INQUIRER: On the stand, Fumo was somber yet personable and expansive, his voice an alto scratch. He would take frequent verbal peregrinations on any number of subjects, going off-question, offering a five-minute answer when five words would do. Many were the times that lawyers, on both sides, asked him to return to the task at hand. “I can go into depth,” Fumo said. “No, don’t do that,” Cogan admonished. Fumo described an approach where “everything in my life was intertwined,” he said. “I don’t know how to run an organization without that familial methodology,” he said. He referred to staff as family members. He spoke sadly of family members who are now estranged.
The intensity, loyalty and sheer energy Fumo demanded from subordinates bordered on the military. Lieutenants signed up for ceaseless hours and constant demands, more than a few suffering from Stockholm syndrome. “In politics, there are few secrets,” Fumo testified. But he tried to keep some. On Monday, many spilled into the courtroom, some almost painfully private. He apologized for spying on his older daughter’s e-mail, for writing communiques drowned in profanity, for hiring an investigator to spy on a former girlfriend because she was just not that into him. “I was heartbroken. I was jealous. I was in love.” Of hiring the investigator, “I’m not proud of it,” Fumo said, though he said he had no idea the bills were paid by the Pennsylvania Senate. That is, by you and me.
“I was screwed up as a kid myself and that spilled over into adulthood,” he read from a letter he had written to daughter Nicole. “It took years and years of therapy to try and get me to figure out where I had screwed up my life and that I needed medication.” Nicole later disinvited Fumo to her wedding to his onetime protege Christian Marrone, who served as one of the government’s chief witnesses against him. Fumo and his daughter haven’t spoken in two years. MORE