Month: September 2018

In 1952, as candidate for vice president during the Korean War, Senator Richard M. Nixon traveled the country stoking fears delivering his anti-communist message. “At a time when millions of young Americans are fighting and dying, fighting Communists overseas, we need a fair, a sane, but an absolutely effective program of dealing with the Communists right here in the United States of America.” In Philadelphia on February 5, Nixon sharpened his message before a live television audience (WFIL – Channel 6) moderated by the team that founded Meet The Press.

The subject: “How Can We Best Fight Communism within the USA?”

In order to wage his fight, Nixon needed like-minded allies in law enforcement. In Philadelphia, that’s where Frank Rizzo would come in. Rizzo was officer responsible for the police motorcade ushering Nixon’s limousine from the airport to Center City. And for a spell, the two men, “America’s foremost anti-Communist politician of the Cold War” and a cop known as “The Cisco Kid” sat talking, and agreeing about the Red Menace.

Sixteen years later, Nixon returned, this time campaigning for President. The Republican candidate asked to meet with the new Police Commissioner. The meeting between candidate and cop, also in a limousine, reportedly lasted five, or even as long as ten minutes. According to Tom Fox, “Frank Rizzo jumped into Richard Nixon’s limousine at the airport that day and he and Richard Nixon had this . . . conversation in whispers. When Frank Rizzo got out of the limousine, the newspaper people wanted to know what he said…”

“Aw,” said Frank Rizzo, “I was just giving him Carmella’s recipe for meatballs and spaghetti.”

Nixon had a more believable explanation: “Rizzo’s record has met with the approval of all law enforcement officers across the United States. He has an effective record. I wanted to get his views. As I see it, other cities could use Rizzo’s ideas.”

S. A. Paolantonio, Rizzo biographer, provides a third explanation: Nixon “approached Rizzo about running for mayor—as a Republican.”

Rizzo would run for mayor in 1971—as a Democrat—and took office in January 1972 facing a massive deficit—about $100 million. For help, Rizzo turned to his friend in the White House. “We did very well indeed,” Rizzo told reporters on the White House lawn, grinning broadly after the 45-minute meeting.

“We want the Bicentennial City to be well taken care of,” assured Nixon. “Philadelphia will get its fair share” of federal aid. Nixon then “winked broadly” and said he’d be making a “nonpolitical visit” to Philadelphia later that year, a visit that happened to be in the midst of Nixon’s re-election campaign.

In return, Nixon would get Rizzo’s support. “I’m a Democrat but I’m very fond of President Nixon, Rizzo said. He is one of the greatest Presidents this country ever had.”

As the election approached, Nixon made another promise, that Philadelphia “would be the exclusive host for the Bicentennial celebration.” In mid-September, Rizzo traveled again to the White House “to find out what I can do to help re-elect the President.”

“Right now he is building a strange new political power base and he is doing it with a foot in both parties,” wrote Tom Fox of the mayor in the Daily News. “I cannot remember a politician making this kind of daring move and landing on his feet, but Frank Rizzo gets away with it because he is a singular man. Amazing.”

Less than three weeks before the election, Nixon did come to Philadelphia to sign the State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act of 1972 at Independence Hall. The bill, according to Daughen and Binzen, “pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into cities and towns in all fifty states. There were hardly any strings attached… Most of the local jurisdictions used it to pay operating costs, thus holding down taxes.  …Philadelphia got $70,000,000 of this manna from Washington in Rizzo’s first year as mayor. That was nearly 10 percent of the city’s operating budget.” The city actually ended up with a surplus.

As expected, George McGovern, the Democratic candidate for President, carried Philadelphia. According to Paolantonio, “Nixon lost the city by a mere 88,000 votes, despite the Democratic party’s 302,000-voter registration edge. [The president] carried South Philadelphia by a near two-to-one margin” and he won Pennsylvania. In all, it was “a landslide reelection victory.”

“Frank Rizzo had delivered.”

