From News Services
Friday, January 6, 2006
Thomas M. O'Malley, 80, a Montgomery County-based criminal defense lawyer and the father of Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley (D), died Jan. 5 at his home in Rockville. He had a lung ailment.
Thomas O'Malley was an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia from 1957 to 1962, followed by about a decade of legal practice in Washington. Ever since, he worked in Montgomery County.
Among his clients was Rep. Robert E. Bauman (R-Md.), a conservative who was charged in 1980 with soliciting sex from a 16-year-old male dancer. Bauman pleaded not guilty, and the charges were dropped when Bauman agreed to undergo a court-supervised rehabilitation program for what he said was alcoholism.
Mr. O'Malley ran unsuccessfully for state's attorney in Montgomery County in 1994 and 1998, in the first race as a Democrat and in the second as a Republican.
Mr. O'Malley switched his party affiliation in 1998 in a race against the Democratic nominee, Douglas F. Gansler, who was decades his junior and whom he tried to paint as inexperienced. Gansler still holds the job.
The son of an Internal Revenue Service employee, Thomas Martin O'Malley was a Pittsburgh native and served in the Army Air Forces as a bombardier during World War II. On Aug. 6, 1945, he said, he was on a routine mission when he saw the atomic mushroom cloud rise over Hiroshima in the distance.
"Some of my bombs were dropped at the same instant, but the mushroom was a mystery," Mr. O'Malley told an Annapolis reporter last year.
Mr. O'Malley was a 1949 graduate of Georgetown University and a 1952 graduate of its law school.
He was a member of St. Mary's Catholic Church in Rockville.
In addition to Martin O'Malley, survivors include his wife of 51 years, Barbara Suelzer O'Malley of Rockville; five other children, Peter O'Malley and Patrick O'Malley, both of Baltimore, Paul O'Malley and Eileen Schempp, both of Rockville, and Bridget Hunter of Arlington; 12 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
In 2002, Mr. O'Malley published on the Internet "Deep Throat: Fact or Fiction." In it, he alleged that his close friend Joe Lowther, a former aide to Watergate judge John J. Sirica, confessed on his deathbed that he was Deep Throat.
Last year, breaking a 30-year silence, former FBI official Mark Felt revealed he was the source dubbed Deep Throat, who secretly provided guidance to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during their investigation.