our DA has publicly praised for her “courage” time and again. That’s because, tragically, she’s lost two sons to gun violence. My heart truly goes out to her. But Johnson-Harrell also started a nonprofit in her son’s name which she promptly stole from, funneling a half million dollars through the anti-gun violence charity to pay for a Porsche, fur coats and a Mexico vacation.
She was charged by then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro (not by her friend and onetime employer Larry Krasner), pled guilty, and was sentenced to 11-and-a-half to 23 months in jail back in January of 2020, before an early Covid-related release. Now she’s back on the taxpayer dime, doing PR for the sheriff’s office.
Which brings us to Sheriff Rochelle Bilal, the best evidence out there for the elimination of the row office she holds. Her misdeeds are too numerous to recount in one sitting (not unlike Trump, come to think of it), but let’s highlight a few of the greatest hits, shall we? Her tenure as sheriff started with whistleblowers like Brett Mandel outing “slush-fund” spending, which was followed by the praiseworthy made-up news stories she promulgated using ChatGPT, the 76 guns her office somehow couldn’t locate, and the nearly 10 grand of taxpayer money given to the creators of the GEICO Gecko for the creation of her office mascot.
The failure of Bilal’s office to sell tax delinquent properties in a timely manner has cost the city in excess of $35 million. But the last-straw story that ought to have candidates lining up to oppose Bilal on the platform of simply eliminating her office came to light in the summer: Turns out, a number of folks who have been buying properties at Sheriff sales haven’t been receiving the deeds to their properties, while they pay interest on their loans. It’s a classic case of base incompetence, and one that you might think would prompt a cacophony of criticism.
A lone voice shouting into the wind
Hah, just kidding. Only one politician has spoken up — State Representative Jared Solomon. Solomon raised the specter of impeachment — “at the state level, you can impeach any civil officer” — and wrote a letter to President Judge Nina Wright Padilla of Common Pleas Court, calling for her to conduct an evidentiary hearing into the sheriff’s failure to perform the duties of her office. It’s a scathing letter that you can read here.
Here’s a snippet of the complaints Solomon points to:
I am deeply concerned by the substantial, publicly documented deficiencies and unacceptable backlogs in the Sheriff’s administration of these core responsibilities, including but not limited to:
An analysis finding that between January 2020 and June 2023, the Sheriff’s Office received notice of 10,028 protection orders that required weapon relinquishment, but in that time, deputies had marked just 13% of those cases as completed.
An investigation finding that the Sheriff’s Office was placing fees from auctions in bank accounts outside of the city’s control, and spending it on expenses such as DJs, catering, ammunition, Rochelle Bilal trading cards, and a $9,000 costume for an office mascot.
A finding by the City of Philadelphia Law Department that the Sheriff’s Office circumvented Philadelphia’s standard contracting procedures in awarding a no-bid to an online auction company without approval from city lawyers, costing the city and school district an estimated $35 million.
A 2022 performance audit of the Philadelphia Sheriff’s custodial accounts performed by the Philadelphia City Controller’s Office finding that the Sheriff’s office was “operating outside of the checks and balances established in the Home Rule Charter meant to protect taxpayer funds from mismanagement or misuse.”
I caught up with Solomon this week and he kind of chuckled when I asked about the response his July letter received. “I haven’t gotten a response,” he said.
Uh, kinda the problem, no? When Dougherty and Henon were charged with, and ultimately convicted of, using public office for private gain in the most Sopranos-like way imaginable, I wrote that, finally, public corruption would be on the ballot. Well, there I go again — often wrong, but never in doubt.
Turns out, hardly anyone cared. In fact, municipal corruption has arguably gotten worse in the birthplace of American democracy. Whether it’s the litany of ex-cons drawing taxpayer dollars or the “business as usual” reactions to the sheriff’s misdeeds, we’ve long had a citywide allergy to accountability.
Case in point: Parker’s response to the news that all these convicted felons are working in her City Hall. “The Parker administration supports every person’s right to a second chance in society, and that includes Mr. Singletary and Ms. Acosta,” spokesman Joe Grace told The Inquirer. “We also believe, just as strongly, that every individual must be accountable for his or her actions.”
