Philadelphia

Philadelphia is the seat of Philadelphia County in southeastern Pennsylvania, where the city and the county have operated under one government since the Act of Consolidation of 1854, the law that also created the Philadelphia Police Department.¹

Police payoffs and the Locust Street bust-out bars

The Pennsylvania Crime Commission issued its report on police corruption in Philadelphia in March 1974. It found that police corruption in the city was "ongoing, widespread, systematic, and occurring at all levels of the Police Department," in every police district and at ranks from patrolman to inspector, and it identified more than 400 individual officers by first name, last initial and badge or payroll number as having received improper payments in cash, merchandise, sexual services or meals. Among the liquor-licence findings, more than 20 officers had received illegal cash payments from bars and about 50 from after-hours clubs, and the commission found "widespread shakedowns of licensed liquor operators on the 'Locust Street Strip'" by members of the department, with evidence that payments to the police were directly responsible for several illegal and open "bust-out" operations.² One bust-out bar owner cooperated with the commission for more than a year and recorded conversations about payoffs; the owner and his employees paid an aggregate of $800 a month to policemen in every unit that covered the area.² The commission separately reported that in narcotics enforcement the corruption it found was more individual than squad-wide, with about eight officers identified and an estimated fifteen more unidentified.³

The report traces the Strip back through earlier inquiries. A United States Senate subcommittee examined the failure of local unions to stop employers from forcing employees to solicit drinks in 1962, and heard from the commissioner of police and the inspector of the Central Division in which the Strip lies; under oath the inspector said the record would show that the department had done a job in this area "that cannot be equaled by any police department in the country." The commission's note to that passage records that in 1962 the inspector in charge of the Central Division, where most of the bust-out operations were located, was Frank L. Rizzo.⁴ Rizzo was police commissioner from 1967 to 1971 and mayor from 1972 to 1980, and the commission's history of the department cites accusations concerning Mayor Rizzo's use of a special squad from the Internal Affairs Bureau, drawn from the presentment of a special grand jury of June Term 1972.¹⁴ The same history records Joseph F. O'Neill as acting commissioner from February 1971 and commissioner from 1972.⁴

The Why Not Lounge, in a building that also housed the Versailles restaurant, was run by Irvin Goltzer. Goltzer paid an inspector each month through a "bagman" because he had not had enough contact with the officers to be trusted; his manager, Salvatore La Russa, negotiated the payoffs, and when Goltzer did not want to pay, La Russa advised him that otherwise "they will bust the joint."⁵ For a month, at the request of its owner, Goltzer and La Russa also ran the Brass Monkey at 1227 Walnut Street as a bust-out, while the protection payments made for the Why Not Lounge kept police away.⁶ A separate chapter of the report describes a police lieutenant working as a bartender at a Gaslight Lounge, where obscene shows were performed when he was on duty.⁷

La Russa, known as "Sam the Barber," immigrated from Sicily in 1951, worked as a barber in South Philadelphia, and later ran a series of bars on Locust Street that he called "bust-out" joints, then restaurants and clubs on South Street and Delaware Avenue.⁸ The 1990 report of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission lists his prior arrests for liquor law violations at bust-out bars around 13th and Locust Streets and his ownership of La Cucina Ristorante at 121 South Street, which it describes as a hangout for members of Scarfo's family. The former LCN members and government witnesses Thomas DelGiorno and Nicholas Caramandi testified that La Russa's house in Whitemarsh Township was used by Nicodemo Scarfo for an LCN induction ceremony.⁹ La Russa died of a heart attack at Chestnut Hill Hospital on Sunday, August 18, 1996, aged 58. He had said under oath that he first met Scarfo as a teenager around 11th and Carpenter Streets in South Philadelphia, and Scarfo hosted a Christmas party at La Cucina in 1985 that drew intense law-enforcement surveillance. Questioned before a federal grand jury in 1987 about the induction at his house, La Russa said he had invited Scarfo several times, that he was called away to work that day and did not share in the catered meal for about 40 people brought in from his restaurant, that he was a frequent guest at Scarfo's waterfront home in Fort Lauderdale and had supervised some construction work there, and that he was in the dark about Scarfo's mob activities: "I never ask him any questions." Caramandi testified later that he and two other mob figures were formally initiated that afternoon after La Russa left the house.⁸

