SPARE CHANGE

The 4th District could be in for quite a shock as leadership shifts from a prep school grad to a former gang member. Meet future city councilman Curtis Jones Jr.

by Kia Gregory

It’s only 10 a.m., and Curtis Jones Jr. is apologizing.

After a string of news stories he thinks smear his character, the likely new 4th District councilman is wary of the press. He says he’s not from the Mary Mason school of publicity that believes any press is good press. After 20 years in city government, Jones knows bad press can dry up campaign coffers, leave phone calls unreturned and derail a sure thing.

So on this particular Friday morning Jones is attempting damage control with this interview. He hopes the interview will shed light on his character and his motivations—which could be a show of either his better judgment or of his flaws.

For one, Jones is woefully impatient. He’s also aggressively impulsive—especially when he thinks he’s right. These traits are both his blessing and his curse.

As Jones puts it, he’s “survived” seven mayoral administrations, holding posts ranging from administrator to deputy finance director. And now for the first time in his political career his ethics are being officially examined. Last week the Daily News reported the city’s inspector general is investigating Jones for misusing city resources.

So before we even sit down he’s apologizing—for his handlers: Al Spivey, his longtime friend and campaign manager, and Anthony Ingargiola, vice president of political and strategic services at Evolve Strategies, the PR firm that rents the conference room we’re sitting in. Both men insisted on sitting in on the interview to protect their candidate from yet another reporter. And who can blame them?

Wynne-ing side: After nabbing his first election in 29 years, Curtis Jones Jr. is likely the 4th District's next councilman

During the primary Jones, who came of age during the city’s black political power movement, allowed himself to be lured to a 4th District street corner where he shouted down a little old lady.

Today, though, Curtis Jones is relaxed, dressed in a dark pinstriped suit and a monogrammed sky blue shirt with cameo-style cufflinks. At 50, the married father of four shows specks of gray in his beard, his fine hair is thinning and he wears the paunch of middle age.

Jones can be charismatic and inviting, and expresses the sincerity of a man satisfied with his past. He knows what’s behind the walls of city government. He’s politically connected, and he considers himself, as his campaign website says, an expert on economic development.

But there’s something about him some describe as slick and yet rough around the edges, possibly from his days as a member of the 54th and Berks Street gang in the ’70s. Something shouts that this is a guy not to be played. It’s his street cred that defines his appeal, which makes him the best of both worlds—or perhaps the worst.

“He’s gonna cooperate,” Ingargiola says about the looming inspector general investigation. “His first instinct was, ‘How can I help you, what do you need?’”

“That was my second instinct,” Jones quickly says, getting a laugh from around the table.

Asked to elaborate, Jones shakes his head, so Ingargiola jumps in to explain.

“Curt’s the total package,” he says. “He’s a bright guy. He’s hardworking. He’s very passionate. But somewhere underneath all this polish and the pinstripes is a tough guy. I mean that in a good way. A guy who doesn’t appreciate people taking cheap shots at him, whether on 54th Street or in the Daily News.”

Or a little old lady on a street corner.

“That cheap shot part is a work in progress that I have to learn,” says Jones. “If someone can make you mad, they can control you, and that’s not gonna happen.”

One dead-on shot is that Jones doesn’t have the reformist image of Michael Nutter, his predecessor in the 4th District.

Instead, Jones’ image is that of a man in desperate need of reform.

“Don’t paint folks in absolutes,” warns his longtime friend David Brown. “Curtis is one of the most authentic cats I’ve known. He knows not only the language, but the culture of the community he’s trying to represent, and that can be powerful.”

Still, the contrast between the buttoned-down Nutter and the street-smart Jones can be striking.

The change of leadership in the 4th District could prove seismic, as it shifts from a prep school grad to a former gang member.

“Nutter isn’t an easy act to follow,” says political consultant Jeff Jubelirer. “Jones will be measured against that, and he certainly hasn’t gotten off to a good start.”

Asked about the differences between himself and the mayor in waiting, Jones turns to the similarities.

“Nutter and I have common roots,” he says. “We once lived on the same block.”

Did he ever take Nutter’s lunch money?

“Nutter wasn’t a nerd like that,” he says. “Michael would fight. He wasn’t a punk. He wasn’t afraid. He walked with a different crowd, but we’ve had interactions over the years, and we’ve had a lot more on the campaign trail.

