FILE – In this July 14, 2015 file photo, former Harrisburg Mayor Stephen Reed waits to make a statement after his preliminary arraignment at District Judge William Wenner's offices in Lower Paxton Township,... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE – In this July 14, 2015 file photo, former Harrisburg Mayor Stephen Reed waits to make a statement after his preliminary arraignment at District Judge William Wenner's offices in Lower Paxton Township, Pa. Jury selection is set to begin Monday, Jan. 23, 2017, in the criminal case against Reed,... (Associated Press) 
 
 HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — An obsession with the Wild West compelled then-Mayor Steve Reed to scour the country for artifacts and plan for a museum to house them all in the unlikely location of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. 
 
 The museum never came close to being built, and on Monday prosecutors and his lawyers will begin to pick a jury for Reed's trial on 112 counts of receiving stolen property. 
 
 Investigators say they recovered some 1,800 artifacts, many from his home, and jurors will hear about dozens of them. They include stagecoach equipment, saddles, a dice game known as chuck-a-luck, copies of the Tombstone Epitaph newspaper, knives and a gun collection that includes a "Whorehouse Box w/pin fire revolver." 
 
 His lawyer, Henry Hockeimer Jr., said Reed, who is dealing with what he described as serious health issues, denies the allegations. 
 
 "Suffice to say that we believe the evidence at trial will show that Mr. Reed ... did not steal anything and was in fact in lawful possession of the items the attorney general's office charged him with," Hockeimer said. 
 
 As to why he is charged with receiving stolen property, as opposed to theft, Hockeimer said prosecutors "never have completely articulated their theory." 
 
 Reed, a Democrat, had been a phenomenally successful politician in Pennsylvania's capital city, winning re-election six times and receiving plaudits for revitalizing the city's dingy downtown. 
 
 A centerpiece of his economic development strategy had been a planned network of museums to draw tourists, including a Civil War museum that did get built. 
 
 But the Wild West museum was clearly his pet project, an effort he continued to push even after it became public and attracted derision and pointed questions about the costs, paid by a city fund that Reed controlled. A grand jury report issued nearly two years ago described Reed's compulsion to buy artifacts as "an almost pathological preoccupation." 
 
 A former spokesman, Randy King, told the grand jury that Reed would send so many boxes back from buying trips they would sometimes clog the mayor's office, making it difficult for city employees to maneuver. 
 
 King testified that city officials tried to stop Reed, telling him: "'You've got to stop this, you've got to cut it out, it's just going to kill your career,' but that Reed would not listen," the grand jury wrote. "He would simply repeat to them that he was 'almost finished.'" 
 
 Reed's museum plan had its supporters: as the scandal became public in 2003, a member of the board that oversaw the spending described him as "the Walt Disney of our time in central Pennsylvania." 
 
 But by the next year Reed had to put the project on ice. Harrisburg was already starting to stagger under the weight of hundreds of millions in Reed-era debt tied to a trash incinerator, a financial crisis that nearly bankrupted Harrisburg. 
 
 The Wild West museum and artifact buying sprees were among the reasons Reed lost in the 2009 Democratic primary to one of his main critics, Linda Thompson. The city subsequently became the first Pennsylvania municipality to be taken over by the state. 
 
 Prosecutors have argued that Reed, 67, overpaid for many of the relics and collectibles. Under Thompson the city sold thousands of them, recovering about $4.4 million of the estimated $8.3 million the city paid for about 10,000 items. Experts said the collection was a mishmash of real treasures alongside fakes and junk. 
 
 A state investigator said a storage facility Reed maintained near his Harrisburg home was packed with artifacts and collectibles, as well as a re-creation he staged of his mayoral office, complete with civic awards. 
 
 "That's one of many instances of poetic license taken by the attorney general's office in the drafting of the presentment," Hockeimer said. "It's not fair, it's not correct." 
 
 In May, a judge threw out 305 of the 449 counts filed against Reed, saying too much time had elapsed and the statutes of limitations had run. Prosecutors subsequently narrowed their case down again, to 114 counts. 
 
 Reed is also charged with one count of evidence tampering for trying to sell some of the artifacts on consignment, and one count of dealing in the proceeds of unlawful activities. 
 
 More recently, Reed's lawyers have been trying to prevent prosecutors from using witness testimony of an appraiser, and to be able to tell jurors about the hundreds of charges that were previously dismissed. 
 
 "The commonwealth did not bother to take any steps to evaluate whether the city of Harrisburg disposed of the property it is alleging Mr. Reed had stolen," his lawyers argued in a recent filing. The attorney general's office called that "an incorrect recitation of the process." 
 
