You couldn’t call him a mystery man, because enough is known about him, most of it suggesting that he can be a decent fellow. Nor is he a ghost, for he makes public appearances on regular occasions, routinely in the sort of daylight you find on brilliant Sunday afternoons at Qualcomm Stadium .

Some weekdays, he’s actually in his second-floor office at Chargers Park, a well-tanned, quiet-spoken boss who pays his employees by the millions of dollars. Pictures of him — and his dad —are all over the walls at team HQ.

Dean Spanos does, however, tend to vanish into thin air. At the darndest times. Just seems to go into hiding, sometimes in plain sight.

It’s almost inconceivable, the way the Chargers’ owner has worn a virtual cloak of invisibility throughout much of the team’s exhaustive attempt to get a new stadium, a monumental, tooth-pulling ordeal now well into its second decade.

At the same time, as much as the family name is identified with the Chargers, Spanos has maintained a submarine-low profile while his National Football League club suffers disaster after disaster most every weekend this season. Which has only served to further alienate San Diego from Spanos. And vice versa.

Indeed, by now, it’s become a big puzzle: Where’s Deano?

Typically, the Chargers are keeping Spanos(es) at bay. Presented earlier this season with a Union-Tribune request for a biographical interview with Dean Spanos, public-relations director Bill Johnston said the CEO was “not interested” in taking part in the story. And if Dean Spanos wasn’t making himself available, Johnston said, nobody else in the Spanos family or Chargers front office would be talking.

The problem there being, Dean Spanos has spawned the Chargers’ management team with other Spanoses. His son John is director of football operations – at 36 years old, the man in charge of the on-field product – and older son AG is director of business operations. Other relatives dot the organization.

Put it this way, too. When it comes to community endearment involvement, the Spanoses haven’t exactly been to San Diego what the beloved Rooney family has been in Pittsburgh, though five Vince Lombardi Trophies makes for a lot of local love.

Dean’s been particularly averse to the public eye and, even more so, discourse.

“I think it’s a big mistake,” said longtime civic leader George Mitrovich. “Dean Spanos needs to be the face of the Chargers in this city. Not Mark Fabiani. Not his attorney. For me, that is so clear. It’s confounding to me that it hasn’t been done.”

Mitrovich spoke as someone who immersed himself in the Padres’ successful effort to construct Petco Park in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. That voters approved the measure for a downtown facility as the baseball replacement for Qualcomm Stadium was definitely spurred by timing – the Padres’ appearance in only their second World Series was still fresh in San Diego’s hearts and minds – but it was also attributable to the out-in-front campaign leadership of Padres exec Larry Lucchino and owner John Moores.

Before he ever got to San Diego, Lucchino was credited for his highest-profile role in the birth of Camden Yards for the Baltimore Orioles. Since leaving the Padres, he’s since been credited with the renovations of both Fenway Park and the Boston Red Sox .

Like Fabiani, Lucchino was an attorney, but he was part of team ownership and much more than a spokesman, troubleshooter or negotiator. As an owner, Moores was both folksy and nerdish, not terribly comfortable with the spotlight on him, but he made public appearances all over town to make the ballpark pitch.

“If you’re going to get a stadium, you need to involve your fan base, season-ticket holders, everybody,” said Mitrovich. “You need to take your message to the people of the city. The Chargers haven’t done that.”

After roughly a dozen years of grappling over the questions of who’d pay for the new stadium and where, the Chargers have presented the sense that they’re ready to move to Los Angeles, but still hopeful they don’t have to. The issue could be resolved by a vote of NFL owners on relocations in January or sometime thereafter.

As the Chargers owner, Spanos is the natural choice as villain by those who perceive that the team really wants out of town. Already villified by San Diegans convinced that Spanos is determined to relocate the team, he’s basically set up to be cast in the same scorned, cursing breath as Georgia Frontiere in L.A., Robert Irsay in Baltimore and Art Modell in Cleveland.

