Frank Rizzo

Frank Rizzo

Frank Rizzo (born October 23, 1920 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania , † July 16, 1991 ibid) was an American politician and mayor of Philadelphia from 1972 to 1980.

He began his career as a police officer and worked his way up to becoming the city police chief. In this function he achieved international fame because of his controversial action against the African-American civil rights and student protest movement . He ran in a total of five mayoral elections and ran for both Republicans and Democrats . His person and administration polarized the citizens of Philadelphia to a high degree, with opponents accusing him of police-state methods and racism .

Career

family

Typical block of flats with row houses in South Philadelphia

Rizzo's father, Raffaele Rizzo, emigrated to the United States in 1908 at the age of 14 from Chiaravalle Centrale , Calabria , Italy . The main reason for emigration was the agricultural crisis in southern Italy that began in the 1890s . He moved to Philadelphia, which had its greatest population growth in the years leading up to World War I, with immigration mainly from southern and eastern Europe . Like almost all Italian Americans , who had an extremely low social status and were excluded from political power-sharing by the German and Irish Americans who had previously immigrated and were more economically successful , he lived in South Philadelphia . At that time, this ghettoization could only be observed among Afro-Americans in Philadelphia . The crime of the Black Hand Gang and the emergence of the Philadelphia Crime Family under Salvatore Sabella increased the discrimination against Italian Americans even further. Raffaele Rizzo worked as a self-employed tailor with his own shop. In 1917 he joined the police force and continued tailoring as a sideline. Frank Rizzo's mother, Theresa Erminio, grew up in South Philadelphia and had parents from Italy. Her father was a craftsman from Tuscany who immigrated to the United States in the 1880s and worked as a stonemason while her mother was from Abruzzo . Raffaele Rizzo and Theresa Erminio married in the summer of 1918. They bought a row house on South Rosewood Street, just outside the Italian-American neighborhoods. Frank Rizzo was born on October 23, 1920, the eldest of three sons and was named after his paternal grandfather, Francesco Rizzo, the first name being Americanized .

Rizzo grew up in South Philadelphia and had a strict upbringing. As was often observed in Italian-American families of this time, the father had a more demanding and more distant relationship with his firstborn son than with his younger brothers. From an early age, the expectation of Rizzo was to be independent and to take responsibility for the younger siblings. The father also placed little value on education, instead emphasizing hard work and legal compliance as ideals. Typically, Rizzo's relationship with his mother was closer. Even as a child he was physically superior to most of his contemporaries, he developed little ambition in school or sports, but was characterized by a pronounced rowdiness. In 1938 he was discharged from high school without a degree when he failed to retrieve his lost school books. That same year he volunteered for the United States Navy without his father's permission . After only a short period of service on the cruiser USS Houston , Rizzo was discharged from the Navy in November 1939 because of a diagnosed diabetes insipidus . He then worked in construction and, after the United States entered World War II, in a steel mill in northwestern Philadelphia that manufactured naval guns. In 1940 Rizzo helped his parents move from South Philadelphia to Germantown , which meant a significant gain in social status for them. In 1942, Rizzo's mother died at the age of only 39. A month later, in April of the same year, he married Carmella Silvestri, whose parents had migrated to the United States from the province of Salerno in 1908 . Soon after, he and his wife bought a row house very close to their in-laws in Germantown. Since his industrial job was no longer enough to support himself, he changed his career. In March of the following year, Rizzo's first son was born, who was followed by a daughter in 1950.

In the police force

On October 6, 1943, Rizzo was appointed a police officer. Although this career entry in the Republican- controlled police service in Philadelphia was easier to achieve than before during the war, he needed political patronage . This was made by a Republican on the Germantown local council who knew Rizzo's father. When Rizzo took office, he became a Republican like his father. The Philadelphia police force at the time was dominated by German and Irish Americans; so of 47 captains only two were Italian-Americans. For the next seven years he went on patrol in the Nicetown-Tioga neighborhood of North Philadelphia . In addition to his height, Rizzo stood out from the start with his immaculately polished uniform, which became his trademark. He was first reported in the Philadelphia Bulletin in April 1944 when he had burned his hands off-duty at a pharmacy. In January 1946, the first photo was taken of Rizzo in uniform, who would later become the most photographed police officer in the United States. Rizzo's police work was first mentioned in the press in 1948 when he arrested five people who ambushed a taxi driver. He only suffered injuries to his face, while four of the robbers had to be treated in hospital.

Depiction of Rizzo on a mural at the Italian Market in South Philadelphia (2015)

In 1950 the Senate set up a committee of inquiry, headed by Estes Kefauver , to uncover links between organized crime, politics, and police nationwide. At the top of the priority list of the Kefauver Hearings was Philadelphia, whose police service was considered particularly corrupt. In October 1950, a senior police officer escaped the hearing by suicide, which was followed by two more suicides by corrupt police officers. The Philadelphia public safety officer, Sam Rosenberg, was therefore forced to restore the city police's battered reputation by renewing its staff. At that time, one morning on his way to work, he noticed Rizzo directing traffic. After studying his personnel file, Rosenberg named Rizzo a sergeant and transferred him to South Philadelphia, where he was given command of a squad on South 7th Street.

His territory bordered north to the Down Town of Center City and he had received from Rosenberg expressly commissioned against the Racketeering , so the illegal activities of organized crime to take action. At that time, a new generation came to power in the American Cosa Nostra of Philadelphia with Joseph Ida and his Capo Angelo Bruno and pushed back the Kosher Nostra , led by Harry Rosen , which had controlled the city in the 1940s. As a sergeant, Rizzo was in close contact with the nightclub owner Frank Palumbo, who was on friendly terms with police officers, politicians and bullies . To what extent an understanding was reached between the two is unclear, but Rizzo took robust action against street crime , while he largely left the Cosa Nostra and illegal gambling alone. On the other hand, as a superior in his area, he followed the clear course against police corruption prescribed by Rosenberg. Rizzo was soon known for his daring and fondness for brutal combat with baton use. Ever since he kicked the door of a brothel in July 1951 after a reported disturbance of the peace and arrested nine people there after a brawl, he has been nicknamed the “Cisco Kid” after the famous western hero .

