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3 of 4 found the following review helpful:
 Confesssions from a Corrupt Political Worker Dec 18, 2007
A "tell-all" book by a Rizzo political operative and a former State Senate Chief of Staff employee is a fascinating learn that the goon mentality existed within the Rizzo campaign. It is good that the author has had a change of heart, decades later, and hopes that exposure of these past misdeeds will help anger citizens to demand greater honesty of their public servants. Much of the writing, though, comes off with the same bravado that the Rizzo crowd often expressed, yet so long as it is now examples of what not to do, the events depicted are quite enlightening.
Frank Rizzo, was Mayor of Philadelphia from 1972 to 1980. As many of us suspected, the author confirms that cash flowed from associates of organized crime to the Rizzo camp. Reporters who covered the Rizzo campaign ultimately wound up receiving jobs with Rizzo, and while the author cannot confirm if there was any advance knowledge that those writing favorable stories of Rizzo would later be rewarded, he confirms that he knew while he was working for a radio station that a reward was forthcoming. The author writes how he only found research for his radio station that was helpful to the Rizzo campaign. In addition, he admits writing the questions to be posed for Rizzo's debate with his opponent, Thatcher Longstreth, and how he even supplied Rizzo with advance knowledge of what the questions would be. Before the debate, the book states Rizzo thought a "fiscal year" was a "physical year", and Rizzo did not know how that differed from a calendar year. Knowing the questions in advance, Rizzo stunned everyone with his sudden brilliance on city issues.
The author tells of meeting a labor leader by holding a gun to his head, spying on campaign opponents by placing workers in their campaigns, stealing all of Longstreth's prepaid, preaddressed reply cards, tearing down opponent's posters, disrupting opponents' rallies, "bushwhacking" people who attempted to disrupt Rizzo rallies, printing counterfeit campaign materials to trick the supporters of an opposition slate to vote for the Rizzo slate instead, paying off ward leaders to support Rizzo and his candidates, promising approval of a development proposal in return for the owner cancelling a fund raiser for a candidate Rizzo didn't like, and assisting an opponent who could siphon off votes from Rizzo's main opponent.
When Rizzo was in office, the author was Mayor Rizzo's Executive Assistant, Area Manpower Planning Council Chairman, and member and secretary of numerous city boards and commission, to which the author admits "I was not qualified for any of the positions, let alone all of them." Yet, he was capable of doing the job Rizzo wanted, which mostly was getting patronage jobs in the various board and commissions where the author worked for whom Rizzo wanted jobs.
After leaving the Mayor's office, the author became the District Office Chief of Staff to State Sen. Buddy Cianfrani. Cianfrani, as Appropriations Committee, had the ability to get law and graduate schools, who received state funds as allocated by the legislature, to accept students who otherwise would not be accepted. The author claims that two of these unqualified students today are sitting Judges. Unfortunately, this practice that Senator Cianfrani developed was also illegal, and Senator Cianfrani went to jail. The author also discussed how people were illegally put onto the State Senate payroll. These employees did no state work, including the Senator's mistress, who then turned on the Senator when she learned he had still another mistress (not counting the mistress the author claims she didn't know about.) The author even discusses the possibility that there were discussions of "eliminating" the Speaker's Executive Assistant who was a prime witness in the prosecution's case against Senator Cianfrani.
The author admits he was "personally responsible for some reprehensible and possibly criminal activities". Hopefully many of the tactics he describes have disappeared, or only rarely, remain in politics and government. The author is now on a campaign for more ethical government and elections, which is a good thing. It is just too bad he once thought his methods were the way to go. The Rizzo years were among the most corrupt years in our state's history. Fortunately, many were aware that what was going on back then was wrong, and we appreciate that those doing these things now realize the same. With a reformer Michael Nutter about to become the next Philadelphia Mayor, we hope to see further advances towards integrity in Philadelphia politics.
4 of 4 found the following review helpful:
 A Disillusioned Former Rizzo Aide Looks at Political Corruption Jun 23, 2007
From 1971 through 1977, the author lived the seamy side of Philadelphia politics as aide to Mayor Frank Rizzo and State Senator Buddy Cianfrani. Rizzo spent much of his time successfully fending off criminal and journalistic investigations, and Cianfrani eventually pleaded guilty to serious federal charges involving the misuse of his state senatorial office. The author drove Cianfrani to prison, and repeatedly visited him there and did errands for Cianfrani and his fellow prisoners.