 Trial is expected to take about a week and a half. ||||| HARRISBURG, Pa. (Reuters) - A sweeping corruption case against a former mayor of Pennsylvania’s capital city Harrisburg ended on Monday when he pleaded guilty to 20 counts of receiving stolen artifacts bought with public funds for a proposed museum that was never built in the city. 
 
 Former Mayor Stephen R. Reed, 67, made the plea on the morning when jury selection in his trial was scheduled to begin in Dauphin County Court of Common Pleas. As part of the plea deal, prosecutors dropped 94 other counts. 
 
 Reed, who was originally charged in 2015 with nearly 500 criminal counts, could receive up to nine months in prison under state sentencing guidelines when Judge Kevin Hess sentences him on Friday, although he may only get probation. 
 
 Many of the more serious charges, including bribery and siphoning money from bond issues, were dismissed last year on statute of limitations grounds. 
 
 “Today’s guilty plea marks the final chapter in a case that has gone on for several years,” said Deputy Attorney General Rebecca Frantz. “This will help the city of Harrisburg to move on.” 
 
 Reed, known as an avid private collector of Civil War and American West memorabilia during his 28 years in office, pleaded guilty to illegal possession of 20 historical documents and photographs with a total value of more than $18,000. 
 
 The artifacts were among thousands acquired by Reed with public funds for a proposed Museum of the American West that he had hoped to build in financially strapped Harrisburg. 
 
 After his plea, Reed told reporters he experienced “gut-wrenching humiliation and embarrassment” over his arrest, after serving as Harrisburg’s mayor for decades. 
 
 He said many of the artifacts seized from his home and warehouse during a raid in 2015 were legally owned by him, but similar to ones acquired with public funds for the museum. 
 
 He believes the 20 items in the plea were accidentally placed in boxes of his own papers after he hastily left office following his defeat in 2010, but acknowledged the packing was done under his supervision. 
 
 “The precepts of my faith require that I take responsibility for this error, and that was my ultimate deciding factor in doing this plea,” Reed said. 
 
 A hearing is scheduled in March on Reed’s petition for the return of artifacts he believes belong to him. Frantz said prosecutors would oppose that request. 
 
 Harrisburg has been under state financial supervision since 2011, primarily because of cost overruns on an incinerator retrofit project. ||||| Like Ahab with his white whale, ex-Harrisburg Mayor Stephen R. Reed has long been obsessed with historical artifacts, a vexation that played a key role in his political undoing and now appears to be part of criminal investigation into his time in office. 
 
 For much of his 28 years as mayor, a visit to Reed's dimly-lit City Hall office meant two things: Encountering a thick haze of cigarette smoke and being surrounded by a bevy of Civil War, Native American and Old West artifacts, which were crammed into both the mayor's conference room and his private quarters. 
 
 Reed made no secret of his obsession for all things Civil War, Native American and Western. Yet, the multi-million-dollar artifact collections he amassed using public funds from the Harrisburg Authority, the city's bond-making and utility-owning arm, were conducted largely behind the scenes, if not in total secrecy. 
 
 It became no secret that Reed also possessed a more modest private collection of artifacts, which he kept at his Cumberland Street rowhome. On Tuesday, nearly a dozen investigators raided Reed's midtown home and could be seen taking away saddles, a totem pole, what looked like a stuffed fox, a whiskey barrel and assorted other items, Eric Veronikis reported. 
 
 On Wednesday, an ailing Reed, who says he is suffering from stage 4 cancer that started in his prostate, broke his near total silence since being turned out of office in 2009, proclaiming that all of the artifacts in his home belonged to him. 
 
 Reed didn't elaborate, saying he was bound by a gag order related to the Office of the Attorney General's grand jury investigating Harrisburg's incinerator bond deal fiasco. Reed appeared before the panel in April. 
 
 But the then-mayor confronted the artifact issues head-on in a March 2009 interview conducted as he was preparing to mount a bid for his eighth term in office. Stung by the artifact backlash, as well as rising city deficits and service cuts related to runaway spending on the deeply indebted incinerator renovation, Reed would lose the Democratic primary to then-City Council President Linda Thompson. He quietly left office at the end of 2009, and has remained mostly mum ever since. 
 
