Eminentoes: Baltimore's Little Caesar

...But there is one big difference...

...But the legislature did him an even bigger turn, rewriting the laws in the middle of the suit, as State Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller told the Washington Post, "to ensure a win inthis case...

...To Peter Angelos, this is a temporary setback...

...They will go after companies like Sherwin-Williams and Glidden under a novel "market-share liability" argument, with the half-dozen or so makers of lead pigment dividing up liability based upon historical market share...

...Then the cameras closed in, treating viewers to a remarkable and fitting sight—two left-wing dictators, nestled comfortably in their box seats, deep in friendly conversation...

...His contract with the state entitles him to one-quarter of any award...

...What is criminal is that Angelos's rackets are perfectly legal...

...Let me assure you," he told Business Week, "I'm going to restore the litigation rights of Marylanders...

...It really looked like two characters come down from the Silver Screen to bask in a surreal setting which could only have been manufactured in Hollywood: Castro as Woody Allen's character Fielding Mellish in Bananas...

...The General Assembly's ethics committee has cautioned Stone against voting on the proposal to remove the pain and suffering caps because of the clear conflict of interest...

...For the sake of trial, the courts consolidated the cases, bundling the many bogus suits with the few legitimate ones...

...Though he may be the most feared shark in the trial lawyer tank, Angelos's style hasn't worked for his baseball club, which has become something of a joke under his stewardship...

...Eight lawyers in his firm are busy drawing up suits against the lead industry, claiming the lead pigments from paints used in homes before 1978 have killed and harmed countless children...

...The nationally televised audience back in America saw 50,000 Cubans smiling and waving and celebrating in the warm Caribbean sun...

...it was just a matter of finding victims of "asbestos lung disease" and other related maladies...

...Angelos denies personally lobbying President Clinton, but did he really have to...

...Not every private citizen can persuade the legislature to pass a special bill benefiting only himself...

...Not long afterward, Sen...

...He has been described as the "most powerful private citizen in Maryland...

...Incredibly, some members of the legislature even are on the Angelos payroll, and they routinely sponsor and shepherd legislation that is exclusively in their boss's interest...

...When he assumed control of the Orioles five years ago, he was hailed as the hometown hero who would spend what it takes to right a listing ship...

...He dragged Ripken, the future Hall-of-Famer and one of the most popular players in the game, along with him to see to it that the waves kept on coming...

...When Bromwell and Stone introduced another "Angelos bill" last year to remove monetary caps on pain and suffering damages affecting approximately 200 of their boss's asbestos suits (and worth millions of dollars to Angelos, according to the Baltimore Sun), Bromwell defended the move with eerie similarity: "I ain't doing this for Peter Angelos...

...Says Del...

...But he has run the team like a dictator, driving out highly regarded baseball executives, managers, coaches, players, and even the radio announcer...

...He has been very, very good to the Democratic Party, and they have been very, very good to him...

...Glendening quickly signed the bill, giving Angelos full protection of the law and shielding him from breach of contract...

...So Angelos made a trip to the state house in Annapolis...

...So offended was one committee chairman by Stone's stated insistence on voting for the bill, he allowed the bill to die without ever reaching a vote...

...But if Angelos refused to field scabs, he risked having the team seized from him by the American League...

...Even a mere $250 million is not a bad payday...

...It was the Pittsburgh-born Angelos's good fortune that his Greek immigrant parents moved to Baltimore when he was eleven, enabling him to grow up in a state with a charming little history of political corruption...

...As Opening Day approached, Major League Baseball toyed with the idea of fielding teams with replacement players...

...The more involved Angelos gets, it has seemed, the less chance the team has to succeed...

...A study last summer found the Angelos family to be the fifty-fourth most generous political donors in America...

...Angelos did receive a White House meetingwith National Security Adviser Sandy Berger to discuss the matter, and subsequently received his waiver...

...He meddles in every area an owner typically does not...

...Angelos, who declined a request for an interview to discuss this and other issues, plays this system like a finely tuned instrument for fun and profit...

...Emergency legislation sponsored by state Senators Stone, John Pica, and Thomas Bromwell whisked through the General Assembly, making it a crime to field replacement players at Camden Yards...

...This modern-day Little Caesar doesn't break the law to enrich himself and accumulate power, he personally changes the law to suit him...

...Peter Angelos, who really was born on the Fourth of July, was Real People...

...Angelos had the common touch...

...Trial lawyer Angelos, who has constructed a sorry mix of overpaid has-beens and sub-mediocre never-weres, has been guilty of managerial malpractice...

