AS TOLD BY OUR LEGAL CORRESPONDENT, J. CONOR CORCORAN, ESQ.: Let’s be honest – there haven’t been any colossal revelations in the course of the Fumo trial. There certainly hasn’t been anything more salacious than what had already been leaked to the press over the past few years.

Christian Marrone, the son-in-law, laid out a pretext that subsequent witnesses have hammered home again. And again. And again. Conniving to slaughter a neighbor’s barking dog, packing the bags of Fumo’s bevy of sycophants for wee jaunts to the Vineyard, yacht trips and booze, all on the taxpayer’s dime. Sounds like a rock and roll, cocaine-sex-jam Valhalla that would lend a ruddy rouge to the cheeks of Keef himself. But it just keeps coming, ad nauseum. Rather narcoleptic, really. I can’t imagine sitting through this trial every day. Judge Buckwalter is earning his keep, for sure. Hooray for judicial pay hikes.

And while the quality of this evidence is becoming mundane, the sheer quantity of it is ceaselessly mounting, and nipping, at Fumo’s heels. It may very well paralyze any hopes the defense has of vindication. If Fumo will be found guilty, it’ll be this kind of evidentiary nitpicking that gets him.

I will say, however, that there something undeniably familiar about Fumo’s alleged behavior in this regard. A certain patina, an indefinable je ne sais quoi, that demarcates his behavior as peculiar – not insofar as its supposed parameters beyond the purview of the federal criminal code so much as it’s beyond….well, quite frankly, his position.

The man is a millionaire, many times over, enjoying well paid positions, at the top of the totem pole, in both a major Philadelphia law firm and a bank, while he simultaneously enjoyed his perch at the summit of Pennsylvania politics. He is the apotheosis of a Nietzchean protagonist.

Why, then, would he waste his time on nickel-and-dime endeavors to cheat the public? How is it that a man of such ability, and wherewithal, would bother to have his staffers clean his laundry when he could afford to pay for it himself? Why, according to his ex-girlfriend’s latest testimony, the sheer glee in using “OPM” – other people’s money; our Pennsylvanian money, really – to fund a lifestyle of extravagance he could so evidently afford himself?

There’s something vaguely avaricious and trite, tremendously familiar, characteristically parochial, about all of this

And then it hits me. It’s a typical, Philadelphia story, but with nary a C.K. Dexter Haven in sight.

South Philly, born and bred in the 1950s, shackled by every insecurity and demographic burden imaginable in white, ethnic Philadelphia, with its notorious crab-in-the-bucket mentality towards people of promise. Eventually wanders up to St. Joe’s Prep at 17th and Girard for his high school education (a place I know too well, producing, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, a kind of “brainy beast of an entrepreneur who loves to break ‘em.”) A Jesuit institution where, according to his ex’s testimony, he was picked on relentlessly, perhaps coalescing over the years to produce the personality she recognizes as “shy” and “socially retarded.”

He eventually becomes the infamous Vince of Darkness, a man with multiple exes, betrothed and otherwise, all apparently blossoming from a similar provenance. As far as I’ve seen, they are over-ripened beauties, battle-scarred Maidens In Lament of Fertility, attractive to the Vince (in the same fashion, I suppose, as his indentured servants) not only for nomenclatures riddled with familiar ethnic hallmarks, but perhaps their similar working class identifications, their Delaware County residences, their Port Richmond sensibilities, and like the Vince himself, their relentless ambition to move up the ladder. Hell, his political compatriots, of similar ilk, often provided their significant others to assist with the construction of his Green Street mansion, a kind of class endeavor to construct an edifice they all could share in, a grand, phallic monument to possibility. It even has a turret. One of us, perhaps they thought, made it to the top.

And there he was. He just didn’t realize it – the Feds are barking that he wanted more – and he never bothered to separate himself from the very people nipping at his heels, to rise above it all. In a way, sadly, the man failed to realize his potential.

He did make it all the way to Harrisburg. But as is oft echoed about the halls of Philebrity H.Q., you can take the boy out of Philadelphia…

Here at Philebrity, we are no strangers to reaching for the telephone in a cold sweat, fingers trembling in fear, punching in a few numbers and asking as soon as someone answers, asking “Fuck! Are we gonna get sued for this?” Always, on the end of the other line is one Conor Corcoran, Esq., our resident go-to guy for all things scary and legal. Read more of his missives to Philebrity here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 5:18 pm.