Sep 14, 2015 3 min read

HARRISBURG (AP) – An agent from the state attorney general’s office Monday showed a judge slides of many of the artifacts former Mayor Stephen Reed is charged with illegally using public funds to buy for museums that never materialized.

Special agent Craig LeCadre’s presentation opened the prosecution’s case at Reed’s preliminary hearing before Senior District Judge Richard Cashman on hundreds of criminal counts including theft, misapplication of government property, criminal solicitation, bribery and tampering with evidence.

PennLive.com said the city-owned items in the slide presentation, which prosecutors seized from Reed’s home and storage facility last spring, included a $19,000 bronze statue of a cowboy on a bucking bronco, a $15,000 Ford’s Theater playbill from the night President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated there in 1865 and a $14,000 suit of Spanish armor.

The former mayor’s 19-room storage suite was about 100 yards long, LeCadre said.

“We discovered massive amounts of artifacts in every room, from floor to ceiling, front to back,” he said.

Reed, a Democrat who served as mayor of Pennsylvania’s financially strapped capital for 28 years before voters ousted him in 2010, has said he will fight the charges. He sat quietly in the courtroom as LeCadre answered questions about the slides from Deputy Attorney General Clarke Madden.

Defense lawyer Henry Hockeimer said Reed didn’t steal the historic artifacts state investigators took from his home. He said Reed bought hundreds of artifacts the state attorney general’s office has accused him of stealing from the city.

“Whatever they pulled out of his home was purchased by Mr. Reed from another source, privately,” he said.

Reed, 66, spearheaded construction of Harrisburg’s National Civil War Museum in 2001 on an abandoned reservoir overlooking the state Capitol. He said he was planning museums dedicated to the Wild West, sports and African-American history, but they were never built.

Some of the money for the artifacts came from more than $200 million that the city borrowed for a renovation of its aging municipal trash incinerator. The project contributed heavily to the near-collapse of the city, where a third of the 49,000 residents live below the poverty line.

Other sources of money included the impoverished schools and a minor league baseball team formerly owned by the city.

Prosecutors reduced the number of charges against Reed from 499 to 485 in what Madden described as an administrative move that would have little or no effect on the case.

The judge did not rule on a motion by Reed’s lawyer to dismiss 338 charges on grounds that the statute of limitations had expired. The judge said he referred the request to Dauphin County Court for consideration if the case is bound over for trial.

The hearing was scheduled to continue today.