In the middle of the night of June 3, 2020, the statue of former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo outside of a city office building was pulled up by a crane and moved into storage. The event brought back a lot of feelings, as relevant today as they were fifty years ago.
The tragedy in Minneapolis, which provoked demonstrations about brutal cops across the nation and the removal of the Rizzo statue, took me back to the very beginning of my career as a reporter in Philadelphia. A great number of my reporting days and then later in politics were spent following Frank Rizzo. I remember the election day in 1971 when I was 17-years-old, not old enough to vote, and we didn’t live in Philadelphia so I couldn’t have registered my vote against Rizzo, anyway. It was actually the evening before election day. I made my own “get out the vote” flyers and, at rush hour, I stationed myself in the middle of Haverford Avenue at the border between the city and Montgomery County. I didn’t badger the people driving west—they probably couldn’t vote against Rizzo either. But I gave as many of my flyers to cars heading east, into the city.
How many of them would pay attention to my flyer and decide to vote in that election which I thought was the most important in our lives? Later I checked out the vote in the wards where I was trying to suppress the Rizzo vote, the 34th ward. Rizzo only won it by about three percent. He won the city by about six percent. It was a solid victory but by no means not a mandate.
No matter. Rizzo won that election to be Mayor. And it was, “Buckle up. It’s going to be a bumpy night.
Let me tell you about Frank Rizzo. The iconic photograph of Frank Rizzo shows him arriving at a crime scene in South Philadelphia. He was coming from a formal dinner at the old Bellevue-Stratford hotel, wearing a tuxedo with a billy-club shoved inside his tight-fitting dinner jacket. The tragedy in Minneapolis brought my mind way back to the very beginning of my career, which was as a reporter in Philadelphia. The iconic photograph of Frank Rizzo shows him arriving at a crime scene in South Philadelphia. He was coming from a formal dinner at the old Bellevue-Stratford hotel, wearing a tuxedo with a billy-club shoved inside his tight-fitting dinner jacket.
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This was the image that invariably came to me for my first time face-to-face meeting with “The Riz.”Actually, it was face-to-chest because I am very short and he towered over me at 6’2” and weighed in at over 200 pounds. His neck was about half an inch smaller than boxer Mike Tyson. I was writing a story about his campaign style and I got parts of his schedule from his top aide, Marty Weinberg, “Winberg,” as Rizzo called him.
I was waiting for an event to begin at that very same Bellevue Stratford hotel of the billy-club pic when Rizzo came storming towards me and Winberg. He looked down at me—and it was quite a distance—he shouted at his closest aide. I don’t remember the exact words but they were something like, “I told you, Winberg, I don’t want them people around.” I was one of them people who wrote for a magazine he felt was against him. Rightly so. Most of our reporting at Philadelphia Magazine was not kind to Rizzo.
I snuck into the event anyway and was able to catch him at a few other events, and wrote a short story about his campaign style. It was not a negative story. It was color commentary. That was the assignment, and it was an easy one. In his way—short, punchy sentences, loud, intentionally controversial, maybe purposely grammatically incorrect, threatening at times—he was an effective campaigner.
He was also a gift to reporters that never stopped giving. His quotes were priceless, foul, racist, hateful, incendiary, but nevertheless priceless gifts to reporters. Just a few examples. The other iconic photo was of the front page of the Philadelphia Daily News after he flunked a lie detector test. It said in a typeface similar to what was used when we won the Europe theater in World War II. “Rizzo Lied, Test Shows.”
In one of his campaigns, the call to action in black neighborhoods was “Vote Black.” So, he told his people to “Vote White.” One of his campaign slogans was “Rizzo Means Business,” and the “business” the slogan referred to was not about new companies coming to the city or new stores on Market Street.
He denied saying “Get their black asses” at a demonstration. But he rarely denied his colorful quotes, especially when they involved people of color.
When he was running for a second term, he said he would "make Attila the Hun look like a faggot."
My favorite was when he was asked about his combative style, he insisted he was a man of peace. He said, “I have doves flying out of my armpits.”