 But in March 2009, as Reed was attempting to reassure voters, who for the first time seemed to be questioning his judgment, the mayor had this to say: 
 
 "Never have I kept city- or authority-owned anything at my house, other than my pager. There are in the city government center different artifacts, some of them are in this room (his city office, where he pointed to an Indian buffalo head dress and several bound volumes on a table behind his desk.) Some city archival items are hanging out in the atrium; some are in the display cases downstairs; and some are in storage here. That's not many. The overwhelming majority of artifacts are in storage." 
 
 His reassurances, however, would not be enough. Not by a long shot. 
 
 Winning the Civil War 
 
 The North won the Civil War, and then 130 years later Steve Reed attempted to purchase it in Harrisburg. Throughout the 1990s, Reed amassed thousands of Civil War items from both North and South, including the hat box for Abe Lincoln's famous stovepipe, if not the hat, itself. 
 
 The money came largely from bond fee proceeds and other non-tax funds from the Harrisburg Authority. The authority's board, which R eed hand-picked in those days, funneled the money into a "special projects fund" that financed tens of millions in artifact spending in the 1990s and 2000s. 
 
 Reed's gambit was this: The literally thousands of artifacts he would hastily hand-pick at retail dealers from Gettysburg to Arizona would become the city's local matching funds toward the building of state-financed museums in Harrisburg. 
 
 This was the very formula Reed used to build the National Civil War Museum in Reservoir Park, which opened in 2001. The $33.2 million project was split among the money Reed spent on literally thousands of Civil War artifacts, many of which remain stored away in the bowels of the museum, and state funds to build the place. Reed spent more than $17 million on those artifacts, at the state put in $16.2 million for construction. 
 
 All told, Reed planned five museums for Harrisburg, including an African-American history museum, a sports hall of fame on City Island and perhaps most famously, a Wild West museum in decidedly eastern Harrisburg. Only the Civil War museum and the much smaller-scale National Fire Museum, ever became reality. 
 
 Reed's ambitious – some would say, fool-hardy – artifact-spending for museums began to unravel in 2003, when word of Reed's prodigious spending on Western and Native American artifacts first surfaced in a July 6 front-page story in the Sunday Patriot-News. 
 
 The scoop detailed at least $4.8 million (and counting) in Western artifact spending and unveiled Reed's plan for a National Museum of the Old West. Reed said that nearly all of the $4.8 million came from underwriting fees charged to borrowers who use the Harrisburg Authority, the independent bond-issuing agency which funds or refinances public projects – and not taxpayer dollars. 
 
 Reed explained that Harrisburg Authority fees cannot be spent on city services such as police, fire protection, or any other operating expenses. The money must be spent on "capital purchases" – long-term investments which, Reed said, would include purchases for a city museum. 
 
 All these facts came to light only after an artifact dealer in Arizona contacted the Patriot-News with questions about the Harrisburg mayor spending wildly on Western artifacts during trips all over Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and beyond. 
 
 Reed had become instantly recognizable among antiques dealers and collectors in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming and California. And dealers said he was known for paying top dollar and almost never haggling over price. 
 
 One skeptical dealer, stunned by the money Reed was spending in Colorado Springs – as well as the mayor's practice of dispatching an armed city police officer to collect his finds -- began raising questions: 
 
 "It made me wonder," Jack Johnson, a dealer at Cadillac Jack's Trading Post in Calhan, Colo., told the Patriot-News in 2003. "Money's not an object for your mayor. He's buying stuff all over. I've never seen this in 20 years here." 
 
 Pressed with these facts, Reed confirmed the spending in an interview, during which he released a list of his purchases six pages long and agreed to answer questions about his museum plans. His treasures included extensive collections on Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, as well as a complete Wells Fargo wagon. This would grow to become a 10,000-item Western collection owned by Harrisburg, for which Reed paid $8.3 million. 
 
 But one thing the city collection would not include was the $3,248 purchase at Cadillac Jack's. Reed promptly cancelled the order after the owner ratted him out. 
 
 At the time, Reed said his idea for a Wild West museum should have come as no surprise: "I've repeatedly stated over the years the long-standing plan, as part of the city's overall economic development program, is to create national, first-class facilities to attract and retain business, jobs, residents and visitors," Reed said. 
 
 But why a Western museum in Harrisburg? 
 
 "Why not?" Reed asked. 
 
 Why not, indeed. 
 
 The Backlash Begins 
 
 Fred Clark, then a member of the Harrisburg Authority board that approved Reed's artifact spending, famously dubbed Reed as "the Walt Disney of our time in central Pennsylvania." But not everyone in Harrisburg saw it this way. 
 
