His cronies increasingly tied to allegations of corruption, Gov. Shapp sought to quell complaints of conflict of interest involving his appointed attorneys general by appointing special prosecutors.
One 1976 appointment was a deputy special prosecutor to investigate police and government corruption in Philadelphia. This appointment went to an up-and-coming young lawyer in the Philly DA’s office named Ed Rendell. No politics there.
Soon there were cries that these special prosecutors themselves were hired for political ends. Soon Shapp was even accused of firing special prosecutors to conceal political corruption.
“Shapp actually appeared more willing to dismiss investigators than to fire corruptionists,” write Klein and Hoogenboom. “The Shapp administration, for example, dismissed Walter M. Phillips, Jr., the special state prosecutor in Philadelphia -- despite his two year record of fifty-nine indictments and twenty-one convictions -- ostensibly because he netted small fish but apparently because Phillips was investigating a connection between Speaker of the House Herbert Fineman (both a big fish and a Shapp ally) and the award of architectural contracts for the Philadelphia school system.”
By the sunset of his term, in June 1977, Gov. Shapp had lost the ability to lead or to command respect from the legislature. When he vetoed budget items, the legislature not only overrode him, but did so nearly unanimously.
By the end of Milton Shapp’s final term, most everyone in the legislature and the public had had enough. Milton Shapp had almost single handedly destroyed the Office of Pennsylvania Attorney General.
They blamed much of Gov. Shapp’s problems on his misuse of the attorney general’s office. Over Shapp’s objections, the legislature introduced a proposed constitutional amendment providing for an independently elected state attorney general.
“There was too much corruption in state government,” remembers Democratic state representative Mark Cohen, of Philadelphia. Today Cohen is the longest-serving member in the General Assembly. The proposed constitutional amendment, he recalls, “sailed through the legislature. There wasn’t much opposition.”
State voters approved the constitutional amendment in the primary election of 1978. The newly elected attorney general of Pennsylvania would be given both far-reaching, and concentrated powers. Most important, the AG would now for the first time have the power to prosecute crimes.
Prior to this, the state AG would refer criminal matters to local district attorneys. This system had worked for a century and more. Now it would be the other way around. Independently elected local DAs would now refer matters to the state AG, or see important matters ceded to a powerful elected AG.
This would create the top-heavy, politicized bottleneck that we see today in the elective AG’s office under Tom Corbett.
Just as bad, the office of attorney general, always a viper wrapped around the staff of the governor’s office, now became a full-fledged power base and financial player of its own in Pennsylvania politics.
It’s easy to think of these offices, with their thousands of employees and imposing edifices, as concrete and steel structures. The point of this essay though is to remind you and to give you a sense, as I have had a sense in my life, that these offices are actually flesh and blood people, with beating hearts, jealousies, ambitions, strengths and faults.
What corrupted the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office in the 1970s? It’s tempting to explain it away and say that this was mostly big city Philadelphia politics infecting itself on what for decades had been sleepy rural Pennsylvania governors’ offices. But big city Mayor David Laurence of Pittsburgh had been governor in the late 50s and early 60s without any of this sort of massive, wholesale abuse of our justice system.
It would be fair and accurate to say that what happened under Gov. Shapp with the state attorney general’s office was a result of Shapp’s own personality flaws and his runaway political concerns and ambitions.
From here out, the personality flaws and the political concerns and ambitions of a succession of elected attorneys general, each with his eye on the governor’s office, would take an equally heavy toll on the commonwealth.
In each case, political calculation and partisan crony machinations would be the very nature of the beast.
3
The Magic Moment:
Six decades of Pennsylvania governors, AGs,
and the state Republican Party:
The Elected Years 1980 to 1995
Here come the prosecutors
Corruption in the Shapp administration, and what to do about it, not only resulted in a constitutional amendment to elect Pennsylvania’s attorney general in 1980. It became the preeminent issue in the 1978 campaign for governor to replace Gov. Shapp. Five former prosecutors sought nominations for governor that year.
