2003 S.F. MAYORAL RACE / Angela Alioto campaigns with her heart on the line / Ex-supervisor known for her passion makes 3rd run for S.F. mayor

9/29/2003 | Color | 3star | 22p8 x full | a1 | A-Section | steve, 6026 | Alioto 9/29/2003 | Color | 3star | 22p8 x full | a1 | A-Section | steve, 6026 | Alioto Photo: CHRIS STEWART Photo: CHRIS STEWART Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close 2003 S.F. MAYORAL RACE / Angela Alioto campaigns with her heart on the line / Ex-supervisor known for her passion makes 3rd run for S.F. mayor 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

Fourth in an occasional series of candidate profiles

Angela Alioto was on Haight Street one recent weekend, working on a cleanup project with about 20 volunteers, all wearing "Angela for Mayor" T- shirts.

"Lots of people would come by, see me working and ask me, 'Where does she stand?' on one issue or another," Alioto said. "I'd say, 'The she is me and here's where I stand.' They couldn't believe it was me because I was out there cleaning the streets."

That type of hands-on concern has been an Alioto trademark during her years in San Francisco politics, and it's not going to change during her third run for the city's top job. To the 53-year-old former supervisor, who campaigned once as "the heart of San Francisco," no detail is too small if it helps the city where she was born -- and the plans she has to improve it.

"When something is very important to me and I do not see it being done, I will personally do it, and that's from cleaning toilets to begging people on the street to sign my petitions," Alioto said in an interview at her Howard Street campaign headquarters.

Alioto jumped into the mayoral campaign with a bang, telling 300 supporters at the Italian Athletic Club in North Beach in February that "I'm a passionate reformer and a passionate person and I'm not ashamed to say it."

While few question Alioto's passion, particularly for the poor and those who don't have a voice in the establishment, critics say that passion has often clouded her judgment -- whether it's comparing Pacific Bell Park to the Colosseum in Rome, lashing out at former colleagues who endorsed a rival, watching her personal finances slide toward bankruptcy or dating a con man.

But the emotional attachment to politics and the city she grew up in fuel Alioto's campaign. She has never been one to back away from a fight and, in the mayor's race, she's already picked a few new ones.

She's dismissed Mayor Willie Brown as a dealmaker who has filled City Hall with his cronies, promised to have Supervisor Gavin Newsom, the front-runner in the campaign, investigated under anti-corruption laws, and suggested that Supervisor Tom Ammiano's supporters should look for a candidate with a chance to win on Nov. 4.

Alioto has gathered support from such longtime friends as Larry Mazzola of the plumbers union and Sal Rosselli, president of the public employees union that represents 11,000 city health-care workers.

ROLE AS AN OUTSIDER

Alioto argues that she's running as an outsider, which is an eyebrow- raising claim for someone who shares one of San Francisco's best-known political names and who proclaimed in 1995 that "I can't imagine the mayor's race without me."

Her late father, Joe Alioto, served two terms as the city's mayor, ran for governor and was a nationally known attorney with close ties to the Democratic Party and the labor movement. Her relatives have their names on businesses, restaurants and law firms across the city.

But the six years she's spent out of office, running her own anti- discrimination law practice, is the equivalent of a political lifetime, Alioto said.

"As an outsider looking in, you see a fundamental lack of common sense" in city government, she said. Her recent lack of involvement in City Hall affairs will make it easier to dump many of the city's high-paying jobs, jobs she doesn't believe are necessary.

"I don't know these people, I have zero reason to tolerate this and I won't tolerate this," Alioto said.

She has promised to hold daily hearings during her first days as mayor, grilling department heads in public about their budgets and firing the ones who can't answer her questions.

'UNDAUNTED SPIRIT'

The thumbs-up or thumbs-down, Roman circus image those planned hearings evoke can be dismissed as typical Alioto hyperbole, but it's an important part of her political appeal.

"You know you're with a whirlwind when she walks into a room," said Carole Migden, a state Board of Equalization member who served with Alioto as a San Francisco supervisor. "I like her intensity and her undaunted spirit."

Her colleagues, including Migden, have often become targets of that intensity. Alioto's take-no-prisoners style, along with her outspoken manner, have made her plenty of enemies and even alienated some of the friends who could have helped her political career.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, for example, was a longtime friend who was Alioto's finance chairwoman in her first campaign for supervisor in 1986. But a few years later, Alioto was calling Pelosi -- now Democratic leader in the U.S. House of Representatives -- "a cog in the (political) machine" and suggesting the congresswoman's "political nature and her ambition" were the reasons she wouldn't support Alioto.

In her unsuccessful 1996 race for a state Senate seat, she was outraged when her opponent in the primary, Democratic Assemblyman John Burton, sent out a mailer that featured 26 female officeholders who were backing him, including Pelosi, Migden, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Sen. Barbara Boxer and every woman who served with Alioto on the Board of Supervisors.

Alioto went ballistic, charging in her 1997 book "Straight to the Heart" that Burton was a sexist and talking darkly about "women who were willing to do whatever it took to get ahead, even if it meant selling out other women."

The mailer went beyond saying that they were supporting Burton because he was better on the issues, Alioto said.

"The mailer, sent by women, denigrated me after some incredible legislation I believe saves lives, after eight years of giving up everything," she said. "I gave up a lot to do what I did. To have these women say by that mailer there was something wrong with Angela was upsetting."

That dispute is water under the bridge, said Migden.

"I expect combative relationships with my colleagues because the issues are important, they mean something," she said. "Of course, with Angela, it's kind of a blur in scattershot about who her enemies are."

