The Judge Makers

It doesn’t feel tough or hardball so much as … absurd. That this guy … The other big-time consultants in the city, Carol Campbell and Pete Truman, go at it a little differently. Campbell, head of the city’s 4th Ward and a former city councilwoman, is close to Bob Brady, and wields much of her power through the city committee. She’s gotten into trouble: Campbell was indicted in 2001 for not reporting activities of her political action committee. No problem: Two years later, deeming herself a consultant, she didn’t have to account for the $140,000 she collected from judicial candidates.
 
In the 2007 election, though, one of the Common Pleas candidates suggests that Campbell was playing fast and loose. The candidate was in the office of a ward leader who received a call from Campbell; he put her on speaker phone. Campbell wanted a candidate, one who had paid her to be on a sample ballot, removed from that ballot. “Take him off — take him off today! I want you to put this other person on the ballot,” the candidate heard Campbell demand.
 
Here’s another trick of the trade practiced by Campbell: Promise several wards’ worth of support for some other consultant’s candidate, collect a check from that candidate, and then return the uncashed check to the bewildered — and angry — candidate after the election. Nothing illegal there, since she didn’t get paid. (Campbell has recently had serious health problems that may be diminishing her power.)
 
As for Pete Truman, he stages meet-and-pay events at the Airport Sheraton and other city hotels, comprising a series of get-togethers with 10 or so mostly African-American ward leaders. At the first one, prospective candidates come and speak for a couple of minutes, selling themselves; next, the ward leaders meet privately to decide whom they’re going to support; then at a third meeting, the anointed candidates come back with checks for the ward leaders. Mike Erdos, for one, paid Truman $25,000.
 
But Sabatina, jeez … A guy who at one point, when he worked for the Housing Authority, was relegated to a desk next to a soda machine. A guy with a personality “like chewing aluminum foil,” says the ward leader who’s known him forever. A guy who admits that “People constantly put up roadblocks for people like me.” This is why insiders laugh that he’s now being compared to Buddy Cianfrani. Buddy was a rascal. Buddy was fun. Sabatina is … a pain in the ass. He just won’t stop.
 
John Sabatina worked with three candidates for Common Pleas in 2007, with only four slots open. All three — Erdos, Alice Beck Dubow, and Ellen Ceisler, for whom he did some pro bono work as a favor to John Dougherty — won. All three — in the sheepish description of one of the winning judges — are rich Jews. This is the sort of co-opting of his system that makes that moralist Bob Brady crazy (he calls consultants “insultants”); Brady wields his wannabe-judge list with an eye to making the bench reflect the ethnic makeup of the city.