This article looks into the bugging of the office of Philadelphia Mayor John Street, discovered on October 7, 2003, after Street had his own sweep team inspect his office. On the eve of the 2003 mayoral election, an FBI bug was discovered in Mayor John F. Street’s office, unmasking a federal pay-to-play corruption probe of City Hall. The investigation resulted in two dozen convictions, including that of former City Treasurer Corey Kemp, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The article goes into a fair amount of detail including the efforts made by the FBI to get their listening devices installed.
Craig R. McCoy and Mark Fazlollah, Inquirer Staff Writers
Posted: Sunday, October 6, 2013, 2:01 AM
Before it all blew up, the FBI’s bugging of Mayor John F. Street’s City Hall office went off without a hitch.
In a choreographed intrusion, dozens of agents protected the perimeter while the small technical team made its way to Street’s second-floor suite and broke in.
It helped that the mayor’s City Hall office was unguarded and there was no alarm system. And luckily, the hallway key fashioned on the spot by the FBI team also opened the door to Street’s inner office.
Not that it wasn’t nerve-wracking, especially when the FBI’s surveillance crew reported that Street was on the move, possibly heading back to the office late that weekend afternoon from a campaign event in North Philadelphia.
“It was pretty close,” one knowledgeable source recalled, helping to provide the first authoritative account of the bugging. “There were some tense moments.”
As the teams quietly withdrew after their hour’s work, the FBI case agent, John Roberts, turned to his fellow agents and said: “We just made history.”
In perhaps the most audacious act by law enforcement in recent Philadelphia history, the FBI and federal prosecutors chose to rig Street’s office with listening devices as the climax of a “pay-to-play” investigation weeks before before Street was to stand for reelection.
It was all for naught. The FBI would not pick up a single conversation, incriminating or otherwise, before someone leaked word of the bug to the Street administration. A top aide to the mayor then instructed the police commissioner to sweep the office for listening devices.
Ten years ago Monday, Philadelphia police pulled down the small bug from the ceiling of Street’s office, revealing the massive federal investigation.
The news was a bombshell. It rocked the electorate and triggered a tumultuous week rivaled for governmental chaos in recent memory only by the aftermath of the MOVE bombing. The furor grew as FBI agents fanned out across the region, raiding city offices, businesses and homes and handing out a blizzard of federal subpoenas.
In the mad scramble that followed the bug’s discovery at 7:15 a.m. on Oct. 7, 2003, top agents immediately confirmed to a shaken and angry Street that the bug was indeed a FBI device. But the FBI deliberately misled him about the scope of their probe in a desperate ploy to salvage the investigation and protect other bugs still functioning, according to interviews.
Minutes after the FBI briefed him on its investigation, Street put his own spin on things, telling the public he had no idea who had installed the bug. “It could be a private party,” he said.
His police commissioner, Sylvester Johnson, misled the public, too, saying he had ordered the bug sweep as “routine” security check.
It was not until years later, after Johnson’s boss had been safely reelected, that the public learned Johnson had uncovered the bug at the urging of George R. Burrell, Street’s top political aide. Nor did Johnson reveal to the public that he had also alerted the FBI to the pending sweep.
The probe was star-crossed in other ways.
Along with the Democratic mayor, the investigation’s main quarry was Ronald A. White, a lawyer with no government position who nonetheless secretly held sway over concessions at Philadelphia International Airport – along with municipal bond action, city contracts and more.
While Street never faced criminal charges, White headed the long list of corrupt officials, crooked lawyers, bent bankers, and bogus contractors charged in the case. But White died at age 55 of pancreatic cancer two months before his trial, cheating prosecutors of their marquee defendant. Street attended his crowded funeral.
With White gone, the feds turned another indicted official, Corey Kemp, just 32 years old when named city treasurer, into “Mr. Big,” his former defense lawyer, L. George Parry, said last week. Kemp ended up with a 10-year prison sentence, the stiffest handed to anyone in the scandal.
Despite the setbacks, prosecutors went on to win 24 convictions.
…
‘A workaholic’
“I couldn’t believe it. Wow! This is going to the mayor’s office,” Coleman recalls thinking.
The afternoon of the bug’s installation, as many as 80 men and women, most of them FBI agents, played roles, large and small.
Coleman had a supporting role. He was one of several agents stationed in City Hall’s many stairways to head off any visitors on their way to the second floor.
Another team kept an eye on Street as he attended the political event a few miles from the office.
Tailing the mayor was not easy. He traveled with his own watchful security detail.
Still, a source said, “we knew exactly where he would be.”
A big worry was that Street might simply pop back to City Hall.
“Street was known for his erratic habits. He was pretty much a workaholic,” the source said. “He was known to show up day or night.”
The team arrived with a clear understanding of the layout of the mayor’s office. Five weeks before the break-in, sources say, FBI Special Agent J.J. Klaver had scoped out the office to quickly sketch out a floor plan.
Sources declined to say how the agent managed to step inside the office beyond noting that City Hall was a very public space at the time. Klaver declined to comment.
The drawing, obtained by The Inquirer, carefully noted such details as chair placements, the TV, and a credenza behind the mayor’s desk.
Sources declined to say precisely how the FBI entered City Hall itself, a building guarded by police around the clock. Their reticence suggests someone covertly helped the FBI that weekend in late September.
With Street safely off the premises, the technical team, wearing plainclothes, headed up to the second floor and got to work. According to the sources, agents then opened the hallway door to the office, using a technique known as key “impressioning.”
Working with files and key blanks – ones known to work given the lock’s manufacturer – an expert agent carefully created a working key from scratch, pushing the blank in, withdrawing it, noting marks, filing it, reinserting it.
The FBI team, though adept in classic lock-picking, saw impressioning as having an advantage. Break-in artists who pick locks the traditional way have to pick them once again upon departure to restore them to their original locked status.
In about 10 or 15 minutes of uninterrupted work, the agent was finished. The key turned the lock, and the door to Room 215 opened.
Once inside, the team moved swiftly past the desks of two aides, and, using the same key, opened the door to the mayor’s inner office.
There, the agents quickly put the two devices into place, hefting one up to the ceiling, placing it squarely in the middle of the room, above the dropped ceiling.
As they were well into their work, they got a message from the “eyes” out in the field: Street had left the political event early and might be headed back to the office.
It turned out to be a false alarm of sorts. Though Street had moved on from the campaign event, he wasn’t bound for City Hall. Still, the team and the scouts quickly wrapped up the job, leaving behind a seemingly untouched office.
Under the strict ground rules imposed by Judge Robreno, the FBI could not merely turn on the listening device and roll tape.
The rules stipulated the agency could record conversations only among White, Street, and other selected people. The FBI chose to wait until White and Street met in the room. That never happened.
In the brief two weeks or so the bug was in place, the two men never met in City Hall.
The device was never switched on. It never recorded a sound.
It was almost as though people knew to avoid the room.
‘A feeling’
Despite intensive investigation, the FBI was never able to determine who gave up the bug. No one has ever been charged in connection with the leak.