Sounds like most of the $$ probably ended up in Manny's pockets.
Posted on 09/25/2010 7:17:13 AM PDT by grace522
He’s the largest developer in Germantown, and is also the community’s largest employer, which partly explains why politicians, both white and black, have always liked him: everyone from Governor and ex-mayor Ed Rendell, who used to call him “Manny,” to Congressman Bob Brady, who scored him a $250,000 federal earmark in 2009, to Councilwoman Donna Reed Miller, whose daughter, Shakira, was paid $55.14 an hour by a Freeman-run nonprofit to “consult” with her mother, using walking-around money controlled by legislators and administered by Rendell’s Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED). (Brady didn’t respond to an interview request, and Miller said her daughter worked hard and scrutiny was “unfair")
When you start to add up grants, tax breaks and low-interest loans, you find that Freeman has raised at least $100 million for his enterprise since the mid-’80s. To an oil company, $100 million is a rounding error, but for a nonprofit working in a single part of a single city, it’s unheard of. Crazy, though: When you visit Germantown, you can’t see where any of this money went. When I walked through Germantown this spring, with two black women who used to work for Settlement and have since become its critics — Anita Hamilton and Debra White-Roberts, of the Wister Neighborhood Council — what we saw was blight: a run-down, graffiti-tagged strip mall called Freedom Square, built with $400,000 from the city, $600,000 from the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC), and $600,000 from the federal government; three abandoned, boarded-up stucco homes on East Penn Street; and a gaping foundation pit on Wakefield Street, full of trash bags. Settlement “developed” these properties. “This is all we got,” White-Roberts told me. “We’re worse off than if the money hadn’t come here in the first place, because we don’t know where it went.”
(Excerpt) Read more at phillymag.com ...
Thank you to Jim Foster and Jason Fagone for their bravery in investigating and exposing this travesty.
Please circulate this to your lists. This story must put pressure on the Feds to investigate. This is only the tip of this corrupt iceberg.
Let me guess. The Amish again?
IT WAS DEVLIN, a former officer at a Freeman-run company, who told me this:
“Emanuel Freeman is the Robert Mugabe of Germantown.”(Philadelphia)
Rep. Chaka Fattah (D) (not mentioned in this story) has funneled hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to this criminal. HUD is stonewalling any investigation. Lets light this candle and put these thugs in jail.
ping
When you think of the hardworking citizens whose tax dollars went into this corruption it makes you sick.
Sounds like most of the $$ probably ended up in Manny's pockets.
Don't you love how what used to be just drug user slang is now commonplace in media?
OUTRAGEOUS!
With “Fast Eddy” running the state, I’m skeptical about anything being done to fix this. And with the corrupt politicians in Philly having the protection of the “D” after their name? Why, they’re for “the common man”, don-cha-know; just like Barack Hussein Obama - Mmmm, mmmm, mmmm...
When you start to add up grants, tax breaks and low-interest loans, you find that Freeman has raised at least $100 million for his enterprise since the mid-'80s. To an oil company, $100 million is a rounding error, but for a nonprofit working in a single part of a single city, it's unheard of. Crazy, though: When you visit Germantown, you can't see where any of this money went. When I walked through Germantown this spring, with two black women who used to work for Settlement and have since become its critics -- Anita Hamilton and Debra White-Roberts, of the Wister Neighborhood Council -- what we saw was blight: a run-down, graffiti-tagged strip mall called Freedom Square, built with $400,000 from the city, $600,000 from the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC), and $600,000 from the federal government; three abandoned, boarded-up stucco homes on East Penn Street; and a gaping foundation pit on Wakefield Street, full of trash bags. Settlement "developed" these properties. "This is all we got," White-Roberts told me. "We're worse off than if the money hadn't come here in the first place, because we don't know where it went."
And then there is Val Jarrets/Rezko properties in Chicago.
Even in "small town" there is HUD abuse. (A relative turned in two in just our little community) Multiply that by every big city in the US. HUD needs to be audited if not disbanded.
Isn’t Chaka married to one of the Phila news anchors? Maybe she’s undercover to expose the corruption. /s
Philadelphia definitely needs the fire and brimstone treatment.
Outrageous and very sad. When I think of elderly people living in these facilities or children going to school in unsafe, unsanitary buildings, it makes me sick. As a society we’re too often bullied or manipulated into accepting corruption as part of helping those in need. Corruption in the social services and charitable sectors galls me almost as much as corruption in government. Unfortunately, they often go hand in hand.
Yes, Renee Chenault.
This is an old and familiar story common to cities across-the-board. There have been similar scandals just about everywhere.
Ex dashiki-wearing fist-pumpers go into the city government or “social services” rackets and become “Black Emperors”, waxing fat and happy for decades, sucking the taxpayer teat, trading favors and covering for each other.
It happens all over and this story is unusual for the depth it goes into. I’d say most cities’ social services provider grants are sucked up this way and if any incoming reformist administration wanted to accomplish something it would be a matter of demanding audits of all its social services and housing providers and following those up with indictments and prosecutions all round.
That, and taking on the public employee unions.
Ayers and Obama come to mind with the millions of Annenberg Challenge dollars that were meant to educate the poor children on Chicago’s south side.
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