 Jason Smith, then-owner of the marketing firm Fathom Design Group on North Second Street, saw Reed's Wild West museum idea as patently absurd, and the ad man used his gifts for words and images to subvert the proposal with biting humor and subversive wit, beginning in the fall of 2003. 
 
 Smith began by launching a website with slogans like, "Just say 'neigh' to the Wild West Museum" and "Give the Wild West Museum the boot." He would show up at City Council meetings, asking, "Why are we buying Annie Oakley's underpants?" And by 2005, Smith would be running for mayor against Reed. Among his campaign trinkets were Reed finger puppets, with Harrisburg's "cowboy mayor" decked out in a Stetson hat and leather chaps. 
 
 Smith would lose the election by a 3-to-1 margin, but the public relations damage was done. And Reed knew it. 
 
 Knocked off balance, Reed tried to recover by first putting his Wild West museum plans on hold in early 2004, then scrapped the idea altogether in fall 2006. He reluctantly agreed to begin selling off the now-10,000-item Western collection. But it was too late in many ways. 
 
 Ironically, the closest Reed ever came to realizing his vision of a Wild West museum was the lavish display of all of his best artifacts put on by a high-brow auction house in Dallas, Texas. Heritage Auctions did right by the collection, producing glossy catalogs with professional pictures and lavish descriptions of each impressive piece. Then all of the best artifacts were put on display in a football-field-sized exhibition hall in Dallas, where they were auctioned off to the highest bidder over a weekend of bidding. 
 
 There were pistols under glass; a pyramid-shaped display of cowboy boots and saddles; a caravan of stage coaches and wagons; a table of Indian moccasins; a wall of rare photos and art; and a range of rare rifles. All of it was carefully arranged, dramatically lit and imaginatively presented - a glimpse of the Western museum that might have been. 
 
 "I think he definitely had a vision in mind when he assembled this collection," said Rawhide Johnson, a Western artifacts specialist from Cody, Wyo. "It's impressive," he said. "You can kind of get the idea of what the museum would have been like. I think he probably could be rated as a great visionary for what he tried to do." 
 
 Alas, Reed did not travel to Dallas to see it. He cancelled his trip at the last minute, citing city business. 
 
 In the end, the Dallas auction and several subsequent city artifact sales recouped only a fraction of the $8 million-plus Reed spent on them. For example, the 2,914 guns, wagons, documents and old photos sold at the much-ballyhooed Dallas auction netted only $1.66 million – far short of the $8.3 million Mayor Stephen R. Reed spent acquiring the collection. Worse, the city's cataloging and storage of the items – most of which were crammed into a dusty warehouse by the city's trash incinerator – proved far less than ideal. 
 
 During his stint on the Harrisburg Authority board, current mayor Eric Papenfuse tried to make sense of the city's artifact inventory, attempting to match invoices with the items and track the authority's payment approvals and the current location for each item – only to be thoroughly frustrated and infuriated by incomplete or missing data. 
 
 Aside from the Civil War and Western artifacts, Reed had acquired numerous other items purportedly for the "city archives." Among them: a Sumerian bead necklace, Egyptian mummy items, a vampire kit, money from the French Revolution, World War II items and the like. 
 
 As a result, Papenfuse, after copying all of the authority's artifact records, made a public call for a criminal investigation in Sept. 2007. 
 
 By 2009, as Papenfuse was making a failed bid for City Council and Reed was running for re-election to an eighth term, Pepenfuse publicly stated that the FBI was investigating Reed's artifact spending and the way those purchases were handled and funded. Papenfuse said he knew this because he had been questioned by the Feds and had even been given a code name. The FBI, as is their custom, would neither confirm nor deny an investigation. But Reed, in his March 2009 interview, blasted the assertion. 
 
 "I don't know what they would be investigating," Reed responded. "A lot of artifacts were purchased. They were purchased for museum projects and the city archives. And it's all a matter of public record." 
 
 A method to his madness? 
 
 Another troubling aspect of Reed's artifact spending was the seemingly arbitrary manner in which he amassed such a vast and costly collection, paying full retail prices at high-ticket tourist shops in well-traveled Western cities and towns. 
 
 In collecting for the Wild West museum, Reed would travel, either alone or with his friend and one-time city employee, John Lavenda. According to one dealer in Colorado Springs, the mayor simply breezed into a shop and then proceeded to spend thousands of dollars in a matter of minutes. 
 
 After picking out his loot, Reed would leave behind his mayor's business card, instructing the dealer to mail out an invoice. In reply, the Harrisburg Authority would cut a check. Reed's purchases were then crated up, but not shipped. 
 
