The Judge Makers

When Lerner lost, one of the first people he went to see was one Michael Nutter, then a councilman and head of the 52nd Ward. Lerner believes that Nutter cut him from his ward’s sample ballot, even though, Lerner says, “Nutter knew what kind of public defender and judge I had been. If I had earned anybody’s support, it was Michael Nutter’s.” But Nutter’s ward went with other, apparently better-paying candidates. Lerner says that Nutter apologized when he went to see him.
 
Lerner had learned his lesson. He spent a great deal of time before the 1999 election going around and kissing up to ward leaders and their committee people. Why? It’s the same answer Erdos gives: He had no choice. If he really wanted to become a judge, that’s what he had to do.
 

I MEET JOHN Sabatina at Fluke’s, a restaurant and bar just off the Cottman Avenue exit of 95; it’s a couple miles from his stomping ground in the Northeast, which is how The Kid wants it — no one will recognize him here or see him talking to a reporter. He is a pasty, nondescript, cautious man who has played hardball politics as a ward leader — the 56th — for two decades. He has had his office broken into, his car set ablaze. Sabatina doesn’t respond in kind. He’s got a different method. A fellow ward leader who’s watched Sabatina work for the past two decades explains it:
 
“Let’s say a ward leader won’t support Ellen Ceisler for judge because she looks like a woman who turned him down for the senior prom. But he can’t tell anybody that, so he’s against Ellen, he’s really against Ellen. John will get on that phone, and he’ll wear the ward leader down. John just keeps calling and calling. It just gets to be too much trouble, so finally … ‘Okay! I’ll support Ellen Ceisler!’ Candidates get their money’s worth out of John Sabatina.”
 
I ask Sabatina how many ward leaders he has that kind of relationship with, how many he can call and badger and finally get what he wants because he’s so relentless. How many?
 
Sabatina won’t say.
 
Twenty? A third of the city?
 
“That’s low.”
 
And what if a ward leader crosses him? What if the leader agrees, say, to back one of his candidates and then takes the candidate’s name off a sample ballot or stickers it over?
 
“They only do that once to me.”