...There is an intersection where Peter Angelos's dabbling in politics meets his dabbling in sports...

...Angelos got his judgeships...

...Angelos has not revealed his take from the $750 million in settlements, but it is likely somewhere between the traditional one-third s contingency fee and the up to one-half c!) allowed in Maryland...

...And while he figures out how to squeeze more money from asbestos and tobacco, he already has turned to The American Spectator - December 1999/January 2000 73 the next target...

...The asbestos manufacturers had decided to settle...

...embargo against Cuba had prevented just such events for years...

...But amid howls of protest over this arrangement, it moved to cut Angelos's fee in half to 12.5 percent, a measure the pugnacious Angelos is fighting...

...Ripken, as close to a mega-celebrity as the state of Maryland has, smiled and posed for photographs with giddy state legislators...

...Stone officially accepted a position with Peter G. Angelos & Associates...

...While Mellish was dreamed up by Allen as a celluloid spoof on Cuba's Banana Republican, Angelos has become a real-life parody of Robinson's Rico...

...Beside him sat Peter Angelos, a man who over just a few years has done the same to one of the proudest franchises in sports...

...Sure, he might have buckets of gold in the vault, but this son of a saloon keeper still lived in the same house he moved into three decades before, he still drove and parked his own car, and he was still married to his first wife...

...The bill would have effectively overturned a 1995 Maryland Court of Appeals ruling...

...The manufacturers crumbled like, well, asbestos...

...The legislature's gift could mean as much as $1 billion for Angelos when all the accounting is done...

...He said, `For crying out loud, Kennedy tried to invade the island and tried to kill him...

...Angelos purchased the Baltimore Orioles baseball team in 1994 with his cut from the first wave of asbestos lawsuits...

...So in April, for the first time since the Communist revolution nearly forty years ago, Major League Baseball returned to Cuba...

...This was anathema to Angelos, with his working-class roots and close ties to organized labor...

...The current governor, manifestly unpopular Democrat Parris Glendening, holds his office despite evidence his 1994 election was fraudulently obtained...

...Angelos was a fan's owner, a Baltimorean who knew what the team meant to the average denizen of Charm City...

...Flanagan, suggested this might constitute a conflict of interest, an enraged Pica rushed from the Senate to the House chamber, declaring, "I'm going to knock his lights out when I see him...

...But to get it he ; needed some help...

...77 son, the same day Johnson was named the American League's Manager of the Year...

...But by 1996 his hyper-litigation on behalf of more than 9,000 such victims was clogging the Baltimore courts and slowing his cash-flow...

...He would never field replacement players, he announced...

...A mong the more unseemly examples of the incestuous arrangement between Angelos and state officials came during the baseball strike in 1995...

...Making the games happen, however, required a State Department waiver and permission from the White House...

...A 1987 Maryland Court of Appeals ruling prohibited bringing claims on behalf of people dead for more than three years...

...Bearded and clad in his trademark fatigues sat Fidel Castro, the man who for four decades has run Cuba into the ground...

...In reality, he may be the most powerful private citizen anywhere...

...Never mind that the manufacturers voluntarily took the product off the market more than 40 years ago when health risks first came to light, or that lead paint only causes problems when landlords poorly maintain their buildings...

...Peter Angelos expressed sympathy for Fidel Castro," said Angelos friend and Pacifica radio commentator Saul Landau about a lunch the two shared...

...Two of the bill's good shepherds—Senators Stone and Pica—have worked for Angelos's firm...

...It materialized this past spring when his Baltimore Orioles traveled to Havana to play the Cuban national baseball team...

...Faced with a potentially bankrupting legal fight, most of the targeted companies opted to settle...

...Stone's legislation (which passed) extended the statute of limitations in asbestos cases from three to seven years after death...

...The vast majority of these cases were dubious, depending on questionable expert testimony by plaintiffs' doctors about the perils of "asbestos lung disease," a deadly sounding moniker that confuses a benign condition with cancer caused by asbestos...

...I didn't do this for Peter Angelos, and I didn't do this for Cal Ripken," he told one reporter...

...He fired one manager he didn't like, Davey John-44 Some members are on the Angelos payroll, and they routinely sponsor bills that are exclusively in their boss's interest...

...In pioneering the litigation of the immensely lucrative suits against asbestos manufacturers, he hit something of a trial lawyer's jackpot...

...These are openly referred to by legislators and in the press as "Angelos bills," and there is often at least one in the hopper at any given moment...

