DeFazio macing a relic of old style of Pa. corruption

Former Allegheny County Sheriff Pete DeFazio's guilty plea to a misdemeanor macing charge is one of the last gasps of old machine-style politics that ruled Pennsylvania for a century, political experts say.

Macing -- the once-common practice of forcing public employees to contribute to political campaigns -- nearly vanished during the last 30 years or so. Macing was forced out by the rise of civil-service rules, unions and a public no longer willing to subsidize political paybacks, say experts.

The practices that snared DeFazio and three others in the Sheriff's Office are the same as those that powered the careers of people such as Gov. George Howard Earle III, who was indicted for macing in the 1930s, and Westmoreland County political boss Egidio Cerilli, who went to prison in 1980 for extortion and conspiracy.

"Human nature is such that corrupt individuals are always going to find a way to work the system. I think people can take some comfort in the fact that nowadays, people don't get away with it as much as they did in the old days," said former Pennsylvania Gov. and U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh.

DeFazio's plea Tuesday marked the end of a five-year investigation of the Sheriff's Office by U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan. Two high ranking officials -- including DeFazio's chief deputy, Dennis Skosnik -- are serving time in federal prisons and another is on a year's probation. DeFazio will be sentenced Feb. 23, though he is not expected to get jail time.

The investigation centered on officials who pressured workers to buy tickets to DeFazio's fund-raisers. Those who didn't were punished with undesirable assignments or denied vacation requests.

"Really, the sad part about the sheriff is he probably didn't think he was doing anything wrong," said former county Chief Executive Jim Roddey, who clashed repeatedly with DeFazio over budget and management issues when the two shared the County Courthouse.

Were DeFazio sheriff 40 years ago, he probably would have gotten away with it, said G. Terry Madonna, political science professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster County.

"That was a real common practice in courthouses around the state," Madonna said. "Courthouse gangs" of county officials ran Pennsylvania's local governments from around the end of the Civil War until the 1960s, he said.

Those who wanted a government job needed a local ward chairman's approval. Then they had to give as much as 6 percent of their salaries to the ruling party's campaign coffers, Madonna said.

Party chairmen who were successful macers in county governments sometimes were given a chance to ply their trade at the state level.

Then-Gov. Milton Shapp appointed Cerilli to run PennDOT, which was "a cesspool of corruption," said Thornburgh, who as U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh prosecuted Cerilli on extortion and conspiracy charges in the late 1970s. Thornburgh won the governor's office in 1979.

"The reason I was elected was I had a track record dealing effectively with public corruption. People were concerned about it," said Thornburgh, who became the first governor in decades to avoid a major corruption scandal in his administration.

Several high-ranking officials in the state Legislature and elected state row officers were indicted for corruption during his tenure. The most famous was R.Budd Dwyer, a state treasurer who was found guilty of accepting a bribe and shot himself in the head during a televised news conference the day before he was to be sentenced.

"The tide kind of turned when it was clear that these kinds of activities weren't going to be tolerated," Thornburgh said. Prosecutors were emboldened to go after crooked politicians by a series of federal laws enacted in 1967, including one that allowed public-corruption cases to be prosecuted like racketeering cases.

"Parties became weaker. Unions got a toe-hold in municipal government," and civil-service rules became more widely used, Madonna said.

Many current politicians came of age while watching high-profile officials, such as former state Auditor General Al Benedict, go to jail, Roddey said. Benedict was sentenced to six years in prison in 1988 for tax evasion and racketeering.

"People that have gotten elected in the last few years are not part of that old machine," Roddey said.

In the 1970s, the Justice Department called Pennsylvania the most corrupt state. The department doesn't rank state corruption anymore, but a newsletter called "Corporate Crime Reporter" ranked Pennsylvania as the 14th most corrupt in 2004, based on the number of public-corruption convictions per 100,000 people.

Most corruption today involves politicians enriching themselves, rather than a political machine, said Nils Frederickson, spokesman for state Attorney General Tom Corbett. Instead of employees paying for a job, it's contractors and lobbyists.

"The glory days of Tammany Hall and other things like that -- maybe they have, indeed, gone the way of the dinosaur," Frederickson said. "That doesn't mean there aren't a few dinosaurs still wandering around."

The number of corruption cases nationwide rose sharply in the last six years, as the FBI increased the number of agents in its public-corruption task force from 358 in 2002 to 618 this year. Convictions rose from 584 in 2002 to 759 in 2005, according to the FBI. Of the number of public-corruption convictions this year, roughly 258 -- or 34 percent -- involved local-level government officials.

Pennsylvania Common Cause Executive Director Barry Kauffman won't say whether he believes macing is becoming less common.

"To what degree something is common or not common -- you're kind of playing with fire there," Kauffman said. "What's 'common?' Is it 10 percent• Is it 80 percent•

"One case of corruption's too much."