Fumo and the Barnes move

Barnes follies (cont'd.):
The Fumo connection

ROBERT ZALLER

While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer made the national headlines last week, Vince Fumo, for 30 years the rainmaker of Philadelphia politics, made the local ones with his announcement that he wouldn’t seek reelection to the Pennsylvania State Senate. “He Brought the Money Home,” the Inquirer mourned in a front-page article, and it was certainly true. Some of the swag, though, may have stayed at home; hence the 139-count federal indictment that hangs over the senator.

“In the immortal words of Shakespeare,” said his colleague Bill DeWeese, himself no stranger to scandal, “his like will not be seen again.”

But, really, I think the last guy you’d want to compare Vince Fumo to is Hamlet. No one ever suggested that Fumo ever had trouble making up his mind about anything, or getting anything he wanted.

Which brings me to my point.

The biggest thing in Vince Fumo’s career may well be the one he refuses to take any credit for.

Easy to find, on page 244

In October 2002, allocations of $100 million and $7 million were placed in the pending Pennsylvania capital budget to facilitate the move of the Barnes Foundation to Philadelphia. There was no public discussion and no debate. The allocations were not very prominently displayed; you have to look them up on page 244. The budget was passed on October 30, 2002.

The title page of that capital budget bears the name of Vincent J. Fumo (D., Philadelphia), Senate Appropriations Co-Chair.

Step forward and take a bow, Vince. They say you brought $8 billion to Philly over the years. At today’s art prices, the Barnes collection, with its more than 350 works by Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse, and Picasso alone, is worth several times as much. This is surely your greatest coup of all.

A funny thing, though. The man who never forgot a friend, a foe, or a favor can’t remember anything about the allocation for the Barnes. Fumo says he has no gosh-darned idea how that little $107 million item got into the budget that bears his signature.

Why, I wonder, would that be?

Despite public assurances…

Let’s go back over the calendar. Back in 2001, the official position of the Barnes Foundation was that it had no wish or intention to move to Philadelphia. Then-director Kimberly Camp assured the public that the Foundation fully expected to work out its alleged financial difficulties while remaining in its Merion home, as mandated in its indenture of trust.

Someone had a different idea, though. Someone had decided that the Barnes ought to go where it said it didn’t want to go.

Can you say “conspiracy to violate a trust”? A conspiracy so brazen that it hid itself in plain sight in the state’s capital budget?

Even afterwards, the state allocation remained concealed on a “need to know only” basis. One person who apparently did not need to know was Judge Stanley R. Ott, whose Montgomery County Orphans Court had jurisdiction over the Barnes, and whose approval was required to move it. In proceedings spread out over a year in 2003-04, Judge Ott was never informed of the existence of the allocation for the Barnes— not by the trustees petitioning for the move; not by their fund-raising allies, the Pew Charitable Trusts; not by the state Attorney General’s Office.

When the judge found out

I think it is fair to say that Judge Ott was not pleased when he finally got wind of the money— in September 2006, nearly two years after his ruling that permitted the Barnes’s move.

Now, you’ll wonder, why not tell the judge? Wasn’t it splendid that the Barnes already had two-thirds of the projected $150 million cost of its move in the bank? Would that not make the case for the move that much stronger? Wasn’t it an actual obligation of the Barnes trustees to declare the Foundation’s assets to the court, especially since their petition was based on a claim of insolvency?

Ah, but let us not forget some inconvenient facts. If Judge Ott had known of the $107 million, he might have asked why the same sum could not be applied to keeping the Barnes in Merion rather than moving it. He might also have done a little research, and discovered that the allocation had been inserted in the state’s budget just after the trustee petition had been filed. Might that not have looked like exactly what it was— an attempt to hijack the Barnes by outside parties, abetted by the trustees themselves?

Fumo’s connections

The Friends of the Barnes Foundation, in its 2007 petition to reopen the matter of the move, flagged this matter for Judge Ott’s official attention. The group asked why material information had been withheld from the court, and pointed to the extraordinarily close and convenient timing between the trustee petition and the state allocation. It pointed to the connections between Vince Fumo and several of the principals involved in the move, among them Stephen J. Harmelin, managing partner of Dilworth Paxson, Fumo’s own law firm and, from 2002, a Barnes trustee.

The trustees, in their reply brief, denounced the mere mention of the $107 million as “scandalous and impertinent.” My Webster’s defines “scandalous” as “libelous,” “shocking,” “defamatory” and “offensive to propriety or morality.” How thieves do howl when they’re caught. As for “impertinent,” that is, among other things, “characterized by insolent rudeness.”

I guess the truth is pretty rude.

No, Vince Fumo isn’t Hamlet. But there really is something rotten in the state of Denmark.

Oral arguments will be heard before Judge Ott on March 24.



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