POLITICAL TARGETS

Critics have claimed Alioto has a thin skin for a politician. From the time she was young, she and her family were very visible political targets.

"When I was a little girl, it was hard because my mother was always crying, " she said. "I grew up thinking that (the late Chronicle columnist) Herb Caen did nothing but hurt my mom . . . it used to be difficult to read about something that would hurt either my mom or my dad or, later, my kids."

The political guns were turned on Alioto when she entered politics. Her outspoken willingness to take up unpopular or unusual causes got her plenty of publicity, but also a reputation as a flaky loose cannon, capable of doing or saying just about anything.

Alioto put up a resolution asking local hospitals to stop using electric shock therapy on patients. She went to court to help a Buddhist family fight a city order for an autopsy on their drowned daughter. She battled against city plans to keep panhandlers away from bank ATMs, persuaded the city to include traditional Chinese medical practices in its employee health plan and supported San Francisco's symbolic offer of sanctuary for conscientious objectors to the 1991 Gulf War.

But while Alioto's early support for citywide smoking bans, needle exchanges and medicinal marijuana drew plenty of guffaws and complaints, she's had the last laugh as those positions have moved to the political mainstream and been picked up across the country.

"If that's flaky, that's too bad," she said. "I consider those to be core values, I consider them to be San Francisco values, and anyone who calls them flaky doesn't understand San Francisco."

Alioto has had her share of problems, not all of them political.

She had a romantic relationship with Peter Louis Rowland in 1991 and 1992, when she was elected president of the Board of Supervisors. Unfortunately, Rowland turned out to be a con man who bilked local people and businesses out of more than $250,000. He ultimately was sent to prison, leaving Alioto to explain her apparent lack of judgment.

'MORTGAGED MY SOUL'

Newspapers also reported Alioto's long-running financial problems, which left her with more than $700,000 in debts on a $91,000 income in 1991.

"I used to be a very wealthy lady before I got into politics," Alioto said in a 1991 interview.

Throughout her career, Alioto has used her own money to finance her political ambitions. In her losing 1986 run for supervisor, she loaned her campaign more than $250,000. She spent another $130,000 to win a supervisor's seat in 1988 and more than $250,000 in her 1991 campaign for mayor.

By then, Alioto was a widow with four children, aged 15 to 21. Homes she owned in Pacific Heights and Los Gatos were heavily mortgaged and her income was $26,000 from her job as a supervisor and varying amounts from part-time legal work.

She was in debt "to the hilt," she said in a 1991 Chronicle interview. "I have mortgaged my soul for this campaign."

Alioto lost that 1991 campaign and dropped out of the 1995 mayor's race when her campaign treasury hit zero. For all those years, she was one short step ahead of her creditors.

It all came to a head on a rainy day in 1997, when she was reopening her law practice in a small office above the Rubicon restaurant on Sacramento Street.

"My dad was dying, I was broke, I couldn't afford the colleges where my children were going to school," she said. "I had been a politician for eight years. I had to go on my own for the first time in my life. I was in a dire financial situation, dire.

"I'll never forget that day," Alioto said. "That day flashes through my brain every time a jury comes back with a multimillion-dollar verdict."

Alioto's legal work saved the financial day. In recent years, she's won a number of high-profile, high-value discrimination cases, including a $132 million verdict against Interstate Brands Corp. for racial discrimination against black employees in 2000 and an $11 million verdict against Mary Kay Cosmetics last year on behalf of a pregnant worker with breast cancer. Although the Interstate Brands judgment was later cut to $27 million, Alioto's fee from those two cases alone turned her financial situation around.

"I have almost paid my home off," she said. "I live in a $10 million home that has a $500,000 mortgage on it. I have paid almost everything off in case something happens to me."

Her case against Interstate Brands was named the No. 1 Verdict of 2000 by Verdicts and Settlements magazine and Alioto was named a Litigator of the Month in 2000 by the National Law Journal and a finalist for 2001 National Trial Lawyer of the Year by the National Trial Lawyers for Public Justice. Last year, she was honored as one of California's top 30 female litigators by Verdicts and Settlements magazine.

"I was nominated for national trial lawyer, not national woman or national Sicilian," Alioto said. "That means something."

With her legal business booming, Alioto's new run for mayor isn't likely to be a financial coup.

"When you win a couple of big cases, more big cases find their way to your door," said one San Francisco attorney, who asked not to be named. "That's where the real money is."

But Alioto's legal work, and the money it's brought in, has given her one more chance to grab the political brass ring and become mayor of San Francisco.

She's confident that her experiences as a woman who had four children before she was 24, as a grandmother of two, as head of a multimillion-dollar legal corporation and her years as a progressive leader in the city give her an important edge over the others in the race for mayor.

"None of them have the qualifications I have," she said. "San Francisco is literally branded on me, on my heart, you might say. When something is done wrong in San Francisco, that I believe hurts the city, I can spot it a mile away. My colleagues can't."

THE CANDIDATE: ANGELA ALIOTO

-- Born: Oct. 20, 1949

-- Education: B.A., English, French literature and Italian Renaissance, 1971, Lone Mountain College. J.D., 1983, University of San Francisco School of Law.

-- Politics: Democrat. Elected to Board of Supervisors 1988. Re-elected, 1992. Board president, 1993-95. Candidate for mayor, 1991 and 1995

-- Hero: Francis of Assisi and Dante

-- Family: Four children, Angela Mia, Adolfo, Joseph and Gian Paolo, and two grandchildren, Chiara Mia and Sebastiano.