In November 1951, Joseph S. Clark, a Democrat, was elected mayor of Philadelphia for the first time after 67 years of Republican supremacy . It did so because the Democrats in the white working class and among South Philadelphia's Italian-Americans broke Republican dominance. As one of his final acts, Rosenberg promoted Rizzo on November 18, 1951 and placed him in command of a motorized street police unit on South 7th Street. Philadelphia's new police chief, Thomas J. Gibbons, was an old friend of Rizzo's father. Although Rizzo was notorious for his violent police methods as the "Cisco Kid", he promoted him in January 1952 to captain . Shortly afterwards he was given the management of a police station for the first time. It was on North 39th Street in West Philadelphia in an area inhabited primarily by African Americans. Gibbons gave Rizzo the order to concentrate mainly on speakeasys , i.e. illegal bars. Rizzo continued his robust police methods against blacks unchanged. When he even stormed the box houses of the Elk Lodge , this was perceived by the local middle class as breaking a taboo. After just a few weeks, African-American lawyers forwarded collective complaints against Rizzo to District Attorney Richardson Dilworth, which had no legal consequences. In May 1952, Gibbons moved Rizzo to 12th South Street in Center City .

The background for this transfer was that at the time a group of reform-minded and influential business people, including one of the most important fundraisers of the Democratic National Committee , pushed the mostly Irish-American party officials of the Democrats to redesign downtown. This project met with resistance from local residents and small business owners, most of whom were owners of nightclubs and bars. Clark, Gibbons and Dilworth decided on Rizzo as the district manager on 12th South Street in order to robustly enforce the curfew and alcohol bans as well as to combat the widespread prostitution. After some negative press reports about his raids against prostitution and illegal gambling , Rizzo decided to cooperate with the press and specifically pass on information to the gossip columnist of the Philadelphia Inquirer . In January 1953, Rizzo used the baton to end a scuffle between several people after a union meeting, drawing a handgun for the first and only time during his service. Thanks to his efforts, two seriously injured people were rescued who would probably have died without his intervention. This and other events gave Rizzo an increasingly high reputation on the street.

In connection with the process of displacement that the Kosher Nostra in Center City was exposed to against the Cosa Nostra, Dilworth suspected Rizzo of only acting against the Jewish mafia and allowing Italian-American organized crime to continue. He, as well as Clark and Gibbons, as Democratic Irish Americans, also had ethnic reservations about him; also, the Italian Americans in South Philadelphia were traditionally Republicans. In order to prove his loyalty to the district attorney, Rizzo arrested two high-ranking racketeers of Capo Bruno in November 1953 . In 1954, Rizzo focused on cracking down on striptease bars near South Broad Street, where renovation of the office buildings had begun. In February 1955, a squad from Rizzo's territory arrested the well-known stripper Blaze Starr , who soon left town. In her autobiography twenty years later, she accused Rizzo of having had a sexual affair with her three weeks after her arrest, although other testimonies exonerated him. Since the city government used him as a front man to clean up Center City, Rizzo was a controversial and so popular political figure in Philadelphia by 1955 that both candidates in the election campaign for the office of district attorney signaled their full support for Rizzo. Dilworth was elected mayor by a large majority that same year. When Rizzo arrested five United States Navy sailors in August 1955 , they later accused him of beating them with a baton at the police station. This was followed by the first judicial hearing on possible wrongdoing by Rizzo as a police officer, whereby the complaints were dismissed.

In the late 1950s a bohemian emerged in Center City , although it was more adapted and quieter than that in San Francisco , New York City or Boston . Nevertheless, the residents ran open doors with their complaints about the gay scene at Rizzo, who viewed the bohemians with great antipathy. As a high school dropout and hard-working policeman, he was bothered by her obsessive love of books and her idleness. On February 12, 1959, a squad led by Rizzo stormed the gay bar Humoresque and put its owner Melvin Haifetz and 24 guests under arrest for one night. Haifetz then filed a lawsuit to 25,000 US dollars against a Rizzo, who was partially supported enthusiastically by the majority of residents and most newspapers, and threw him a threat and insult before. Even before the competent federal district court dismissed Haifetz's lawsuit, Gibbons transferred Rizzo to a new police station in prosperous Northeast Philadelphia on March 20, 1959 . This involved a promotion to Police Inspector . This whole episode resulted in Rizzo becoming an idol for many police officers.

The Philadelphia Police Headquarters, completed in 1960, is also known as “The Roundhouse” (“The Roundhouse”).

In 1959, Dilworth was re-elected mayor by a large margin. His next goal was the governor of Pennsylvania, so he tried very hard not to anger the mostly white Democratic party establishment. For this reason he promoted the popular Rizzo wherever he could in the following years. When the latter revealed that Northeast Philadelphia was underutilized, he was only transferred to West Philadelphia and shortly thereafter in August 1960 at the urging of Congressman William A. Barrett and his financier Palumbo to Center City. Here he made an agreement with Bruno, who was now the boss of the Philadelphia Crime Family . While Bruno stopped violent crimes and did not deal with drugs, Rizzo left him alone in his business with illegal gambling and loan shark business . In February 1962, James Hugh Joseph Tate became mayor while Dilworth was running for governor. Tate gave the order to take action against crime in downtown, with Rizzo successfully concentrating on the red light district . In June 1962, Rizzo testified before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in Washington, DC ; this is a subcommittee of the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs . He was the only non- police commissioner to be summoned as an expert in the fight against organized crime. Rizzo has now achieved national notoriety and testified to committee chairman John Little McClellan that the judiciary and the American Civil Liberties Union are too lenient to crime.

In the fall of 1963, when the Democrats were in crisis over internal disputes and the Internal Revenue Service exposed corruption in the Philadelphia police force, Tate appointed four new Deputy Police Commissioners, including Rizzo, who commands 6,000 police officers received. The chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Cecil B. Moore , sharply criticized this appointment and was the first to publicly accuse Rizzo of racism. He'd had a clash with Rizzo as a lawyer ten years earlier while that district manager was in West Philadelphia. Moore complained that Rizzo, as a school leaver, lacked the educational qualifications for this position and accused him, without being able to produce evidence, of using "SA tactics" against African-American business owners. Despite this criticism against his personnel decision Tate won the mayoral election in November 1963. From 28 to 30 August, 1964 flared up in North Philadelphia on Columbia Avenue race riots . Contrary to the urging of Rizzo, who wanted to use force against the looting and partly armed African American crowd, police chief Howard Leary ordered a defensive police tactic. Doomed to inactivity, Rizzo had to watch on the spot how almost an entire neighborhood was destroyed. In the end, two people died and 309 were injured, and over 600 businesses were looted, many of them owned by Jews . This nationally televised event marked a defining moment in the history of the city and in the relationship between whites and African Americans in Philadelphia.

