When things get rough for Pennsylvania politicians, each party will reach for its own house judge to overrule the other party’s lower-court decision.
Editor’s note: Pennsylvania politicians spend years appointing judges to the state’s courts, and helping them get elected to ever higher courts. When the sledding gets rough, those politicians reach for, and expect help from, those politically appointed judges.
Today’s political turmoil on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is nothing much new. The following article was excerpted and only slightly updated from Bill Keisling’s 1993 book “When the Levee Breaks, a history of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.”
Tunrpike commissioner Peter J. Camiel was loved by Pennsylvania Democrats in the 1980s, and just as disliked by Republicans, and bedeviled by corruption charges involving old-time patronage practices.
Camiel was one of the more colorful characters in the history of Pennsylvania politics. He certainly lived a life. In his youth he was a light-heavyweight prizefighter in Philadelphia. At nineteen he set out to see the country. He threshed Kansas wheat, poked Wyoming cows, worked as a longshoreman organizer and a theater stagehand in San Francisco.
An expert crap shooter, one night working as a stagehand, he won $3,600 from actor John Barrymore.
Before long he drifted back to Philadelphia where he was elected a Democratic ward leader. In 1952 Camiel won a state senate seat in an upset victory, beating the brother of the Republican city boss.
Time would make Camiel a millionaire wholesale beer distributor. He felt no compunction about using his public office to further his beer business. Once in the state senate he fought a bill that sought to raise $37 million for Philadelphia schools when he learned the proposal levied a small tax on beer and liquor. In 1971 he won passage of a law allowing beer distributors a monopoly to import beer from out-of-state brewers.
Camiel became chairman of the Philadelphia Democratic committee in 1970. As Philadelphia boss he cut a deal with Pittsburgh Democrats in 1971 to nominate one of two open state supreme court seats. Democrats at each end of the state would select a candidate.
Camiel picked Robert N.C. Nix, Jr., a black. Nix’s father, Robert N.C. Nix, Sr., was the state’s first black congressman, elected from Philadelphia in 1958. The Pittsburgh Democrats tried to balk at the prospect of running a black for supreme court, but Camiel held them to their agreement. Nix was elected and, by seniority, would become chief justice in 1984.
Chairman Camiel, meanwhile, deepened a feud with Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo. In 1973 he accused Rizzo of approaching him in the bathroom of the Bellevue Stratford Hotel and offering him control of the city’s architectural contracts if Rizzo could select the next nominee for city district attorney. This episode tarnished Rizzo’s Mr. Clean image, some say hurting his chances to become governor. Rizzo, in 1976, ousted Camiel as party chairman.
Hoping for a political comeback, Camiel won an appointment as turnpike commissioner. The comeback hit a snag with charges of corruption. On October 25, 1980, a federal jury convicted Camiel and two others on mail fraud charges. The feds accused them of placing thirty-six no-show “ghost” workers on the state senate payroll between 1974 and 1978.
Convicted with Camiel were state senator Vinnce Fumo, and senate majority leader Thomas Nolan. Fumo during some of the time in question had served as chairman Camiel’s patronage chief, with the title executive assistant in charge of patronage. The three had written letters requesting jobs for the no-show workers, hence the mail fraud charges. Some of the ghosts ended up working at Democratic party headquarters while others didn’t work at all.
Part of the trial centered on whether certain patronage practices may have still been legal at the time they were perpetrated. A city party official, referring to then-recent legislative patronage reforms, told reporters, “The case presented the thorny question of, ‘When they did what they did, was it considered illegal at the time or merely unethical?‘” It clearly was a case of old-time practices judged in the harsh light of a new day.
Camiel and Nolan took the jury’s guilty verdict like rocks. Reports had Fumo, then thirty-seven years old, “visibly shaken” by the jury’s decree. “I’m crushed,” he told reporters as he left the courthouse. “I feel just utter despair.”
Even before the verdict Fumo was reported to be considering getting out of politics. Politics was just getting too clean.
Convicted on all fifteen charges brought against him, Fumo faced seventy-five years in the pen and a $15,000 fine. His electorate seemed to take it in stride. He was re-elected a few days later, but was not sworn in pending appeal.
Governor Thornburgh had already suspended the indicted Pete Camiel from the Turnpike Commission. The Philadelphia Inquirer, meanwhile, boasted about a series of articles it had published that it claimed was responsible for the guilty verdicts.
Camiel Nolan and Fumo, as I say, appealed and, the next year, on August 4, 1981, federal judge Clifford Scott Green threw out the convictions.
In response to pre-trial motions, Green acquitted the three of fraud charges, citing not so much a lack of evidence as conflicting evidence. Some of the conspirators and unindicted co-conspirators hated each other, Green ruled, so he found it hard to believe they’d cooperate in any scheme. (One or two of those involved had earlier deposed Camiel from the county chairmanship.)
