He deserved this honest, thorough and fair biography
—The Wall Street Journal
Here is the 10th anniversary edition of the first full-scale biography of Frank L. Rizzo, one of the most beloved and feared public figures in urban American history. Sweeping and finely detailed, this is a work of scholarship that reads like a novel, packed with colorful details and revealing stories about a man whose life demonstrated how the force of personality can affect history.
Rizzo was loved. He was hated. There was no one else like him. As cop, police commissioner, mayor, and consummate campaigner, he was the last of the big men who patrolled the urban landscape. He became a symbol for the racial tensions that inflamed America's cities and was center stage in the bloody struggles over civil rights, the war at home over Vietnam, and the expansion of political empowerment in the 1960s and 1970s. At a time of reexamination of police tactics and urban policies, it is vital to study the life of a man who had vast influence on both.
Read archival material that reveals the inside story of how Richard Nixon made Rizzo the centerpiece of his 1972 reelection campaign—and Nixon's personal thoughts on their friendship. Learn of Rizzo's implicit understanding with Angelo Bruno, the Docile Don of the South Philly mob, and read about how the men who ousted Bruno considered whacking Rizzo in a dispute over his son-in-law the bookie. For the first time, hear from the man who gave Frank Rizzo a very famous lie detector test. Also revealed in this book are the private meetings and secret deals of Rizzo's five campaigns for mayor, including his pact with Sam Katz to beat Ron Castille in the 1991 Republican primary in Philadelphia, and the real story of how Rizzo planned to beat Ed Rendell and return to power.
For the first time, Rizzo's wife Carmella and his family have agreed to cooperate fully, providing access to family records and photographs. In many ways, this book is like a home movie of Philadelphia's most famous family, which had carefully guarded its privacy for five decades.
This biography delivers more than 100 years of riveting Philadelphia history, including the media wars, the government corruption, and the personal struggles for political power from Boies Penrose to John Street. It is filled with the men and women who make the Frank Rizzo story so compelling. There is Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Jimmy Carter, Nicky Scarfo, Walter Annenberg, Richardson Dilworth, Jim Tate, Pete Camiel, Cecil Moore, Charles Bowser, Lucien Blackwell, Wilson Goode, Bill Gray, Bill Green, Billy Meehan, Ed Rendell, Arlen Specter, Ron Castille, Lynne Abraham and Sam Katz.
About the Authors:
Formerly a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, S. A. Paolantonio now works for ESPN. John F. Timoney served as the police commissioner of Philadelphia.
This well-researched, savvy biography limns the unlikely career of Frank Rizzo (1920-1991), who won mayoral nominations in Philadelphia from both major parties, maintaining power not through political philosophy or machine politics but by sheer personal magnetism, shows Paolantonio. A city cop, Rizzo switched his allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic party when offered the position of police commissioner by the Democratic mayor in 1966. In the summer of 1967, when riots broke out in Newark and Detroit, his law-and-order tactics kept the lid on in Philadelphia, gaining approval from whites and blacks alike. But much of Rizzo's political career was based on racial polarization, according to the author, from his first year as mayor in 1972 when he instructed his police commissioner "to fight federal lawsuits to open the police department to minorities and women" to his return bid in 1987 (this time as a Republican) when he disregarded the black community.
—Publishers Weekly