The next year, starting May 1, Moore led daily demonstrations against Girard College in Philadelphia, which only admits white students. When protesters tried to storm the campus on June 24 , Rizzo ordered some police officers to drive their motorbikes into the crowd. Three weeks later, Rizzo was attacked on the spot by demonstrators and thrown to the ground, injuring his hand. Nevertheless, he remained publicly effective on the scene, as the television news showed. At the time, Rizzo was the nationwide police officer who had the greatest influence on the image and politics of a big city. In February 1966 Leary moved to New York City as police chief. He was succeeded by Edward J. Bell, a close friend of the mayor, but it was clear to everyone that it would be Rizzo's turn. In August 1966 he stood in for the police chief and took action against the local Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) when he received information that members of this black civil rights movement were setting up arms caches. A raid of four houses on August 12th was unsuccessful except for the discovery of a few sticks of dynamite. There were a few arrests, but in the end there was only one suspended sentence. The chairman of the SNCC, Stokely Carmichael , attacked Rizzo as a racist after this action.

In November 1965, Arlen Specter had been elected as the new district attorney, the first Republican success in city elections since 1953. A previously unseen TV election campaign with a strong emphasis on law and order had led to this victory . In addition, the popularity of the democratic reformers around President Lyndon B. Johnson sank in the face of race unrest, the Vietnam protest and the 68er movement as a whole, so that the Democrat Tate had to fear his re-election in November 1967. Particularly among white electoral groups such as the Italian-Americans of South Philadelphia, where Rizzo was particularly popular and later Richard Nixon , the distance to the Johnson government grew. On the advice of the influential Congressman Barrett, Tate declared on May 16, 1967 during the Primaries that Chief of Police Bell would have to relinquish his post to Rizzo due to illness. The mayor explicitly allowed Rizzo to do police work freely. In return, Rizzo stripped the Republican family tradition and registered as a Democrat.

Chief of Police

After a wave of race riots in the summer of 1967, including those in Detroit , Philadelphia became more concerned about such an event in the city, so public assembly was banned on August 17th. Rizzo enforced the measure with great severity and several hundred arrests were made. In many places where there was resistance or unrest spread, Rizzo showed up on the front line with police officers and a filming camera team from local TV and a baton in hand. Rizzo became hugely popular and topped the polls. If re-elected, the mayor promised to continue working with Rizzo as chief of police, while his opponent Specter made no such promise. In the end, Tate narrowly won the election, but Rizzo was considered the real winner.

On November 17, 3,000 African-American students marched on the city's school board and demanded the introduction of black studies into the curriculum and a new dress code in high schools. Whether and to what extent a previous provocation took place remains unclear, in any case Rizzo ordered the formation of a police cauldron and the use of batons on site, which resulted in several injuries. The image of the police beating unarmed youthful demonstrators burned itself into the memory of the black community in Philadelphia, although a year later Rizzo protected African-American students from racist attacks in a white residential area with massive police operations. This event divided the entire city, so that more and more voices called for Rizzo's replacement. Tate saw the opportunity now to get rid of the annoying Rizzo, but his deputy, Charles W. Bowser, convinced him to hold on to the police chief. On December 20, 1967, Tate announced that it would appoint Rizzo as police chief for that term.

As police chief, he pursued a restrictive security policy, as requested by Tate. Rizzo demanded constant loyalty from his subordinates and showed it to them in return. He preferably filled posts in his immediate vicinity with people with a military past, which earned him the nickname “The General”. Rizzo, who was a great admirer of J. Edgar Hoover , further strengthened the already existing cooperation with the FBI . The Civil Defense Squad (CD) was founded in 1964 by his liberal predecessor Leary , whose main task was to gather information in the run-up to demonstrations and to de-escalate communication with activists . The first target of the CD under Rizzo was the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), a Maoist group of the Black Power movement. It was infiltrated for over a year before a November 1968 raid uncovered a small arms store. There was no subsequent conviction of a RAM member, but the group was no longer active in Philadelphia.

According to the lawyer and civil rights activist Frank Donner, Rizzo converted the CD into an aggressive instrument to suppress the black civil rights and student protest movement , so that police violence against demonstrators increased as a result. The CD also monitored members of the New Left , such as employees of the Philadelphia Free Press , which was the mouthpiece of the movement in Philadelphia and sharply criticized Rizzo. Members of the CD demonstratively took up quarters in the immediate vicinity of the newspaper employees, broke into their apartments and cars, confiscated “subversive books”, threatened them with firearms or attempted to intimidate them with violent attacks and temporary arrests. Rizzo sent his friend, journalist Albert V. Gaudiosi, from the Philadelphia Bulletin CD information, which the latter used in a series of articles against the Free Press which had the character of an advertising campaign for the police chief .

Another goal of the CD was the school board, which from December 1967 held conferences of students, principals and social scientists in order to pacify racial tensions after the November 17th demonstration. Rizzo had the remote conference venue in Chestnut Hill monitored by the CD, the participants identified and dossiers drawn up. When he became mayor in 1972, he fired the nationally renowned school inspector Mark Shedd for despising him as an indulgent progressive . In 1968-69, Rizzo also used the CD against the National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC), an offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which essentially organized the student protests . The NCLC was accused, among other things, of planning to blow up a school. There were arrests on the matter, but the proceedings were abandoned after four years with no results.

During the presidential campaign in 1968 , Nixon visited Philadelphia and there, ignoring the Democratic mayor, met Rizzo on July 17, whose policing he publicly praised. He saw in Rizzo a natural ally with a good sense of the mood of the voters in different “races” and social classes. So he tried to persuade him to run for mayor for the Republicans. Even as chief of police, he continued to lead several raids on homosexuals and bars where he suspected drug trafficking. This earned him the nickname "Rizzo the Raider". His discussion of the Electric Factory Coffee House , which opened in February 1968 and was a meeting place for hippies , rockers and students, became particularly well known .

