When Mayor Cherelle L. Parker took office in early 2024, William F. Dunbar Sr. became one of the most important people in Philadelphia politics.
A confidant of Parker who played an important advisory role in her 2023 campaign, Dunbar was also a registered lobbyist with a growing client list.
When other key figures in Parker’s campaign took top roles in her administration, Dunbar stepped into an official, but unpaid, role managing People for Parker, the mayor’s political committee.
Those dual roles created an unusual circumstance: Someone who raised money from donors for the mayor’s campaign was also a lobbyist whose clients paid him to influence her administration.
And they were physically embodied in a 2,250-square-foot office in the Penn Center complex one block west of City Hall. Dunbar’s lobbying firm, Dunbar Public Affairs & Associates, rented the space in March 2024, and People for Parker paid half of the $3,750 rent through a sublease agreement, according to lease documents obtained by The Inquirer.
But the heady days for Dunbar didn’t last. Parker let Dunbar go from her campaign in August 2024. Neither side has publicly explained what led to the separation. And last week, he pleaded guilty to federal tax fraud charges unrelated to Parker’s campaign.
A plea agreement Dunbar signed allows U.S. District Court Judge Kelley B. Hodge to consider three instances of “additional misconduct” — separate from the tax fraud scheme — that did not result in charges when she decides his sentence in January.
One instance stemmed from a dispute over the sublease agreement for the Penn Center office. (In the other incidents, prosecutors said Dunbar falsified a document for a mortgage application and submitted false financial information to receive additional financial aid at a private school.)
In the plea agreement, Dunbar stipulated that he “falsely modified the terms of the lease agreement” to increase the notice the campaign was required to give him to terminate the lease, a move that could have resulted in the campaign paying him money he was not owed had it not been discovered.
City law prohibits officials from using government resources, including City Hall office space, for political purposes. By renting space with Dunbar’s firm, Parker and her team could pop across the street and attend to political tasks without running afoul of ethics rules.
In a letter from March 2025 that was obtained by The Inquirer, an attorney for Dunbar wrote that his firm “had no need for an office space that was close to City Hall other than to support the Mayor’s needs.”
The dispute culminated in the final breakdown of their already-strained relationship, an exchange of emails between lawyers for Parker and Dunbar shows.
“It has come to our attention that Mr. Dunbar has misrepresented that he continues to have relationships with People for Parker to current and prospective clients,” Timothy J. Ford, an attorney for Parker, wrote to Dunbar’s lawyer, Mark Jaffe, in March 2025. “Mr. Dunbar must cease and desist immediately from making incorrect statements of any affiliation with People for Parker, Mayor Parker in her political or personal capacity, or staff or consultants related to People for Parker.”
Jaffe fired back.
“Respectfully, my client asks that the Mayor cease and desist from contacting all donors and personal/business contacts that Dunbar Public Affairs supplied her immediately,” Jaffe wrote Ford in response. “It has come to Mr. Dunbar’s attention that the Mayor continues to misrepresent that Dunbar is still supportive of her efforts and that said relationships should still support her.”
Dunbar asked for “a letter of formal apology from the Mayor [for] the harm she has caused as to his reputation and financial losses to his company.”
Dunbar declined to comment for this story.
From Lincoln to ‘kitchen cabinet’
Dunbar, 42, first met Parker, 53, around 2005, when he was a student at Lincoln University, he said in a 2023 interview. Parker, a Lincoln alum, was a Pennsylvania state representative, and she visited her alma mater to speak to political science students.
“She was a star to the folks at Lincoln then,” Dunbar said in the interview. “Cherelle is the big sister. She sometimes call me the big little brother. I’m very, very protective of Cherelle.”
Both were elected student government presidents during their time at the historically Black university in Chester County.
They maintained a connection over the years as they made their way up the ladder in local politics, Parker as an increasingly high-profile elected official and Dunbar as a well-connected operator.
By the time Parker began preparing to launch her mayoral campaign, Dunbar had become a lobbyist for Comcast. He volunteered as part of her “kitchen cabinet” of informal advisers, and he made a key contribution by championing a strategy of Parker leaning into her life experience, from growing up in a household that needed public assistance to being a single mother.
“I always would come back to that we need to continue to define Cherelle as the authentic Black woman working mom,” he said. “Cherelle is able to live with that every day, so I knew and believed that the message would always resonate more, in particular with Black women, who obviously are the No. 1 voting bloc in our city.”
An unexplained separation
When the top aides in Parker’s campaign joined her administration, preventing them from managing or being paid by a political group, the mayor turned to Dunbar to run People for Parker in 2024.
Although Parker is not up for reelection until 2027, her campaign has remained active, raising and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars each year since she became mayor.
Meanwhile, Dunbar’s lobbying practice grew: the School District of Philadelphia, which employed him a subcontractor, and an ATM company became clients in January 2024, according to the public records. (Dunbar is no longer representing the district because the primary contractor terminated their agreement, according to the district.)
But his arrangement with Parker didn’t make it through the summer. Parker acknowledged the separation in an interview while she was at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
“Will has been a valued friend to me, and let me just say that life is good right now [for Dunbar] and business is good and it’s growing,” she said.
Dunbar said at the time: “I’m very much still an informal senior adviser but because of a different set of priorities, the mayor has decided to manage her politics herself. … My business has continued to grow as we work to support our clients.”
In the March 2025 letter, Dunbar’s attorney said Parker in August 2024 had “agreed to continue a business relationship for public perception” after the split.
The sublease dispute that unfolded over the next six months eliminated that possibility.
Two documents, one lease
The Inquirer has obtained two versions of the sublease agreement, one with a 30-day termination window and one lasting a year. Both versions include electronic signatures from Dunbar on March 2, 2024, and Gabrielle Cook-Frazier, on behalf of the campaign, on March 8, 2024.
Parker’s attorney said it only ever had the version with a 30-day window. Federal prosecutors alleged Dunbar forged the version with a one-year window to squeeze more rent payments out of the campaign.
“People for Parker is particularly concerned that Mr. Dunbar produced a different version of the Document containing a term to which People for Parker did not and never would have agreed,” Ford wrote.
Ford said the campaign was willing to make rent payments through the end of 2024 to “soften” Dunbar’s separation, but not after. The campaign made rent payments totaling $22,850 to Dunbar Public Affairs between March 2024 and November 2024, according to campaign finance records.
In the letter, Dunbar’s attorney suggests Parker’s aides could have violated city ethics laws by doing political work “on City time using said space for political meetings with the Mayor.”
The Parker campaign declined to answer questions for this story, but sent a statement rejecting Jaffe’s assertion in the 2025 letter.
“The allegation is patently false,” Ford said in a statement. “Neither the Mayor nor her team engaged in political activity on City time or using City resources.”
It’s far from clear that the arrangement would be a violation of ethics rules. The top officials in Parker’s administration were salaried employees for the city who worked far more than 40 hours per week, making it difficult to assess when they were on the clock. They are allowed to participate in political meetings so long as they are not paid by the campaign and have only “minimal input” on strategy, communications, or finance, the city’s ethics regulations state.
Despite the breakdown in their relationship, Dunbar held out hope for a reconciliation.
“Notably, if the Mayor or her political team would ever like to reconcile and restore this relationship, my client would welcome that and he stands ready to continue to be a selfless supporter of the Mayor and her administration,” Jaffe wrote, adding that Dunbar would no longer seek additional rent payments.
Weeks later, Dunbar learned that federal agents were investigating him for tax fraud.