The Bruno and Scarfo family

The Philadelphia branch of La Cosa Nostra was led by Angelo Bruno. The 1990 Pennsylvania Crime Commission report dates his tenure as boss from 1959 until his murder on March 21, 1980.⁹ The Third Circuit gave the start of his tenure as "approximately 1960," and wrote that Phillip Testa succeeded him, that Scarfo served as consigliere under Testa and became boss after Testa was "blown up in his house in early 1981."¹⁰ Scarfo and Salvatore Merlino took over the one-third interest in a business held by Salvatore Testa, a partner, after Salvatore Testa was murdered on September 14, 1984.¹⁰

In a RICO trial that ran ten weeks and concluded on November 19, 1988, in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, members of the Scarfo crime family were convicted of conspiring to participate in, and participating in, an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering activity. Joseph Pungitore was also convicted of participating in a conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine; Scarfo, Merlino and Joseph Ciancaglini were convicted of possession of methamphetamine with intent to distribute it; and Scarfo, Merlino and Pungitore were convicted of illegal sports bookmaking. The court of appeals called the case "the latest saga in the government's dismantling of the Philadelphia branch of La Cosa Nostra."¹¹ DelGiorno testified that in May 1983 Ciancaglini, then a captain, authorized him to arrange a methamphetamine deal between two dealers, with Merlino's approval, under which members of the enterprise would receive $3,000 for every pound sold, and that he received $150,000 from transactions involving fifty pounds.¹¹

The Pennsylvania Crime Commission's 1990 report states that the Scarfo family was particularly active in methamphetamine production and distribution during the 1980s, that Philadelphia was known as the "meth" capital of the world in the early 1980s, that the Drug Enforcement Administration had labeled the city the "methamphetamine capital of the world," that the mob associate Raymond Martorano, who became a made member in April 1981, entered the Philadelphia methamphetamine market in the late 1970s, and that the family collected extortion payments from three major methamphetamine networks in the city.⁹ The same report records that a Scarfo family member became involved in 1981 with members of the Pagan outlaw motorcycle gang in manufacturing and distributing methamphetamine.⁹ The 1990 report describes the chemical P2P as the precursor imported from Western Europe and names a Dresher, Pennsylvania, supplier who sold it to Martorano.⁹

Film, the Horsch circle and the Black Mass

Raymond Charles Hoersch, who later used the name R.C. Horsch, opened Underground Cinema 16, a 16-millimeter theater at 2021 Sansom Street, in October 1969. The Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections, whose deputy commissioner was Leo Goldstein, closed the theater that month in a license dispute.¹² The Bandbox Theater then ran the Vietnam documentary In the Year of the Pig, which Cinema 16 had under contract.¹³ Art Carduner bought the Bandbox in Germantown in 1966 and ran it until 1975; he exhibited foreign and art films and died at 90.¹⁴

