Seth Williams hopes to improve on his '05 D.A. effort

IN A CANDID moment in Mount Airy several weeks ago, Seth Williams flashed some of the self-confidence that has driven his campaign for district attorney for the last six years.

"Having been there [in the D.A.'s office] for 10 1/2 years, I knew, or I thought, that I could do a better job than the boss," Williams told 40 people at the Lutheran Seminary, on Germantown Avenue.

"I've felt that way wherever I've worked - at Sears at 63rd and Market, when I delivered pizzas for Domino's, when I drove a cab at Penn State," Williams said. "So I left the D.A.'s office in 2003 so that I could run for D.A. in 2005."

Underfunded and widely written off as a serious contender, Williams lost that 2005 race to incumbent Lynne Abraham. But Williams got 46 percent of the vote, demonstrating strong support throughout minority neighborhoods, and he never really stopped campaigning.

Even during a two-year stint as the city's inspector general from 2005 through 2007, when Williams was barred from politicking by the city Home Rule Charter, it was an open understanding that he intended to run again for D.A.

This year, with Abraham retiring after 19 years as the city's top prosecutor, Williams is still running, and no one is writing him off - least of all himself, appearing on stage after stage with his four Democratic opponents and telling audiences what he will do after he's elected.

"The criminal-justice system is broken," Williams proclaims at nearly all his public appearances. His favorite piece of evidence: 59 percent of all felony charges are dismissed before trial, he says, echoing a theme from 2005. The figure reflects a panoply of reasons why charges are dismissed, including judicial actions on procedural grounds, witnesses failing to appear, victims changing their stories and prosecutors deciding that original charges were excessive.

Williams claims he's the most qualified of the five candidates, by virtue of more years working in the D.A.'s office, and of holding two supervisory positions before he left - running its Municipal Court unit and then a unit dealing with repeat offenders.

Through months of public appearances, Williams and the other candidates agree on many of the problems in the D.A.'s office. But his opponents are dubious about Williams' biggest proposal - to revamp the office along geographic lines.

Williams says he would assign teams of city prosecutors to police districts and detective divisions, making them more familiar with the crime patterns in each community, and more responsive to victims and witnesses.

The same assistant D.A.s would handle criminal cases from the time defendants are charged to the moment they're sent away to prison, Williams suggests.

Other cities have taken this approach successfully, and Abraham herself has pushed to expand community-based prosecution beyond the repeat-offender unit, where it already occurs.

But in the middle of a city fiscal crisis, it would require significantly more prosecutors and expenditures for office space, besides creating major scheduling problems for the courts. Abraham's efforts have been stymied for years by opposition in the court system, prosecutors say.

"Seth is talking about putting prosecutors out there in the community, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year," opponent Dan McElhatton complained at a debate the other day. "Where are we going to get the money?"

Williams' response to Mayor Nutter's budget proposal, calling for a 22 percent, $7 million cut in the D.A.'s spending? "We shouldn't allow it," he told an audience at the Free Library recently. [Editor's note: The Nutter administration yesterday said about $4 million would be restored to the D.A.'s budget. Story on Page 6.]

With campaign advertising held down by the city's contribution limits, Williams' name recognition has been a valuable asset.

He entered the race as the best-known of the candidates - thanks to his campaign four years ago and the publicity he got as inspector general, investigating municipal wrongdoing in the final two years of the Street administration.

Unlike past inspectors general, who seemed to prefer anonymity, Williams sought news coverage of his efforts and made himself accessible to reporters - to the point of staying in touch when he was sent off to Army Reserve duty in Germany to talk with a reporter about payroll abuse in the city Health Department.

Unlike most prosecutors, he was willing to publicly confirm the existence of ongoing investigations.

The downside to Williams' public history is that he has a record to shoot at.

Irregularities in his campaign-finance reports have been one target. For the last four years, he repeatedly has had to revise his reports to correct omissions and accounting errors.

Using personal funds for campaign expenses, and then arranging for reimbursement, made his campaign finances less transparent. The practice led one opponent, Dan McCaffery, to challenge Williams' candidacy, on grounds that Williams should have listed more than $10,000 in reimbursements as income on a financial -disclosure form.

A Common Pleas Court judge initially sided with McCaffery, but a three-court panel from Commonwealth Court put Williams back on the ballot.

Williams blew off the issue at a debate April 14. "I'm not running for city controller," he said.

The city Board of Ethics took Williams to task for the reporting errors, though, and yesterday announced that his campaign has agreed to pay a $3,750 fine. The board acknowledged that the campaign "adopted better record-keeping practices in 2008."

Williams' campaign-finance reports also disclosed that he had raised money to repay 2005 campaign debts while working as inspector general, in spite of a city charter requirement prohibiting political activity by city employees.

Williams produced an e-mail from the city Law Department allowing him to do fundraising - as long as it was limited to repaying old debts.

The practice was cleared by Evan Meyer, the ranking ethics expert in the Law Department, who has subsequently taken a job with the city Board of Ethics.

But another D.A. candidate, Michael Turner, last month raised further questions about the fundraising.

Turner noted that after leaving the city payroll in early 2008, Williams began spending money on his current race, while he still owed thousands of dollars to his creditors from 2005.

"[S]uch expenditures - made with money raised as inspector general - may in fact violate the very city solicitor's opinion that Mr. Williams has been standing behind," Turner said, calling for a probe by the Board of Ethics.

Williams' opponents also have questioned the value of his work as inspector general, for which he was paid $130,000 a year and supervised an 11-member staff.

Asked at a public forum to identify his major accomplishments as IG, Williams cited the Health Department probe, which led to the demotion of the acting health commissioner, for allowing the city's top food-safety inspector to remain on Philadelphia's payroll after taking a full-time job in Washington, D.C.

Several high-level city officials, including the procurement commissioner, lost their jobs when Williams documented that they were living outside the city, in violation of a residency requirement, and he also helped expose a bribery scam at the Water Department.

Williams, 42, is married and has three daughters. He grew up in West Philadelphia, the adopted son of a teacher at Sulzberger Junior High School and a secretary at the Navy Yard.

He went to Central High School and Penn State, where he was elected president of the student government. He joined the D.A.'s office in 1992, right after graduating from Georgetown University Law Center in Washington.

Colleagues in the D.A.'s office remember Williams as self-confident and ambitious, beyond his experience and talent in the courtroom.

"He was a fairly mediocre D.A.," said one prosecutor, among others who expressed a similar view. "There were people who liked him, but also people who thought he was a blowhard."

Though he was not regarded as one of the office's top prosecutors, Williams developed a close personal relationship with Abraham and won a couple of promotions supervising other lawyers.

Abraham attended Williams' wedding, his daughter's baptism and his father's funeral, among other personal events.

By Abraham's own account, she once told Williams at a family barbecue that when she was ready to give up the office, "we'll sit down and talk" about his potential candidacy.

But their friendship turned quickly to enmity when Williams challenged Abraham's re-election in 2005, accusing her of "failed leadership" and "outdated thinking." She accused him of "blind ambition."

So far Abraham has steered clear of this year's race.

Staff writer Dave Davies contributed to this report.