The prosecution had maintained there was one scheme, the defense said there was no scheme but, if there was, there were two unrelated schemes, while judge Green said evidence suggested there may have been as many as four separate schemes. Because the prosecution had developed evidence for one grand scam, the same evidence couldn’t be applied to prove several scams, Green ruled, and dismissed charges. It wasn’t exactly what you’d call a great moral victory.
The day after charges were dropped, the Inquirer, forgetting its earlier claim of proud responsibility for the convictions, ran a gushing puff-piece on Fumo.
The paper described him glowingly as Philadelphia’s wheeling and dealing “golden boy,” who somehow now stood redeemed and venerated. When he heard the charges against him had been thrown out, “I let go a lot of emotion,” Fumo told the Inquirer. “I cried for a while.” Now a free man, Fumo brimmed with all the possibilities of a fresh start. He’d finally be sworn in for another term in the state senate. From here out he’d be a man of the people, a reformer, he promised. “There’s a tax relief bill I want to get through,” he bubbled. “Oh, there’s just a lot of things, a long list.”
This wasn’t Fumo’s first brush with trouble. He’d resigned from his first stint in state government, as a commissioner in Gov. Milton Shapp’s office of professional and occupational affairs in the 70s. He’d been accused of using that office to spy on Shapp’s enemies. Even so, the Inquirer pointed out, no one ever alleged Fumo used his offices for “personal enrichment.”
Things weren’t so bright for Pete Camiel. Soon after the acquittal, turnpike chairman Jack Greenblat wrote governor Thornburgh to say Camiel would be reinstated as commissioner. Thornburgh objected, saying only he had the power to reinstate a commissioner. The governor said Camiel’s acquittal, caused by a variance between the crimes charged and those proven by the evidence, “appeared to be based more on a legal technicality than a finding of innocence.” Thornburgh cited a court ruling which, he said, empowered him to suspend anyone “for acts of misconduct that may fall short of an indictable offense.”
Republican Thornburgh directed Republican attorney general LeRoy Zimmerman to seek an immediate court injunction to prevent Democrat party boss Camiel from being reinstated to the Turnpike Commission.
There ensued a memorable partisan battle in the state courts. State lawyers, I’m told, to this day, still talk about the partisan “battle of the house judges.”
Each party reached for its own house judge to overrule the other party’s lower-court decision. (Republicans went to State Supreme Court Justice William Hutchinson, while the Democrats used Commonwealth Court President Judge James Crumlish.)
Observers say this fight over Camiel was actually an attempt by Thornburgh to gain more control over the commission, particularly the awarding of bonds. While the court battle raged the commission lacked votes. Thornburgh deliberately worsened the situation by instructing his representative on the commission not to vote, creating a lack of quorum. Without a working panel of commissioners the turnpike was paralized. Day to day business like the processing of purchase orders and hirings ground to a halt. Fidelity Bank of Philadelphia, the turnpike’s trustee, went to court to break the deadlock (some say Thornburgh encouraged the bank to sue). Thornburgh viewed the fight over Camiel as a bargaining chip to win more leverage (and largesse) in future turnpike battles.
The Battle of the House Judges culminated with Camiel issuing vague instructions to a young turnpike lawyer to telephone state Supreme Court Chief Justice Nix after hours for an emergency order that would serve to retain Camiel as commissioner. Nix, nominated to the court by Camiel, was only too happy to help his patron.
Chief Justice Nix went so far as to suggest the type of order which the young, befuddled and shaken turnpike attorney would best request. (Not long afterward Camiel got his own lawyer; the joke at the turnpike was that Chief Justice Nix called Camiel to say the young turnpike lawyer didn’t know what he was doing.) Camiel remained as commissioner.
This use of “house judges” continues to this day, with Gov. Tom Corbett’s selection of the friendly federal Middle District Court of Pennsylvania to hear his suspect anti-trust case against the NCAA, for example.
“Not illegal, but merely unethical” became the patronage battle cry at the turnpike, and throughout Pennsylvania’s courts for the next dozen years.
There have been relatively few prosecutions at the troubled state courts or, for that matter, throughout much of state government. This is not because those in government and on the courts are getting more honest — by all accounts they’re bravely crooked and getting braver. It’s not only because our law enforcement community has been so poorly and politically administered over the recent decades.
It’s mostly because we have created a political culture built on greed and selfishness. No one seems willing or able to draw the line between avarice and illegality.
There are no standards by which to measure proper conduct.
Postscript: In 2009 State Sen. Vince Fumo was finally convicted of “enriching himself.” Funo was found guilty of all 137 counts of political corruption brought against him by Republican U.S. Attorney Pat Meehan. Nevertheless, federal Judge Walter Buckwalter, of Lancaster County, and a graduate of F&M, sentenced Philly’s longtime political boss to only 55 months in Club Fed. Go figure.
The Peter J. Camiel Service Plaza meanwhile to this day is open 24/7/365, and serves the public at mile marker 304.8 of the Pennsylvania tunrpike, outside of Philadelphia.
Happy motoring!
