In his campaigns for mayor, governor, and now mayor again, the Philadelphia Republican has crafted a picture of himself as a buttoned-down corporate type, a manager primarily.

It is true that he built a business, created jobs, and balanced a budget. Public Financial Management Inc., the government-consulting firm he helped lead for 18 years, grew during his tenure to include 178 employees, $27 million in annual revenue, and branch offices in 16 cities.

But Katz, 49, has never been an administrator so much as an entrepreneur and salesman. As with every salesman, his principal product has been himself: his talent for innovation, his taste for risky ventures, and a self-confidence that borders on brass.

A close look at Katz's quarter-century business career yields a complex, in some ways unexpected picture:

Though in private business his entire career, he has made much of his money from public sources as a bond counselor and financial adviser to cities, schools, transit agencies and airport authorities coast to coast.

Far from being a boardroom general, he has spent years in hotels, airports and rental cars marketing himself to clients. Along the way, he became a master of what salesmen refer to as the cold call. "I have a career full of them," he said.

He practically invented a business specialty as financial adviser in the building of more than a dozen professional sports stadiums and arenas, from Philadelphia's First Union Center to Baltimore's Camden Yards to Cleveland's Jacobs Field. This is high-wire work, former colleague Carl Hirsh said: "The deal's alive at 11 o'clock . . . It's dead at 2 o'clock . . . It's back alive at 4 o'clock."

Since leaving Public Financial Management in 1994, he has sought financial independence through a myriad of entrepreneurial ventures, none of which has yet paid off: a sports motorpark near Reading, community skating rinks near Ambler and in Mount Laurel, a golf course on an island in the Delaware River, even an American Indian casino in California. Many of these projects are public-private partnerships, in which a public asset would be leveraged for private gain.

If he won the Nov. 2 mayoral election against Democrat John F. Street, Katz would be the first businessman in modern times to hold Philadelphia's highest office. Every recent mayor has had a government background. Ed Rendell was district attorney. W. Wilson Goode was city managing director, the No. 2 job at City Hall. Bill Green was in Congress. Frank Rizzo was police commissioner.

Street was City Council president.

Katz, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican nominations for mayor in 1991 and for governor in 1994, has never held public office. Street has sought to depict that as a weakness. Katz said that only a career politician would think a businessman unqualified to be mayor.

"I think part of the mayor's job is absolutely being able to persuade people and build consensus," he said. "I have done that. . . . I think it's a combination of understanding policy and being able to market."

For Katz, business and politics have been inseparable.

Katz, who grew up in West Philadelphia and was an honors student at Central High,started out a Democrat, working on several losing campaigns in the 1970s: Lou Hill's run for mayor, Bill Gray's first try for Congress, and Green's bid for the Senate.

His introduction to government consulting came from G. Edward DeSeve, a Green associate and founder of Public Financial Management, who hired Katz as PFM's first employee in 1976, and made him a junior partner.

DeSeve declined to be interviewed about his work with Katz. Katz said he was the firm's road man. He roamed the state, soliciting business. When a town council or school board wanted to finance a park or athletic field, it often needed to borrow money. As an independent adviser, Katz helped his clients raise money on Wall Street on the best possible terms. His role was distinct from that of investment bankers, whose fees grew with the size of the bond issue.

In 1978, PFM got its first big, out-of-state client: the City of Memphis. Then it was hired by Pittsburgh to help set up a water authority. Then came a contract in Florida to help finance the Orlando airport.

Katz said he had to push open doors everywhere. "I went out, and 70 percent of the time lost," he recalled. "If you can't accept the risk of losing, you don't go into the businesses that I have been in."

In 1979, DeSeve left PFM to become city finance director for Mayor-elect Green. Soon after, PFM was purchased by First Pennsylvania Bank. Katz was now co-chief executive with F. John White, another veteran of Philadelphia Democratic politics. With others, they would repurchase PFM in 1982 and sell it to a second bank in 1984.

White (no relation to John White Jr., a runner-up in last spring's Democratic mayoral primary) recalled that Katz was a "policy wonk" who, among other things, made himself an expert on federal transportation policy. "He liked to read big, thick policy papers and understand them," White said.

Katz and White kept a hand in politics, and reaped dividends.

White, though never a candidate for office, managed Green's 1979 mayoral campaign, and has long been associated with Rendell.

In 1981, Green named Katz to the school board.