“I was more thrilled by the President’s reelection that I was by even my own victory,” Rizzo told reporters on November 8, “because yesterday’s election meant so much to the people of America. They have rejected the Democratic Party as the party of radicals… The liberals and radicals are out of business…”

Rizzo maintained an unflagging loyalty to Nixon. After the President’s second Watergate speech, August 15, 1973, Rizzo commended the president “for his courage in presenting his case before the American people” and urged Americans to “close ranks behind him and the great office he holds.” But Watergate led to Nixon’s resignation and the funds to make Philadelphia “the exclusive site of the Bicentennial celebration never materialized.”

Rizzo ran for re-election the year following Nixon’s resignation. His campaign slogan: “He held the line on taxes.” Soon after the election, Rizzo faced up to reality and convinced City Council there was no choice, the city’s wage tax needed to be increased as much as 4.31%. That would be among the highest in the nation. More than 250,000 angry citizens signed the recall petition.

In 1986, Rizzo would finally leave the Democratic party and formally declare himself a Republican—again. Actually, Rizzo’s original registration was  Republican. His years with the Democrats was a marriage of convenience.

[Sources: “Tonight, on TV, Keep Posted.” Inquirer, February 5, 1952; Tom Fox, “The Big Bambino Renews an Old Friendship” Inquirer, January 25, 1972; Dan Lynch “’Bicen City Will Be Well Taken Care of,’ Nixon Tells Rizzo in 45-Minute Visit.” Inquirer, January 25, 1972; Jon Katz, “Nixon Assures Rizzo: City Will Get Its Share,” Philadelphia Daily News, January 25, 1972; Tom Fox, “Big Money Talk in the White House” Philadelphia Daily News, September 15, 1972; Donald Janson, “Rizzo Bolstered by Nixon Victory: President Sends ‘Warmest Thanks’ to Democrat,” The New York Times, November 12, 1972; “Rizzo Hails Nixon’s Talk,” Inquirer, August 16, 1973; S. A. Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America (Philadelphia: Camino Books, 1993, 2003); Joseph R Daughen and Peter Binzen,The Cop Who Would Be King: The Honorable Frank Rizzo (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977)]

More PhillyHistory posts on Frank Rizzo here, here and here.

To win re-election in 1967, Mayor James. H. J. Tate figured he needed to send a law and order message. So even before the primary polls closed in the Spring, Tate announced his choice for police commissioner: Frank L. Rizzo.

The day of Rizzo’s swearing in, Joe McGinniss, then a columnist at the Inquirer, described the 46-year-old commissioner walking through the corridors of City Hall.  “It is almost as if he had just been elected Pope” wrote McGinniss, suggesting that in Rizzo’s family “there is less honor in being President than in being commissioner of police.”

“The only thing he thinks more of than a cop is two cops.” noted McGinniss. Rizzo, “quotes J. Edgar Hoover with an much reverence as he does the Bible.”

“It might be said that he believes in speaking loudly and carrying a big stick anyway,” wrote McGinniss of Rizzo’s policing style.

After a lunch of eye roast at the Lit Brothers restaurant, Rizzo walked “quickly and chestily, back to his office. ‘I feel like a movie actor these days. All these pictures. I don’t go in for that posing stuff, but I’m getting pretty good. You see me this morning? Bowing from the waist? How about that?’”

“It is sort of fun, at least for now,” wrote McGinniss, “having Yogi Berra as commissioner of police.”

Rizzo’s “fun” with the Press, or with McGinniss, anyway, would last only a few weeks.

During the summer of 1967, riots in Newark and Detroit left 69 dead, 3,900 injured, and resulted in hundreds of devastating fires. In late July, Mayor Tate ordered, and Philadelphia City Council quickly passed, a proclamation declaring a state of limited emergency prohibiting public gatherings of groups of 12 or more. Those who disobeyed were subject to up to two years imprisonment.

On July 30^th, a demonstration across from the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul resulted in 22 arrests. Rizzo insisted eight were card-carrying Communists, although he refused to confirm their identities and used the occasion to further stoke fear adding that several “agitators” from Newark and Detroit were now doing their worst in Philadelphia.

“I think it is a despicable and cowardly thing Rizzo has done” said Spencer Coxe, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Philadelphia, who was among those arrested.