“I bring a shared experience of government,” he continues. “I’ve sat on the other side of the aisle while he asked me about my budget, and I’ve served under seven administrations, so I get it. I’ve been involved in it. We share that. We now share a district that we both care a great deal for, and what we have in common is that we want to change things.”

Jones gives the parks as an example.

“One end of my district views the parks as an ecological experiment that needs to be preserved,” he says in a serious monotone, “and therefore the issue of deer population is very important. The other end of my district says they come out to picnic, and there are crack vials and bottles of 40s out here. Both constituents are environmentalists. They say it differently, but they both care about the park. Both of them want to increase funding for that park. I’ve learned how to translate issues from one end to the other and find the common denominator. So I’m comfortable in a boardroom and I’m comfortable at 60th and Market.”

Ward leaders anointed Campbell to the seat six months prior in a special election after Nutter left to run for mayor. During the campaign Campbell, a rotund woman who sometimes uses a wheelchair, was being investigated by the city’s new ethics boards for ties to political action committees. She barely campaigned, becoming a strong symbol of the corrupt and contented culture of Philadelphia politics.

Of the nearly 100,000 registered voters, 25,000 people went to the polls in the 4th District—which stretches from West Philadelphia to East Falls, Manayunk and Roxborough—with an eclectic mix of race, class and needs.

The final tally was: Jones, 35 percent; Campbell, 33 percent; McClure, 32 percent.

Jones beat Campbell by only 446 votes.

“No one thought he was gonna win,” says political consultant Jubelirer, who supported McClure. “McClure was spending tons of money. Campbell was entrenched. But now, since it’s pretty much a one-party town, it’ll be next to impossible for him not to be elected in November.”

Had the bad press come sooner, Jubelirer says, Jones may have lost.

“There were 1,000 votes separating the three,” he says. “If there was a perception among just 10 percent of voters that his record was as negative as Campbell’s in terms of ethics, it could’ve helped McClure. It could’ve made a difference.”

When he gets there, he’s met by a band of angry residents—Campbell supporters, he says, who tell him the surveillance camera mounted to the utility pole on the corner isn’t working.

Keeping up with the Jones: The candidate shows he's a man of the people.

As the president of the Philadelphia Commercial Development Corporation (PCDC), Jones testified in City Council in March 2006 that surveillance cameras would deter and capture crime.

Last fall the Justice Department gave the agency $493,000 to install cameras in four high-crime commercial corridors “as a demonstration project,” Jones asserts, “and that’s important to note—a demonstration project, so we could learn about it and pass the information on to City Council.”

In Jones’ mind, of course the camera was working. Why wouldn’t it?

So on the corner he won the screaming match with the gray-haired block captain. He pointed at her, moved in close and called her a liar. The scene made the evening news, and was posted on YouTube by someone with the username “dontvoteforcurtisjones.”

Jones adamantly assured the group they were being recorded by the camera at PCDC headquarters that very second.

They weren’t.

The only activity on the monitor was the words: “Video Lost.” And not only was the camera at 54th and Berks not working, but two others along the corridor were also out. Three out of the five cameras installed had been down for weeks.

The contractor PCDC hired cited blown fuses, and noted that the system was checked only every two weeks.

“They were right,” Jones now admits readily. “But two things: Why would you tell criminals that the surveillance cameras weren’t working if you were really, truly speaking for the public? And how do you know they weren’t working?”

Does he wish he handled the situation differently?

“Yeah,” he says with a chuckle. “Anyone who can make you angry can control you. And even though I knew who she worked for and even though I knew her motivations weren’t genuine and even though I knew she was heckling me, I should’ve never, ever, ever … and I apologized to her later. I should’ve never lost my cool.”

Two months later a young man was shot and killed outside a Chinese restaurant at 54th and Arlington. The surveillance camera outside wasn’t working. The PCDC’s new director blames computer hackers and lightning.

Asked about the incident and who’s monitoring the cameras, Jones says, “When Curtis Jones Jr. was at PCDC, all the cameras were working. I want to underscore that when I was there it was a priority for me. I understand the cameras are working now. But I’ll never say that again.”

In May the media reported that Jones had federal tax liens totaling more than $25,000, along with thousands of dollars in other miscellaneous debts, to which Jones reportedly responded: “We’re regular people. We get behind in things like that I guess.”

