He said he remains convinced that slots will come to Maryland within a couple of years. But if the Rosecroft deal falls through, Angelos said, that might very well be the end of his family's involvement.
That is just one of the uncertainties facing Angelos -- some of which he discussed more openly than others during the course of two interviews at his Baltimore law firm.
At spring training 1994, Peter G. Angelos is flanked by Orioles Rafael Palmeiro, left, and Chris Sabo. Angelos, who built his practice representing workers, refused to field a team of replacement players during the 1994-95 baseball strike.
(James A. Finley -- AP)
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Angelos was adamant about his desire to remain a baseball owner. He said he had no interest in a rumored deal that would provide compensation to his franchise if baseball decides to move the Montreal Expos to Washington. And despite his advancing years, Angelos said he and his sons have never really discussed whether the Orioles should remain in the family beyond his tenure.
Angelos came of age in a blue-collar neighborhood of East Baltimore after his parents arrived from Greece, nearly penniless, when Angelos was a young boy. A tavern that his father would come to own catered to steel and refinery workers from the neighborhood. Angelos credited his father for instilling his work ethic, which associates said still keeps Angelos at his law-office desk past 9 o'clock most weeknights and routinely brings him in on Saturdays.
After working his way through law school, Angelos started representing the steelworkers and other laborers around whom he had grown up. During the 1970s, many of those workers began getting sick, the result of years of breathing asbestos particles from building insulation and elsewhere.
Angelos came to represent thousands of people diagnosed with asbestos-related illnesses, and the cases made him rich. He is said to have collected more than $1 billion for his clients and their survivors by the early 1990s, taking a cut of several hundred million. The money allowed Angelos to purchase the Orioles and to buy the 22-story downtown tower to which he moved his law firm. It is one of several Baltimore properties Angelos owns.
As Angelos's wealth has grown, so too has his reputation as a philanthropist. There was the time in 1998, for example, when a friend came to him looking for suggestions on how to raise $1.5 million in seed money for a new African American museum. Angelos wrote a check for the entire amount the next day. Numerous other acts of generosity have gone unheralded.
Early in his career, during the 1960s, Angelos served a single term on the Baltimore City Council and made an unsuccessful bid for mayor. He has not run for public office since but has shown a knack for wielding political influence.
That may be Angelos's greatest asset in his fight to keep baseball from Washington, and it helps explain why slots proponents have sought him as an ally.
During one interview for this article, Angelos sat in a conference room at his law office that overlooks a building once occupied by Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. Shortly after Angelos bought his tower, he learned that the utility planned to build a water-chilling and furnace plant on the site that would have included an unsightly 15-story iron cylinder.
Angelos turned to City Hall, arguing that the plant should be banned under a decades-old "urban renewal" designation adopted when he sat on the City Council. He prevailed, in part by volunteering $3 million of his own money to help Johns Hopkins University take over the building.
John Pica, a former state senator who now serves as a lobbyist for Angelos, remembered his first contact with Angelos in Annapolis.
In 1990, Angelos wanted to remove a provision from a state law that set a 20-year time limit on lawsuits against builders, architects and engineers. The provision was standing in the way of millions of dollars in asbestos-related lawsuits. The proposal drew hearty opposition from business interests and became the most heavily lobbied bill of the session.
Angelos was "a one-man army," explaining the issue in painstaking detail to anyone who would listen and staying late into the evenings to catch legislators in more relaxed settings, Pica said.