In 1984, Goode made White chairman of the zoning board. Goode also hired PFM as a financial consultant on the Convention Center.

PFM played the political game in other cities, too. From 1987 until 1993, the firm had a political action committee that gave $161,861 to candidates in Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland, Florida, and other places where PFM did business.

In 1991, with the city on the verge of bankruptcy, Mayor-elect Rendell called on PFM to help write a five-year financial plan required as a condition for a state bailout.

Katz's work on high-profile projects, including the five-year plan, has created an image of him as an expert on city budgets and the minutia of municipal finance. It is an image he has reinforced. But on the five-year plan, White did more of the work than Katz.

"John was much more the nitty-gritty, local-government expert," said David L. Cohen, Rendell's chief of staff at the time. "Sam's expertise was in transportation, public-private partnerships. It was not in the nitty-gritty of municipal public finance."

A cold call in Miami by Katz

leads to a big Dolphins deal

At the Intercontinental hotel, he picked up the Miami Herald, and read that Joe Robbie, owner of the Miami Dolphins, was trying to build a privately financed stadium. The article quoted skeptics saying that it could not be done, that only cities and counties built stadiums.

The 33-year-old from Philadelphia decided that he was going to find the money to build that stadium.

He looked up the Dolphins in the phone book, and placed a cold call to Don Poss, the team's executive vice president. The two met that afternoon in a seventh-floor office overlooking Biscayne Bay.

Poss had never heard of Katz or PFM. But banks in New York and Miami had scoffed at the Dolphins' requests for stadium loans. Poss had been hearing from "all sorts of kooks" with financing schemes. Katz, at least, had credentials.

Poss introduced Katz to Robbie. "The two seemed to hit it off," he recalled.

Poss said bankers were afraid to loan money for a stadium because there seemed no way for Robbie to guarantee his payments. The Dolphins were a class team in the National Football League. But what if they became losers? What if attendance fell? A stadium is not a house; a bank cannot repossess it and sell it.

Poss and Robbie had the germ of a financing plan: They would help pay off the stadium by leasing luxury suites and prestige seats.

Katz refined the concept, which became a model for arena financing across the United States.

He told Robbie that the leases should be for 10 years, rather than one, to give lenders greater confidence that they would be repaid. He also convinced Robbie that seat revenue had to be contractually committed up front to paying off debt. Bondholders would get paid before Robbie did. The owner himself would have to stand in line.

Katz eventually persuaded Marine Midland Bank, which at the time owned PFM, to put up a $45 million letter of credit to guarantee Robbie's payments on tax-exempt revenue bonds issued by a Metro Dade authority. The deal was done, with no tax dollars.

The 75,000-seat Joe Robbie Stadium (now Pro Player Stadium) opened in 1987 at a cost of $115 million.

In February 1989, when the stadium hosted the Super Bowl, Katz, his wife, Connie, and their children were the guests of Marine Midland.

Katz by then was smitten with pro sports. Stadiums became his prime interest.

Katz worked with a Pittsburgh stadium authority to upgrade Three Rivers Stadium, where the football Steelers and baseball Pirates play. He was involved with the Trans World Dome in St. Louis, now home of the football Rams. He helped finance the America West Arena for the Phoenix Suns basketball team.

In 1987, Maryland established an authority to build a ball field in Baltimore for the Orioles, who complained that ancient Memorial Stadium was not suited for modern baseball. Katz pitched hard for PFM to become the financial adviser on what would become Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

"Right about January of 1987, I started getting phone calls from Sam Katz," said Edward E. Cline, the agency's deputy director.

Again, Katz was selling himself - his expertise, his track record, his attitude that said: You can't do better than me.

"I did see mostly self-confidence, almost to an extreme," Cline said. "He was so sure of his numbers and so sure of his approach that he would create an impression that there was no reason to question him. Because he did have all the answers."

Katz had nothing to do with the decision to return baseball to downtown Baltimore, a break from the custom of placing pro-sports facilities out by an interstate. He had nothing to with the design, a throwback to the knothole era.

But he helped make the $210 million project happen. He was a key member of a team that devised an intricate structure for raising the money to build the park, and sold the idea to the public and the legislature.

The Maryland Stadium Authority backed $155 million in revenue bonds, and the state lottery kicked in $55 million.

The stadium projects would go on and on. Katz would become perhaps the best known stadium-finance authority in the nation.

