"We saw no reason to doubt that," said Mark Bencivengo, director of the city Health Department unit that funds Parkside.
When Parkside's board asked Ward why so few clients were paying for treatment, he answered that too: He said most of the clients were too poor to pay.
"The board is a liberal board," said Parkside's lawyer, Gregory E. Smith. ''They believed him."
Their belief was blind faith.
It was so blind Ward looted the agency for at least three years while Parkside's board - and its government overseers - ignored troubling questions about his management and fiscal misconduct, interviews and records show.
That faith finally shattered last month, when Ward, 37, of Roxborough, pleaded guilty in federal court to three counts of theft from a federally funded program for stealing $184,000 from Parkside from July 1986 to June 1989. He also pleaded guilty to intimidating a clinic worker who cooperated with the FBI.
Parkside is one of 43 private, non-profit clinics that share $20.8 million in city funds to treat poor addicts. It offers counseling and detoxification at three West Philadelphia sites.
It operates the largest of 10 city-funded methadone programs for heroin addicts, serving about 300 a year. Parkside also provides psychological, job, family and other types of counseling to another 500 abusers of other substances.
State Medicaid covers the cost of that counseling, but makes clients pay 50 cents to $2 per visit.
Ward pocketed all those fees that clients paid in cash, depositing only checks and money orders.
His embezzlement was the largest of a web of schemes he used to siphon
funds from Parkside, the Daily News found.
Bencivengo called the theft an exception to a well-run city system of drug treatment for the poor.
But critics say Ward's case shows how the system invites abuse with inadequate government supervision and training for directors of city-funded
drug clinics.