On September 5, 1970, the Black Panther Party called for a "revolutionary people's convention" at Temple University Philadelphia. After the death of two members in December of the previous year, she declared war on police across the country. When there were several, sometimes fatal, attacks on police officers on August 29th and 30th, Rizzo took this as an opportunity to crack down on the Black Panthers with the utmost severity. On August 31, 1970, Rizzo had three party's offices in Germantown and North Philadelphia raided and evacuated on a questionable legal basis. The Black Panthers, all released a few days later, were forced to strip naked outdoors so the police could search their clothes. The Philadelphia Daily News published a cover photo of this scene a few days later, which gained worldwide prominence on the Associated Press and sparked criticism of Rizzo's police practices. This image overshadowed Rizzo's political image until the end.

Rizzo was unimpressed by several setbacks in court, affecting eleven of his raids - he was concerned about his public impact as a “savior”. All in all, he was skilful in dealing with the public: after his raids, he used pithy words to present concise photos at press conferences and won over the reporters with favors and attentions. By 1970, Rizzo had earned such a national reputation as the best man in the fight against crime. That he intended to run for mayor was an open secret. With Rizzo winning back the white workers voters lost to Nixon in the 1968 presidential election by the historic low-spirited Democrats, Barrett convinced the reluctant mayor to offer Rizzo support in the next mayoral election before Nixon did. For Tate himself, city ordinances excluded a third term in City Hall . The party leader of the Republicans showed interest in Rizzo too late, so that in early January 1971 the Democrats agreed.

Mayoral elections of 1971

On February 2, 1971, Rizzo resigned as chief of police in order to run for mayor, making him the first United States police officer to do so in a metropolis . Rizzo, who is reluctant to speak in public and prefers confidential meetings with press representatives, was supported by Gaudiosi as campaign manager. In the primary , the Afro-American Hardy Williams and the reformer William J. Green were his competitors. Williams was the first Black Philadelphia to enter the primary with a significant following and against the backdrop of a significantly increased African American population, but he had no chance of success. Rizzo benefited from this candidacy, as Williams could potentially remove votes from Green, who was the favorite of the Liberal party wing and of Governor Milton Shapp . As a Catholic Irish American, Green counted on support from this ethnic group in the working class. On the other hand, Philadelphia, which had lost 7 percent of its population since 1950 - much of it as part of suburbanization to the surrounding area - was, like other major cities in the nation, in a mood of decline. In Philadelphia, the Democratic Party establishment controlling City Hall was blamed for this, which harmed Green.

Although Rizzo made some mistakes in the election campaign, he advocated the legalization of gambling and avoided the press, and he consistently led the polls. His liberal opponents of the party panicked, so that they finally accused him of personal connections to the Mafia boss Bruno, without being able to do any significant harm to Rizzo. On the contrary, the Democrats recorded a record number of newly registered voters in the pre-election process, including over 17,000 former Republicans. In the end, Rizzo won the primary with almost 50%. Overall, the Rizzo phenomenon, which later became known, was shown here for the first time: Its popularity did not result from political positions, but rather from his personality as a man from the street, a policeman and internationally known authority in the fight against crime and a particularly receptive zeitgeist.

For the mayoral election in November 1971 he ran with the slogan Rizzo means business against the moderately liberal, little-known Republican candidate W. Thatcher Longstreth. Rizzo almost exclusively communicated the fight against crime as a message. The election campaign appearances took place mainly in residential areas of the white working class and not in a single district with a black majority. Although he had done a very bad figure in three television debates in October, he prevailed in the end with a lead of almost 50,000 votes, winning only 35 out of 66 electoral districts and clearly defeated Longstreth among African-American voters. In its success, Rizzo benefited from the fact that 200,000 more Democrats than Republicans were registered as voters in Philadelphia, apart from the high approval of white voters who supported his harsh police operations in the past. Within the Democratic Party, prominent politicians like Ramsey Clark and Eugene McCarthy had spoken out against him and for his Republican rival Longstreth.

mayor

North facade Philadelphia City Hall (2013)

First term

The first response to the crisis that he had to decide as mayor concerned the Philadelphia police. Kent Pollock had reported widespread corruption in their ranks for the Inquirer , who had been sold in 1969 by Rizzo's friend Walter Annenberg . Rizzo responded with damage control by posting a list of past corruption cases and their sanctions. The accusation shook Rizzo's close relationship with the local press, from which he had taken many journalists, especially from the Philadelphia Bulletin , to the staff as mayor. Under the new owners of the Inquirer there was a realignment of the newspaper, which clearly distanced itself from Rizzo and reported more precisely and more critically about him. The Inquirer had sided with Longstreth during the mayoral election. Overall, the departure of the conservative Annenberg led to a slow but steady shift to the left in Philadelphia's press landscape. During the election campaign, a hearing by the United States Commission on Civil Rights at the state level gave 41 witnesses the opportunity to raise serious allegations against the Philadelphia police for brutality and disregard for civil rights. Rizzo dismissed this as a conspiracy to get control of the police. In the end, the committee recommended that the United States Attorney bring charges against the Philadelphia police, but the White House stopped them.

Rizzo was primarily concerned with assigning offices on the basis of personal relationships and ensured that family and friends were given sufficient consideration. He appointed the most important advisor Martin Weinberg as legal representative of the city and campaign manager Gaudiosi he procured a seat on the city commission for the organization of the celebrations for the 200th Independence Day of the United States. He promoted the younger brother Joseph Rizzo from battalion chief to fire department president. He used his power as mayor to take action in particular against journalists critical of the local media and was sometimes able to get them fired. Around the middle of 1972, Rizzo ordered the formation of a special police unit. This was originally intended to gain information for Specter in matters of urban corruption, but was misused by the mayor for his personal interests. He had political opponents, members of the civil rights and 68er movement up to striking teachers and Archbishop John Joseph Krol monitored. This special unit prepared a dossier itself through the district attorney. At City Hall he was quickly overwhelmed by the arduous bureaucracy and severity of the problems the city was facing. His first city budget was $ 100 million in deficit, so he turned to his friend, President Nixon, for help.