Snider sought financial help

in New York, not Philadelphia

Snider's company, Spectacor, wanted to build a privately financed sports facility on South Broad Street - though, in the end, the project would include $32 million in public money.

In 1991, City Council voted to give Spectacor a zero-interest, $6.5 million loan to finance a garage.

Soon thereafter, Spectacor began leasing yet-to-be-built luxury boxes in the envisioned sports palace. Leases for 126 suites and 1,880 club seats were to be used as collateral to obtain $140 million in bank loans.

Getting the loans would not be easy. The country was in recession. Snider called in big guns: the Wall Street investment banking firm of Goldman Sachs.

Katz recalled: "PFM was not selected, which was a tremendous disappointment and a professional black eye, I felt."

For many months, Goldman Sachs tried to get financing. It failed.

Then came CoreStates Bank, which took the lead in finding a consortium of lenders to go for the deal. It, too, failed.

Only then did Katz get a chance.

He soon found himself in the middle of a grudge match between two self-made millionaires: Snider and Harold Katz, then owner of the Sixers.

Harold Katz, whose basketball team shared the Spectrum with the Flyers, was balking at playing in the new arena. Without the Sixers, the deal had no financial chance.

New Jersey Gov. Jim Florio was courting the Sixers' boss to take his team across the Delaware to Camden. That gave Harold Katz leverage in his negotiations with Snider.

But Florio lost his seat to Christine Whitman in 1993. Cohen, then Rendell's chief of staff, recalled that Philadelphia officials mounted an "orchestrated campaign" to convince the new governor that a Camden arena was more trouble than it was worth.

In the media, they painted an impression that the project would be exorbitantly expensive and, with just one team, would never bring in enough money to justify its cost.

Sam Katz, representing Snider in the campaign, played a behind-the-scene role, supplying cost estimates to back up the dire predictions. "Sam was providing all the background technical information and expertise for this," Cohen said.

Katz was one of several agents for Snider who dealt with Harold Katz as a go-between in what he recalled as "a very long, protracted, often nasty series of discussions."

He said that the Sixers owner did not want to bite the bullet that Joe Robbie had chomped down on: to forgo his profit from suite leases until after the obligation to lenders had been met. Harold Katz did not return calls requesting an interview for this article.

"The deal between Ed and Harold had been that each would get 25 percent of the luxury-seat income," Sam Katz said.

He persuaded them to take a backseat to the bondholders, just as Joe Robbie had done.

Sam Katz then was able to get an arm of the Prudential insurance company to grant a mortgage for the $140 million. He had worked with the Prudential people in financing the Portland Rose Garden, home of the basketball Trailblazers.

Snider put up $45 million in equity. With the city and state kicking in $32 million, the major elements of a $217 million project were in place.

Carl Hirsh, one of Katz's future business partners, was development director for Spectacor then. He was asked recently what Katz did that no one else could have done.

"I can't tell you," he replied. "Goldman Sachs worked on this project for over two years. I don't think they understood the business. Sam sort of created this business of financing sports arenas."

Cohen said that Katz's role was crucial. "That project was dead," Cohen said. "The nurses were disconnecting the leads. . . . And Sam came in."

Snider gave Katz some credit, but was less effusive in his praise. He said Katz might have speeded up the deal, but "we would have built this building eventually."

Though proud of accomplishments,

restless Katz looks for new role

And Katz was restless. That was clear from his failed attempts to become mayor and governor.

He was proud of what he had accomplished at PFM. "I believe that the contributions that I made have improved the sports facilities of this country in a significant way - created a lot of jobs, created a lot of civic enthusiasm," he said.

But he chose to leave the firm after 18 years.

His former partner White, a Democrat, is supporting Street for mayor. He said that reflects his regard for Street's role as a City Council leader in rescuing city finances. White said he was committed to helping Street before Katz got into the race.

Katz said his biggest reason for leaving PFM was a pent-up desire to own a piece of sports and entertainment businesses, not just work as a "fee-for-service provider."

Over the years, he had watched team owners reap millions from the arenas he had helped build. All he had gotten was a fee. Often, it was a big fee - more than $1 million in both the CoreStates Center and Rose Garden deals, by his account - but it was a fee nonetheless.

Now he wanted to use what he had learned to make himself the owner.

He knew that, when Rendell had to step down in January 2000, he might run for mayor once more.

That gave him five years to make it big on his own.