A Nov. 10 Style article about Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) incorrectly identified Gilbert Sandler, a Baltimore author and historian, as Gilbert Sanders.
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Pride of Baltimore
(By Linda Davidson -- The Washington Post)
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"It was the time of the Depression," Pente says. "I came out of Calvert Hall [high school] with a diploma under my arm and no job."
So he went to Big Tommy.
"He helped me get a job as a timekeeper" for the workers at a construction site.
And of course, such favors, such help, cemented a bond between patron and politician.
Pente shrugs and describes the ethic this way: "You scratch my back, I'll scratch your back. We all looked out for him."
Big Tommy tried to help people with scholarships, with education, with assimilation.
"You had a lot of foreigners here that needed to get around and get their citizenships and they didn't speak English," Mugavero recalls.
Big-city machine politics, no matter where it was practiced, often was a magnet for criminality. If a person betrayed the boss's loyalty, the consequences sometimes weren't pretty. Corruption often went with the territory.
In 1953, one of D'Alesandro's longtime associates, also a relative by marriage, was caught up in a bribery probe related to off-street parking. But Big Tommy was not known as a politico with dirty hands. Not even when the Teamsters tried to strong-arm the mayor during a city garbage strike in 1956 did he buckle to mob pressure.
Tom J. O'Donnell, 95, was D'Alesandro's press secretary in those days and remembers well how the mayor ran afoul of the Teamsters when he declared one Friday that striking garbage collectors would be fired if they did not return to work on Monday.
That Saturday, he got a visit from a Teamsters official sent by Jimmy Hoffa himself.
"He told the mayor, 'Mr. Jimmy directed me to tell you that he is very unhappy with what you are doing,' " says O'Donnell, reading from a self-published book about his years with D'Alesandro. "And the mayor spoke up and said, 'You go back and tell Mr. Jimmy I'm very unhappy with the garbage piling up on the streets of Baltimore, and I'm not going to stand for it.' " And when Monday came, says O'Donnell, most of the striking workers were back on the job.
