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Karen Heller: The Friends & Family plan at Philadelphia Traffic Court

Greetings, unwitting general public! Did you realize there's a "two-track system of justice" at Philadelphia Traffic Court, according to an investigative report commissioned by Pennsylvania Chief Justice Ronald Castille, "one for the politically connected and another for the unwitting general public"?

Greetings, unwitting general public!

Did you realize there's a "two-track system of justice" at Philadelphia Traffic Court, according to an investigative report commissioned by Pennsylvania Chief Justice Ronald Castille, "one for the politically connected and another for the unwitting general public"?

That would be us, the clueless, ticket-paying schmoes without access to our Democratic ward leader's cell.

The report, required reading for anyone who still believes in fairness, justice, or Santa Claus, shows that ticket-fixing was rampant at the patronage swamp, involving at least seven judges and much of the staff, who offered a generous Friends and Family plan to the region's most politically connected.

Ticket-fixing? Judge Christine Solomon claimed not to be familiar with the practice. Excuse me? She was a ward leader for 20 years.

Solomon required three interviews, one where she claimed illness - really, Oscars have been awarded for less - to acknowledge the practice. This despite her son's prowess in obtaining 29 acquittals on 38 citations.

Denial is a constant refrain in the investigation, as is adopting the guilty-child defense that if everybody does it, then it isn't wrong. The court was raided by the FBI last fall and is being investigated by federal authorities.

"This is Philadelphia. We do things a lot different in Philadelphia," Judge Bernice DeAngelis told a Bucks County district judge when he was assigned to the hackatorium - dialogue straight out of The Untouchables, albeit with a change of venue. "Everything you've learned, throw out the window, because this is what we do down here."

The office of Democratic U.S. Rep. Bob Brady was a frequent "requestor" of "special consideration," according to the report, a practice the congressman denies.

Supreme Court Justice Seamus McCaffery's wife was acquitted of a moving violation after the justice met with William Hird, allegedly the court's top fixer - the Tom Hagen, if you will - in the parking lot. McCaffery requested that an out-of-county judge be assigned to the case, the motivation unclear given that he's a justice for all of Pennsylvania. McCaffery, a former cop and Municipal Court judge, stated he didn't know Hird was the main Traffic Court contact for the politically connected, though the report says Hird told a fellow staffer that he and the justice were close.

"The report details a very sad state of affairs that did not develop overnight," Common Pleas Court Judge Gary Glazer, whom Castille assigned to oversee Traffic Court's reform, told me this week. "It is a very daunting task to remedy the problem."

If there is drama in the dregs of the court system, there is also drama at the top. Castille and McCaffery, the Supreme Court's two Philadelphians, aren't exactly chummy. The feds were already conducting a probe of Traffic Court when Castille hired his former top deputy in the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, William Chadwick, to lead the investigation that subsequently implicated McCaffrey. Now, insiders report, that rift between the two justices has deepened.

At Traffic Court, staff operated on the presumption that if no money changed hands, it wasn't really a crime.

But that's garbage. There was no sense of justice. The politically connected kept money in their pockets while the rest of us paid.

Traffic Court hears 170,000 cases annually and grosses about $24 million. Of last quarter's $7.6 million in revenue, more than $3 million was remitted to the commonwealth, $2 million to the city, and $500,000 to city courts.

It's impossible to calculate how much revenue was lost due to ticket-fixing - I'm sorry, "special consideration" - but staff and family boasted an acquittal rate of 85 percent, according to the report, almost three times the 26 percent rate for we idiots, the unwitting general public.

Traffic Court has been a cesspool of patronage, favoritism, and corruption for so long that no one can recall when it wasn't.

In 1978, Court President Louis Vignola was convicted of bribery. Six years later, 15 staffers were indicted in a massive ticket-fixing scheme under President Salvatore DeMeo. Twelve employees, including the court supervisor, were sentenced to jail time.

During staff ethics training this year, portraits of some former judges were removed so as not to serve as examples. And I haven't even mentioned the appropriately named, privates-exposing Judge Willie Singletary.

What's to be done next? Listen to Judge Bernice: Everything you've learned, throw it out the window!