Horsch's directorial debut was The Erotic Memoirs of a Male Chauvinist Pig, shot in Philadelphia in February 1973 with John Butterworth, a photographer and cameraman whom Horsch described as a news cameraman for KYW-TV. The film was financed by La Russa, a nightclub owner and friend of Scarfo, and it depicts rape, bondage, underage sex and the title character's violent relationship with a drug-addicted woman.¹⁵ Its performers included Georgina Spelvin, Tina Russell and Darby Lloyd Rains.¹⁶ Horsch told the podcaster Ashley West that he sold the film to Sam Lake, a New York distributor, for 50,000 dollars, and that the sale was arranged through La Russa and Philadelphia organized crime.¹⁷ The trade chart in Boxoffice listed the film's distributor as "Mature," with a review date of October 15, 1973, and Take One reported in the spring of 1973 that "Bob Sumner's Mature Films in New York followed up Memoirs of a Male Chauvinist Pig (starring Ms. Spelvin) with High Rise."¹⁸¹⁹ In the same article John Morthland wrote that pornography "operates on the fringes of legality, and that area has always been ripe for organized crime, which started calling on various exhibitors around the country to offer 'protection' within a couple of weeks of the Court ruling," and named "the Mitchells, Mature Films, etc." among the few in the business in a highly visible way.¹⁹ On February 14, 1975, Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York issued a preliminary injunction in Walt Disney Productions v. Mature Pictures Corp., in a suit over the use of the "Mickey Mouse March" in a film titled The Life and Times of the Happy Hooker or The Life and Times of Xaviera; the opinion does not say whether the defendant is the distributor of the 1973 film.²⁰

Black Mass, Horsch's satanic-mass film, drew a public protest in February 1975. On Thursday, February 27, 1975, Christian and Jewish leaders of Greater Philadelphia combined to discourage the showing of the film, which was reported to be scheduled to open that weekend at a center-city theater and one in Germantown. The center-city house said the report "was a mistake," and the Germantown theater said it was not yet known whether the film would be shown. The producer-director, Ray Hoersch, was quoted as describing it as "the Satanic Mass ... the exact inverse of the Catholic ceremony." The statement was signed by 16 leaders, among them John Cardinal Krol, archbishop of Philadelphia, and Rabbis Charles Lacks and Harold Goldfarb of the Greater Philadelphia Board of Rabbis, together with Friends, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Greek Orthodox, Baptist, Methodist and Byzantine-Ukrainian Rite leaders. It called on those in the film industry in the Philadelphia area "to resist and reject every attempt to market or portray this film."²¹ The Arcadia Theatre (Philadelphia) on Chestnut Street cancelled a midnight showing, and the film was then booked at the Bandbox.²² The condemnation was reported in the diocesan press in Erie in March 1975.²³ Horsch later said he made Black Mass with the proceeds of Erotic Memoirs and other films.¹⁷

The Horsch family and the Olney house

Raymond Horsch's criminal record begins with a counterfeiting arrest in the late 1970s and a methamphetamine laboratory a few years later. He skipped bail after the second arrest and went to coastal New Zealand after taking the identity of a real chemist. He worked at a chemical plant in Timaru under that alias, with a forged Stanford diploma, and was caught in New Zealand with five fake passports. He was later apprehended in Florida and returned to Philadelphia, where he was sentenced to federal prison.¹⁵ The Timaru employment is linked to Chemical Technology Limited, a Clandeboye company working on milk byproducts that the Christchurch lawyer John Rutherford set up with a man he knew as Dr. Stanley Stokowski.²⁴ He had married Myroslawa Ferkuniak, the mother of Eugene Horsch, in Reno on September 12, 1980, while using that identity.²⁵ The sentencing judge, Joseph L. McGlynn Jr., said in April 1985 that "anybody who has a speed lab ought to know he's going to jail," and a second judge, Donald W. Van Artsdalen, added a year and a day for bail-jumping.²⁶ The Drug Enforcement Administration, which the 1990 Crime Commission report credits with labelling Philadelphia the methamphetamine capital of the world, had arrested Horsch in February 1977.²⁶⁹

His father, Raymond C. Hoersch, was an engineer and former glider pilot in the United States Army Air Forces. His grandfather, Albert Hoersch, lived on West Chew Street in the Olney section of the city and died on July 1, 1972, aged 81; his wife Helen E. Hoersch had died on August 27, 1968, and their daughter Helen M. Hoersch died on April 5, 2004.²⁷²⁸ His mother, Clara Hoersch, was a daughter of Cecilia T. Hagerty of Stroudsburg, where he was born in 1943.²⁹ Krista Killen is credited as a performer in multiple films he directed.³⁰