Committee of 70 CEO Lauren Cristella agreed that second chances are important, and focused on transparency in hiring. “Ensuring transparency and accountability in hiring builds a stronger foundation of trust between the public and those who serve them,” she said. “Withholding this information undermines that trust.”
“We don’t get to the big issues unless we fix the way government delivers services. I hear it every day in my district. People are frustrated when they see others getting a quicker response from government than they do.” — State Rep. Jared Solomon
Grace and Cristella are honorable public servants who I’ve long admired, but this is why Democrats lose, folks — this inability to speak plainly about right and wrong. So let’s explicitly call out the disingenuousness of the “second chance” argument. No one is arguing that Singletary, Acosta, Johnson-Harrell, et al, don’t deserve a job after having served their time. They just don’t deserve a taxpayer-funded patronage job after having already violated the public trust. To suggest otherwise is to send a terrible message that detracts from our sense of civic pride, which Mayor Parker, to her credit, is otherwise ably trying to marshal.
As for Solomon, his colleagues in the political class will privately agree with him, but they’ll shy away from sharing in his public outrage. They see matters of good government as divorced from the big issues of public safety and quality of life, while Solomon sees them as inextricably linked.
“We don’t get to the big issues unless we fix the way government delivers services,” he told me. “I hear it every day in my district. People are frustrated when they see others getting a quicker response from government than they do.”
Solomon says all of us — politician, journalist, citizen — have to do a better job of linking acts of corruption to actual outcomes that affect folks in their everyday lives. Willie Singletary showing photos of his junk is gross, yes, and disqualifying, but the ticket-fixing scandal he went away for spoke to a two-tiered system of governance: One for connected insiders, the other for suckers like us. Solomon points to all those blighted properties kids have to avoid on their walk to school in our neighborhoods as the actual tangible result of the sheriff’s failings.
It takes all of us
To that end, he has a challenge for me, one I’m inclined to accept. “We need to gather all our stakeholders — The Citizen, Committee of 70, Common Cause, all concerned groups — and go out into the neighborhoods and explain why good government matters,” he said. “We finally have a mayor, to her credit, who is cleaning and greening the city — well, let’s expand the definition of ‘clean’ and clean up our government, too.”
Over 100 years ago, when muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens labeled Philadelphia “corrupt and contented,” he also wrote that “the people are not innocent.” Philadelphians should be pissed off when their elected leaders talk about “second chances” when hiring ex-convicts in City Hall because such excuse-making is an insult to our collective intelligence. To Solomon’s point, we know that a 2014 study found that the average Pennsylvanian pays an average $1,300 annual corruption tax. You okay with being taken like that?
In other cities and even countries, citizens have not given up. In India, for example, the website ipaidabribe.com debuted nearly 15 years ago and had some initial success. Private citizens used it to anonymously self-report incidents of corruption — naming bribes paid, identifying corrupt officials, and aggregating its data into detailed maps and charts, shaming bad actors and shocking the conscience of unaware citizens. Its popularity and influence has waned of late, but it remains a compelling case study of how a citizenry can rise up and fight back.
Philly fancies itself a tough town, but we cower when those in power shrug and offer bland rationalizations about “second chances.” Solomon is no raving madman, but, on some level, he’s really suggesting that we need to summon our inner Howard Beale. Remember him? If not, watch Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film Network right now for a dark prediction of these very times.
Beale — played by Peter Finch, in an Oscar-winning performance — was a disillusioned TV anchorman during corrupt, economic hard times who called a citizenry to collective action with the war cry: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Let’s finish by watching Beale — and asking ourselves if we’re too beaten down to similarly demand more from those we hire to deliver for us:
The Fix is made possible through a grant from the Thomas Skelton Harrison Foundation. The Harrison Foundation does not exercise editorial control or approval over the content of any material published by The Philadelphia Citizen.
MORE OF THE FIX FROM THE CITIZEN