Rizzo was a role model for Nixon in choosing key issues for his 1972 presidential campaign . The President recognized that the white working class and ethnic Catholics such as Italo and Irish Americans were being lost to the Democrats as the urban core constituency due to their increasing urban exodus, and therefore sought proximity to Rizzo, who was particularly popular with these constituencies with his law and order topics . John Ehrlichman and Harry Robbins Haldeman, as well as Nixon himself, telephoned the Mayor of Philadelphia weekly from January 1972, who announced in April that he would not support the Democratic presidential candidate, George McGovern . By June, Rizzo had become a key advisor to Nixon's election campaign, and in return, for example, received federal funding for hiring more police officers. Although the president and his advisory staff were in the hot campaign phase and dealing with the nascent Watergate affair , he returned the favor to Rizzo and signed the State and Local Fiscal Assistance Act on October 20 at Independence Hall in Philadelphia . This law granted subsidies to major cities struggling with suburbanization, with Philadelphia receiving disproportionate benefits. For Nixon, the alliance with Rizzo was worthwhile, as he won Pennsylvania in his landslide victory on November 7, 1972 and received almost twice as many votes as McGovern in South Philadelphia. Shortly after this success, the president was so preoccupied with the Watergate affair that contact with Rizzo fell asleep and Philadelphia lost its privileged status as a city. The plans for a world exhibition in Philadelphia on the occasion of the 200th Independence Day were not pursued any further. Nonetheless, construction projects in particular represented the greatest successes of Rizzo's first term in office. During this time, Philadelphia International Airport was renovated and expanded, and the foundations for four museums were laid, including the National Museum of American Jewish History and the African American Museum.

In late 1972, the Philadelphia Daily News revealed that Rizzo, through the mediation of his friend Alvin Pearlman, had acquired a property for one-fifth its real value. The seller had previously tried to sell it to the city as an extension for Fairmount Park, which the city refused for reasons of cost. Rizzo came under further pressure when the newspaper researched that Pearlman was charging him just over a quarter of the real price for building the house in Roxborough . Just before Christmas, Dilworth and Tate informed the Inquirer that they suspected Rizzo of having her phone lines monitored . At that time he lost the support of Peter J. Camiel, the Democratic Party leader in Philadelphia, who saw Rizzo's support for Nixon as a betrayal of the party. With Rizzo's popularity falling over the land purchase affair and the current teachers' strike, Camiel felt the time had come to conflict with the mayor at the primaries for the district attorney and city auditor election. In addition, Specter and Tom Gola were both Republican incumbents.

Camiel's main ally in City Hall was City Council chairman George X. Schwartz , who headed a broad system of office patronage . On February 27, Rizzo, in the presence of Vice Mayor Philip RT Carroll Camiel , showed a list of municipal employees and projects over which Schwartz was seeking control. However, he did nothing until April 1973 when Camiel, with F. Emmett Fitzpatrick, sent a promising candidate against Specter to the primaries, since he himself was under so much pressure because of a second wave of press reports about the construction costs of the house in Roxborough that he himself Withdrew from purchase in mid-May. Rizzo also aspired to be elected governor of Pennsylvania the next year , for which he needed the party's support. In order to secure Specter's re-election against Fitzpatrick, however, he ordered the expansion of Camiel's telephone surveillance. He knew about it and informed the press about it, so that on August 5th, both Bulletin and Inquirer brought "Frank Rizzo's espionage troop" as the cover story . A few days later he accused Rizzo of showing him the list on February 27 in order to bribe him: In order to renounce Fitzpatrick's candidacy, he had offered him patronage over a municipal construction project of his choice. Rizzo and Carroll categorically denied this allegation. The Philadelphia Daily News challenged all three parties to a polygraph test , which they took on August 13. When Rizzo failed six of nine questions in this test, while Camiel passed all of them, the next day the newspaper headlined “Rizzo reads, Test Show” (German: “Test shows: Rizzo is lying”). That cover picture became one of the most famous in Philadelphia's press history and haunted Rizzo for the rest of his life. His chances of being elected governor had been severely reduced by this affair. Weinberg had advised him against running anyway, because as governor he would have to reside in tranquil Harrisburg and would miss the popular activities of a mayor.

At the height of the Yom Kippur War , in early October 1973, Rizzo suggested that Philadelphia buy $ 1 million in government bonds in support of Israel . On the one hand, he saw Israel as an ally of the United States, and on the other, he wanted to improve his reputation, which had been battered after the polygraph affair. On November 1, the city council approved Rizzo's proposal and authorized the purchase. In the election campaign to fill the office in recent weeks, Rizzo broke his silence and attacked four judges for being too lenient in dealing with criminals. Of these judges, two were women and two were African American. Specter lost to Fitzpatrick in the end, but was able to ensure with his last official acts that Rizzo got away with a mild reprimand for the actions of his "espionage troops" before a large jury on January 5, 1974.

In March 1974, the Pennsylvania Crime Commission, a committee of the State Legislature , released its investigation report into the Philadelphia Police Department. He stated that the police across all ranks and districts suffered from systematic corruption, and cited specific misconduct for over 400 police officers. The report hit Rizzo as former police chief and incumbent mayor at an inconvenient time set by Shapp, as the primary for the gubernatorial election was due in two months. Moving to the Republicans was not an option because they were in historic sentiment due to the Watergate affair. At a press conference on airport construction two days after the investigation report was published, Rizzo left the room when journalists persistently questioned him about the findings of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission. He did not believe the report and was determined to stand by the police even if their corruption was proven. Special Counsel Phillips, dispatched to Philadelphia to prosecute, suffered from under-staff. Nevertheless, he developed the ambition to uncover further corruption cases in the city administration and the parties. On September 7, 1974, the city advertised 280 job vacancies for ordinary workers, and the next morning several thousand applicants, including many poverty-stricken and African-Americans, stood in long queues at the registration offices. As the bulletin revealed shortly afterwards, not a single one was taken because the night before all Rizzo's employees' positions had been given to political friends. Phillips firmly believed that the mayor himself had ordered this nepotism , not least because Rizzo was seeking a second term in City Hall at the time. But before he could become dangerous to Rizzo, his Senate ally from Pennsylvania , State Senator Henry Cianfrani, saw to it that Phillips' funds were cut significantly.