His son, Eugene Horsch, was stopped in June 2026 near Independence Mall with a woman, carrying drugs, illegal guns and fake identification, one card bearing the name of a woman who had been missing for three years. That led local and federal investigators to the family's twin house in Olney, where they recovered vats of chemicals, notes describing serial killings and bank cards. Police had not charged him with any crime relating to the missing women.¹⁵ The Philadelphia District Attorney's Office had prosecuted him in 2025 on drug counts after a fire at the house, and after his June 2026 arrest it charged him with illegal gun and drug possession; on August 6, 2026, it withdrew those charges because the United States Attorney's Office would handle the case.³¹ On September 16, 2026, Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel, with Deputy Commissioner Frank Vanore and the FBI, said that 58 people had been identified in the material recovered.³² The case is covered on the Olney House Investigation page.

Garzone Funeral Home and the tissue trade

The Garzone Funeral Home in the Kensington section of the city was operated by Louis Garzone and Gerald Garzone, who with James McCafferty owned the Liberty Crematorium. In early 2004 the brothers and McCafferty agreed to supply cadavers to Michael Mastromarino, owner of Biomedical Tissue Services, for $1,000 each, without the knowledge or consent of the families; the arrangement continued until September 2005, when Mastromarino learned that the Food and Drug Administration was investigating him and advised the Garzones to destroy their records, which they did by incinerating them in a crematory just days before FDA investigators arrived. At least 244 cadavers were provided, for which the Garzones and McCafferty received more than $245,000.³³³⁴ The Superior Court of Pennsylvania affirmed Louis Garzone's sentence in 2010 except for the award of costs for prosecutors' and detectives' salaries, and the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania held on January 19, 2012, that the costs-of-prosecution statute did not permit the district attorney's office to recover those salaries.³⁵³³ Raymond Horsch had access to a Kensington crematorium linked to illegal sales of body parts, years before the missing persons investigation.³⁶

The body-parts case centred on Biomedical Tissue Services, a New Jersey company based in Fort Lee. In February 2006 National Public Radio reported that Brooklyn prosecutors had indicted four men in connection with the company, including its principals, for harvesting bones and skin from corpses.³⁷ Mastromarino, a former oral surgeon, pleaded guilty in Brooklyn in March 2008 to 14 counts, admitting that he had carried out the scheme from 2001 to 2005; he faced 18 to 54 years in prison and agreed to forfeit $4.68 million. The company shipped bones, skin and tendons to tissue processors, and about 10,000 people received tissue it supplied in transplant operations.³⁸ In Philadelphia, after a grand jury investigation that began on May 4, 2006, Mastromarino entered an open guilty plea on August 29, 2008, and on October 22, 2008, was sentenced to 25 to 58 years, concurrent with his New York sentence. The trial court found that he had received more than $1,105,751 from tissue banks for the Philadelphia material alone, and gave aggravated sentences for abuse of corpse because the conduct was "so beyond the pale of what the guidelines contemplate." Because he had forfeited $800,000 in cash, the Commonwealth sought no further restitution. The Superior Court affirmed the sentence on July 21, 2010.³⁴

The MOVE bombing of 1985

The Philadelphia Special Investigation Commission was established by Executive Order 5-85, signed by Mayor W. Wilson Goode on June 19, 1985, to examine the events at 6221 Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia. Its chairman was William H. Brown III, and its members included the former Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice Bruce W. Kauffman, the Watergate special prosecutor Henry S. Ruth Jr. and the former FBI assistant director Neil J. Welch. It conducted more than 900 interviews, gathered the records of 36 government agencies, and held public hearings from October 8, 1985, with 90 witnesses over five weeks, broadcast live by WHYY. Its report of March 6, 1986, contains 68 findings, conclusions and recommendations, 66 of them unanimous.³⁹

