And this year, a new report revealed last week, State Rep. Dwight Evans and School Reform Commission Chairman Robert L. Archie Jr. relentlessly twisted arms in back rooms to make sure their favored candidate got a lucrative contract to run a high school.
Archie turned out to be phrasemaker, too.
"This is Philadelphia," he reportedly told the candidate he was forcing out. "Things are different here."
As the details revealed in the exhaustive report made plain, there is little point disputing that.
Philadelphia remains a city where official business is routinely done in the dark. Despite indictments, new ethics rules, and scathing reports, it remains a town with an entrenched culture in which the powerful circumvent the rules to get things done and the cloutless find themselves on the curb.
"There is a lot of talk in the development community about how hard it is to do business here," said Harris Steinberg, the planner leading a drive to redevelop Penn's Landing after previous efforts fell prey to corruption.
Insider demands, he said "add costs to the project, and they create uncertainty. It's not a level playing field, and I think it does a disservice to the city as a whole."
Though the bedrock realities of the city political culture often remain secret, every once in a while a little light leaks in, as when Street and Graham let loose with their unexpected moments of candor.
Another instance was when FBI wiretaps made it clear that a low-profile power broker, the late Ronald White, never elected to anything, was the secret czar over contracts and concessions at Philadelphia International Airport during the Street administration.
Then there was the testimony during former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo's trial that two of the city's most influential lawyers, David L. Cohen and Arthur Makadon, told a corporate executive in 2000 to "work it out with the senator" when Fumo demanded $50 million from his company.