The author seemed to have a reverse Midas touch. He was offered a job with Vice-President Spiro Agnew, only to see Agnew plead guilty to corruption charges a week later. As an insurance agent retired from politics, he was asked to temporarily vacate a suite of rooms he had been using for business purposes at Philadelphia's Barclay Hotel: it turned out they were about to be used to entrap Philadelphia elected officials in the famous FBI Abscam investigation.
The author documents the ambivalance many in Philadelphia politics felt towards political corruption. Rizzo would distance himself from wrongdoing and denounce it, but quietly reward wrongdoers who were helping him in the process. Cianfrani took bribes from time to time, but would quickly spend the money on someone else--either through gift buying or gambling--as soon as he got it. Abscam defendant Harry Jannotti told the author that he cut up into pieces $50,000 in Abscam bribe money that he had taken, and flushed it down the toilet. And the author himself documents both his participation in corrupt activities and his efforts to stay clear of them.
As the book evolves, the author becomes a more and more compelling figure.
He was an atypical recruit for the Rizzo 1971 mayoral campaign: he came to Rizzo's attention when he authored a series of hostile, tough questions for a television interview. Accustomed to adulatory softballs from a favorable press corps, campaign manager Al Gaudiosi decided to recruit their antagonist to help them. Stunned at a full-time job offer, the author finally accepted an offer to do part-time research for the campaign while continuing his regular research job with WCAU television. After Rizzo won the mayoral primary, the author officially resigned and joined his campaign team.
Taking money from a campaign that one was covering raised all sorts of ethical questions, but the author was slow to act on them. He busied himself at work developing so many tough questions and for Rizzo's opponents, and negative research on them, that the station had little time or inclination to go after Rizzo.
In the general election campaign, the author scored a great coup that was both dazzlingly effective and completely outrageous: he used his contacts with debate host WCAU to get to co-author the questions for the debate between Rizzo and Republican opponent Thacher Longstreth. Rizzo and Gaudiosi refused to further engage him in debate planning (the author had fully researched different debate formats as well), but used the advance text of his questions to good effect, having Rizzo memorize persuasive answers to them, while his better educated and informed opponent was having to instantly respond to questions he was hearing for the first time. High school dropout Rizzo far exceeded expectations against Princeton University graduate Longstreth, and the wind was gone from Longstreth's campaign as a result.
Some of the research he was paid to do for Rizzo appeared odd: he was asked to critique Rizzo's record from the point of view of the black community, a request that seemed like it was to aid the campaign of State Rep. Hardy Williams, a black freshman state legislator whose campaign seemed to aid Rizzo's by helping mobilize voter turnout and splitting the opposition vote.
Rizzo would ultimately hire about 30 members of the press for jobs in his adminstration. The author says he felt "like a whore" for taking Rizzo's money while pretending to be an objective journalist, and he assumes without investigation that others Rizzo hired also were rewarded during the campaign as well and had their coverage influenced towards Rizzo by an understanding that they,too, would be joining his administration.
The author's job in the administration revolved around the development of patronage rewards for supporters and potential supporters, and the linking of existing city jobs to the Rizzo patronage apparatus. The author recounts his dedication to wooing Rizzo opponents with excellent responsiveness to their needs and requests, and his less than admirable activities.
These included seeking financial contributions from all sorts of shady characters and people whose economic interests were adverse to those of the average citizen, yielding to the ethos of personal enrichment and pressure from superiors by keeping some of their cash contributions for himself, developing a list as to the city employees in each ward, and sharing it with wardleaders and key Rizzo campaigners as a resource for organization-building, securing Cadillacs to be given to black wardleaders who would back Rizzo over strong constituent objections, recruiting violent thugs to harass opposition rallies and break up an opposition ward meeting, harass the Democratic City Committee through violence and disruption of its pre-1974 primary fundraiser, and use his vast patronage power only to build a political machine, and not to recruit well-motiavted high-quality people to government.