The chronology in the report begins with the emergence of MOVE, led by John Africa (Vincent Leaphart), in the early 1970s, and the 1978 blockade of its headquarters in Powelton Village, which ended in a gunfight in which Police Officer James Ramp was shot to death; nine MOVE members were sentenced to 30 to 100 years each. MOVE adults and children later took up residence at 6221 Osage Avenue, and the occupants made threats by loudspeaker. The commission found that the Mayor's policy toward MOVE was one of "appeasement, non-confrontation and avoidance," that in the summer of 1984 he was told that a legal basis existed to act against certain MOVE members, and that in May 1985, after neighbors pressed him, he authorized the Police Commissioner to prepare and execute a tactical plan under the supervision of the Managing Director. Police Commissioner Gregore J. Sambor chose as planners the head of the Bomb Disposal Unit, a sergeant from the pistol range and a uniformed patrolman, excluding the command structure of the department; no written plan was sought or received.⁴⁰³⁹

On May 13, 1985, police fired more than 10,000 rounds of ammunition in under 90 minutes at the row house, which the commission called "clearly excessive and unreasonable," and used explosives to blow holes in the party walls. At 5:27 P.M. a bomb of Tovex and C-4, dropped from a Pennsylvania State Police helicopter, detonated on the roof, where, according to a police memo corroborated by a news photograph, a five-gallon gasoline can had been hoisted, and the commission found that the fire began a millisecond afterward when friction-heated metal fragments penetrated the can. Between 6:08 and 6:12 P.M. the Police Commissioner and the Fire Commissioner decided to let the bunker burn, which the commission called "unconscionable." Eleven people died, five of them children. The commission found that police gunfire prevented some occupants from escaping to the rear alley, that the deaths of the five children "appear to be unjustified homicides which should be investigated by a grand jury," that the medical examiner's performance was unprofessional, and that the fire destroyed the neighborhood and left sixty-one families homeless.⁴¹⁴⁰⁴²

Finding 21 concerns the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In January 1985 an agent of the bureau's Philadelphia office delivered nearly 38 pounds of C-4, a military plastic explosive, to the Philadelphia police bomb squad. Neither agency kept any record of the transaction; the agent told the commission he "never had to keep any kind of records or anything" regarding C-4. After May 13, at least one agent deliberately withheld information about the cache from his own superiors, saying he was "in fear of losing my job," and FBI officials "unwittingly furnished the Commission with inaccurate and untruthful accounts" of the bureau's involvement. The commission wrote that because of the absence of record keeping "all the facts of the use of C-4 on May 13th may never be known." The commission's explosives expert found that the bomb contained substantially more C-4 than the officer who constructed it had reported.⁴³⁴² Commissioner Kauffman dissented from several findings, including the finding on the alley gunfire, and from the majority's accusation of racism against the Mayor, the Managing Director, the Police Commissioner and the Fire Commissioner, writing that the events were caused "purely and simply, by incompetence, bad judment, and other errors."⁴⁴ No city officials or employees were charged after the commission's report and a county grand jury report of May 15, 1986, and a federal grand jury declined to indict.⁴⁵

Holmesburg Prison and the Army's human tests

Holmesburg Prison in northeast Philadelphia was the site of the experiments of Albert Kligman, a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist who began testing on people incarcerated there in 1951 for such companies as Johnson & Johnson and Dow Chemical as well as the United States Army, which commissioned him to test hallucinogenic and psychotropic drugs. The program ran 23 years; Philadelphia banned medical testing at Holmesburg in 1974.⁴⁶

