Dancing Philly sheriff ad was part of $8 million in new ‘slush fund’ spending

College football fans probably weren’t expecting to see Philadelphia Sheriff Rochelle Bilal on TV in November when they sat down to watch the Penn State Nittany Lions take on the Michigan State Spartans.

But there she was, with sheriff’s-office branded hand fans, line dancing with her coworkers to 803Fresh’s viral hit “Boots on the Ground.”

The purpose of the 30-second advertisement was not clear until its final moments, when the words “apply to be a sheriff” appeared on screen along with the office’s web address.

The advertisement was an effort to hire more deputies as Bilal’s office, like law enforcement agencies across the country, grapples with historic staffing shortages.

Bilal won’t answer questions about the ad, including how much it cost, who was paid to produce it, and whether it led to the desired number of recruits.

Records obtained by The Inquirer show that in October 2025, weeks before the Penn State-Michigan State game, a sheriff’s office employee cut a $250,000 check to a communications firm run by Bilal’s former campaign manager, Teresa Lundy, for a “deputy hiring campaign.”

Lundy’s firm, TML Communications, was also paid $255,569 in April 2025 and $100,971 in July 2024 for advertising related to deputy recruitment, according to the records, which were obtained through a Right-to-Know request.

The $606,540 ad campaign appears to have brought in a handful of deputy recruits. The office listed 38 new recruits between October 2025 and March 2026, compared to 22 new recruits during the same period a year before, payroll records show.

In comparison, the much larger Philadelphia Police Department hired 468 officers last year, using $500,000 for similar recruitment marketing that was allocated by the city’s Office of Human Resources.

However, the recent ad campaign checks — and thousands of other “off-budget” expenditures made on Bilal’s watch — were instead written from a little-known TD Bank account called “Operation Cost Payable” that a former top aide said operates as a “slush fund.”

Bilal’s office previously described the account in a year-end summary as containing revenue from fees the office charges for services such as hosting real estate auctions or serving eviction writs and other court orders.

That revenue is required to be turned over to city coffers and allocated through the city’s annual budget process, according to a 2022 city controller audit and an opinion issued at that time by the city’s Law Department.

But Bilal’s staff has repeatedly insisted that they are allowed to circumvent that process and spend the money as they see fit.

The new financial records show that off-budget spending in the sheriff’s office has increased dramatically.

Between March 2024 and October 2025, the sheriff’s office has made nearly $8 million in such purchases, with some of the largest checks going to TML Communications.

An earlier Inquirer report detailed about $2 million in spending from this account during a 17-month period, from October 2022 to February 2024. Since then, the pace of monthly spending from these accounts has nearly quadrupled.

The office’s annual budget is $35.5 million.

Bilal and Lundy would not comment on the new expenditures.

Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s spokesperson, Joe Grace, and city finance director Rob Dubow did not answer questions about how that money in the sheriff’s office is being spent.

City Council President Kenyatta Johnson and 15 other Council members all declined to comment for this article.

Councilmember Mark Squilla said in an email Thursday he was not aware of the sheriff’s spending and would reach out to the city Law Department for a legal opinion.

“If true it would be a serious concern,” Squilla said.

Lauren Cristella, president and CEO of the good-government group Committee of 70, said the sheriff’s office is violating the Home Rule Charter by spending money that should be transferred to the city’s general fund.

“While Philadelphia scrambles to fund its schools and finds more ways to tax its residents, our sheriff is running a personal slush fund, spending public money on herself and her cronies like it’s her own private account,” Cristella said.

Cristella also criticized Council for “looking the other way as public dollars disappear.”

"They have the authority to end it," she said. “They have chosen not to. That is not oversight. That is complicity.”

While Bilal has said the office struggles with its core functions due to a lack of funding, the Operation Cost Payable account has paid for expenses that do not relate to these duties, according to an Inquirer review of 19 months of checks ending last October.

They include:

The office also tapped this account to pay $466,000 to staffing company FirstPro for temporary hires to assist with handling real estate sales and accounting. For the last two years, the office has been unable to promptly process deeds following sheriff sales.

An earlier Inquirer analyses found similar expenditures in past years, including a $300,000 pop-up health clinic, professional DJs, a $6,600 party at Chickie’s & Pete’s and a $9,250 costume for the office mascot, “Deputy Sheriff Justice.” The mascot, a cowgirl, is prominently featured in the new recruitment ad.

The increased spending is the result of the sheriff’s office bringing in millions more in fees: In mid-2024, auctions of tax-delinquent properties resumed after being offline for three years. Later that year, the office assumed eviction services that had previously been handled by the now-defunct Landlord Tenant Officer.

Bilal, a former Philadelphia police officer, was elected in 2019 as a self-described reformer who pledged to bring transparency to the sheriff’s office and clean up its finances.

Within weeks of taking office, however, Bilal’s first chief financial officer, Brett Mandel, said he was terminated after he refused to steer off-budget money to the sheriff’s allies and associates.

The sheriff then started signing the checks herself, Mandel has said.

“In my first week as CFO for the sheriff, I took a look at this and said, ‘I don’t think any of this is legal,’” Mandel, a former deputy city controller, said last week.

Mandel filed a whistleblower lawsuit after he was fired in 2020. City lawyers paid Mandel $465,000 to settle the lawsuit and $77,802 to cover Bilal’s legal costs, without admission of any wrongdoing.

“Everyone in the city wrings their hands and says the sheriff’s actions are a problem,” Mandel said. “But nobody has done anything about it and it’s now six years later.”

Public finance experts said it is unusual for the leaders of a city agency to be allowed to spend such a large amount of money on their own.

“I’ve not seen anything like this,” said Justin Marlowe, director of the Center for Municipal Finance at the University of Chicago. “There is nothing inherently bad about a chief or sheriff having some discretionary funds, but that would be much smaller amounts than we’re seeing here, like petty cash.”

The discretionary spending goes back at least to former Sheriff Jewell Williams, who held office from 2012 to 2020.

Joseph Vignola, who served as Williams’ undersheriff, said Dubow, the city’s finance director, had agreed at the time to let the office spend some money outside of the city budget, mostly for expenses related to sheriff sales.

“We tried to restrict it to things that were in furtherance of the sheriff-sale process,” Vignola recalled last week. “We didn’t buy any mascots or stuff like that. We did things that were crazy, but not that crazy.”

Benjamin Hayllar, a city finance director under Mayor Ed Rendell who served as Williams’ chief deputy for finance and accountability, said he did not recall the money being used under Williams for such a wide variety of goods and services.

“They paid to have somebody run those ads of her dancing?” Hayllar asked. “Holy s―!”

For the past several years, city budget officials had estimated that the sheriff’s office would hand over to the city about $12 million in fee revenue annually. But the sheriff’s office repeatedly gave the city little or nothing.

Last fiscal year, the office sent along just $2.6 million to the city, while keeping millions more in its TD Bank account. The city has since begun to budget for that lesser amount annually.

Last week, Bilal appeared before City Council to ask for a 54% increase in her budget, citing a lack of funding.

Council members thanked her for an exemplary performance. Although it has been public knowledge since at least 2022, none asked about the millions of dollars her office has been spending off the books.

Acknowledgment

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