Richard Thornburgh set the prosecutorial tone on the campaign trail. Thornburgh was a former Nixon-appointed U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, and a former Assistant Attorney General in the U.S. Justice Department’s Criminal Division.
In campaign appearances Thornburgh said he’d counted 60 people who’d either been indicted or convicted during the Shapp administration. Gov. Shapp, for his part, characteristically replied, “Thornburgh says today out of 107,000 or thereabouts state employees there are 60 people who have either been indicted or convicted. Now I think that’s a pretty low percentage.”
If elected governor, Thornburgh promised, he’d take a get-tough approach of a prosecutor to the state’s highest office.
Thornburgh was elected. Under Thornburgh, however, corruption arguably not only got worse, criminal activity became much more vicious and outlandish, and institutionally protected.
The years would prove that a prosecutor by nature is not the most balanced, fair, nor competent individual to place in the highest office. Prosecutors by nature are prosecutorial, accusatory, and often tend to see and present things in stark black and whites, with little or no nuance, nor impulse for the whole truth or fairness.
Most prosecutors (there are exceptions) are not used to telling people to be fair, to listen to all sides, to suspend judgment, or to wait until the jury is in before rushing to judgment, as a leader must often do. Prosecutors, instead, are used to telling a jury to ignore the other side of the story, to render a guilty verdict, and to throw the book at those he or she is prosecuting.
For the next thirty years, beginning with Dick Thornburgh, Pennsylvania would be morally and politically hobbled by a long line of ethically challenged prosecutors either in the governor’s office, or vying for the governor’s office. Coincidentally or not, Pennsylvania never has been in such a state of moral and political decline as now.
The prosecutors have brought their own peculiar brands of corruption to state government. Cronyism and cover-up, particularly in the justice system and the courts, would become a growing problem. Another big problem would be misuse of the justice system for personal or political ends.
Of these former political prosecutors vying for the governor’s office, only one successful candidate -- Ed Rendell -- has not been a Republican.
Since 1980, when the elected AG’s office was first filled, there have been four elected state attorneys general: LeRoy S. Zimmerman (1980 to 1987); Ernie Preate (1988 to his indictment in 1995); Mike Fisher (1997 to December 2003); and Tom Corbett (2005 to 2011). Each of these AGs was caught up in partisan elective politics, and a chase for political cash. Each was also mired in severe criminal, ethical or moral scandals of their own. They each, in their own way, have been disasters for Pennsylvania.
Now, instead of reading about Pennsylvania attorneys general in history texts, the best place to read about them would be in court papers, suicide notes, and FBI transcripts.
At the root of the problem are the political contributions required to finance the political campaigns of an elected AG, and the political network required to protect a tainted elected prosecutor.
Lumps under the carpet
El
ected prosecutors in the governor’s and AG’s offices not only create their own peculiar brands of corruption. The remnants of their peculiar misdeeds are strange. They leave behind rather unusual, telltale lumps under the carpet.
When Gov. Dick Thornburgh left office in 1987, he left behind some mighty peculiar lumps under the carpet for his successor, Gov. Bob Casey. It didn’t take long for the rather peculiar outlines of some of these lumps to surface under the tightly woven carpeting in the governor’s office.
Only two days after Bob Casey was sworn in as governor, the state treasurer, Budd Dwyer, of Meadville, pulled out a .357 Magnum and shot himself to death at a televised news conference.
Moments before killing himself, Treasurer Dwyer implicated Gov. Thornburgh and the state’s first elected Attorney General, LeRoy Zimmerman, in a long-running bribery conspiracy, and cover-up of same. Republican Treasurer Dwyer also accused fellow Republicans Thornburgh and Zimmerman of political manipulations of the criminal case that caused Dwyer to dramatically kill himself before the cameras at his spectacular news conference.
As I say, these ill-tempered prosecutors leave behind some rather unusual lumps, and stains, under and on the carpeting of some rather high state offices.