The Army's contract record was placed before the Senate in 1975. Lt. Gen. R. R. Taylor, the Surgeon General of the Army, told the joint hearings of the Senate health and judiciary subcommittees, questioned by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, that in the period from the mid-1960s volunteers at Edgewood Arsenal had been active-duty personnel, and, asked about contract work, said the subjects were students and, "in one case they are prisoners in Holmesburg Prison near the University of Pennsylvania," adding when pressed, "Prisoners in one contract that I am aware of." The list the Army then supplied for the record shows prisoners at Holmesburg as the volunteers under three contracts of Edgewood Arsenal: "Threshold Doses in Humans" with the University of Pennsylvania from April 1, 1964, to March 31, 1967 (contract DA-18-035-AMC-126(A)), testing Ditran, atropine, scopolamine and a glycolate-type anticholinergic compound; and two contracts with Ivy Research Laboratories, Inc., the first running from June 28, 1968, to December 1, 1969 ($78,135), to determine threshold doses of incapacitating agents, irritant agents and other chemicals, including a glycolate anticholinergic, an apomorphine-type emetic and a series of isomers of tetrahydrocannabinol, and the second ending September 30, 1971 ($46,700), in which an intravenous emetic was tested and "the study was discontinued after the fourth subject reacted adversely with retching and fainting."⁴⁷

Two years later Deanne C. Siemer, General Counsel of the Department of Defense, told Senator Kennedy's Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, with Senator Richard S. Schweiker of Pennsylvania questioning her, that the Edgewood compound EA 3167 had been tested "in a different form and for different purposes at the Holmesburg State Prison in Pennsylvania" before the Central Intelligence Agency's involvement in 1971, a testing that "may have involved from 5 to 12 prisoners; one document says 5, another one says 12." The Department of Defense's written account of the Edgewood project, part of MKOFTEN and recorded in the vault's MKSEARCH entry, states that Edgewood "also engaged in clinical testing on human volunteers at the Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, using prisoners as test subjects," that in 1971 the CIA reviewed that earlier work and transferred $37,000 to Edgewood, and that the CIA-sponsored human testing consisted of one experiment in June 1973 with two military volunteers.⁴⁸⁴⁹

The University's own Army work was reported in 1995. Kligman worked at the University from 1951 to 1972 and conducted scores of experiments on inmates at Holmesburg, many through Ivy Research Laboratories, one of four research groups he founded in the mid-1960s. In 1964 he tested dioxin on prisoners under contract from Dow Chemical and the Department of Defense; Vernon Rowe, a former Dow employee to whom Kligman reported, testified before an Environmental Protection Agency hearing in January 1981 that Kligman applied 7,500 micrograms to ten prisoners, "468 times" Dow's authorized maximum, and that eight developed chloracne lasting more than seven months; Kligman has said the records were destroyed. In 1966 the Food and Drug Administration banned him from testing drugs on humans, and in about the same period the University signed a $386,486 contract with the Army to test chemical warfare agents, which the Philadelphia Inquirer reported at the time. His 1967 report to Edgewood Arsenal on skin "hardening" against blistering and other agents records that three prisoners exposed to ethylene glycol monomethyl ether "exhibited psychotic reactions (hallucinations, disorientation, stupor) within two weeks and had to be hospitalized." According to the 1975 report of the Army Inspector General, "Ivy Research [Laboratories] used at least 94 inmates to test choking agents, nerve agents, blister agents, vomiting agents, incapacitating agents, and toxins" and was banned from Holmesburg after its tests were blamed for a 1972 prison riot.⁵⁰ A former inmate told Allen Hornblum, whose Acres of Skin (1998) first documented the program in detail, that researchers had injected him in a padded cell and videotaped him, after which he hallucinated.⁵¹⁵² Kligman is reported to have told a reporter in 1966, "All I saw before me were acres of skin."⁵¹ A suit by about 300 former participants against Kligman, the University, the city, Dow and Johnson & Johnson was filed in 2000 and a court ruled in 2001 that the statute of limitations had expired; the city apologized in 2022.⁴⁶

