Fed Ed: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like RICO

Earlier this month, I told you that former Allentown Finance Director Gary Strathearn, known to the feds as Public Official No. 4, would be the next head to roll in the pay-to-play investigation that is clearly targeting Mayor Edwin "Fed Ed" Pawlowski. Yesterday, that's exactly what happened. So far, three of Fed Ed's myrmidons have been toppled as prosecutors methodically build a RICO (racketeering) case against him. For his part, Pawlowski is still in denial, trying to pretend nothing is wrong.

The federal information filed against Strathearn (you can read it here) is similar to the one filed against former Assistant Solicitor Dale Wiles. At the direction of Fed Ed, both participated in a bid-rigging scheme to ensure that an unnecessary revenue collection contract would go to Northeast Revenue.

This work was being done by Portnoff, but Pawlowski was apparently unhappy that contributions had dropped off. Northeast Revenue, in contrast, has kicked in $15,000

Lehigh County, incidentally, as a similar deal with Northeast.

What no one has answered is why.

If a person fails to pay his municipal, county or school tax bill for two years, his property is going to be sold. So there really is no need for privatized tax farmers. The only thing these firms manage to do is penalize homeowners are already down on their luck after losing a job or incurring major medical expenses. They file liens and tack on extortionate attorney fees. if the liens are unpaid, they sell the property and will include attorney fees and other costs that are sometimes as much as ten times greater than the unpaid taxes.

If there were no tax farmers, a homeowner could set up a payment plan with the County to get caught up on his taxes. Even if he fails to make good, the County can eventually sell the property without imposing onerous charges.

The only reason for tax farmers, which first started in several school districts is pure greed. Short-sighted school districts failed to realize they have an obligation to be fair to the taxpayer.

Cities have jumped on this bandwagon, too. Bethlehem and Easton both use tax farmers.

Fairness to taxpayers is obviously rather low on Fed Ed's list of priorities. We now know that, despite his private protests to the contrary, he knew that the feds were looking at him for at least a year before the investigation became public knowledge. Both Wiles and Strathearn gave materially false statements to FBI agents investigating the bid-rigging scheme in May 2014. That explains why, as explained in the Ramzi Haddad information, Fed Ed started using burner phones and sweeping his office for electronic bugs.

The Moody Bible Institute grad had a guilty conscience, something that even his prayer meetings failed to prevent.

Like Lady MacBeth, he washes his hands to remove the stain of guilt, but it's still there. "Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!"

Federal investigators still have plenty of work ahead of them. There's the purchase of land the City did not need, using money it could ill afford to spend, to purchase two tracts of land from Abe Atiyeh at an inflated price. There's the nonexistent Ruckus Brewery at the old Neuweiler Building. There's the City water lease.There's the removal of Allentown Brew Works from the golf course. There's the trash-to-energy plant and the strange switched vote by Cynthia Mota. And of course, the NIZ.

Feds are setting Pawlowski up for a major RICO indictment, and that's going to take time.