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The mayor with a golden touch
By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD, Times Staff Writer
TAMPA -- The most popular mayor in Tampa's history is packing up. A woman who works at City Hall stops him outside his office. "I don't know if I can handle you leaving," she says. "Everybody's got to go, sugar," says Greco. He can't place her name, but he doesn't let on. He stops to embrace her. He imparts a kiss. She leaves beaming, and the 69-year-old mayor feels terrific that he's made her feel terrific. Pick any day in Greco's four terms as mayor, and you'd find a hundred such moments. What distinguished Greco, who leaves office Tuesday, was his extraordinary brand of tactile, one-on-one politics. It's a politics of flattery and close-quarters persuasion, of companionable arm-squeezes and instant intimacy with strangers. Greco's official legacy includes massive redevelopment of Ybor City and Channelside, more police officers, the Marriott Waterside Hotel, and a plan for a riverfront arts district. But it would be just as accurate to say his legacy was one of style. Greco turned personal warmth into a peerless political weapon. He learned the style young, in his family's Ybor City hardware store. Politicos came to press the flesh with his father and, Greco said, "everything was very personal." From the time Greco first won office as mayor in 1967, when he was 34, to his return in 1995, he deployed a velvety Old Tampa touch that charmed voters and neutralized opponents. "With Dick Greco, it's like visiting somebody's Italian family," said Patrick Manteiga, publisher of the weekly newspaper La Gaceta. "He is an old-style politician who pulls it off so well in a modern day. He hugs you, he kisses you. It doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman. He's very comfortable about it. It's natural with him. Some people do it, and you can see it isn't natural to them." Greco would have loved to be Florida's governor, but said he couldn't afford to run. But it's doubtful his particular skills would have played well on a statewide stage, and before a large Legislature. A medium-sized town like Tampa, with a small city council, seemed to suit his temperamental taste for both chummy politics and control. And his accessibility to voters was a point of pride. April Griffin, a 34-year-old Tampa woman, remembered complaining to Greco of a dangerously dilapidated house in her Seminole Heights neighborhood. Within weeks, the city had torn it down. She also recalled how Greco behaved when he first met her, at a political function. "He caressed my face and told me what nice skin I had, and asked me if I ever got out in the sun," said Griffin, who was flattered. "He has a charisma that doesn't make you feel he's a lech. There's not many people who could get away with that." Thousands of people could report similar encounters. "It's not so much flirtatious as it is a way of life, especially with Italian people. That's just the way I've always been," Greco said in a recent interview. Growing up in Tampa, he said, "We all hugged, kissed, loved each other." These days, he said, the world feels a little colder. When he pats a kid's head in the grocery store, he might get a cold stare from the mother. "You're more conscious today of what you say to and around people," Greco said. "If someone's hair looks good, or they've got a pretty dress on, I'll say it. A lot of people wouldn't dare say that today." Greco dislikes being alone; he needs personal contact. He said he has never sent an e-mail and doesn't know how to turn on a computer. When he married for the third time in 1996, he realized he didn't know how to operate a dishwasher. "I'm not comfortable with machines and things," he said. "I almost resist it, because it's so cold." Greco returned to the mayor's office in 1995 with a reputation as a reformed playboy, but some doubted whether he ever reformed all that much. His own stories reinforced this image. He frequently tells one about a tour of the darkened wine cellar of Bern's steakhouse in the company of his wife, along with the mayor of Oviedo, Spain, and the Spanish mayor's wife. During the tour, as Greco tells the story, his hand slipped to what he thought were his wife's buttocks. They turned out to belong to the other mayor's wife. "She was smiling," Greco said. Asked what he will miss about being mayor, Greco replied, "Probably everything." He drives the streets, counting the number of people riding the trolley day and night, reporting streetlights that are out, visiting crime scenes. "All of those things won't be any of my business anymore, and I think I'll probably find that unusual," he said. "The city is my life. I see things people don't." He'll also miss giving tours of Tampa landmarks in his city-issued Lincoln. He gave one of the last to a reporter, with characteristic effusiveness. At the Marriott Waterside Hotel, he said, "They're doing better than any hotel that size in the nation." At Channelside: "Look at all the people waiting for the trolley." At Cotanchobee Fort Brooke Park: "That's Indian. That means, 'Where the water meets the land.' Right there's going to be a big sculpture that an Indian's doing." At Centro Ybor: "All this stuff is there because we went out and got it." At Belmont Heights Estates, formerly the site of a public housing development: "What a difference. They got trees, they got grass. Now you've got a real neighborhood. You had 8-foot fences. Kids looked like they were in jail." Striding back into his office, he passed a policeman standing guard at City Hall. "This is Supercop," Greco said. The officer brightened. Never a detail man, Greco let the city's department heads run the day-to-day operations, and he loathed the thought of firing people. His critics called that cronyism; his supporters called it loyalty. In 2001, as his administration teetered on the brink of a scandal, Greco stood by his housing chief, Steve LaBrake. Week after week, damning new claims emerged about LaBrake's misuse of his office for personal gain. Greco steadfastly refused to fire him. "He came in here and told me his whole story," Greco said. "I saw him cry on two occasions. He told me personal things that made me feel for him as a person." He fends off criticism of his surreptitious trip to Cuba last July, telling how at lunch with Fidel Castro, he asked if Monsignor Laurence Higgins, a Tampa clergyman along for the trip, could say a prayer. The Cuban dictator agreed. "How can you believe in God, and believe that people can't change?" Greco said. Greco plans to continue working, probably in development, and possibly for Eddie DeBartolo Jr. When Greco resigned as mayor midterm in 1974, pleading financial trouble, he went to work for the DeBartolo Corp., the nation's leading builder of shopping malls. Greco's close friendship with the DeBartolos has long been a source of uncomfortable rumor. In 1997, Eddie DeBartolo Jr. slipped former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards a cash-filled suitcase in the hopes of winning a Louisiana casino gambling license. He later pleaded guilty to failing to report the payoff. But Greco's association with DeBartolo gave Tampa's voters no pause. "Greco could raise 5 cents and still be a credible candidate, because he gives you that euphoric feeling," said council member Charlie Miranda. Greco's best trick, say those who have watched him, was that he never made "No" sound like "No." "He may not say yes, but when you leave the office, you say, 'Gee, what a nice guy,' " Miranda said. Added Manteiga, the La Gaceta publisher: "He talks to you and tells you how good you look, and how's your family, and when you get out on the street you realize you didn't get anything accomplished. That's called being Greco'd." With Greco's departure, said Manteiga, a stripe of old-school politics is vanishing too. "You're losing a generation of politicians. They're slowly fading away, and Greco's the last in the area." -- Christopher Goffard can be reached at 813-226-3337 or goffard@sptimes.com
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