 Instead, Reed would dispatch a city employee and an armed Harrisburg police officer to fly out West, rent a truck, pick up the treasures and drive them back to Harrisburg. On one such journey, the city employee and police officer spent two weeks making pick-ups in four Western states. Reed said this practice saved money on the professional armored transport that would otherwise be required for some of the more valuable items. 
 
 When Reed didn't find what he was looking for, he would leave behind handwritten wish lists with shopkeepers. For artifact dealers, these lists were like wanted posters, offering rewards in the form of top-dollar sales for the dealer who can locate the items. 
 
 In wake of the details about Reed's artifact-finding trips, some city officials raised questions about the travel, meal and personal reimbursement expenses Reed and others had put in for. They cited missing receipts, inadequate details and reimbursement forms submitted long after the trips and purchases were completed. Reed also submitted for reimbursement from the authority expenses for artifacts that he bought with his own money over the years. In the 2009 interview, Reed defended these practices: 
 
 "They weren't personal items. They were items that I had purchased for the archives and museum projects. They were delivered here (to the city) from the very beginning. They were never anywhere else but delivered here. I didn't sell anything to the authority or the city. I got reimbursement for exactly what I paid to get those items. Not one penny more." 
 
 As for working with a professional curator or consultant in acquiring artifacts, Reed had tried that approach with in amassing his Civil War collection -- and it came back to bite him. 
 
 Russell Pritchard III had advised Reed on his Civil War artifact purchases and sold items to Reed for the museum. But it turned out that Pritchard, who was an occasional volunteer appraiser for PBS's "Antiques Roadshow," was staging phony appraisals and defrauding Civil War collectors, according to the FBI. 
 
 After the FBI probe, Pritchard was ordered to pay $830,000 in restitution – most of it to descendants of Confederate Gen. George Pickett, who alleged that Pritchard, then a buyer for The National Civil War Museum, bought military antiques from Pickett's family for $87,000 in 1995, only to sell them to the museum for $870,000. A jury had awarded the family more than $800,000 in damages in 1999. 
 
 And when Pritchard was given access to photograph Harrisburg collection, he switched a soldier's jacket valued at more than $30,000. It would finally be returned five years later. 
 
 Said Reed at the time: "Pritchard violated our trust; he violated the law. They stole from others through fraudulent actions and put a taint on Civil War artifact preservation in this nation." 
 
 Perhaps it was no coincidence then that when it came to collecting his Wild West artifacts, Reed would go it alone. 
 
 A Visionary's Lament 
 
 In his confessional March 2009 interview, as the then-mayor was preparing to face Harrisburg voters a final time, Reed expressed rare regret for his artifact obsession: 
 
 "The biggest mistake that I made was not securing broad community buy-in to the plan to create nationally scaled museum facilities clustered in Harrisburg, Pa. It wasn't that there was any secret about it, but there wasn't any broad community process where everything was unveiled at one time, input invited, and so forth and so on. In retrospect, it would certainly be done differently... The genesis of all of this was the concept of Harrisburg becoming a much bigger player in ... the tourism business." 
 
 In the end, however, the past has always been prologue for Steve Reed. 
 
 So as law enforcement agents hauled artifact after artifact from the ailing ex-mayor's home this week, one couldn't help but wonder whether this marked Reed's last round up.
– Former Harrisburg Mayor Steve Reed was a man with a bold vision: Building one of the country's finest Wild West museums in Pennsylvania. But while the Democrat spent years searching the West for artifacts and brought about 10,000 of them back, the museum never got built and he now faces trial on more than 100 counts relating to what prosecutors say was his obsession, the AP reports. Reed, who was mayor for 28 years before losing a primary election in 2009, has been charged with 112 counts of receiving stolen property, as well as one count of evidence tampering and one count of dealing in the proceeds of unlawful activities. Hundreds of other charges, including theft, were thrown out last year because of the statute of limitations. Prosecutors say Reed, who successfully created the city's Civil War museum, used millions of dollars from the financially strapped city's bond issues to pay for artifacts like stagecoach equipment, Doc Holliday's dental chair, antique newspapers and guns, as well as a lot of forgeries, Reuters reports. He was known among dealers in the West for always paying top dollar and for sending an armed city cop to collect his many purchases, PennLive reported after he was charged in 2015. The city recovered about $4.4 million from selling thousands of the relics Reed bought, but some 1,800 other Old West artifacts were seized from his home and a warehouse he owns. The 67-year-old Reed's lawyers say he can prove he is the rightful owner of the seized items—and he wants them back.