The legacy of all all three of the aforementioned NFL owners was the hatred they engendered by moving teams away to St. Louis, Indianapolis and Baltimore, respectively. Never mind that each of the three transplanted franchises wound up in a Super Bowl.

Conversely, the NFL is full of owners with either the ego or the everyman sense of community obligation to stand front and center. Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys and Robert Kraft of the New England Patriots come to mind as extreme cases of the former, the Rooneys an example of the latter, much-adored by Steelers fans.

If the Chargers are still looking to make something happen in San Diego, then, might not it help for Spanos to openly lead the stadium charge as well as the Chargers?

“Wow, that’s a great question,” said Jeff Marston, a public-relations and political expert who once worked for the Chargers. “On the one hand, I can’t really think it would be harmful in any way, shape or form. On the other hand, is it too late for that?”

Above all, it’s clearly not in Spanos’ nature to step to the fore. In the hope of drumming up more local interest in the Chargers’ cause for a new stadium, Spanos and Marston were brought together several years ago. Citing the heightened profiles that Lucchino and Moores adopted in pushing Prop C, how they effectively took total command of the Padres’ public-relations machine, Marston eventually urged Spanos to take a similar tack for the Chargers.

“I told them, the Chargers do so much good around the community, good deeds worth millions of dollars, but don’t let anybody know about the good that they do,” said Marston. “His response was something along the lines of, ‘Well, I appreciate that. But that’s just not what our family is all about. It’s not what we do. We do not seek attention.’

“I leaned forward and said something like, ‘Well, Dean, you’re just going to have to get over that.’ I looked at the foreheads of the other two people at that meeting and they read like the new ticker in Times Square: ‘Gee, Jeff, it’s been nice working with you.’’

Soon enough, Marston said, their expressions were confirmed.

“Dean sat there and smiled, almost laughed, then he fired me,” said Marston. “But he fired me in a way that I greatly respect. He didn’t get mad at me. He didn’t let any emotion enter into it. He just fired me. And that was that.”

Spanos tried to take himself out of the team picture, metaphorically speaking, when turning over the football and business ops departments to his sons. At the time, Dean Spanos’ impetus for stepping down was partially the desire to concentrate more fully on the stadium effort, though he sure doesn’t seem to have come out from behind the scenes in the months since.

Likewise, Dean Spanos had been handed down the team from his own father, a hyper-assertive, and domineering man who’d made his own fortune. Before he began suffering the ravages of dementia , Alex Spanos lived for moments in the spotlight, whether tap-dancing with Bob Hope in front of an audience or making outrageous statements that caused fusses.

Memorably, in a sort of “Shot Heard ‘Round the County,” the elder Spanos caused quite a furor when making a random declaration that the Chargers needed a new stadium. Never mind that this was in 2000, a mere three years after Qualcomm had been renovated to the team’s specifications, plus the fact that the NFL deemed the “Q” good enough to host a Super Bowl in 2003.

Dean Spanos has somebody to do his talking for him. The flamboyant Fabiani is in his 14th year as Chargers “special counsel,” but the unofficial title he joined the team with was “Master of Disaster,” a moniker he earned while helping clients as President Bill Clinton and Lance Armstrong through their disparate difficulties.

Fabiani, who also had been a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles and spokesman for the White House, certainly has far more experience in the political realm than Spanos. He’s rubbed more than a few local government bigwigs the wrong way, including several who adamantly passed when asked to comment for this story, one of them a former mayor.

Critics will take issue with Spanos’ skills, giving him low marks as a leader and team executive. More seem to have been completely alienated by Fabiani.

For this story, the Union-Tribune e-mailed two questions to Fabiani. One asked why Dean Spanos has maintained such a low profile, given the fact that he’s the owner of the team and considered the face of the franchise. The other: might it not help the team’s chances or hopes of a new stadium if the community had a better familiarity and sense of Spanos?

Fabiani, the Spanos spokesman, has not responded.