Atlantic City Weekly

As a prominent Philadelphia-area attorney and the former Pennsylvania Boxing Commissioner, James Binns has achieved an exceptional level of success and prosperity in his professional life.

He’s a man who wields a lot of influence and has plenty of friends in high places (having played himself as boxing commissioner in two Rocky movies alongside Sylvester Stallone), but it’s probably not his personal or professional life that he’s best recognized for. Binns, who turns 71 in September, has single-handedly made more philanthropic contributions to worthy causes than probably the sum-total populace of many municipalities.

In a sort of circuitous but interconnected way, Binns has overseen the funding and dedication of hundreds memorial plaques for police officers who died in the line of duty (including eight in Atlantic City and two in Margate), and created a similar program that commemorates the lives of Philadelphia firefighters who lost their lives while serving the public. He’s established a fundraising effort called Cop Wheels that has provided dozens of patrol motorcycles to various police departments, and he single-handedly revived a popular Philadelphia spectacle (scheduled for Sept. 18 at the Wells Fargo Center in Philly) called the Hero Thrill Show that has raised well over $1 million in five years to pay for the college tuitions of children of police officers/firefighters who died in the line of duty.

This Saturday, Aug. 28, as a sort of prelude to that Philadelphia show, the City of Margate will host its own Hero Thrill Show. It will take place at Ventura’s Greenhouse at Benson Street and Atlantic Avenue (by Lucy the Elephant) from 11am-3pm, and will include daring stunts by the Philadelphia Police Department Motorcycle Drill Team, a K-9 unit demonstration, stunts by the Philadelphia Police Narcotics Strike Force Bicycle Team, and a demonstration by the Atlantic City Bomb Squad. The event is free to the public, and there will be food and entertainment provided.

The Philly Hero Thrill Show has roots back to 1954, and was created to fund the secondary educations of children of emergency civil service personnel who perished in the line of duty. It was created following a 1953 fire that took the lives of eight Philadelphia firefighters, but the original Hero Thrill Show fell on hard times starting in the 1980s and was in danger of disappearing entirely in the early 2000s. Binns took over and jettisoned the incumbent Hero Thrill Show governing body, created his own 501c(3) non-profit organization, and revived it largely through his own colossal network of contacts in law enforcement and elsewhere.

“[The Hero Thrill Show] was a big deal when I was a kid growing up in Philly back at what was then called Municipal Stadium [later to become JFK Stadium, which was torn down in 1992. The Wells Fargo Center is sited there now],” says Binns, who has a summer home in Margate. “Well, attendance started to dwindle and there were undertones of corruption — in fact a past chairman of the show got indicted in the Abscam [a notorious FBI public-corruption sting operation that netted several Philadelphia civil leaders]. Attrition caused it to fall apart and the city was going to get rid of it entirely, but many people were familiar with what I had done with the memorial plaques and the Cop Wheels program, and I was asked to take it over.”

Binns was also instrumental in having the famous Rocky statue moved back to its original Philadelphia location at the Art Museum from the Spectrum, after the Spectrum was closed and slated for demolition. That move further endeared him to Stallone, who agreed to be the Master of Ceremonies for revived Hero Thrill Show in 2006. Attendance shot from a few hundred to 13,000 the first year. The 2009 Hero Thrill Show in Philly had over 40,000 spectators, and this year (Sept. 18) Binns anticipates well over 50,000.

“This all stemmed from a chance encounter I had with a cop in 2001,” says Binns. “I used to own a restaurant in Philly, and the cop knew the widow of Danny Faulkner [a Philadelphia police officer who was shot and killed in the line of duty by Mumia Abu-Jamal in 1981]. He told me that Danny was murdered right in front of my restaurant, which I didn’t know, and I got the idea to put a memorial plaque in front of the place. I called Maureen [Faulkner’s widow] and we arranged to have the plaque dedication on the 20th anniversary of his death [Dec. 9, 2003]. I had no idea who would show up. Well, 14,000 cops showed up.”

Binns has since spearheaded the memorial-plaque dedications for 283 Philadelphia police officers and 285 Philadelphia firefighters who died in the line of duty, several other plaques for emergency-service personnel throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, and chaired the program to donate or replace Harley-Davidson motorcycles to the Philadelphia Highway Patrol and several other area police departments.