The author's role as Rizzo critic turned Rizzo zealot(even Rizzo said he was "nuts") alienated his original patron Gaudiosi, and led to him being surveilled at home by Rizzo aide Phil Carroll. This increased his sensitivity to privacy issues, and he was able to prevail on a member of Rizzo's notorious "spy squad" to stop wiretapping private City Council Democratic caucus meetings.
Other virtuous acts the author committed including getting Philadelphia sidewalks curbed in a fashion that increased the mobility of handicapped persons, dramatically increasing the access of the handicapped to Philadelphia city governmental jobs, turning down an offer of a key Rizzo backer of oral sex with his beautiful secretary, and deciding that he would not perjur himself if interrogated by investigators, an eventuality that never occurred. But he did not volunteer information about what he knew to investigators either.
Thoroughly sick of corruption, but attracted on a personal level to a good number of people who engaged in corrupt acts, he left politics and government in 1977, and did not return to political involvement, with the exception of a generous contribution to 1983 Rizzo foe Wilson Goode, until the 2007 mayoral campaign of insurance executive Tom Knox, where he played an important opposition research role.
The author's long absence from the political scene leads to occasional factual errors and overgeneralizations, but his book still ranks as a classic in Philadelphia politics. At a national level, there are thousands of books by disillusioned insiders; this may be the first such book ever written on Philadelphia poltics.
The author errs in seeing corruption as the same in the Rizzo Administration as in the current Street Administration; he fails to carefully examine the examples he cites. Corruption in the Rizzo Adminstration was all about maintaining a vast political machine in contravention of laws mandating merit hiring and objective considerations for awarding contracts. It was about using violence as a tool to keep the opposition too scared and too weak to fight.
The author's reprinting of ward by ward election returns makes clear the widespread geographical dispersion of Rizzo's opposition, and the narrow geographical base of his intense support. The author also makes clear the obstacles Rizzo faced as a supporter of high-profile Republicans like Richard Nixon and Arlen Specter, as a cultural conservative in a basically liberal city, as an insurgent fighting a political organization committed to the advancement of the Democratic Party.
By the time of the Street Administration, political machines had lost their status as a controlling force, and his administration's corruption was overwhelmingly about the private enrichment of campaign contributors. The Street Administration used access to political capital and favorable media coverage as far less invasive mthods of maintaining control, as did all of Rizzo's other successors.
The author makes judicious use of quotations from the ancient world. He quotes Machiavelli to the effect that only a well-informed leader can balance and synthesize conflicting advice, and Sallust's warnings about the dangers of men who rely on showmanship and natural aggressiveness instead of genuine concern for the public.
The author and this reviewer share the belief that the great tragedy of the Rizzo Administration was its lack of vision and purpose; the author accuses Rizzo of being being hostile and hateful towards those with genuine expertise in areas of public policy.
The author never fit in with the general insular blue collar aura of the Rizzo movement: while he shared Rizzo's ethnicity, he was an intellectual with army intelligence experience in various parts of the world. He lived first in a black neighborhood, and then in a liberal professional neighborhood. He had no previous ties to politics, or to the police force. While his grandfather was a barber, his father was a doctor, and he did not grow up with resentments toward the wealthy and the powerful. While the Rizzo movement was substantially about cultural conformity in the anti-Vietnam War era, the author smoked and acted as a supplier of it for his coworkers at WCAU.
The author's personal relationship to Rizzo was always ambivalent. He was a loyal hard-charger who ruffled a lot of feathers, and thus created additional political problems for Rizzo, already swamped with political problems. He developed loyalties to others he worked with, which he says infuriated Rizzo. At the low point in their relationship, in the 1975 campaign, Rizzo threatens to kill him. The author thinks that Rizzo is crazy, in over his head, and he blames Rizzo's staff for not reognizing that and reigning Rizzo in. But the author himself lives in fear of crossing Rizzo openly. Rizzo bounces him from job to job, often with pay increases, but clearly does not want him to go into the opposition camp.
Now that the author has laid the groundwork for a public understanding of who he is and what he did, this reviewer hopes he will finish the novel he is writing about Philadelphia politics, do further research, refreshing of his memory, and writing about the Rizzo Administration, and continue to speak out as a needed voice for political reform and a sage adviser about the relevance of the past towards the present.
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