Mayoral elections of 1975

In the Democratic Primary for the mayoral election, Louis G. Hill, Dilworth's stepson, was a surprise candidate for Rizzo's strongest rival after Green and John B. Kelly Jr. , Grace Kelly's older brother , shied away from the race and the deputy Mayor Bowser had opted for a non-party candidacy. Some of Rizzo's close associates considered joining the Republicans, but Weinberg and Cianfrani were against it; the Grand Old Party was still suffering from the Watergate affair and was controlled in Philadelphia by Irish-Americans whom it did not trust. Hill's first wife came from the Wall Stree Journal's owning family , which Rizzo used in the election campaign to ridicule his opponent as a “Six Million Dollar Man” and a lobbyist for Wall Street. In fact, during the primary, the mayor received more donations from large Center City corporations than his challenger. According to mafia informant Nicholas Caramandi, Bruno supported the Rizzo street election campaign by paying Pearlman in cash. In April 1975, Phillips got uncomfortably close to Rizzo's investigation when he brought charges against City Manager Hillel Levinson. The Inquirer while it supported the editorials and Phillips Hill, but the editor for urban policy had an affair with State Senator Cianfrani and reported very favorably on the mayor. She was granted full access to Rizzo's campaign material. Weinberg and Cianfrani did not succeed in finding an African-American candidate for the Democratic Primary who was able to remove votes to the advantage of Rizzo Hill as black Williams in 1971 did from liberal Green. On the other hand, with a generous wage increase and improvements in working conditions, Rizzo was able to avert an impending strike by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which represented 16,000 urban workers in Philadelphia, most of them African-American. Weinberg skillfully positioned the mayor as a representative of white and African American workers against the supposed patrician Hill, who resided in the posh Chestnut Hill . At the primary on May 20, Rizzo won with 52% and, in addition to South Philadelphia and the harbor districts on the Delaware River, also won many districts in North Philadelphia, where predominantly black members of the working class lived. Four weeks later, the appropriate Pennsylvania Senate committee cut all funds from Phillips, ending its investigation. In late August, Rizzo moved into an eleven-room property in need of renovation in Chestnut Hill, with friends doing the complete renovation. Although there was renewed criticism in the press, which questioned how the mayor could afford this residence in a prime residential area, this time Rizzo ignored the reporting.

Despite the large concessions made to the AFSCME, Rizzo made no effort to give blacks more power and influence in the city administration. African-American entrepreneurs and professionals observed with annoyance that the city almost always signed lucrative contracts with white firms and business partners. The press accused Rizzo of racism in this regard, which struck him the hardest of all criticism expressed against him. Philadelphia Republican party leader William Meehan turned Thomas M. Foglietta against Rizzo after Specter turned him down, who wanted to focus on his candidacy for Senator for the 95th Congress the following year. The little-known Foglietta was an Italian-American and, like Rizzo, came from South Philadelphia. Since he was unmarried, rumors about his sexual orientation surrounded him from the start. Foglietta had studied law at the prestigious law school of Temple University and belonged to the liberal wing of the party under Jacob K. Javits . Rizzo successfully highlighted these aspects of his opponent in the election campaign to his disadvantage and thus won the votes of the conservative Italian, Irish and Polish Americans in the south and northeast of the city, who wanted a law and order policy. Bowser campaigned for a third party he founded called "The Philadelphia Party". This led to the further division of the anti-Rizzo forces and robbed them of all chances of victory.

The city budget emerged as a central election campaign topic. Under Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford , there was a recession that worsened the economic situation in the big cities. The situation in Philadelphia was less precarious than in other American metropolises, but here, too, more and more companies and with them jobs were leaving downtown and settling in the suburbs, where production costs were lower. Nevertheless, Rizzo promised neither to raise taxes nor to order layoffs in the public sector. When a refinery burned in Southwest Philadelphia on October 22nd, Rizzo left a campaign appearance early to go to the scene. There a pipeline exploded near him, breaking his hip. After that, he had to stop his already irregular campaign appearances, but the event strengthened his reputation as a "strong man". On November 4, 1975, Rizzo won an overwhelming election victory with over 170,000 votes ahead of Bowser.

Second term

Shortly after Rizzo's inauguration, he had City Treasurer Lennox Moak announce a revised budget forecast on January 20, 1976 that increased the expected deficit from $ 65 million to over $ 80 million. He announced that this could only be offset by emergency legislation for more tax revenue, which immediately caused outrage among many white workers, Rizzo's regular voters, and undermined the political base of his popularity. A few days later, the Philadelphia Party, the liberal political organization Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and urban activists held a meeting and discussed whether a majority could be achieved in a referendum to replace Rizzo as mayor under the Philadelphia Home Rule be. The last such vote of a mayor in a major city was that of Frank L. Shaw in 1938 in Los Angeles . The driving force behind the initiative to vote out Rizzo was Henry Nicholas, a close ally of Bowser and leader of the city's hospital workers union, the majority of which were African American. Normally the popular Rizzo's motion to be voted out would have had no prospect of success, but the announced tax increases meant that Bowser, Nicholas and the ADA leadership saw a realistic chance of victory for their initiative.

Rizzo needed the approval of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives for the emergency tax increases . This project failed because of the resistance of the MPs from the urban fringes, who had many citizens among their voters who had emigrated from metropolises like Philadelphia in the past few decades. Rizzo therefore ordered the closure of the Philadelphia General Hospital , the only public hospital in the city, on February 15 . He hit especially the poorer, largely Afro-American sections of the population who were dependent on this clinic. Not making any other cuts and allowing the expensive system of patronage that certain companies favored, he was again faced with the allegations of racism. Due to his large electoral lead in November 1975, he saw himself as mayor as incontestable. At the beginning of March, Rizzo received a satire by the Inquirer four days before its planned publication date from friendly employees. This fictional report contained a self-talk by the mayor about the budget deficit and satirized his speaking style. Rizzo saw the text as an attack on his ethnic origin and filed a $ 6 million libel suit against the newspaper on March 13, but failed to prevent the column from appearing the closest. For him, the process was also a means of stylizing himself as a victim and reversing criticism of the planned tax increases. On March 19, several hundred construction workers demonstrated in front of the Inquirer's headquarters against its supposedly business-friendly and anti-worker reporting and prevented the Daily News from being delivered until the next morning when a United States District Court banned the blockade. Rizzo had previously secretly given the union leader Thomas Magrann the green light for the action on the condition that the banners take up the issue of workers against management and that there would be no violence. Nationwide, the action was condemned as an attack on freedom of the press, while Rizzo justified his passivity by saying that he did not want to help the Inquirer "throw the labor movement back into the 1920s".

