In another blow to State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo, a computer technician who prosecutors said carried out an electronic cover-up for Fumo has agreed to plead guilty and is expected to testify against his former boss.

Leonard P. Luchko, 51, who worked in Fumo’s South Philadelphia office, is scheduled to plead guilty on Monday before a federal judge, according to a document filed yesterday in U.S. District Court.

Luchko and another computer technician are charged with systematically deleting e-mails and other potential evidence from computers used by Fumo and Fumo aides as well as by staffers at a key nonprofit organization that figured in the federal investigation.

The cleansing of the computers was allegedly done at Fumo’s behest and for the sole purpose of thwarting the federal investigation into Fumo’s activities.

Fumo, 65, a Philadelphia Democrat who has been a political powerhouse for decades in Harrisburg, is to stand trial in a sweeping corruption case starting next month.

He is accused of defrauding the state Senate and two nonprofit groups, misusing their employees and money for personal and political advantage. He is also charged with staging a cover-up to obstruct the FBI and IRS investigations.

Luchko is the second new prosecution witness to emerge in the months leading up to the trial before U.S. District Judge William H. Yohn Jr.

In June, political consultant Howard J. Cain, for years one of Fumo’s closest confidants, pleaded guilty to tax evasion and agreed to testify against Fumo.

Another computer aide in Fumo’s office, Donald Wilson, has been cooperating with federal prosecutors since before the indictment. He, too, is on the prosecution’s witness list.

James C. Schwartzman, a longtime friend of Fumo’s who is representing Luchko, did not respond to e-mail or phone messages. Fumo’s lead defense attorney, Dennis J. Cogan, would not comment about Luchko’s decision to plead guilty.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys John Pease and Robert Zauzmer also declined to comment about the scheduled guilty plea.

Luchko and a second computer technician, Mark C. Eister, were charged with leading an effort to cleanse computers used by Fumo, his staff, and workers at Citizens’ Alliance for Better Neighborhoods, a civic nonprofit organization funded with millions of dollars through Fumo’s efforts. Eister is awaiting trial with Fumo. His lawyer, Brian P. McMonagle, could not be reached for comment.

According to the federal indictment, the effort began in earnest Jan. 25, 2004, after The Inquirer reported that the FBI was investigating Fumo.

“The FBI probe into the Senator has really set him off. . . . He wants all the Blackberries wiped,” Luchko wrote in an e-mail to Eister that evening.

Even as Luchko and Eister worked assiduously to clean others’ computers, they failed to cleanse their own, an oversight exploited by the FBI to obtain copies of hundreds of e-mails.

In those messages to other staffers and Senate contractors, Luchko repeatedly cited demands from “the Boss” that potentially damaging e-mails be deleted.

“Mail from the Boss needs to be deleted!” Luchko wrote to one Senate contractor. “. . . You really have to clean your mailbox up this is the kind of s- that can get us in trouble.”

In another, Luchko boasted about his ability to outwit the FBI, saying investigators could never extract data from a particular Citizens’ Alliance computer.

“Good Luck to them because they are going to need it,” Luchko wrote. “They aren’t getting s- off that PC.”

In the e-mails, Luchko portrayed Fumo as absolutely determined to have the staff’s computer cleansed.

“The Boss is driving us ALL nuts with this FBI madness. . . . Life just got so complicated it isn’t even funny and the killer is I can’t tell anyone about it.”

Now, it appears, Luchko is talking about it, to prosecutors.

Might not look good for Fumo, but I still wouldn’t bet against him. Dude has more than nine lives.

Source: Philly.com

Sheriff John Green has spent 37 years in law enforcement. But these days he’s best known around town for the law he won’t enforce.

With the economy soft and thousands of Philadelphians delinquent on their mortgages, Sheriff Green this spring refused to hold a court-ordered foreclosure auction. His move raised eyebrows on the bench and dropped jaws among lenders and their attorneys, who accuse him of shirking his duty to enforce legal contracts.

It also prompted a sweeping, court-endorsed deal, scheduled to go into effect next week, that aims to help homeowners avoid foreclosure. Even as Congress moves forward with a federal plan that could insure up to $300 billion in refinanced mortgages, Mr. Green’s unilateral approach has pushed Philadelphia to the leading edge of local responses to the national crisis.

“More of our neighbors, our families and our friends are falling behind on their mortgages and losing their homes” to foreclosure, the 60-year-old Mr. Green writes in a “Declaration of Neighborhood Stability” on his Web site, www.phillysheriff.com1. “My staff and I watch the suffering every day and witness the heart-wrenching scenes as families lose their primary means of wealth-building and face eviction.”

Mr. Green’s 241-person sheriff’s department is the armed wing of Philadelphia County courts, charged with transporting prisoners, securing courtrooms and auctioning off foreclosed properties at sheriff sales. In a city beset by poverty and crime, Mr. Green has emerged as an unlikely blend of lawman, politician, spiritual leader and social worker.

Desperate Homeowners

A dozen or more desperate homeowners appear in the sheriff’s lobby each day, seeking solace and counsel from Deputy Sheriff’s Officer Marquette Parsons, who sits at the front desk wearing blue and packing a sidearm. “This is the end of the line,” Mr. Parsons says. “They have to face reality now, because they’re facing a sheriff sale.” Mr. Parsons helps homeowners understand documents they’ve received from the court and advises them how to reach housing counselors. Sometimes he’ll contact the lender’s attorney to mediate a misunderstanding. The sheriff runs ads in local papers urging people to take “Sheriff Green’s Important Steps to Saving Your Home.”

