Power: The Importance of Being Ernie

I half expect him to run for state office again because he enjoys schmoozing so much, but he can’t; he’s barred from doing so. Which is a shame — for Ernie, at any rate. Having a big platform is Ernie in his element.

As a tough-talking law-and-order prosecutor, he wrote the book on how to win capital cases. Ernie sent five men to death row as Lackawanna County District Attorney. As Attorney General, he won a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the state death penalty. One of the crackdown crime measures he fought for made it exceedingly hard for lifers to get their sentences commuted. When it came to drugs, he was the law in Pennsylvania. Ernie had a grand plan to take over narcotics cases from county prosecutors, and formed a special squad — 23 officers in all — who’d run around the state making drug busts, dressed in unmarked black hoods and combat fatigues, carrying automatic weapons. But even Ernie’s supporters among county D.A.’s saw his scheme as opportunism. “His grand plan to take over narcotics prosecutions was clearly designed to feather his nest and assist him in his campaign for governor,” says Bucks County Common Pleas Court Judge Alan M. Rubenstein, a four-term district attorney and president of the state’s D.A. association in the early 1990s. And then there was the way Ernie ran the A.G.’s office. His temper was legend; staffers called his office “Thunderdome.” He’d conduct an interview with a reporter with his feet up on his desk, eating an apple, gazing out over the capitol from that 16th-floor window. He’d bark into the intercom, yelling at his secretary to bring so-and-so in to explain a case, and then the attorney would come cowering in, not knowing what to expect.

Regardless, Ernie was on his way to the governor’s mansion, considered the front-runner for the GOP nomination when he entered the race in 1994. Then the campaign-funding scandal broke, and within two months, it all started to unravel. In June 1995, Ernie pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud relating to $20,000 in illegal cash contributions from video-poker operators. That was after he went around to tell D.A.’s throughout the state, “They’re after me for spurious reasons.” For Ernie, though, it was either negotiate a plea or risk a much longer jail sentence associated with a potential federal RICO indictment, not to mention the possibility of exposing two of his brothers to legal problems.

You might be able to call this a redemption story, the neatly tied-together standard comeback morality play, if Ernie would admit the extent of his campaign funding problems. But he won’t. He continues to package it as though he pleaded to a minor crime, taking a fall to protect his brothers. Give a listen: “It wasn’t any racketeering,” Ernie says. “It wasn’t any favors granted to anybody. It was a state election law violation that, because I put the documents in the mail, was elevated to federal mail fraud. That’s all it was. Less that $20,000.” The truth is, Ernie was staring down the barrel of a big racketeering indictment, a series of crimes far broader than one count of mail fraud.