Today he reaches into the folder and pulls out receipts. “There you go,” he says. “In fact, the IRS gave me a rebate—about $18. I was proud. I said, ‘Let me keep that check and never cash it.’”

In June a Daily News story reported that Jones didn’t have a master’s degree, as his website biography stated. Instead he has a master’s compliance administration certificate.

“We did our website some 10 years ago,” he explains. “I gave the information to them, and it said ‘master’s certificate.’ It got on there as ‘master’s degree.’ I should’ve edited it. I didn’t mean to mislead anybody.”

A few weeks ago Jones made headlines again by driving a company car for a company that no longer employs him.

Jones laughs.

“You mean this car that’s in my name?” he asks. “I wanna show you this—exhibit B.”

He pulls out the registration for a 2005 Dodge Durango, registered in his name—the car in question.

Jones says when he left his post as president of PCDC in February to run for City Council, he asked the agency’s board if he could assume the lease.

“The car was my personal office,” he says. “I grew attached to that car.”

Jones says the board agreed, and at that moment, starting in February, he assumed all payments for the lease and the insurance. But if he doesn’t pay, the city’s still on the hook.

Inspector general Seth Williams says he received an anonymous letter in April about Jones and the car, as well as claims that Jones used PCDC resources and staffers to aid in his campaign.

“I promised him we’d be fair,” Williams says. “If I don’t investigate, people will say it’s because he’s part of the Chaka Fattah family. If I do, it’s for political reasons. So you can’t win.”

The report should be completed sometime next month, but Williams says he’s received several more allegations. He says he gets calls and letters about Jones almost daily.

He wouldn’t elaborate, only to say: “When it rains, it pours.”

Jones thinks he’s caught in a political gang war, the target of a vengeful political machine that wants to paint him as corruptible for going against Campbell.

“The Democratic establishment needs to own up to what happened,” says Spivey, his campaign manager. “He’s the Democratic nominee, and they’re trying to impugn his character. At the end of the day anyone can make a mistake. At the end of the day it comes down to what you’re known for and what you’ve produced. If that’s the measurement, Curtis Jones is ahead of the class.”

His mother Barbara Jones was a single parent raising what Jones describes as two bad boys. “She worked very hard to pay the mortgage and the bills,” he says. “And we worked very hard to give her gray hairs by running the street.”

When Jones was 12, he joined the 54th and Berks Street gang.

“The streets had a certain allure as an adolescent,” he remembers. “They were to a degree my surrogate parents for a while.”

There were more than 100 gangs in the city back then, all battling over everything from turf to girls.

“You had to be able to fight,” Jones says. “It was either that or when you got to school, you got your lunch money taken.”

When Sister Falaka Fattah, a widowed mother, learned one of her six sons was in a gang, she and her husband David invited all his 15 gang members to the family’s two-story two-bedroom West Philadelphia row house. That evolved into the House of Umoja, the country’s first urban boys’ town.

After a gang-related murder, Fattah, her husband David and her 16-year-old son Chaka held a meeting at the Wynnefield Residents Association (Jones was elected to the board unanimously last month), which kicked off Umoja’s No Gang War in ’74 campaign.

“I was inspired by her message of: Why are you doing it?” remembers Jones. “What is the relevance, and do you know there’s a greater world out here you should be making a difference in?”

The message crystallized one night when Jones was 14. He was on his way to a house party when a man came out of the driveway and fired into the crowd, killing Jones’ girlfriend.

The site of that shooting is about three blocks from the 54th Street commercial strip where he pushed for surveillance cameras last fall.

“Those cameras weren’t just academic things that I sat in a boardroom and said, ‘Oh yeah, let’s do something about this,’” he says. “I lived it.”

As gang violence escalated in Wynne-field, Jones retreated to the House of Umoja on what he calls the block of peace.

“I can literally say the house saved my life,” he says.

It was there that Jones and Fattah’s son Chaka, now a U.S. congressman, once became friends and fellow activists.

“When you start becoming an activist, it’s like an addiction,” says Jones. “If you see one wrong—say youth violence—you understand that it’s an economic thing, that these guys don’t have jobs. Then you see that if you don’t get a good education, you don’t have a good opportunity to be successful. It’s links in a chain, and you start to get involved in all of them, and it’s not much different than it is today.”

Jones came up learning from independent, anti-machine politicians like state Rep. John Anderson, City Councilman Lucien Blackwell and state Rep. David Richardson, a trinity of influences Jones describes as the legislator, the conscience and the activist.

