FRANK BELLOTTI, who died this week at 101, led a large, impactful life. Not because of its extraordinary length, but because of what he did, the people he influenced and nurtured, and the ways he served as a role model and mentor, and shaped much of Massachusetts public life during the last three decades of the last century, and into this one.
There is so much I can say about Frank Bellotti that it is difficult to summarize it all in this reflection on his life. Let me focus first on what he did as attorney general, and what he meant to a generation of Italo-Americans who for so long felt distanced and disassociated from public life. And then I’ll share how he saved my life.
Frank was first and foremost a political being. Politics for him was a calling, a driving force in his life. He ran in every statewide election but one from 1962 through 1990, always chasing but never achieving his ultimate goal of being elected governor. But in three terms as attorney general, he demonstrated a determination to professionalize that office and make it work for everyday people.
He lost several gubernatorial bids, notably the 1964 race that was one of the closest in state election history. Frank was nothing if not persistent. He was a strict self-disciplinarian, a man who would not accept defeat. “I have always assumed the other guys were smarter,” he once said, “so I’ve always tried to outwork them.”
Frank’s political tenacity showed in his uncompromising adherence to a physical fitness regimen that extended into his 100th year. He once told the former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle a story about being in the Navy, where he was initially terrible at diving and, as Frank recalled, there was a guy who “used to sit by the pool with his friends and drink martinis and they’d all watch me and laugh when I took the dives. And at first I used to land on my stomach and scrape my nose on the bottom of the pool and they’d laugh. But when I finished I knew how to do 14 different dives, all well. And they were still sitting there with their martinis, stiff.”
That can-do persistence served Frank well when he transformed the attorney general’s office from a poorly regarded state office into one of the leading public law offices in the country.
He moved the office completely out of the State House, a symbolic move to keep the law separate from politics. He built a law library from scratch. He ran seminars on trial preparation. He demanded excellence from his legal team, and he got it. He offered the top appointment of first assistant to a man — Robert Bonin — who did not vote for him. For Frank Bellotti, choosing Bonin was a way to make the point that he was going to “pick the best people I could find.”
Frank attracted an enormous number of young, talented lawyers, and together they helped him transform the office into something truly remarkable. I was first an intern in his office and later, fresh out of BC Law School, a young assistant attorney general in the Government Bureau.
There I saw and worked with and learned from the talented people he had attracted – Margot Botsford (later an SJC justice), Steve Rosenfeld (later chief legal counsel to Gov. Dukakis), Don Stern (who would become US attorney), Mitch Sikora (later justice of the Appeals Court), Scott Harshbarger (later attorney general). The list is too long to continue, but you get the point. Bob Travaglini worked for Frank, learned from Frank, and eventually took that mentoring and became Massachusetts Senate president. The range of Frank’s influence on the fabric of Massachusetts law and politics is incomparable.
For me in particular, an Italo-American kid who grew up in East Boston, having Frank Bellotti as a role model and mentor was important to my own self-esteem and sense of belonging. For years, Italo-Americans felt looked down upon and were treated like second-class political citizens, often caricatured or even vilified as petty criminals or worse by many who painted stereotypes with a broad and unfair brush.
Having someone like Frank Bellotti succeed, and prove himself as not just worthy of public office but worthy of respect for using his political power to help the average person, reform the AG’s office and invest it with pride, made young people like me feel like we, too, could make a positive difference in public life. It was a validation that we, too, could shape the future if we tried hard enough.
“Go forth and do good” was a motto many of us learned and lived by following our experience with Frank Bellotti.
Now, about Frank Bellotti saving my life.
It was a dozen or so years ago, and I was sitting in the Mass. General Hospital hand clinic waiting to get a cortisone shot for a persistent pain in the muscle near my thumb.
I heard someone call out my name, and it was Frank. He sat next to me, and we talked for a while. At one point, he turned and said to me, “Guess what? I have prostate cancer!” I asked what had happened. He explained that he had noticed something called velocity in his recent PSA test. Velocity, I learned, is when a man’s PSA reading jumps significantly from one test to the next. Frank said to me, “Jimmy, pay attention to your numbers, and if you ever see that happen, have it checked out.” Frank had it checked out and had it resolved.
I am something of a hypochondriac, so conversations like that one typically stay with me. Many years later, I noticed that my PSA test had jumped significantly from the prior test. This was the velocity Frank had mentioned to me.
I had it checked out, despite the protestations of my primary care doctor and the urologist that I had nothing to worry about since my PSA was “still in the normal range.” I pushed for a biopsy, and sure enough (and I can remember with clarity the mixture of concern and surprise in the urologist’s voice when he called me with the results) I had prostate cancer. Not the kind to watch. The kind to deal with via surgery or radiation.
I had the surgery, and (knock wood, thank heaven, etc.) I have been in the clear ever since, although once one gets that kind of diagnosis you never feel fully in the clear. Another friend and mentor who dealt with a similar issue once said to me, “It’s like you walk around every day with a parrot on your shoulder — it is hard to forget. But then you realize everyone has a parrot on their shoulder, they just don’t know it yet.”
But here’s the point: If it hadn’t been for my chance meeting with Frank, and his candor and willingness to share that information with me, I never in a million years would have paid close attention to my PSA results, and I certainly would never have heard about the velocity phenomenon. So I can say with some assurance that Frank Bellotti saved my life.
How do you say “thank you” to someone who opened the door to your professional career? How do you say “thank you” to someone who saved your life?
It isn’t easy to do. What I can do is share these recollections and offer some hope that the men and women we elect to serve us in this century will aspire to and achieve even a modest amount of what Frank Bellotti achieved during his career. The prescription is straightforward: attract the best people you can, center your work on helping people and improving their lives, and be a good mentor to younger generations.
Frank Bellotti was a man, take him for all in all – we shall not look upon his like again.
James Aloisi is a former Massachusetts secretary of transportation. He served as an assistant attorney general in Frank Bellotti’s office from 1978-1983.
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