At the end of March 1976, Rizzo announced an almost 50 percent increase in water and sewage charges, which was the largest tax increase in the city's history. At the same time, the ADA and the “Philadelphia Party” pushed ahead with their efforts to vote Rizzo out and announced this to the public on March 31st. When the mayor announced higher property and wage taxes of US $ 250 million the next day , an unprecedented increase in what was then Philadelphia, they decided on the same day to begin collecting signatures to vote them out. At the Democratic Primaries in Pennsylvania at the end of April 1976, which Jimmy Carter , who clearly positioned himself against Rizzo, won by a large margin, 30,000 votes for the popular initiative to deselect the mayor were added on election day in Philadelphia alone. At this point in time, more than half of the required quorum of 145,000 signatures for the implementation of a referendum on November 2nd, presidential election day , had already been achieved. Rizzo, who was increasingly under pressure, ousted his opponent Camiel together with Cianfrani at the end of May, making him the leader of the Democratic Party in Philadelphia. At the end of June 15, the voting initiative submitted over 200,000 signatures. Immediately after the 200th Independence Day, the responsible Court of Common Pleas granted a municipal commission an extension to check the validity of the votes. Two of the three members of this body were on Rizzo's side. On August 24, the city solicitor announced that only 90,000 of the signatures were valid, which means that the quorum for a referendum was not met. On September 30, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld this decision and dismissed the electoral rule in the Philadelphia Home Rule as unconstitutional.

In late April 1977, the Inquirer published a series of articles exposing city police officers using violence and torture techniques to extract confessions from suspects. The research upset Philadelphia and polarized citizens. The mayor declined an interview request from the Inquirer in this context. The African American community in particular felt reassured in its distrust of the police and Rizzo, who suffered another setback the following month when his candidates were defeated by the urban primaries. In order to polish up his image again, the decision matured in him to run for a third term, contrary to the Home Rule. While Pearlman encouraged him in this decision, Weinberg advised against this plan as political suicide. After Cianfrani had been sentenced to a prison term for racketeering in the late summer of 1977 and Gaudiosi resigned as city representative, thereby losing important allies and advisers, Rizzo had doubts about a third candidacy. His situation was also made more difficult by the increasing confrontation with the Afro-American Move organization in West Philadelphia and the decision of the Supreme Court , which in late February 1978 rejected the opposition of the predominantly white population in Whitman Park, South Philadelphia to a social housing project , which primarily African Americans benefited. When he took office as mayor, Rizzo had stopped this construction project and was therefore accused of racism by its supporters. At a town hall meeting in Whitman Park, which welcomed him enthusiastically and called for his new candidacy, he announced in mid-March that he did not want to change the Home Rule to allow for a third term. There he encouraged the crowd to feel like they were being treated like "second class citizens", while certain minorities, on the contrary, were being favored. According to the biographer SA Paolantonio was in this mood that defined the "Rizzocrats" in Philadelphia, the seeds of a new political movement in America created from which a short time later by white landowners initiated California Proposition 13 and the "Reagan Democrats" emerged .

After an understanding had been reached in the spring of 1978 with the Move organization, whose house had been barricaded by a judge's order since March, the situation escalated in August. The group, led by Vincent Leaphart , lived in a semi-detached house where they hoarded guns and had disturbed the neighborhood from the start with their violent behavior and the quick neglect into which they dropped the property. On August 8, a few days after the negotiated grace period had expired, more than 600 police officers surrounded the property. Rizzo was there but left Police Chief O'Neill in charge of the operation. An exchange of fire began in which a police officer was fatally wounded. In the television broadcast of this event, however, the violence against Leaphart caused a sensation, who had approached the police with his hands raised and was beaten by them. This scene was shown over and over again by the stations for several days and mobilized the Afro-American community in Philadelphia against the police, for whose brutality Rizzo was once again blamed.

African-American citizens complained of discrimination in the city’s public service and police repression against them , such as the brutal police raid on a Move organization's home televised in 1978 while the Cosa Nostra in South Philadelphia went unmolested. As a result, in 1979 the United States Department of Justice brought charges against the Philadelphia Police Department, which a federal court dismissed on legal grounds.

Retired and other mayoral candidates

Rizzo was unable to run for a third consecutive term in 1979 because municipal legislation stipulated a term limit. When he reapplied for mayor's office in 1983, he was defeated by the Democrat Wilson Goode . After converting to the Republicans in December 1986 and becoming their candidate for mayor, he narrowly lost the 1987 election, again to Goode. A year later he briefly hosted a talk show on the local radio station WCAU-FM, and at that time he had the highest audience share in Philadelphia.

In 1991 he reapplied for mayor's office. In the Republican primary on May 21, 1991, he was able to prevail over Ron Castille and Sam Katz by a narrow margin of just over 1,000 votes. On July 16, 1991, a few months before the November main election, Rizzo was found unconscious in the toilet at his election headquarters around noon. He died of cardiac arrest at nearby Thomas Jefferson Hospital about an hour later . At the request of the widow, his body was at the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway laid . Already three hours before the start of the public access, almost 14,000 people stood in line to see Rizzo one last time. Rizzo was buried in Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in Cheltenham, Montgomery County .

reception

Statue of Frank Rizzo in front of the Philadelphia City Council building

As early as 1977, the Cop who would be King: The Honorable Frank Rizzo by Joseph R. Daughen and Peter Binzen was Rizzo's first biography . In this critical work, the authors stated that his administration, which was characterized by violence and mismanagement, had been catastrophic and that he had failed to emulate his role model Richard J. Daley . They saw rizzoism as a local virus that would not spread any further. Frank Donner , the former director of the American Civil Liberties Union , sees the way in which Rizzo exploited the police as a means to enforce his moral and racist beliefs and to fight political opponents as an urban police state . According to Donner, the Philadelphia under Rizzo's aegis is an outstanding example of the spread of police-state methods in governance. That's why he speaks of Philadelphia as a police city at that time .