Later, through Winberg, Rizzo apologized to me and invited me to join him at a campaign event. It was at an outdoor swimming pool somewhere in Southwest Philadelphia. We ate rigatoni and very large meatballs. It was not an interview, and all I remember about the conversation was the Mayor talking about birds. Rizzo talked about how he kept pigeons as he grew up in his South Philadelphia row home off of Broad Street. He raised birds like Terry Malloy in “On the Waterfront” and like Rocky in “Rocky.” And the playwright in the original version of “The Producers,” where in one scene Brooks and his sidekick played by Gene Wilder where a director they wanted to recruit was on the roof. He was, the building's concierge as she called herself, explained he was tending to his birds: "Dirty, disgusting, filthy, lice-ridden birds."
Through my career, I followed Rizzo. I had spoken to a friend about whether I should toss my Rizzo archives. I said, “He’s never coming back.” The friend thought that unwise. I’m not a packrat compulsive, but I decided to keep all of the boxes of it. Thankfully.
When I left Philadelphia Magazine to go to law school, Rizzo decided to run again. He was limited to two consecutive terms, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t run once again when four non-Rizzo years were up.
Rizzo was up against an African-American candidate, W. Wilson Goode, and I worked with the campaign consulting firm hired by Goode. An investigative story I had written was the content for one of our best ads against Rizzo. The scandal involved the opportunity to fill about 200 jobs and men lined up for hours to sign up and it was a rainy day. But the jobs were already filled by Rizzo cronies and their cronies. And cronies of their cronies’ cronies. The ad was in black and white, showing men in low resolution. The ad went like this:
“September 1974. The recession. And Frank Rizzo’s the Mayor. It’s raining. Ten thousand people stand to apply for two hundred and eighty jobs. They wait. And hope. But not one of the ten thousand gets a job. Because Frank Rizzo had it rigged. Only his political pals got jobs. The rest of us were left standing in the rain.”*
It was beautifully done and reminds me of an anti-Trump ad produced by the Republican “The Lincoln Project” called “Mourning in America.”
I worked on the team helping Goode prepare for his first debate with Rizzo. Our coach, Myles Martel, had once served as Ronald Reagan’s debate advisor. In the last practice session, I played Rizzo. Wilson whipped my ass, and that was the idea. He was pretty good that night, too.
Wilson Goode won that campaign and became Philadelphia’s first black Mayor. Eight years later, Rizzo ran against Ed Rendell, Philadelphia’s former District Attorney, the guy who later served as chairman of the Democratic National Committee during Bill Clinton’s last term. I think the polls were showing Rizzo having a shot at beating Rendell. But then, after winning the Republican primary, Rizzo died in his campaign office while eating a sandwich, probably from “Shank’s,” the best Italian sandwich place in Philadelphia.
It is all so reminiscent of Black Live Matter, which matters to this day. The reason this all comes back to me so vividly is because of the police brutality against African-Americans in Rizzo’s 1971. Before 1971, Rizzo served as the city’s Police Commissioner and made his name on brutality. Once called the “Toughest Cop in America” in an article in the New York Times magazine, he embraced brutality and racism with seeming pleasure. As Commissioner and Mayor, Rizzo’s was the police force’s get out of jail card on brutality. Back then, a police officer holding an unarmed, handcuffed man down with his knee on the man’s neck for nine minutes was business as usual, and Rizzo meant business.
THAT WAS FIFTY YEARS AGO. And it’s still with us. And the brutality is still coddled by some of the most important people in the world. And it’s got to end.
I've known Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, for almost as long as I knew Rizzo. And I applaud him for his action.
Though, I hope none of this sounds wistful. I hope it doesn’t seem like I am sugar-coating the shameful legacy of Frank Rizzo. I recalled some of his quotes not to glamorize him but remind us that he purposely caused divisions between people black and white, gay and straight. And how he did so for his own personal, political gain. It was an ugly, unsophisticated political strategy, and it worked. Just like now. Black Lives Matter, then and now.
*Credit for “standing in the rain” commercial: Mark Moskowitz, Neal Oxman