Pennsylvania's Supreme Court is ordering a special prosecutor to look into alleged violations of grand jury secrecy in the case of a millionaire casino owner.

The court issued a pair of orders today that instructed Dauphin County President Judge Richard Lewis to appoint the special prosecutor.

It also released copies of a county judge's findings regarding grand jury secrecy to casino owner Louis DeNaples and the Rev. Joseph Sica, his friend who's accused of lying under oath.

Former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo was assailed yesterday by a federal prosecutor as a glutton, a liar, and a thief with a "royalty complex" who obliterated the line between public service and his own enrichment.

"The corruption in this case, ladies and gentlemen, is as astonishing as it was pervasive," Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert A. Zauzmer told the U.S. District Court jury in his closing argument in Fumo's fraud and obstruction-of-justice trial.

He told jurors that the trial had provided them with a unique view of "Fumo World."

"The most important work in Fumo World was taking care of Mr. Fumo," said Zauzmer, who called it "a place of its own - far away from the ordinary reality, and apart from the ordinary laws."

A lawyer who told then-state Sen. Vince Fumo he could continue the "normal course of district office business" after a nonprofit organization that he founded was served with a grand-jury subpoena in April 2004 said under cross-examination yesterday that did not mean Fumo could delete e-mails.

The advice was in a February 2006 letter the lawyer, Robert Scandone, gave to Fumo's then-defense lawyer, Richard A. Sprague, who was preparing Fumo's defense.

Former State Sen. Vincent J. Fumo yesterday admitted that he stepped up his computer security after news broke that the FBI was investigating him - and that his staff continued to destroy e-mails even after prosecutors blanketed his allies and his network of nonprofits with subpoenas.

Enduring a fifth day on the stand in his federal corruption trial, Fumo insisted that he believed that deleting documents was lawful because no subpoena had been served on him directly.

Fumo leveled an accusation of his own yesterday, telling jurors that he had been targeted by the U.S. Justice Department under a Republican president because "I was the most prominent Democrat in Pennsylvania."

Wonder what Governor Rendell thinks of that...