Working on political campaigns, Jones became known as a young man in a big hurry. At 21 he ran for delegate to the Democratic National Convention­—and lost.

When he was 21, he and Fattah, 22, ran for city commissioner.

Jones’ friend David Brown remembers a speech he wrote for him saying the city was at a crossroads. “He just couldn’t say it,” remembers Brown. “He’d keep stumbling. That’s some insight into him because he’s somebody who always works hard to get it right.”

Jones and Fattah weren’t even old enough to hold the office (you had to be 25), but they made a strong showing anyway, and began building political support.

Today, 29 years after his first election, Jones thinks he can do a greater good as councilman.

At PCDC, an agency that helps small businesses owned by minorities, women and low-income people, he’s credited with increasing amounts loaned from $1 million to $15 million, building a business library and creating effective entrepreneurial training programs.

“I’ve made a number of thousandaires and millionaires through that process,” he says. Then he tells a story of sitting in a barbershop around Christmas listening to a guy talk about the XBox he bought his son.

“I think it was for him and his son,” Jones jokes.

The man had just started working at an office supply company PCDC had funded.

“I just kicked back and listened,” Jones says. “That guy could be out there sticking somebody up for that XBox, but his path is changed because of the work we did, and that felt good.”

After 15 years at PCDC, Jones says he’s learned what the city does well, what it can do better and what it fails at miserably.

“But the folks in City Council, a lot of them don’t get it,” he says. “I don’t think they get the urgency—not at all. And that’s one reason I decided to run. I believe I have something to offer. I’m not a status quo guy. I’m a solutionary.

“I’m gonna make some mistakes,” Jones says, “but I’m gonna try something different, and if it works, great. And if it doesn’t, we’ll learn from that mistake and move on. I’m not afraid to do that.”

Turns out the office is closed because the campaign is “reconfigurating,” says Jones’ campaign manager Spivey.

“By September we’ll be back,” he promises. “We took a hiatus during the summer. It was a very difficult fight. But we changed the status quo. The party voted for Carol Campbell, and the public voted for Curtis Jones.”

Still, like the bad press, the shuttered office gives the wrong impression: that Jones is hiding or sees no use in campaigning.

In fact, Jones is looking for a job until the campaign picks up next month.

He quit his $110,000 a year job at PCDC to run for City Council. If he’s elected in November, he won’t see his first paycheck from the $102,000 job until January.

“My mortgage company says, ‘That’s noble,’” he says of his decision to run for office. “‘Pay us.’”

When asked what kind of job he’s looking for, Jones says, “McDonald’s sounds good right now.”

But assuming he wins in November, he says first on his list as city councilman is to “stop the bleeding.”

“Where are we, 260?” he asks of the number of people murdered in the city so far this year. “Anytime you can’t keep up with the count, you have a problem.”

Next, Jones says he wants to increase the school district’s focus on internships and apprenticeships, and create curriculums that train students for jobs in the private sector, like hospitals.

He describes how in Germany, schools partner with area automakers to create a path toward meaningful jobs.

“That is the model,” he says, “and we need to do that yesterday.”

He wants to market the city to niche industries, like defibrillator companies. He talks about how traveling representatives wooed businesses to Philadelphia during the Rizzo era.

“We have to be more targeted,” he says. “We can’t do the shotgun approach. If we do that in small bites—50 jobs here, 100 jobs there—we create a tipping point.”

But outside of seemingly intractable big-ticket issues, Jones says working-class issues—such as fixing a driveway or replacing a broken water heater—get lost in the maze of city government.

“Folks are hungry for leadership,” he says. “I’ve walked in neighborhoods where people say, ‘No elected official has ever knocked on my door.’ So when you finally get there, you’re like the relief fund at the refugee camp. People are starving for some service.”

In the meantime Jones remains impatient. He calls the wait for the inspector general’s report unfair; the wait to prove he’s right, maddening.

“Until you know what kind of ice cream somebody likes, you don’t really know them,” Spivey says later. “Curtis will make a wonderful political servant. In fact this stuff may have an undesired effect for his opponents in that it’ll motivate him to be on his game.”

Jones agrees. If anything, that’s his style—proving his detractors wrong.

“I’ve been listening,” he says. “And come January, I’ll be ready to lead.”