Embattled Philadelphia landlord Philip Pulley admits to voting twice

Struggling property owner Philip C. Pulley finally got the verdict he deserved Wednesday in federal court in Philadelphia.

But it wasn’t the 2022 collapse of one of his North Philadelphia apartment buildings — a disaster that displaced nearly 100 residents — that landed him before a judge this time. Nor was it the piles of unpaid tax and utility bills, building code violations, and complaints from tenants, contractors, and the state attorney general that have dogged him for much of the past decade.

It wasn’t even about the legal battle with his insurance company over $300,000 in damages incurred when his 70-foot yacht ran aground near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 2019. — the dispute that last year it went before the US Supreme Court.

Instead, Pulley, 62, entered a courtroom Wednesday to plead guilty to an entirely different set of offenses — falsely registering to vote and casting multiple votes in several recent elections.

“Do you plead guilty because you are, in fact, guilty?” U.S. District Judge Mitchell S. Goldberg asked Pulley at the end of the brief court proceeding.

The owner, sitting next to his lawyer, replied curtly, “Yes.”

Pulley’s guilty plea — including voter fraud, voter registration fraud and voting more than once in a federal election — was part of a plea agreement reached with prosecutors after Philadelphia election officials noticed Pulley’s suspicious voter registrations last year and reported them to the FBI.

Under questioning from Goldberg on Wednesday, Pulley admitted that between 2020 and 2023, he simultaneously registered to vote in three different counties, providing false addresses as his primary residence and at times providing false Social Security numbers.

Then, when former President Donald Trump unsuccessfully ran for a second term in the White House in the 2020 presidential race against Joe Biden, Pulley tried to vote in all three elections.

He managed to vote in person in Montgomery County, where he has lived since the mid-1980s, and in 2000 he bought a gated estate in Huntingdon Valley called Stonewall Manor. He also voted by mail in Broward County, Florida, where the Pulley family owns a $1.7 million mansion overlooking the bay and waterfront.

If not for election administrators’ decision to reject his application for an absentee ballot in Philadelphia that same year, he likely would have tried to vote there as well.

But Pulley, he told Goldberg on Wednesday, was undeterred and voted in multiple elections over the next three years.

He voted in municipal elections in Philadelphia and Montgomery counties in 2021 and 2023, for which he now faces state charges.

And in the 2022 Pennsylvania gubernatorial battle between then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro and Republican rival state Sen. Doug Mastriano, Pulley voted in person in Philadelphia and Montgomery counties — a week after he also cast an early vote in Florida.

Prosecutors did not say Wednesday which candidates Pulley voted for in either race. However, voter records show he registered as a Republican in Florida but as a Democrat in two Pennsylvania counties.

Pulley, for his part, declined to discuss his voting results, leaving the courtroom accompanied by defense attorney Brian J. McMonagle.

This is the silence he has maintained since the publication of the Inquirer An investigation conducted last month revealed numerous legal issues he faces as a property owner.

Last year, the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office filed a lawsuit against Pulley and his companies, accusing them of renting apartments in substandard conditions and retaliating against tenants who complain.

He is suing his insurers over denied claims, including costs related to the 2022 collapse of his Lindley Tower apartments in North Philadelphia.

And weeks after prosecutors unveiled allegations of election fraud this summer, Fannie Mae, the government-backed mortgage finance company, filed a $60 million lawsuit against Pulley and several of his real estate holding companies for defaulted mortgages.

Those cases are ongoing, and Pulley is expected to be sentenced for election crimes in the coming months. He faces up to five years in prison for each of the four charges he pleaded guilty to Wednesday.