Peter Angelos and the open checkbook few knew about

I had but one face-to-face conversation with Peter Angelos, the longtime owner of the Baltimore Orioles who died March 23rd at age 94. It came about because of a photo of a woman hanging by her neck from a tree.

It was the late summer/early fall 1995 and in between filing stories for the Sunpapers on oddballs, bad guys and bluesmen, I sponsored Bosnian refugees in my Greektown neighborhood. A few of them lived with me on Macon Street and I found cheap shelter nearby for a family of five and a few others.

The idea came to me through a trinity of sorts: genocide in Bosnia, the death of a good friend’s father and a marked decline in my neighborhood’s quality of life, this before the gentrification of Canton began edging into Highlandtown and Greektown.

My compañero’s father was buried with expensive jewelry, the closing of the coffin overseen by trusted friends to make sure the treasure went with him. It was the first time I became aware of the practice. It made me wonder what good could have been done if the gold and gems had been converted to cash and given away.

I asked myself what did I have that could be put to good use?

I had a wide network of friends and a few extra rooms, space enough for people who’d appreciate shelter in a worse-for-wear neighborhood that had launched my family in the New World in the 1920s.

And an image that persisted: 31-year-old Ferida Osmanovic, mother of two, hanging from a tree after her husband was slaughtered by Serb troops along with some 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica. The area, nominally secured by the United Nations, was said to be safe for refugees fleeing the war.

A few calls put me in touch with a liaison for the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. Less than a month later a young man named Eldin Cengic who’d seen his father murdered by Serbs, walked in my front door. The first thing he asked was whether I had any Nutella, which he’d been craving since the war started. He settled for peanut butter until we could get to the store.

After Eldin came another young man who’d seen combat against the Serbs, and then a family of five, the Sadjaks. Though a three-bedroom rowhouse was secured for them on Ponca Street, they slept together in one room.

I got help with clothing from Jewish synagogues in Northwest Baltimore (I was covering the city’s Orthodox community at the time) and regulars at a bar around the corner pitched in for groceries. The good-timers later insisted on buying the Sadjaks a Christmas tree. Decidedly unobservant Muslims, the family was thrilled and put the tree near the front window.

I was running out of room. Drugs were being sold on the corner, where a few of the pissant dealers were relatives. When a few houses on my block – where my grandparents would sit outside after dinner on summer evenings and talk with their neighbors – went vacant, I feared that plywood would soon cover the windows and front doors. Another once “well kept” block in the Land of Pleasant Living was fading.

The friends who found desks and bicycles for the Sadjak kids couldn’t help with this part of the puzzle. So I called Peter Angelos, the big idea man who once tended bar at his father’s tavern at the corner of Eastern Avenue and Oldham Street.

Litigating asbestos and tobacco cases for families of the dead and dying – most of them from neighborhoods like mine – had brought Angelos tremendous wealth, enough to become principal owner of the Birds in 1993 for $193 million.

Before I tell you how he responded, let me share what I’ve learned about him since his death.

“I’d see him criticized for the [failures of the] team and thought, ‘If they only knew how generous he is behind the scenes,” said Perry Sfikas, one of three Greek-Americans elected to the Baltimore City Council: Angelos [1959-1963], Anthony Ambridge [1983-1999] and Sfikas from 1991 to 1993.

“It wasn’t just for the Greek community. I’d go to his office with a request from a constituent who couldn’t pay their medical bills and he’d call out to his secretary, ‘Mary Jo! Get me the checkbook!'”

This, said Sfikas and others – told by Angelos not to mention his good works – happened over and over again.

“Everybody went to him for help,” said Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott D. Shellenberger, who worked for Angelos at the beginning of his career. “I’d be walking by his office and I’d see his secretary shaking her head.

“I’d ask what was going on and she’d say some lady wrote him a letter saying she needed money and he’s writing her a check.”

More times than not, said Shellenberger, Angelos did not know the person in need.

I arrived at his office at 100 North Charles Street with a similar story. The cancer of blight was nibbling away at the neighborhood where my father had grown up delivering newspapers, perhaps to the Angelos family before their house was razed to make way for the Harbor Tunnel.

 I made my pitch, thinking he might help us acquire a house or two for families soon due to arrive.

“This is what we do,” he said, moving his index fingers around the desk as though marking boundaries. “We buy up five or six blocks, it’ll cost maybe a million dollars and you can move in a couple dozen families.”

It felt as though someone had dumped far too much mashed potatoes on my dinner plate.

My kids were still in grade school, I had a full-time job on the paper’s city desk and while it was exciting to be doing good works like my heroes Brendan Walsh and Willa Bickham at the Viva House Catholic Worker on Mount Street, I didn’t have the time or energy for such an undertaking.

And while my editors knew I was working with folks in need from the other side of the world, I surely didn’t tell them I was going to a guy we covered every day for help.

I stood up, extended my hand and thanked Angelos, telling him I’d think about it.

Before I was back on Charles Street I knew his proposal was preposterous; perhaps not for him, but certainly for me. I continued to help my new friends but dropped the idea of going into the non-profit housing game.

And the Bosnians? 

For more than a year we had good times, hosting each other at family dinners, going to ballgames and working through the manifold problems that confront newcomers to America, particularly when there are few others who speak their language.

If Angelos ever gave a second thought to housing immigrants in his old neighborhood, he never told me about it.  He concentrated on downtown, buying landmark restaurants like Maison Marconi, still shuttered after closing in 2004.

Downtown has not turned the corner – it’s actually a disgrace – but Greektown did without anyone’s philanthropy, beyond anything I could have imagined 30 years ago.

The momentum of Canton’s real estate boom just to the west was strong enough for developers to turn an old trucking company at the end of my street into $350,000 townhouses with garages. Combined with steady Hispanic immigration, the neighborhood has stabilized. I hear kids playing on the sidewalk again, chasing each other and laughing, speaking in a language my grandfather would understand.

One by one, all of my Balkan friends – including one woman who complained so much that Eldin told me she was a pain-in-the-ass before the war – moved away. Just like previous generations of East Baltimore immigrants seeking a better life beyond the city.

Rafael Alvarez has covered the City of Baltimore since 1977. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com