Karen Heller: Spring is nigh in Fumo World

Ah, the harbingers of spring. Crocuses sprout. Two weeks from now, daylight saving time commences. Quite possibly, even the Fumo trial will draw to a close.

Well, we can dream.

"This is the beginning of the end," U.S. District Judge Ronald L. Buckwalter promised yesterday morning before delivering instructions to the jury. You could hear a collective sigh. "This has been a long trial, by anyone's standards."

So far, 19 weeks. Administrations have changed. Deficits have escalated.

"The corruption in this case, ladies and gentlemen, is as astonishing as it was pervasive," Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert A. Zauzmer declared at the beginning of closing arguments. He spoke of the "avalanche of evidence" against former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo, a case in which "the outrageous can become mundane."

Zauzmer painted a vision of that magic kingdom, built with Other People's Money and Oreck vacuum cleaners, known as Fumo World. "They created a different place, and they called it Fumo World," Zauzmer said. "In Fumo World, the same rules that apply to the rest of us did not apply to him."

Suddenly, the similarity became clear. Fumo World was like Peter Pan's Neverland. Perhaps I was having an Oscar hangover, but I imagined that at any moment the former senator might burst into song:

And that's my home where dreams

are born,

And time is never planned.

Just think of lovely things.

And your heart will fly on wings,

Forever in Fumo Fumo Land

Know how sometimes you make assumptions about a public figure and, when you get a closer look, it turns out you've been completely wrong in those perceptions?

Vince Fumo is not like that.

On the stand, he was given to making astonishing claims. In a moment of Nixonian paranoia, he claimed the whole trial was political, that he was a target of the Bush administration's Justice Department as "the most prominent Democrat in Pennsylvania."

This must have endeared him even more to reluctant defense witness Ed Rendell. Poor Ed, only a governor, while Fumo was a senator - a title harking back to ancient Rome - with multiple residences and three government-paid drivers for his chariots.

As part of the full-pay, part-time Pennsylvania legislature, "Sen. Fumo was on vacation close to half of the year," Zauzmer noted. He argued that Fumo's very well-paid staff "was not making him a more effective legislator. They're making him a more effective vacationer. They're making him a more effective farmer. They're making him a more effective boater."

There's a life goal: to be a more effective vacationer!

But these many roles took a toll. In an analysis straight from the Manual of Psychiatric Disorders, Zauzmer argued that "it's pretty clear that all of this went to his head. Combine royalty complex and the worry about shortage of money, and willingness to spend other people's money, and you wind up with this case."

That royalty complex will get you every time.

Fumo and his able lawyers have described the family-like loyalty he engendered in his staff. "This is quite a family," Zauzmer said. "This is someone who's looking out for himself and always looking out for Number One. Everyone else goes under the bus."

Fumo's constant need for toys and tools - and, the government argues, at our expense - "is gluttony."

Gluttony, greed, pride, and wrath all played a part in yesterday's close. And Zauzmer is only halfway through his argument and four-sevenths through the deadly sins.