The Navy Yard and the Philadelphia Experiment

The Philadelphia Navy Yard is the site named in the Philadelphia Experiment account, which places a Navy ship there in 1943. The Office of Naval Research states that the origin of the story dates to 1955 with the publication of The Case for the UFO by Morris K. Jessup, who afterward received correspondence from a Carlos Miquel Allende giving details of an alleged secret naval experiment in Philadelphia in 1943 in which a ship was rendered invisible and teleported to and from Norfolk. In 1956 a copy of Jessup's book, with hand-written annotations, was mailed anonymously to ONR; two officers assigned to ONR "took a personal interest in the book," showed it to Jessup, and arranged for a typewritten reprint of 25 copies. ONR's information sheet of September 8, 1996, states that personnel at the Fourth Naval District believe the stories arise from "quite routine research" during the war at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, with degaussing experiments and a 1950s experiment on the generating plant of the destroyer USS Timmerman using a 1,000 hertz generator as the likely sources, and that "ONR has never conducted any investigations on invisibility, either in 1943 or at any other time."⁵³⁵⁴

The Naval Historical Center's statement of June 17, 1996, says its Operational Archives had repeatedly searched and located no documents confirming the event, that the ship named in the account, the USS Eldridge, was commissioned on August 27, 1943, at the New York Navy Yard and was "never in Philadelphia" during the period reviewed, and that no records of a "Project Rainbow" relating to teleportation had been found.⁵⁵

Frankford Arsenal and the Army in the city

The Frankford Arsenal, the Army installation in the city, appears in a CIA memorandum for the record dated November 13, 1957, about a visit on October 30, 1957. The memorandum reviews a 24-hour clockwork project, including low-temperature failures of the mechanisms, and a planned comparison of three lubricants. It also records a .38 caliber slug of sintered tungsten carbide that the arsenal planned to test, and roughly $6,000 of the original project funds remaining.⁵⁶

Nuclear procurement and the 1987 Philadelphia arrest

Arshad Pervez, a native of Pakistan who moved to Canada in 1967, incorporated A.P. Enterprises in Toronto in 1986. In October 1986 he sought a source of maraging steel, a high-strength alloy used in gas centrifuge enrichment plants, and was referred to Carpenter Technology, a Pennsylvania steelmaker. Carpenter had previously been directed by the Department of Commerce not to make maraging steel for Pakistan, because the material was believed to be destined for Pakistan's nuclear facility. Pervez identified his client as Inam Ul-Haq of the Multinational Corporation of Lahore.⁵⁷ In November 1986 a U.S. Customs agent, working undercover as an international marketing analyst for Carpenter, met Pervez in Toronto. Pervez offered several contradictory end uses for the steel, among them a rocket motor project and a university engineering project. On January 13, 1987, he met an undercover Commerce Department licensing officer, Frank Rovello, in Philadelphia and asked how to obtain an export license.⁵⁷

In July 1987 Pervez drove to Philadelphia to facilitate the first shipment of the steel and to make another payment to Rovello, and was arrested there. A federal grand jury returned an eight-count indictment on July 28, 1987, against Pervez and Ul-Haq.⁵⁷ In 1989 the Third Circuit vacated his conspiracy and beryllium-export convictions and ordered a new trial on those counts, and it remanded for a limited hearing on entrapment for the false-documentation counts.⁵⁷ Declassified prosecution records published by the National Security Archive describe Ul-Haq as "a key figure in the A. Q. Khan nuclear procurement network" who evaded arrest by leaving the United States, and describe the Khan front company Multinational as Pervez's counterparty.⁵⁸

James Guerin, the founder of International Signal and Control, was indicted in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in 1991 with 19 codefendants, in a 67-count indictment over a conspiracy to evade the arms embargo against South Africa.⁵⁹ The Third Circuit described Guerin as ISC's majority shareholder, who founded the company in 1971 and afterwards served as an officer and director of its successor companies, after ISC went public in 1982.⁵⁹ In September 1989 the British defense company Ferranti called in accountants to investigate ISC's contracts.⁶⁰ In November 1992, at the trial of Thomas Jasin, the Baltimore Sun reported that Guerin had already pleaded guilty and had begun serving a 15-year federal sentence.⁶¹

