By Ralph Ciprianofor BigTrial.net
The "Vince of Darkness" is back with a vengeance.
Philly Voice ran a long interview this morning with former state Senator Vincent J. Fumo.
Fumo, who spent four years in jail after he was convicted on 137 felony counts, characteristically came out swinging, saying he was the target of "an avalanche of negative publicity," and "prosecutorial over-agression," and that he did not deserve being branded with "The Scarlet Letter."
In Fumo's case, instead of an "A" like Hester Prynne, he got an "F" emblazoned on his forehead as a convicted felon.
Philly Voice also ran an excerpt from my new book, Target: The Senator, A Story About Power and Abuse of Power.
That's on top of an 8,000 word Philly mag profile of Fumo that also discusses the book, which is out on Kindle, and will shortly be available in a paperback, with a hard cover on the way.
Anybody who reads Target: The Senator will recognize some familiar themes from this blog; overzealous and unaccountable prosecutors and a hometown newspaper that blindly favors them.
These are the themes that run through so many stories recounted on this blog, including the Archdiocese of Philadelphia sex abuse scandals, the rogue cops case, the trials of former U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, former L&I Deputy Commissioner Dominic Verdi, and former Penn State President Graham Spanier, as well as the so-called Penn State sex abuse scandal.
Well the granddaddy of all of the cases in this genre is the Fumo case, which was staged for nearly five months at the federal courthouse back in 2008 and 2009.
Whether you loathed or loved Fumo, his case was a travesty from start to finish. There were so many leaks, the defendant was being tried and convicted in the media for years before his trial even began.
In Fumo's case, the feds were able to criminalize politics as usual, and the media and a jury went along with it, deciding that it was a felony for Fumo to fix up an office building, tear down a nuisance bar, rent a car, and put gas in that car. All while the Inquirer portrayed Fumo as Satan.
It was, as I say in the book, a "cartoon version of reality." So in Target: The Senator, I spent a lot of time explaining who Fumo was, how he got that way, and what the taxpayers lost when the feds staged their moral crusade that took him out.
As Harvey A. Silverglate, the author of Three Felonies A Day; How the Feds Target the Innocent, writes in the foreword:
“Target: The Senator brilliantly lays out the federal prosecutorial jihad against one of the most powerful — and colorful — state politicians in recent memory, Vincent J. Fumo . . . . [Cipriano] has interjected truth as a weapon against raw governmental abuse of power and news media gullibility. [He] deserves our thanks for peeling back the curtain on the epic destruction of Fumo, and revealing how it was done. Our job now is to read this important book with care and then to engage, as activist citizens, in an effort to reform the system."
If a rich and powerful guy like Fumo can't get a fair trial, it's bad news for the rest of us.
Another good reason to read the book: nobody who read the Inquirer's Fumo coverage has any idea of what really happened in that case. No, Fumo was not convicted of extorting PECO and Verizon; he was never even charged with that.
What happened in the Fumo case was that the feds, who, recently declassified FBI records show, had targeted Fumo for destruction since the 1970s, were able, with the help of the gullible and irresponsible hometown newspaper, to team up and destroy a guy, along with the presumption of innocence, and a defendant's constitutional right to a fair trial.
In the book, I had access to thousands of pages of previously confidential grand jury transcripts and FBI "302s," stuff the Inquirer never saw, so I could explain exactly how the feds pulled it off. Fumo, of course, also tells his side of the story for the first time.
The hometown newspaper's pro-prosecution bias, even when the prosecutor and that prosecution is proven to be corrupt, is laid out elsewhere on this blog in the Newsweek cover story this week about Philadelphia Police Detective Joe Walsh, and his incredible voyage through the Archdiocese of Philadelphia's sex abuse prosecutions.
In this case, a district attorney, Rufus Seth Williams, who is now sitting in solitary confinement in the federal lockup on Market Street, ran with a false prosecution featuring a fraudulent crime victim -- Billy Doe, AKA Danny Gallagher.
In this case, which is still ongoing, four innocent men were sent to jail, one died there, and we had the amazing specter of the detective who led that investigation for the D.A.'s office, Walsh, coming forward publicly to say it was all a lie, and that he caught Danny Gallagher lying. And when he tried to tell the prosecutor that Gallagher was a liar, former Assistant District Attorney Mariana Sorensen, she replied, "You're killing my case."
Walsh's story is all laid out in two court cases as well as a 12-page affidavit filed in Court. It's a story that's on the cover of Newsweek from coast to coast, and the blind people at the Inquirer still refuse to print a word about it. Amazing.
Instead, in the news columns and editorial pages of the Inquirer, the story is always the same, rapacious priests and innocent victims, as illustrated in Maria Panaritis's recent opus on the lasting damage done by Father James Bryzyski.
I'm not saying that isn't a story. It sure is. But so is Detective Walsh coming forward, and so is Danny Gallagher being revealed as a complete fraud. A guy who sent four innocent men to jail, and stole $5 million from the Catholic Church in a civil settlement for his imaginary pain and suffering.