“The trouble with Frank Rizzo,” wrote McGinniss, “is that he keeps having these delusions that he is really J. Edgar Hoover. “And, operating in that great tradition, he has decided that the best thing to do with his enemies, since he is unable to keep them all in jail, is to stand up and scream that they are Communists. . . . It is a trick that worked for Joe McCarthy until, like a greedy card sharp, he tried it once too often.”

When asked “if he thought Rizzo had the right to make such charges and then refuse to back them up,” Mayor Tate said. “If Rizzo is against Communists, I’m for Rizzo.”

“It is the kind of thing you should expect from Frank Rizzo from time to time,” observed McGinniss. “It is the way he is. Like two weeks ago when he gathered a small audience of reporters in a corridor behind a City Hall courtroom and told them, with great glee, the story of a man he had beaten up. He told how he chased the man, caught him, and finally threw him to the ground.”

“’Then I come down with the old number 12,’ Rizzo said, stomping his foot on the floor, ‘and that guy ain’t walking right today.’ Then Rizzo did an imitation of a man who cannot walk right.”

“It sounds a little gruesome,” wrote McGinniss, “but what the hell. The guy was probably a Communist, anyway.”

In September, the Bulletin published a poll that found Rizzo’s approval rating was 84 percent. “Only 3 percent disapproved of the way he was handling police affairs,” wrote biographer S. A. Paolantonio.

Three years later, when Rizzo resigned to run for Mayor on the law and order and no new taxes platform, Tate claimed he hadn’t “seen anything like this kind of popular support for a candidate since FDR.” Election day in 1971 had a remarkable turnout of 71%. Rizzo’s Republican opponent, Thacher Longstreth, carried 16 of the 17 predominantly African-American wards, but Rizzo beat Longstreth by 48,524 votes.

“He was one of us, said Eleanor Cucci, a housewife in South Philadelphia. “Everybody else in there had forgotten the little people. If he didn’t win, we would have moved out of the city.”

“Above all else,” said a Martha Brennen of Roxborough, “I knew Rizzo was going to look out for us.”

The morning after the election, Rizzo was in the shower at 8224 Provident Street when son Franny answered the telephone. It was President Richard M. Nixon, a longtime Rizzo admirer. The mayor-elect grabbed a towel.

“Frank? President Nixon, congratulations. How are you? . . . I know what you went though. I’ve been through it myself.  . . . You ran a clean campaign. I just wanted to call you and congratulate you.”

[Sources: Joe McGinniss. “The Passing Scene—A Loud Voice and a Big Stick,” Inquirer, May 22, 1967; “A Proclamation,” Philadelphia Daily News, July 28, 1967; Francis M. Lordan, “8 Card-Carrying Reds In Group That Defied Tate Ban, Rizzo Says,” Inquirer, August 16, 1967; Joe McGinniss, “The Passing Scene—The Techniques of Frank Rizzo,” Inquirer, August 18, 1967; “Rizzo Resigns to Run for Mayor of Philadelphia,” The New York Times, February 3, 1971; Don McDonough and Leonard J. McAdams, “Winner’s First Day: Nixon Call Catches Rizzo in Shower,” Inquirer, November 4, 1971; S. A. Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America (Camino Books, 1993, 2003).]

More PhillyHistory posts on Frank Rizzo here, here and here.

By transferring Captain Frank Rizzo, a/k/a “The Cisco Kid,” from the station house at 39th and Lancaster to 12^th and Pine in May 1952, Police Commissioner Thomas J. Gibbons hoped to solve two problems. He increased law enforcement in Center City and saved Rizzo from himself in racially charged West Philadelphia.

On Pine Street, the gung-ho Rizzo immediately got to work with a campaign of raids on Locust Street strip joints. And more. He ordered “a 24-hour raiding spree . . . of vagrants and panhandlers,” throughout Center City, sweeping more than 50 men off the streets. (Rizzo knew this “anti-mugger operation” would appeal to many law-abiding citizens.) His raiders turned eastward to Society Hill. “Police Seize 10 In Reefer Raid, last night at 2^nd and Pine,” read a headline. Then he doubled down on his favorite targets: after-hours clubs, this time venturing beyond the Locust strip.

According to biographer S. A. Paolantonio, Rizzo not only became “the frontline commander for the Center City officials who wanted Center City cleaned up,” he also became “an intriguing and hotly debated political figure in his own right.”