...Further, he risked violating the team's lease at Camden Yards, the Orioles's stadium, requiring that he maintain the team in good standing as a member of the league...

...To Angelos, the facts won't get in the way of rifling through someone else's deep pockets...

...He spreads money around like mulch," says Delegate Robert Flanagan, the House Republican whip...

...Here is where the hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions—including 575,000 in soft money to aid Democratic Senate candidates in the final week of the 1998 election, and $ioo,000 after one of those calls by Al Gore in 1996—paid dividends...

...It wasn't the first time the legislature did exactly what Peter Angelos asked it to, and it would not be the last...

...But then again, not every private citizen has baseball superstar Cal Ripken at his beck and call to help out in a pinch...

...The strict, decades-old U.S...

...But Angelos wanted it to happen...

...74 December '999/January 2000 The American Spectator...

...Indeed, in a much-hyped 1998 rematch, Glendening won going away...

...The lawyer from Baltimore was making millions with his litigation against asbestos manufacturers on behalf of clients referred to him by the local unions with which he was friendly...

...I did this for Baltimore and Maryland because enough is enough...

...Angelos, not surprisingly, is one of the nation's most generous donors to Democratic candidates and causes nationwide, as well as the principal cash cow for Maryland Democrats...

...As a result, the best and brightest have fled the organization in droves, and the team with among the highest payrolls in professional sports has been dismal on the diamond...

...The likelihood is that time will prove him right...

...72 December '999/January 2000 • The American Spectator At many stops along his road to riches, Angelos has been aided by his minions in the Annapolis state house...

...Faced with no legal hopes of winning the case, the tobacco companies settled with the state for $4 billion...

...I'm doing it for his clients...

...MAX SCHULZ is editorial director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute...

...In both appearance and in deed, Angelos is the arrogant Cosa Nostra capo, with sycophantic minions doing his bidding, that Robinson played so brilliantly in the first great gangster film...

...Angelos, a dead-ringer for Edward G. Robinson, as Rico "Little Caesar" Bandello in the film Little Caesar...

...Since he owned the team, he was definitely going to use it...

...And just so they continue to be, he'll continue giving to Democrats to protect him against the GOP—which, he says without the slightest hint of embarrassment, "has spent a huge portion of its time maligning the legal profession...

...Angelos struck gold again —this time with the assistance of Governor Glendening — in 1996 when he garnered the appointment to lead the state of Maryland's litigation in the legal assault on tobacco companies...

...This Pinocchio act—by dancing marionettes who have trouble telling the truth—may be wearing thin on Annapolis's capitol hill...

...He knew he would...

...The sight was in some respects rather comical...

...He wanted to see about getting the legislature to approve more judgeships solely to hear the asbestos cases and process each individual settlement...

...T he skills that have made Angelos a successful litigant—braggadocio, chutzpah, bare-knuckle tactics—haven't translated well to the world of sports ownership...

...Solons like Bromwell and Stone brazenly do that bidding, all the while issuing denials that their bills are done to help Peter Angelos...

...The legislature only rarely defies Angelos, usually when his and his followers' actions become too brazen...

...During the 1998 election cycle, Angelos gave roughly $300,000 to Democrats...

...When one opponent, Del...

...Senator Bromwell, no Angelos employee but a water carrier nonetheless, was defensive about his bill to help Angelos hang on to the Orioles during the tumultuous days of the players' strike...

...Each man, woman, and child in the stadium had been vetted by the government...

...The episode's most scandalous aspect might be that, despite the evidence, no one really cared...

...Angelos has sunk a huge portion of his ill-gotten gains into improving the franchise, which he bought in 1994 for $174 million ($40 million his own...

...State Senator Norman Stone personally sponsored legislation to guarantee Angelos's asbestos windfall...

...Pica never did find Flanagan...

...A friendly crowd ensured that no embarrassing demonstrations would ruin this moment of comity and friendship...

...Cancer deaths actually caused by asbestos were very few in number...

...Flanagan, "What we have here is one guy who, whenever he gets a decision he doesn't like in the courts, comes in here and gets the legislature to overturn that decision...

...That would have left some of Angelos's most compelling cases of deadly cancer caused by asbestos out of the consolidated group of suits, and the "asbestos lung disease" cases might have lost in court...

...Though not as colorful as in Louisiana nor as squalid as in Rhode Island or New Jersey, Maryland's corruption was endemic enough to bring down a vice president of the United States, Spiro Agnew, who left office not for high crimes and misdemeanors in Washington but for common graft in the Old Line State...