Police leadership, prosecutors and the courts

In 1974, the peak year under Rizzo, Philadelphia police shot ninety-seven suspects and killed thirty-one, and in August 1970 Rizzo's police raided the offices of the Black Panther Party and strip-searched members in front of news photographers.¹ Goode, who as mayor approved the 1985 order, was the city's first black mayor.¹

Danielle Outlaw resigned as police commissioner in September 2023, and John M. Stanford Jr. and Vanore were appointed interim commissioner and interim first deputy commissioner on September 22, 2023.⁶²⁶³ Bethel was sworn in as commissioner on January 2, 2024.⁶⁴ The city's courts include Jill Fertel, a lawyer who was an assistant district attorney in the District Attorney's Office, and the criminal defense lawyer Jerome Brown, who represented Horsch.⁶⁵ The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania sits in Philadelphia and tried the Scarfo family RICO case in 1988.¹⁰ J.J. Klaver was a special agent of the FBI's Philadelphia field office from 1998 and its spokesman for his last seven years, until he retired on August 31, 2015.⁶⁶

Companies, churches and the press

George R. Wackenhut, who founded the Wackenhut Corporation, was born in Philadelphia.⁶⁷ On April 24, 1962, FBI SAC Letter 62-24(B) instructed all offices to refrain from any contact with the company, stating that the firm "has utilized misleading advertisements, attempts to capitalize on former FBI affiliation of its employees and its officials have reportedly engaged in personal misconduct and questionable business activities"; the bar was lifted by SAC Letter 65-1 of January 5, 1965.⁶⁸ In May 1962 the investigative firm of Charles B. Flack Jr., a New Jersey firm, merged into Wackenhut, and Flack became district manager of the company's Philadelphia office at Two Penn Center Plaza, supervising operations in the Pennsylvania and New Jersey area; the FBI's Newark office forwarded his letter and a Wackenhut folder to the Director on May 4, 1962.⁶⁸ Horsch said in a recorded interview that after leaving high school in 1961 he worked freelance for Wackenhut, "a security firm staffed by FBI agents," until about 1965: "I bugged telephones and committed burglaries for them." He said one regular client, introduced as "Mr. Smith," was E. Howard Hunt of the CIA, and described jobs at the Fairchild Hiller plant in Hagerstown, Maryland, in Trenton, New Jersey, and in Philadelphia.⁶⁹ When the Secret Service arrested him, then Raymond Hoersch, for counterfeiting in December 1974, authorities described him as unemployed and quoted him as saying that he "hadn't worked for 11 years."⁷⁰ The law firm Pepper Hamilton employed John B. Hannum as a litigator in Philadelphia, and on July 1, 2020, it combined with Troutman Sanders of Atlanta.⁷¹⁷²

Krol led the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia from 1961 and died in March 1996.⁷³ The Philadelphia Inquirer was founded in 1829 as the Pennsylvania Inquirer.⁷⁴

Natives and residents

John J. McCloy was born in Philadelphia on March 31, 1895.⁷⁵ Noam Chomsky, the linguist, was born in the city.⁷⁶ Alex Karp grew up in the Philadelphia area and attended Central High School and Haverford College.⁷⁷ Ro Khanna was born on September 13, 1976.⁷⁸ Jed Rakoff was born in Philadelphia in 1943, Alison Nathan in 1972, John Milton Younge in 1955, and McGlynn on February 13, 1925.⁷⁹ Marcus Foster moved to Philadelphia at the age of three, earned a doctorate in education at the University of Pennsylvania, and later served as superintendent of schools in Oakland, California.⁸⁰ Jack LaSota, the leader of the Zizian group, staged a death in August 2022 after going off a boat in San Francisco Bay and next appeared on law enforcement's radar on January 12, 2023, at an airport hotel on the outskirts of Philadelphia, where state police came to serve a warrant in connection with a murder investigation.⁸¹