Philly political consultant accused of orchestrating scheme to forge petition signatures for judicial candidates

A Philadelphia political consultant forged thousands of signatures on petitions for candidates seeking spots on the city’s 2019 Democratic primary ballot, state prosecutors said Wednesday in announcing charges against the man, including solicitation to commit forgery and theft.

Investigators say Rasheen Crews, who also worked as a deputy in the city’s Register of Wills until last week, paid workers to add fake signatures to already completed and notarized petitions. They also accused him of organizing forgery parties at local hotels, where a room of hired temps helped pass petitions for multiple candidates down an assembly-line-like operation, forging signatures of voters.

None of the people who had hired Crews, 46, to gather those signatures — nearly a dozen candidates for Philadelphia’s Municipal and Common Pleas Courts — is accused of knowing about his alleged forgery scheme.

But the charges filed against him are just the latest example of problems that have emerged in recent years in the opaque world of down-ballot city judicial races that often receive less attention than the marquee contests on the ballot.

“This arrest is an important reminder that interfering with the integrity of our elections is a serious crime,” said Attorney General Josh Shapiro, whose office oversaw the investigation. “By soliciting and organizing the wide scale forgery of signatures, the defendant undermined the democratic process and Philadelphians’ right to a free and fair election.”

Crews, who has previously worked gathering petition signatures for high-profile clients, including Mayor Jim Kenney and former Lt. Gov. Mike Stack, did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday.

His attorney, Jason Javie, described his client as a respected consultant with a “keen political acumen.”

“Mr. Crews surrendered early this morning to agents from the Attorney General’s Office after learning that charges were to be filed today,” the lawyer said in a statement. “Mr. Crews looks forward to resolving the matter in the justice system rather than in the media.”

A criminal complaint filed in the case accused him of ripping off at least 11 candidates, including some now-sitting judges, who had hired him to help gather the 1,000 signatures required under state law to land on the ballot.

In judicial races, political operatives like Crews can make the difference on whether candidates show up on the sample ballots of endorsed candidates distributed at polling locations — or even make it onto the ballot at all.

But judicial candidates, most of whom are attorneys with little previous political experience, have often stated they have little idea what the operatives they hire to help them navigate the campaign process are doing with their money.

Former U.S. Rep. Michael “Ozzie” Myers — who had refashioned himself as a consultant to judicial candidates after serving a stint in prison for bribery in the 1980s — was sentenced to 2½ years in federal prison in September for paying off election workers to add fake votes to several of his clients.

As with the Crews case, prosecutors did not accuse any of the judges and judicial candidates that had hired Myers of knowing of his illegal activity.

Few of the candidates who had hired Crews to gather petition signatures for the 2019 primary — a list that includes Common Pleas Court Judges Anthony Kyriakakis, Brian McLaughlin, and Betsy Jo Wahl as well as Municipal Court Judges Francis McCloskey and George Twardy — were willing to discuss him or his work when contacted Wednesday.

But several sat for interviews with investigators from the Attorney General’s Office over the last year, according to court filings in Crews’ case.

Attorney Lawrence Bozzelli told investigators he’d agreed to pay Crews $2,000 to collect 1,500 signatures to support his candidacy for Common Pleas Court, the filings said.

Instead, he received a call that the petitions that had been filed on his behalf contained numerous mistakes and after reviewing them, found out that the same name appeared on them three times in different handwriting. His mother, who had also circulated petition papers on his behalf, later reported that it appeared signatures had been added to the document she submitted after it had been notarized.

Bozzelli told investigators he felt uncomfortable after discovering the issues and later dropped out of the race.

Vincent Melchiorre, another candidate who dropped out after a run-in that year with Crews, told agents he had hired Omar Sabir — currently a member of the city’s three-member elections board, the city commissioners — to gather his signatures.

He later found out Sabir had farmed the work out to Crews. And when problems emerged on Melchiorre’s petitions he suggested Sabir refund the money he was paid.

Melchiorre, the court filings state, is still waiting for those funds.

Many of the nominating petitions Crews submitted in 2019 shared the same problems. Investigators found the name of one nursing home resident who says she did not sign any petitions listed 17 times on the papers submitted by Crews.

In other cases, the same handwriting appeared to have signed multiple names. And in others still, signatures were clearly added to half-filled-out petition forms after the documents had been notarized.

The problems with Crews’ petitions first became clear in 2019 when former U.S. Rep. Bob Brady, chairman of the Democratic City Committee, began reaching out to judicial candidates after hearing about issues with their petitions and discovering many that he said appeared to be “kitchen-table jobs.”

Brady said at that time several of the petition packages contained what appeared to be photocopied pages from other petitions, which is not allowed.

Brady on Wednesday said Crews had attempted to make amends with the party in the years since — even paying back some of the candidates who had hired him.

Crews had also told Brady that he was under criminal investigation and had been offered a deal that would have required him to no longer engage in political activity such as circulating petitions.

The criminal charges announced Wednesday prompted Brady to speculate that Crews did not take that deal.

“I guess they’re sending a message to people not to mess around with petitions,” Brady said. “Nothing wrong with that.”