Not fit to serve

Veteran Philadelphia political operative Pete Truman won’t go to jail after all.

Even though he pled guilty to tax evasion last year, a pair of psychological exams found him “incompetent to stand trial and unlikely to become competent,” according to a court filing.

So prosecutors, who seemed to have Truman cold, gave up and withdrew charges.

Old Philly political hands will remember Truman as an elected court official, a ward leader, and in recent years head of a firm called Dan Silo Associates that raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars from candidates for city office.

Truman was known to candidates as a broker of sorts for a group of African American Democratic ward leaders who’d agreed to act in concert. Federal prosecutors say Truman failed to report $700,000 of income between 2001 and 2007.

Truman, 75, was charged along with another consultant, Chester Fulton, who was sentenced to prison last month.

The two prosecutions are a useful step toward transparency in Philadelphia elections. For more on that, see my November post on the Chester Fulton case.