Green, say advocates from the Philadelphia Unemployment Project and Community Legal Services, is extracting unnecessary fees from destitute homeowners. Fees that must be paid before lenders will accept further payments. And most of these fees—about $1,000 of a total of $1,700—are spent on advertising.

By law the sheriff must advertise in only two newspapers: the Legal Intelligencer, and in one newspaper of general circulation—which in Philly are the Daily News, the Inquirer and the Philadelphia Tribune.

But for reasons of his own, Sheriff Green places far more advertising in many more newspapers than the law requires. If the sheriff followed the law, homeless advocates say, the advertising tab would only be $420. As it now stands, to stop a foreclosure homeowners must pay $1,000 in advance for advertising that they hope will never run.

That additional $580 is being spent needlessly. As Irv Ackelsberg, a housing advocate lawyer puts it, "Some have the belief that it is more important to maintain revenue streams for the various advertising pages, rather than minimizing the expense of a sheriff sale—even if this revenue is being drained from our neighbors who are facing loss of their homes."

It's hard to know how much of poor people's money Green is spending; Green declined my request for specific numbers. Besides, good numbers are hard to get. A 2003 city audit found that Green's office was in such disarray that fiscal data could "not be meaningfully analyzed," and that millions of dollars were "susceptible" to theft.

Still, using the most conservative estimates from homeless advocates, let's assume that the sheriff advertises 500 new foreclosures every month. At $1,000 a home, that's half-a-million a month, or about $6 million a year. But only about $2.5 million is needed to meet the legal advertising requirements.

Where does the rest of the $3.5 million go? The sheriff says he places additional advertising in smaller newspapers to reach a wider audience. But when I asked both Sheriff Green and the Reach Communications advertising agency for a list of papers they use that don't meet the legal requirements, they declined. (It should be noted that the Reach agency reportedly collects a commission of 15 percent on all the sheriff's advertising. And that one of Reach's owners, Jim Cassell—who died last year—was Green's campaign treasurer in 1999.)

Jim Tayoun, publisher of the Philadelphia Public Record, receives pages of redundant advertising from the sheriff, and is the most vocal of Green's defenders. Tayoun recently ran a front page story condemning a new court rule that shortens the size of individual classified ads, saving homeowners some 35 percent. The reduction was supported by lawyers for both homeowners and lenders. Even the sheriff supported this reduction publicly, though Tayoun contends that the reduction will cause confusion.

Tayoun also staunchly defends the sheriff's largess to smaller newspapers, parroting Green's claim that additional advertising will ultimately benefit the homeowner—after he's lost his house. By reaching people who don't read the dailies, reasons Green, the house will sell for more. Theoretically, then, the former homeowner would get more in the end (presuming, of course, the sheriff returns what's left over). I asked Green for any evidence to support this claim, but Green declined.

The Philadelphia Sun, published by Jerry Mondesire, also benefits from the sheriff's additional advertising. Mondesire, who also heads the local NAACP, declined comment on the sheriff's advertising policies, saying, "Hell no, this is a private matter."

I'm sorry, Mr. Mondesire, it is a public matter when, in my opinion, a sheriff takes money from the city's poorest to pay for something that's neither necessary nor useful. Poor people are losing their homes daily, in part, because a sheriff whose finances are out of control is spending millions of dollars that come from the pockets of thousands of destitute homeowners.