In the office of the state treasurer, I’m told, there’s still a plastered-over bullet hole in the wall.
Will The Real Bob Casey please stand up?
Bob Casey’s path to the Pennsylvania governor’s office was long and tortuous. He sought the Democratic nomination for governor in 1966, and again in 1970. He lost both times to Milton Shapp. In hindsight, it’s easy to say that Casey would have made a better governor than Shapp, and would have been a better steward of the commonwealth.
In all likelihood, had Casey been elected instead of Shapp, for example, the state attorney general would have remained an appointed position.
Passed over by voters for the top job, Casey was twice elected to the watchdog role of auditor general, in 1968 and 1972. He took his job seriously, and approached it in a non-partisan manner
Throughout the years of the Shapp administration, in his position as auditor general, Democrat Casey remained the leading critic and whistleblower of the growing corruption in the Democratic governor’s office. This kept him in good stead with Democratic and Republican voters alike. The down side? In this period, the 1970s, Casey became too popular. “Bob Casey” would become a name on which others would trade, and capitalize.
The most notorious capitalizer was the late John “Johnny” Durbin, an infinitely interesting character who owned a Harrisburg hotel and watering hole called the Senate Horseshoe Bar. Durbin’s bar was known as “The Hatchery.” It was a place where plans were hatched. Durbin’s bar was a popular hangout of capital city politicos, and even mobsters. (Durbin married the sister of a prominent underworld figure.)
In 1976 Johnny Durbin hatched one of the masterstrokes of his career. At the time Bob Casey was in the political wilderness, and was barred from running for a third term as auditor general. One day at his Senate Bar Johnny Durbin announced he was going to get the next state treasurer elected, and it was only going to cost $50. Durbin knew an obscure Johnstown politician named Bob Casey, who was no relation to the popular ex-auditor general. Durbin got the bogus Bob Casey onto the ballot, and the ensuing confusion at the polls saw the unqualified imposter elected state treasurer. For the next four years Johnny Durbin remained the power behind the thrown, and effectively ran the treasurer’s office.
Bob Casey, the one from Scranton, thereafter began to be somewhat humorously referred to as The Real Bob Casey. The joke quickly ran thin with Bob.
In 1978, The Real Bob Casey again entered the governor’s race to succeed Milton Shapp. This time, a former teacher and an ice cream parlor owner named Robert P. Casey got on to the Democratic ballot for lieutenant governor. Again, without spending any money or campaigning, this unknown Bob Casey won the party’s nomination. In doing so he siphoned off enough votes so that The Real Bob Casey lost the gubernatorial nomination to Pittsburgh Mayor Pete Flaherty. Flaherty and his running mate, the ice cream impresario Bob Casey, ran unsuccessfully against Dick Thornburgh in the general election.
I was a young newspaper reporter in 1978. That year I covered a televised gubernatorial debate between Dick Thornburgh and Pete Flaherty at the WITF studios in Hershey. I thought Flaherty came off seeming soft, and without focus. Thornburgh seemed sharper, and attacked Flaherty’s record like a prosecutor.
I suspected Bob Casey would have mopped the floor with Thornburgh. Casey was a very good extemporaneous speaker, and had a warmth and a natural charm about him. Thornburgh on the other hand came across as plastic, cold, calculating -- a warmed-over Nixon. Behind his five o’clock shadow and trademark round-lens eyeglasses, Thornburgh exuded a coached, calculated warmth. He should never have been left out of his prosecutor’s cage, I thought then.
I also think it’s safe to say that if Bob Casey had won this 1978 governor’s election the state not only would have been in better hands: in hindsight, state Treasurer Budd Dwyer likely would not have ended up shooting himself to death on the floor of the treasury.
By 1980, even Republicans were capitalizing on the astounding popularity of Bob Casey. The fake Bob Casey from Johnstown, now the incumbent state treasurer, stood for re-election. The GOP launched a TV campaign reminding voters “Casey wasn’t Casey.” This imposter Bob Casey lost in the general election to Budd Dwyer, of Meadville, setting the stage for the memorable GOP blood feud and tragedy involving Dwyer and Gov. Dick Thornburgh.
