Two Penn Center, a building in an office park uptown, gave former Harrisburg Mayor Steve Reed rent-free storage space for artifacts and other objects.
An uptown office park owned by a pair of Harrisburg lawyers was home to a “veritable treasure house” of artifacts collected by former Harrisburg Mayor Stephen Reed, who stored them there in a kind of a personal museum, according to a grand jury presentment released by the state attorney general Tuesday morning.
A series of ground-floor rooms at the site, which Reed used rent-free for years, contained objects including a life-size sarcophagus, a full suit of armor and “what appeared to be a life-size buffalo head,” according to the presentment, which formed the basis of nearly 500 criminal counts filed against Reed Tuesday morning.
One of the rooms also housed a re-creation of Reed’s city hall office, adorned with civic awards and commendations and various Western items, the presentment said.
Prosecutors have alleged that many of the objects were paid for with city money and that Reed’s personal storage of them amounts to a theft from taxpayers.
The lawyers, Michael J. Daley and Burton D. Morris, would not comment when reached separately by phone on Tuesday.
Morris said he was “not in a position to confirm” either ownership of the building or Reed’s alleged storage of city-bought artifacts there. Daley, who identified himself as a stockholder in the company that owns the property, said he had no comment.
The building in question, though not named in the presentment, is Two Penn Center, a part of the former Polyclinic Hospital campus uptown, which Morris and Daley bought in 2004, according to property records.
An exhibit to the presentment refers to artifacts seized and catalogued at Two Penn Center, and Roxbury News had also previously published footage of investigators delivering artifacts from Reed’s Cumberland street home to the facility.
A spokesman for the attorney general’s office said Tuesday that it was also his understanding that the uptown facility was where artifacts were stored.
The presentment also claimed the building’s owners provided the space for Reed’s “personal and exclusive use” rent-free, as an “accommodation and out of respect for the former mayor.”
Morris is the co-founder of Penncorp Service Group, a downtown firm specializing in document retrieval and filing. He has worked extensively in state government, as counsel for former Gov. Milton Shapp and as deputy state attorney general for major litigation, according to a biography on the company website.
He and Daley told the Patriot-News in 2001 that they planned to purchase the campus from PinnacleHealth, which had acquired it upon merging with Polyclinic in the mid-1990s, and develop it into a business park.
The presentment, which does not name Morris or Daley, described how agents searched the property and “found artifacts and collectibles of every description” along with documents and other objects, “piled from the floor to the ceiling.”
Reed told investigators the stored objects were all his personal possessions, aside from a few that may have been “inadvertently” brought there by city employees, the presentment said.
But prosecutors found that explanation “wholly incredible,” particularly after they started to compare an inventory of city-bought artifacts with the ones recovered from the storage facility and from a raid on Reed’s home.
The inventory process, which prosecutors said is ongoing, has so far identified city-bought artifacts in Reed’s collection with a purchase value totaling more than $120,000.
Jurors therefore concluded that Reed had “created in this suite of rooms a veritable treasure house comprising quite literally thousands of items which belonged to the people of the city of Harrisburg,” the presentment said.
