May 613, 1999
city beat
Thanks for the Mammaries
While the prosecution thumps former L&I inspector Frank Antico with charges he got nookie for looking the other way, one witness wonders why City Hall's eyes were closed too.
"MR. MCMONAGLE!"
"Your Honor?"
"GO TO SIDEBAR!"
Bowing his head, defense attorney Brian McMonagle walked to the judge's bench. He tried to swallow a sheepish grin. He'd gone too far this time, and he knew it. After ripping into a key government witness by exposing his past as a business cheat, McMonagle had disposed of the guy by cocking a finger-pistol, firing an imaginary shot at him and wheeling back to the defense table with a jaunty "that's allsee ya!"
Judge Jan DuBois, gray-haired and Lincolnesque, rose to his feet and let him have it. A few words of his angry whispering reached spectators and jury: " Inappropriate! only one warning !" On either side of McMonagle, two federal prosecutors stood with arms folded tightly across their chests, annoyed, looking like pro wrestlers about to launch a pre-fight shoutdown.
They had reason to be pissed. All that Friday morning and afternoon, McMonagle had been beating up on witnesses testifying against Frank Antico, the former head of Philadelphia's business-regulatory agency now on trial for 18 counts of corruption and racketeering.
One after another, a parade of strip-bar owners and managers had taken the stand to accuse Antico of being a shakedown artist who used government muscle to fondle their dancers and threaten their proceeds.
But McMonagle met each one with mockery, indignation, corner-of-the-mouth putdowns andworst of allthe truth about their own fishy behavior.
That's why the United States v. Frank Antico, currently being heard in Philadelphia's Federal Courthouse and predicted to last until the end of May, is already shaping into a historical eventone of the most revealing and embarrassing views we've had into the greasy inner gears of Philadelphia politics. The more the prosecution builds its case against Antico, the more it builds a case against City Hall's nudge-and-wink Boys Club: How could Antico possibly have gotten away with such stunts for so long without anyonethe Mayor, the L&I Commissioners, the City Council overseers, the District Attorneydoing anything about it?
Antico, the South Philly paisan with the silver hair and tongue to match, was for years second-in-command at Licenses & Inspections, the department that regulates all the city's businesses. Truth is, Antico was L&Ihe'd been at the agency almost since it was created in 1952, and after surviving one previous indictment and the enmity of various mayors and L&I chiefs, he rose to become one of the most powerful behind-the-scenes players in the city, the guy who could close any business on the spot.
But according to federal prosecutors, Antico also spent the last 13 years as if he were constantly on-camera in a non-stop stag film, partying at whorehouses and strip bars, sexing it up with strippers in the Municipal Services Building and exchanging L&I privileges with a successful downtown madam for sex and cash. His taste for T&A was so well known that when two deputy mayors were looking for strippers for a bachelor party, they immediately called Antico, who personally escorted friends Tia, Monique and Amber to the bash. When an aggrieved bar owner wanted to reach the deputy L&I commissioner one Friday night, he didn't look up Antico's listed home number; he didn't try the L&I hotline; instead, he tried leaving a message at a South Philly strip joint, Teazer's. Antico called him back in 10 minutes.
"The problem was, [Frank Antico] was too mouthy and embarrassed the mayor," testified former L&I director Bennett Levin. If he'd kept his mouth shut, he'd have retired in peace and Rendell would have come to the party."
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Also well known at City Hall was the fact that Antico was somehow pulling off a loaves-and-fishes miracle by supporting two familiesa wife and two sons in one rowhome, a secret (sort of) mistress and two sons in another rowhomeon a civil servant's salary that averaged about $30,000 a year for most of his career. How he managed to send the oldest boys to pricey Episcopal Academy and the two younger to private grade school, no one seemed to question.
Except the FBI.
Last year, the feds ended a three-year investigation by accusing Antico of shaking down a pawn shop, forcing one strip bar to cut his son in as co-owner and trying to force another to sell him the business for half its value, coercing businesses to employ his mistress as their L&I liaison and acting as consultant to the proprietress of a mini-prostitution empire who advertised openly on Market Street with a big sign reading, "$60NO TIPPING!" Besides free gropes and sex, the list of perks he took from strip bar owners, the feds say, included a pig roast, limo rides, free drinks and box seats to Phillies games.
"Personally, I think the charges are bullshit," says former L&I Commissioner Bennett Levin. Not because they're untrue, he qualifies, but because they're universally true. "Frank didn't do anything that a dozen other guys hadn't done for years," he explains. "The problem was, he was too mouthy and embarrassed the Mayor. If he'd kept his mouth shut, he'd have retired in peace and Rendell would have come to the party."
Levin was just as blunt while testifying this past Thursday. Put Antico on trial, he suggested, and you might as well drag everyone else in. "Nepotism is rampant in the government, and he was doing nothing more, or nothing less, than anyone else from the top to the bottom," Levin told the court.