As chance would have it ...
By 1986, Bob Casey was primed and ready to fight for the governor’s office to succeed Thornburgh. This time he ran as The Real Bob Casey. He won the governor’s office that November. After twenty years of trying, it was Bob’s turn to be governor.
By 1986 I was 28 years old and had been a professional writer for more than ten years. I’d been published in several national magazines, and I’d written and published three or four books.
I’d recently helped a writer and editor at Philadelphia Magazine with an article about the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown. Philadelphia Magazine, in return of favor, asked me to write an article for them. As luck would have it, the magazine editors commissioned me to write a biographic profile of Pennsylvania Attorney General LeRoy Zimmerman.
I’d been living in Harrisburg most of my life, and knew lots of people. One of my friends, a young woman named Judy, happened to be the personal secretary to the U.S. attorney in Harrisburg.
My friends and I would visit Judy after work. She’d complain about strange goings on with the federal prosecution of state Treasurer Budd Dwyer.
A few weeks after the November 1986 election state Treasurer Dwyer found himself a criminal defendant in federal court. The U.S. Attorney’s office in Harrisburg, where my friend Judy worked, was prosecuting Dwyer on charges of political corruption.
Friends and I would sit in Judy’s living room after she got off work and listen to her complain about the obvious political machinations involved in Treasurer Dwyer’s well-publicized prosecution. At least one defendant who was politically cozy with the prosecutor and his patron, Gov. Thornburgh, mysteriously got off the indictment. Most upsetting of all, she said, U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese interfered in the case on behalf of Pennsylvania Attorney General LeRoy Zimmerman.
udy told her friends that U.S. Attorney General Meese telephoned her boss, the acting U.S. Attorney. Meese made it clear that he was unhappy that his friend and political ally, state AG Roy Zimmerman, was being investigated by the Harrisburg U.S. Attorney’s office. Meese threatened to personally come to Harrisburg to review the case. The acting U.S. attorney hung up the phone and ran out into the lobby of his office to hang a flattering portrait of Ed Meese, should he arrive.
Meese’s overt political intervention came as a bolt from the blue, and had the effect of chilling the U.S. attorney office’s investigation of AG Zimmerman in the brib
ery conspiracy, Judy told us. The acting U.S. attorney and his staff were themselves shocked at the extent to which partisan political connections could interfere with criminal investigations, his secretary was telling us.
As I say, there’s 1,001 ways to protect a cat, and U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese -- one of President Ronald Reagan’s closest political advisers -- was one of those ways.
In Pennsylvania, politics trumps law.
The case involving Treasurer Dwyer, I already knew from the U.S. attorney’s secretary, had been contrived and fixed for political purposes. A few days before Christmas 1986, Dwyer was convicted. He faced 55 years in prison, and the loss of his state pension going back decades to the days he’d taught high school civics classes in Meadville. Simply, as he saw it for his family, he was worth more dead than alive.
As chance would have it, about this time, Governor-elect Casey appointed my father as his chief of staff for his incoming administration. After being out of the governor’s office for twenty years, my father was returning.
The political environment and atmosphere my father had known in the 1960s had drastically changed since the days of Gov. Bill Scranton. There was growing corruption, dishonesty, and palpable darkness in state offices, and in the Republican Party.
The incoming Casey administration would discover some rather strange lumps left under the carpet by Dick Thornburgh and Co.
Gov. Thornburgh had overseen a capital expansion project, and the Casey team was mystified to discover piles of unused granite blocks that had been squirreled away up at Fort Indiantown Gap. The oversupply of unused blocks was strangely purchased from contractors by the Thornburgh administration. The expensive granite blocks for some reason never were used in the capitol project, and were instead stashed out of sight. Under the carpet, as it were.
JoePa Takes the Fall Page 11