Mr. Green, a police sergeant when he was elected sheriff in 1987, has a politico’s eye for his job. Last month, he presented a commendation for valor to an officer who was robbed at gunpoint while sitting in a barber’s chair and wounded one thief in the ensuing firefight. Standing next to the taller officer for the photo opportunity, Mr. Green hiked himself onto his toes. “Just one second,” he said. “I’m going to become a politician.” Everyone laughed. But he stayed on his tiptoes until the photographers finished their shots.

The sheriff says his political life merges with his religious calling. “Everything you do is part of your faith,” he says. For the past 20 years, Mr. Green, who is married and has six children, has hosted an annual prayer breakfast that has become a see-and-be-seen event for the city’s political elite.

The 80-page program from this year’s breakfast is jammed with paid congratulatory ads from businesses and unions, clergymen and subordinates, office holders and office seekers. “When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice,” wrote one pastor, quoting the Book of Proverbs.

‘Stop the Bleeding’

The sheriff first made his mark in the foreclosure issue in 2004, when he noticed a spike in the number of delinquent properties the court was ordering sold. He postponed one month’s auction and then went to Judge Annette Rizzo of the Court of Common Pleas seeking to legalize the move.

“We have to stop the bleeding,” the judge recalls the sheriff saying in a courtroom crowded with worried homeowners. The sheriff says he doesn’t remember making such a statement.

“Really what he did was not legal,” Judge Rizzo says of the sheriff’s decision to stop the auction.

During a recess, she summoned the lenders’ lawyers, the sheriff, consumer advocates and the city solicitor into the back room. She asked them to form a committee to determine which individual homeowners deserved a delay, aid through existing government programs, or just a graceful exit from their house. But she declined to order a blanket moratorium on sales.

In 2007, the foreclosure wave began to swell again. Because Philadelphia didn’t experience a big run-up in home prices, it isn’t in as bad shape as hotter markets in Florida and Nevada. Nonetheless, foreclosure filings in the city rose to 6,237, from 5,288 the year before. Early this year, approximately 1,000 properties a month were going on the block at the sheriff sales, according to the sheriff’s office.

The trend caught the attention of Curtis Jones Jr., who had won a seat on the City Council a few months earlier and was eager to make a splash. He teamed up with consumer advocates and a senior colleague, Councilwoman Marian Tasco, to write a resolution calling on the sheriff and the Court of Common Pleas president judge, C. Darnell Jones II, to impose an indefinite moratorium on foreclosure sales.

On March 27, in its gilt-and-green chambers, the City Council unanimously voted its approval. It was a nonbinding resolution, more of a political statement than a practical one.

But as the council meeting moved to other matters, one of the sheriff’s senior aides phoned Mr. Green to tell him the resolution had passed. The sheriff decided on the spot to postpone the next sale and go to court seeking a longer moratorium. The aide relayed the decision to Councilwoman Tasco, who interrupted the meeting with the news. Housing advocates and their allies in the audience broke into applause.

“We knew [Sheriff Green] would do that,” Ms. Tasco told the council. “He cares about the citizens of Philadelphia.”

Mortgage lenders, servicers and their attorneys thought Mr. Green was acting more Robin Hood than sheriff. “It’s not his job to postpone things in favor of certain people,” says Michael VanBuskirk, a Philadelphia attorney, who describes the city as a “legal free-fire zone.” The city, he says, is “less attractive to business if you can’t be certain that the sheriff won’t invalidate a contract.”

Mr. Green and Judge Jones are casual golfing buddies. Still, Judge Jones warned the sheriff at a meeting soon after the announcement that a blanket moratorium on the sales was “unwise and more-likely-than-not illegal.”

Mr. Green says he never considered the legality of his decision to halt foreclosure sales. His aides say he is being cagey and that he saw himself as a catalyst to get the court to take action.

People Are the Law

“It’s not the sheriff’s job to sell houses,” says Deputy Sheriff’s Officer Paris Washington, a veteran of the department and its head of training. “It’s the sheriff’s job to serve the people who elected him. Because he was elected by the people, he has to listen to the people. Aren’t the people the law?”

In closed-door negotiations in April with lenders’ attorneys and housing advocates, Judges Jones and Rizzo worked out a streamlined process intended to make loans more affordable for delinquent borrowers who live in their houses.

Such homeowners are entitled to a free lawyer at court-supervised conciliation sessions with their loan-servicing company. Housing counselors are lined up to help assemble financial information to enable servicers and their lawyers to assess borrowers’ ability to pay. The lenders are under no legal obligation to reduce principal or interest, but they face strong pressure to make allowances.

Michael McKeever, a partner in Goldbeck, McCafferty & McKeever, says that his clients — large loan servicers and investors — welcome the court initiative’s potential to help borrowers resolve their debt problems. This week Mayor Michael A. Nutter offered $1 million to finance borrowers’ attorneys and counselors.

To give the plan a chance, Judge Jones ordered that sheriff sales on such owner-occupied properties be suspended at least through next month. The foreclosure wave “is a problem,” the judge says. “Is there a way we can do this in a way consistent with the law?”

Mr. Green downplays his own role. “All I did was provide enough time for a solution to develop, which was the easy part,” he says.

Source: The Wall Street Journal