Did you read where that guy in New Jersey who stole $1,200 worth of lobster tails from a casino kitchen in Atlantic City pleaded guilty and made a deal with the prosecutor. He was sentenced to four years in prison. Meanwhile in Pennsylvania, Vince Fumo is sentenced to 55 months (with good behavior, less than four years) in prison after being convicted unanimously in a jury trial of every stinking charge in the 137-count indictment against him in a trial that seemed to go on for 55 months.

What could possibly bind these two men in crime? A taste for lobster, perhaps. 

Years from now we will all look back in fond favor upon this sentence by Federal Court Judge Ronald Buckwalter as one that allowed Vince Fumo, who will be 70 upon his release, to live out his final decade or more in the spirit and service of Benjamin Franklin, another great Philadelphian who once used his tremendous influence and energy to found libraries and universities and hospitals and philosophical societies and volunteer fire companies without once shaking down a major corporation for $17 million by threatening to politically oppose its financial interests.

Whatever you think of Vince Fumo’s hard work and good intentions to improve his community, the biggest crime he committed is the one he wasn’t charged with. He demanded a well-laundered bribe of millions and millions of dollars to change his vote on a crucial legislative issue involving major corporations controlling energy and communications in the state of Pennsylvania.

They call it hardball. He pretended to say no, no, no until $17 million made it yes. To me that was either posturing or outright bribery. Either Fumo knew he was going to vote yes all along, in spite of his previous stated positions, or he was waiting for the right dollar figure to change his mind. You just know that Vince’s first words after the $17 million deal was sealed were, “I’ll bet I could have taken him for twenty.”

All politics is this way. That’s probably why the feds didn’t charge Fumo outright. Start charging politicians about how they vote opens a can of worms with a hornets nest in the middle. Nail him on the vacuum cleaners rather than the blatant “for sale” sign on anything Vince Fumo had for sale. Which turned out to be everything.

I don’t hate Vince Fumo. I hate his type. And to see one of his type humbled gives me faith and hope. I don’t know what he was before, how he saw himself, but after all these months of merciless revelations about his public and private business, Vince Fumo is a shipwreck. Once he was under a white sail on the high seas, the west wind forming white capped waves against blue swells. Once he was at the helm of the ship of state, no matter what the governor thought.

He wasn’t an outright pirate, but Vince Fumo was the ultimate privateer. We only call them pirates when they aren’t doing good things for us. Fumo robbed the rich to give to South Philly. And then he’d wet his beak. But Vince was a gadget substance abuser: One Oreck was too many, 19 were not enough. The feds nailed him with unauthorized use of paper clips when his more obvious crimes went un-prosecuted. Like Capone getting sent away for income tax evasion rather than for being the boss of the mob that ran Pennsylvania from South Philadelphia.

Not that that’s a bad thing.

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