Video of Frank Rizzo calling a reporter a ‘crumb bum’ aired on this week in Philly history
Stan Bohrman wanted to know why members of the Philadelphia Police Department were acting as security guards for the former mayor and police commissioner.
A KYW-TV reporter had a simple question.
Stan Bohrman wanted to know: Why were members of the Philadelphia Police Department acting as security guards for Frank Rizzo, the former mayor and police commissioner?
So Bohrman and members of Channel 3’s investigative team went to find an answer.
A cameraman piled his equipment inside a dark-gray van in the fall of 1980 and parked it outside Rizzo’s Chestnut Hill estate. The goal was to record video of the officers acting as a security detail for Rizzo, who had left office at the beginning of the year.
And then Rizzo and the officers spotted the van.
Rizzo and a few officers confronted the occupant, and after the cameraman identified himself, Rizzo took a few whacks at the video equipment and knocked out the feed as the officers looked on.
A few days later, the reporter, Bohrman, caught up with Rizzo again as the former mayor walked his dog outside his home.
Rizzo, wrapped in a tan raincoat, sporting a patterned fedora, and puffing on a cigar, wasn’t having it.
“Can we talk with you just a moment?” Bohman asked.
“No, I’m busy,” Rizzo responded.
When the questioning continued, Rizzo aggressively grabbed the reporter’s microphone, threatened the reporter with physical violence, and then accused him of being an alcoholic.
“You’re a real crumb bum,” he said. “You’re a crumb creep lush coward.”
When the reporter denied being a “lush,” Rizzo said: “You are a lush, I can tell by looking at ya. I was a cop all of my life and I know a lush when I see one.”
The station’s I-Team report was broadcast locally on Nov. 10, 1980, and Bohrman lamented how the news gatherers had become the focus of the story.
“When it all started, we just wanted to know if your tax dollars were being properly spent for the continuing use of security guards for Mr. Rizzo,” he said in his television report. “We still don’t have the answer to that question.”
About 12 hours after Bohrman’s encounter with Rizzo, the officers were pulled off the house.
Then-Police Commissioner Morton Solomon said the timing was coincidental.
Bohrman, who had made his name in the 1970s as a prominent newscaster on the West Coast, died of cancer in 1994 at age 63.
His son, David, chuckled about the confrontation in an interview with NBC10 in 2017.
“My father was not a lush,” he said. “It was a throw-it-out-there line. Rizzo had to throw out some kind of insult there.”