Anthony Mondello; Worked for Rights of Federal Employees

Anthony Louis Mondello, 87, who as general counsel of the U.S. Civil Service Commission from 1968 to 1975 helped to make federal workplace rules more compatible with a changing society, died Dec. 7 at Carriage Hill of Bethesda of complications from Parkinson's disease. He had lived in Bethesda since the 1950s.

It was Mr. Mondello who made the decision to permit Postal Service employees to wear short pants in hot weather. He also eliminated McCarthy-era loyalty oaths as a condition of employment and worked to discourage discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Before joining the Civil Service Commission, Mr. Mondello was at the Justice Department, where he was deputy director of the Civil Division in charge of the Office of Alien Property. The office was charged with disposing of more than $900 million in assets that had been seized during World War II from Germany, occupied countries and Japan. The property included a Rembrandt painting, a stack of Persian rugs, the rights to the song "Lili Marlene" and 95 percent ownership in the giant chemical company General Aniline and Film Corp.

Mr. Mondello was born in New York, where he grew up in a large Italian family in the Bronx. He received a bachelor's degree in 1940 from the College of the City of New York and then served with the Army Corps of Engineers in Europe, where he supervised construction of roads, barracks and bridges and established factories that produced camouflage materials. In his off hours, a son recalled, he became "a table-tennis fanatic."

Returning to New York after the war, he received a law degree from Columbia University in 1948. He also met a Barnard student named Omah Perino, who managed to beat him at ping-pong. After their marriage in 1947, the couple moved to the Washington area, where Mr. Mondello joined Kenwood Golf and Country Club so he could play real tennis rather than the table-top variety.

Taking a position as a trial attorney in the Justice Department, he soon became a senior attorney in the appellate section. He successfully argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court on such issues as the Federal Employees' Compensation Act and the constitutionality of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activity. In 1962, he headed the department's Foreign Litigation Unit.

He moved to the Office of Alien Property in 1963. Carl Goodman, a former general counsel at the Civil Service Commission and Mr. Mondello's colleague in the Office of Alien Property, recalled that Congress charged Mr. Mondello not only with disposing of the property but also shutting down the office. As that was being done, he took it upon himself to visit various government agencies in search of jobs for everyone he supervised.

"He was one of the most honorable guys I've met in my life," Goodman said.

Mr. Mondello moved to the Civil Service Commission at a time when restrictive postwar and McCarthy-era regulations had to be reconciled with court decisions expanding the free speech, privacy and redress rights of federal employees. As the chief legal authority on issues affecting government employees, he urged managerial flexibility and a tolerance for differences in the workplace, whether long hair on male employees or short pants on Postal Service workers.

As Goodman noted, Mr. Mondello changed the focus of so-called suitability standards from whether a person was "suitable" for a job to whether he or she was capable of doing the job.

Managers must recognize, Mr. Mondello wrote in the Civil Service Journal in 1970, "that a person does not lose his constitutional rights by becoming a government employee."

He also addressed issues of workplace coercion. In 1971, when the Justice Department initially declined to investigate how career employees of the Federal Supply Service had collectively bought 14 tickets to the $500-a-plate Salute to President Nixon, he launched a Civil Service Commission inquiry. The scheme was ruled to be a violation of the Hatch Act.

Leaving the commission in 1975, Mr. Mondello spent a few years in private practice and then joined Amtrak. After retiring as Amtrak's general counsel in 1984, he took Italian lessons and traveled.

His first wife, Omah Perino Mondello, died in 1984.

Survivors include his wife of 20 years, Ann Willett Mondello of Silver Spring; three children from his first marriage, Robert Mondello of Washington, Stephen Mondello of Columbia, S.C., and Juanita Rilling of Bethesda; two stepchildren from his second marriage, Russell Willett of Silver Spring and Julie Baker of Frederick; two brothers; a sister; and four grandchildren.