Word count: 1067 | Reading time: 5 min read
Pretzel Logic
Manipulating the media and other tales from Castle Fumo.
I know that Vince Fumo didn’t hire Gary Tuma for his comedic talents. But watch out, Letterman — the man is hilarious.
He had me in stitches last week, when I was reading Ron Avery’s story in the Daily News about our troubles with Dark Prince Vince, dour denizen of Castle Fumo.
All we were trying to do was find out how many gold doubloons the Dark Prince is sinking into his Green Street castle. Information available on every other property in the history of Philadelphia. Fumo reacted as if we were the Huns. He manned theparapets, stoked up the legal oil vats and tried to immolate us in a firestorm of court petitions. The whole thing cost us many pieces of eight.
Ripping a page out of the playbook of another famed prince, the one named Machiavelli, Fumo cited security concerns in the wake of alleged death threats as the reason the city agreed to place those records off limits. Seems some crazed contractormight dime out the Fumos and give up the secret security plans to assassins unknown if the records were made public.
By way of explanation for the Dark Prince’s heavy-handed reaction, Tuma delivered a punchline to Avery that still has me rolling on the floor.
He accused Scott Farmelant, who wrote the piece, of “trying to manipulate the media.”
And this from a guy who started calling me weeks ago in a dither, first accusing Farmelant of the heinous crime of being in a public room, seeking public information.
“I hear Scott Farmelant is in the Board of Revision of Taxes,” Tuma told me about a month ago in the somber tone normally reserved for informing the press about who really killed Kennedy or where you can find Jimmy Hoffa’s remains.
After explaining to Tuma that, when last I checked, such actions were not prohibited according to the tea-stained copy of the Bill of Rights that hangs on a wall in my office, I courteously informed Tuma that he was a tad mistaken.
Farmelant, I told him, not that it mattered, was not in City Hall.
Not even close.
He was on Martha’s Vineyard or some other stretch of New England marble.
“No, he was just in City Hall,” Tuma reiterated, the edge in his voice tipping me off that all was not well at Castle Fumo and that Prince Vince’s court jester might have dropped one too many juggling balls on his noggin.
The hilarity only continued from there.
A couple of weeks ago, some dim-witted jamoke called us up and left a message for Farmelant.
It wasn’t a love missive.
The guy, who implied that he was one of the many workers scurrying about to spruce up Castle Fumo, said that if Farmelant kept asking questions about the castle, he would “put a 9 mm in his head.”
The police officer who arrived to take the report about the death threat was far more interested in picking up our copy editor than figuring out who might have made the phone call.
A day after the death threat, we received a copy of a letter from Richard Sprague. He’s the 800-pound gorilla of blood-sucking attorneys who brings in a goodly amount of gold doubloons trying to intimidate newspapers out of writing stories.
Sprague was complaining to the court that, by trying to find out the age of Fumo’s daughter, we were actively seeking to violate her security.
The charge was sheer lunacy. But it was no secret that with each inane letter and petition from their lawyers, our legal meter was redlining, which is how 800-pound gorillas operate when they want to scare newspapers away from stories. Or at leastmake them smart from a nasty legal beating.
Not surprisingly, Dark Prince Vince was less than pleased with our efforts and was quick to let us know as much.
Last week Farmelant visited the Board of City Trusts, another one of Fumo’s many little fiefdoms, this one dolingout dollops of doubloons to developers and others.
Farmelant asked why the board was closing its doors in mid-meeting, only to be rebuffed again by the Dark Prince.
“Sue us. Out,” he barked.
The fun didn’t stop with the pre-publication silliness.
One of the people who deliver our newspaper called up last Thursday, somewhat dismayed, to inform us that Skinny Joe Merlino didn’t want the Castle Fumo issue of the paper delivered to his Avenue Cafe.
The reason, surmised the driver, was that Merlino was unhappy that the Dark Prince Vince had been dissed.
So I called up the reputed mob boss and asked him why he put the hit out on our delivery.
“Oh, it must have been one of the young guys,” said Merlino. “They don’t understand. Go ahead, bring in the papers.”
I immediately felt relieved that Skinny Joe is such a big fan of the First Amendment. Hey, maybe the feds have it all wrong about this guy after all.
But my feeling of relief didn’t last long.
We got another call, from another driver.
“Somebody stole my papers,” shouted the driver. “Somebody stole my papers. All of them. Am I going to get fired? Am I going to get paid?”
Three thousand papers were heisted from a drop-off point on Washington Avenue under the I-95 bridge.
Gone.
Goodbye.
Vanished into the ether.
Funny thing is, they were headed for, you guessed it, the neighborhood surrounding Castle Fumo.
Now, anyone could have taken the 3,000 papers. They were sitting on the street and ripe for the plucking.
It could have been the Army of the Twelve Monkeys.
It could have been 1,000 homeless people looking for bedding.
It could have been some disgruntled musician unhappy with EarSHOT, our new music and style magazine published in the last issue.
When I called the police, the woman on the phone asked if we were the Inquirer.
“Oh, you’re only the City Paper,” she said, disappointedly, clearly delineating our place in the journalistic pecking order.
The police who showed up at my office Tuesday were as amused as we were about the whole missing papers incident.
They had no idea who would want our papers, until shown a copy of that issue.
What did we expect, they joked, putting a picture of Vince Fumo’s house on the cover?
I don’t know.
We’re only the City Paper.