According to Paolantonio, Rizzo did not primarily pursue a program in his political action, but geared it solely to personal relationships. He was the first politician in the city, traditionally shaped by Quakerism , whose power lay solely in his charismatic appeal and who sought the limelight. With his personalized political style, he accelerated the rift between the “Races” in Philadelphia. The “Rizzocrats” are to be seen in the context of the late 1960s, when a growing middle class, including many second-generation Catholic immigrants, was centered on the right-of-center. Together with supporters of other important Democratic mayors such as Joseph Alioto , Sam Yorty and Kevin White , they later formed the electoral group of the “Reagan Democrats”, the urban, traditionally democratic working class who voted for the Republican on a large scale from the 1980 presidential election .

According to his biographer Timothy J. Lombardo, Rizzo's law and order policy was a program with which both police officers and the working class could identify with the backdrop of the urban crisis of the 1960s and 1970s in major American cities. Out of this blue collar conservatism developed the phenomenon of mass incarceration that has characterized the prison system in the United States to this day.

Frank Rizzo's statue had been controversial for years. The Staute has been under public fire since the events in Charlottesville. It was vandalized during demonstrations as a symbol of racism and police violence and dismantled by workers from June 2nd to 3rd, 2020 following protests by Black Lives Matter following the death of George Floyd . A mural by Rizzo on the Italian market is one of the most vandalized works of art ever.

literature

• Timothy J. Lombardo: Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia and Populist Politics. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 2018, ISBN 978-0-8122-5054-1 .
• SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Camino Books, Philadelphia 1993, ISBN 0-940159-18-X .
• Joseph R. Daughen, Peter Binzen: The cop who would be king: Mayor Frank Rizzo. Little, Brown and Company, Boston 1977, ISBN 0-316-09521-4 .

Web links

Commons : Frank Rizzo  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Frank Rizzo. In: web presence law.psu.edu. Pennsylvania State University , accessed August 10, 2013 . 
• Frank Rizzo in the database of Find a Grave (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 19-25.
2. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 26-29, 31-34.
3. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 38, 45.
4. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 37-40.
5. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 43-45.
6. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 40, 45-48.
7. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 48-52.
8. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 55-59.
9. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 59-65.
10. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 66-68.
11. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 53-55, 68-71.
12. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 72-76.
13. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 76-79, 84f.
14. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 85-87.
15. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 88-91.
16. ↑ Frank Donner: Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America. University of California Press, Berkeley 1992, ISBN 0-520-08035-1 , p. 199.
17. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 91-95.
18. ↑ Frank Donner: Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America. University of California Press, Berkeley 1992, ISBN 0-520-08035-1 , pp. 200f.
    SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 94-96.
19. ↑ Frank Donner: Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America. University of California Press, Berkeley 1992, ISBN 0-520-08035-1 , pp. 206-208.
20. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. P. 98f.
21. ↑ Frank Donner: Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America. University of California Press, Berkeley 1992, ISBN 0-520-08035-1 , pp. 199f.
22. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. P. 98.
23. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. P. 97f.
24. ↑ Frank Donner: Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America. University of California Press, Berkeley 1992, ISBN 0-520-08035-1 , pp. 198f.
25. ↑ Frank Donner: Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America. University of California Press, Berkeley 1992, ISBN 0-520-08035-1 , pp. 214-216.
    SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 99-102.
26. ↑ Frank Donner: Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America. University of California Press, Berkeley 1992, ISBN 0-520-08035-1 , p. 217.
27. ↑ Frank Donner: Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America. University of California Press, Berkeley 1992, ISBN 0-520-08035-1 , p. 200.
28. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 102-104.
29. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 109-114.
30. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 114-116.
31. ^ Philip S. Klein, Ari Arthur Hoogenboom: History of Pennsylvania. 2nd Edition. Penn State Press, University Park 2010, ISBN 978-0-271-03839-1 , p. 530.
    SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 116-122.
32. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 129-136.
33. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 137-141, 165f.
34. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 145-156.
35. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. P. 174.
36. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 158-163.
37. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 164-169, 174f.
    Philip S. Klein, Ari Arthur Hoogenboom: History of Pennsylvania. 2nd Edition. Penn State Press, University Park 2010, ISBN 978-0-271-03839-1 , p. 530.
38. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 170-172.
39. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 175-180.
40. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 180-187.
41. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 187-190.
42. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 190-192.
43. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 192-196.
44. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 196-202.
45. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 202-211.
46. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 216-223.
47. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 220, 223-227.
48. ↑ Willard C. Richan: Beyond Altruism: Social Welfare Policy in American Society. Hayworth Press, New York 1988, ISBN 0-86656-633-3 , p. 96.
49. ^ J. Patrick O'Connor: The Framing of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Chicago Review Press, Chicago 2008, ISBN 1-56976-394-1 , pp. 25 f .; Dennis Hevesi: Frank Rizzo of Philadelphia Dies at 70. In: The New York Times , July 17, 1991.
50. ^ Dennis Hevesi: Frank Rizzo of Philadelphia Dies at 70. In: The New York Times , July 17, 1991.
51. ↑ Phyllis C. Kaniss: The Media and the Mayor's Race: The Failure of Urban Political Reporting. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1995, ISBN 0-253-20932-3 , pp. 255f.
52. ↑ Phyllis C. Kaniss: The Media and the Mayor's Race: The Failure of Urban Political Reporting. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1995, ISBN 0-253-20932-3 , p. 265.
53. ↑ Phyllis C. Kaniss: The Media and the Mayor's Race: The Failure of Urban Political Reporting . Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1995, ISBN 0-253-20932-3 , p. 276.
54. ↑ Christopher Lehmann-Haupt: The Philadelphia Story. In: The New York Times. October 31, 1977, p. 29.
55. ↑ Frank Donner: Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America. University of California Press, Berkeley 1992, ISBN 0-520-08035-1 , p. 197.
56. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. P. 138.
57. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. Pp. 213-215.
58. ^ SA Paolantonio: Frank Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America. P. 155.
59. ↑ Timothy J. Lombardo: Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo's Philadelphia and Populist Politics. P. 13.
60. ↑ Khrysgiana Pineda: Controversial statue of former Philadelphia mayor Frank Rizzo removed after George Floyd protests. Retrieved June 3, 2020 (American English).