No way, insists Rendell spokesman Kevin Feeley. "As soon as it [Antico's Excellent Adventure] came to our attention, we made sure the proper authorities were notified immediately." It's nothing personal against Antico, he adds: "We just don't condone that type of activity; that's why we worked with the feds to root it out."
Antico himself responds to the charges with a world-weary shrug, palms upturned in a pose of martyrdom. "They tried this shit on me before," he says. Though looking more like a vacationer than a victim with his mid-winter tan, crisp black trousers and lemon-yellow sports shirt, his Lasorda-like face is a mask of determination. "I beat it then, and I'll beat it now."
Back in 1974, Antico was fired and arrested on charges of soliciting a bribe. Mysteriously, the FBI would later drop the charges and Antico would get his job back. But he suffered an ironic side effectbecause he escaped the criminal case, his L&I superiors suspected him of becoming an FBI plant and, basically, banned him from entering L&I headquarters at the Municipal Services Building. They weren't afraid he was a crook; they feared him as a guy gone legit.
"Anytime I had to go in there, I had to have an escort," Antico recalls bitterly. "They kept me in a room by myself in the City Hall annex, doing nothing." But rather than snooze over the sports page, he set out, like a convict with a set of law books, to master the system that had bashed him. For the next three years, Antico studied the thick L&I manual, memorizing arcane rules governing everything from butchers' scales to balconies. "They still have codes on the books for wagon-wheel makers," he says. "I learned them all."
By the time he was re-admitted to the L&I inner circle, he'd made himself indispensable. When reformer Bennett Levin became Commissioner in 1992, he made Antico his right-hand man because, as he's said, "No one knows the codes better than Frank." Levin called Antico "The Hammer," and used him to crack down on the special privileges that gave L&I its reputation as a political plaything. "Used to be, a Councilman called and an L&I inspector would jump. We put a stop to that," Levin says. "And no more special lines for lawyers."
What didn't stop, by Antico's own admission, was his taste for booty.
"Hey, so I like to look. And party," he says with a shrug which suggests, "Who doesn't fondle strippers in their office?"
But things went too far when, during Rendell's re-election campaign in 1994, Antico abandoned even the pretense of professional objectivity to testify on behalf of his son's proposed nudie bar at a community meeting, and then, a few months later, sparked "Boobgate" by hiring strippers Monique & Co. for deputy mayors Herb Vederman and Ted Beitchman.
Now, faced with five years behind bars with no parole and the possible loss of $350,000 in seized assets, Antico in court seems unrepentant and unruffled. During breaks, he jokes with Frank Jr. (an unindicted co-conspirator) and his wife. And why not? Look what's been happening to the prosecution witnesses:
First, an ex-cop had to admit that, yeah, he'd been secretly moonlighting at Wizzards while hiding it from police brass; then, a club owner was drawn into an uncomfortable description of Wizzards' extra magic ("Yes, there was oral sex in the lap-dancing," Peter Reilly struggled, "but not up front at the bar"); then a PinUps manager got tangled in a hard-to-believe story about how he'd gone to Antico for "advice" about decency laws. Not to a city inspector, nor to a lawyer, but to the top enforcer himselflike calling Bill Gates because your laptop won't boot. "I was a virgin in the business," Steve Tartaglia ventured, even though, as McMonagle tartly pointed out, he'd already worked four years at Delilah's Den.
Then came Bill McKee.
Looking more like a state trooper than a nudie bar owner with his cropped hair and double-breasted suit, McKee spoke earnestly about how Antico's son had tried to buy PinUps for a ludicrously low price. They wouldn't sell, so Antico Sr. sent in a "gestapo squad" of L&I inspectors on a busy Friday night to shut the place down.
"This man hurt me at my business," McKee said. He'd been at his best friend's wedding rehearsal when he was beeped with news of the shutdown, and immediately called another strip bar where Antico was known to hang out and threatened to go to the feds.
"But isn't it true," McMonagle asked, "that the first time you ever mentioned Mr. Antico to the feds was when they were investigating you?" McKee stumbled, dodged, finally admitted he'd never told the FBI about Antico until they were on the verge of indicting him for fraud involving land deals in Chester. McMonagle bore down: Wasn't McKee getting a deal from the feds? Weren't prosecutors postponing his sentencing until they saw how he testified against Antico? Hadn't he sold out his high-school friends in the land deals? Each time, McKee squirmed and equivocated under McMonagle's badgering.
What McMonagle is trying to prove is that Antico is being attacked by a string of sleazy, treacherous friendsnudie bar owners, a prostitution tycoon, drug-abusing dancers, an ex-girlfriend with tax troubleswho are trying to turn their legal problems into his. The prosecution is trying to prove that from the first day Antico entered L&I, he left a trail of slime.
But ultimately, they're proving the same thingthat despite the sanctimonious denials now emerging from City Hall, it was only when Frank's wild ride threatened to sap votes away from America's Mayor that the Rendell camp suddenly snapped to and jerked his choke collar. Till then, he was right out there in public, being perfectly Frank.