That stench from New Jersey: It gives us a brief moment to think we're not so bad

IT REALLY SAYS something that Philadelphia - still buzzing from the Vince Fumo conviction and the judicial wrist-slap for Judge Willis Berry - is now the place to go to escape the stench of public corruption.

The Obama administration must not have wanted its announcement of $1 billion in stimulus grants for hiring police to be made in New Jersey, site of 44 arrests for public corruption and money-laundering just last week. So yesterday's news conference featuring Vice President Joe Biden and Attorney General Eric Holder, originally scheduled for Pennsauken, was moved just a few days ago to Philadelphia City Hall.

Philly's public crooks apparently are less numerous - not to mention, shall we say, less gauche - than the hordes in New Jersey.

The iconic image of the case was the perp walk of five rabbis in Hasidic-style garb who were charged with laundering money through charities they controlled - at least $3 million over two years. No less intriguing was a charge against a Brooklyn man for offering to obtain a black-

market kidney for $160,000.

Other crimes involved much smaller amounts of money, but they were more serious, because they allegedly were paid in bribes to 29 public officials and politicians - among them, three mayors, two current and one former state assemblymen, a deputy mayor, a city council president and assorted other officials. In this economy, it seems the public trust is going at a discount - most of the officials were charged with taking envelopes of cash in amounts of $10,000 or $15,000 or arranging to have the money passed to their campaign funds through dummy contributors.

The money-laundering and organ-selling charges aren't directly connected to the bribery charges, except through the government informant, one Solomon Dwek, who reeled in all the suspects.

The details of the public-corruption cases show the suspects to be breathtakingly stupid or breathtakingly greedy - or both. They met with someone they didn't know (Dwek was using an assumed name) and barely hesitated before agreeing to take cash for favors. They did this even though it's obvious that federal investigators had pretty much perfected stings of Jersey pols, arresting 20 in 2005 and another 11 in 2007.

Reminiscent of the Abscam cases that swept up several Philadelphia and Jersey pols in the 1980s, the feds have not charged the officials with taking bribes from anyone but Dwek. Yet the eagerness with which the pols appeared to take the bait suggests a congenital predisposition for corruption.

Yet here's a bitter irony: Dwek himself stole many times the amount of money that was pocketed by the rabbinic money-launderers, the kidney dealer and the public officials combined.

HE WAS a real-estate speculator who flipped houses with the help of banks that bent their rules to lend him money in a veritable Ponzi scheme that eventually collapsed, taking his investors with him.

Dwek operated with such impunity that, when he deposited a check for $25.2 million at a drive-

through window of a PNC bank, he was allowed to write checks on the account immediately. Once caught, he helped the feds catch 44 other wrongdoers. (But that didn't bring justice to the people hurt by his scams.) Dwek reportedly is on his way to the witness-protection program.

Here's the place where we call for reform: campaign finance and lobbying reform, strong enforcement of ethics rules - and regulating the banks that allowed Dwek and others to operate.

But cases like Fumo's, Berry's and Dwek's - and the endless politician perp walks - make us wonder if public trust in government is as risky as investing in one of Solomon Dwek's properties.