US Attorney's Office Charges Head of Selecting Penn's Landing Developer With Extortion

PHILADELPHIA-Leonard Ross, head of the Ross & Goldstein law firm and a member of Mayor John Street’s 1999 election and 2003 re-election finance committees, is charged with extortion and fraud in connection with his position as chairman of Penn’s Landing Corp.’s committee to select a developer for a 13-acre Penn’s Landing site along the Delaware River. He was appointed to the post by the mayor. In a 26-page document, the US attorney’s office of the Department of Justice’s Eastern District of Pennsylvania details several ways in which it alleges that Ross used the position and selection process for financial gain.

The document charges Ross with “secretly providing non-public information to Ronald A. White about the process for selecting a developer so that White could pass this information to Tower (locally based Tower Investments, headed by Bart Blatstein), thus improperly enhancing Tower’s prospects of being selected as the developer of the main site.” White, also a local attorney on the mayor’s campaign finance committees and a Commerce Bank consultant, was indicted last year in a separate “pay-to-play” case, but died of cancer just before his trial began.

It also charges Ross with “telling Tower’s representatives … (sometimes through White) that its proposal would not likely succeed, and that Ross would not support it, if Tower did not give White an equity interest in the development.” At the same time, according to the filed charges, Ross was “soliciting White to arrange for a $150,000 line of credit … from Commerce Bank so that Ross could pay a client of his law firm and others … (a debt of) more than $100,000.” According to the charge, Ross faced “being held in contempt of court” for not passing on to his client all of the settlement proceeds from an earlier wrongful death malpractice suit in which he represented the plaintiff. The document describes Ross’ need for a loan as “desperate.”