Rizzo’s raids sent a law and order message to the public, to law enforcement, to City Hall and to the media. Occasionally, his shenanigans backfired. In 1955, Rizzo and another officer chased down and arrested five carousing sailors. Then, back at the 12^th and Pine Street station, they beat them with nightsticks. “Navy asks full probe of brutality,” read a headline.” Warrants were served on both Rizzo and the other officer, Robert O’Brien, charging aggravated assault and battery. Meanwhile, the sailors were fined $10 each and released.

The charges were soon dropped, but Commissioner Gibson knew full well Rizzo had beaten those sailors “for no reason.”

Rizzo’s ire then turned to the coffee houses of Center City, popular gathering spots for gays, interracial couples, artists, intellectuals and “followers of jazz music.” “’Beatnik’ Center Raided by Police” read a headline the day after police descended on the Humoresque Coffee Shop at 2036 Sansom Street. Patrons “in traditional garb of chinos and sweaters” were were charged with breach of peace and “released after brief interrogation.”

Other targets included the Proscenium Coffee Shop and Experimental Theater at 2204 Chestnut Street, the Gilded Cage at 21^st and Rittenhouse Streets, the Artists’s Hut at 2006 Walnut Street, but Rizzo seemed to have a special interest in the Humoresque, which, according to the Inquirer, was considered to be a “‘gathering place’ for drug addicts” and a destination for “sex deviates” openly “flaunting . . . their sexual immorality.”

In the midst of one raid in February 1959, Rizzo stood before the gathering crowd, many of whom supported his actions, pointed to the Humoresque’s young owner, Mel Heifetz, and shouted: “Are you going to allow that creep to operate that den of iniquity?”

Rizzo threatened Heifetz: “If you defy me, I’ll hang you from the chandelier.”

Heifetz, who much later would make a $16 million gift to The Philadelphia Foundation to support LGBTQ-serving organizations, sued Rizzo and lost, but not before the captain was transferred again, this time to a new station in the Northeast, far from Sansom Street.

Stewart Klein of the Daily News (and later a prominent film, theater and television critic) felt sufficiently inspired to write a poem celebrating the occasion of Rizzo’s departure from Center City.  “Better than anything at the time” Paolantonio observed, An Espresso of Sad Parting, captured “how much Frank Rizzo had become a folk figure—hero to some, feared by others.” Here’s an excerpt:

In the Locust Street coffee parlors
Through the doors he often tore
Say it softly no one hollers:
“He don’t live here anymore.”
Down Mole, Ranstead, Quince
The streets the days of yore;
Sly smiles instead of winces:
“He don’t live here anymore.”
Somewhere the hoods are crying,
Somewhere the dips are sore
But expressoed lips are sighing
“He don’t live here anymore.”

Ten years after he took the helm at the 12th and Pine, “Rizzo was at the forefront of the national debate over law enforcement. He recognized the political power of fear.”

According to Paolantonio, Rizzo had become “the biggest of the big men in the Philadelphia Police Department – a big cop for all America.”

“It was only a matter of time before he had the title to go with it.”

[Sources: Joseph Daughen, “Center-City Booze Bistros Have Lost Their A-peal,” Bulletin June 14 1962; “Drive on ‘Muggers’ Ordered by Captain,” The Philadelphia Tribune, September 2, 1952; “Police Seize 10 In Reefer Raid, last night at 2^nd and Pine.” Inquirer, October 4, 1952; “5 Sailors Accuse Rizzo of ‘Vicious’ Beating With Stick in Station,” Inquirer, August 24, 1955; “‘Beatnik Place Raided by Police,” Inquirer, February 14, 1959; “2 City Departments, State Agency Probe 4 Midtown Coffee Shops,” Inquirer, February 19, 1959; “Neighbors’ Suit To Ask Closing of Coffee Shop,” Inquirer, February 25, 1959; “Coffee Figure Charges Rizzo Threatened Him,” Inquirer, February 27, 1959; S. A. Paolantonio, Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America (Camino Books, 1993, 2003).]

More PhillyHistory posts on Frank Rizzo here, here and here.