43
Mandopoulos cared about officers first
Photo
Mandopoulos
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
You could call John Mandopoulos uncompromising, stubborn and tough.
For a little more than eight years, ending with his forced resignation in early 2009, you could also call him chief of police.
But perhaps the label that best fit Mandopoulos, who died on Sunday at age 63, a year after suffering a stroke, was police officer.
“He always said he was a policeman. He was a policeman first and foremost,” said Tim Bowers, Warren’s current chief.
Mandopoulos identified with officers more than administrators, and that created conflicts when he became chief, said Tom Stewart, a major with the Trumbull County Sheriff’s Office.
“I loved him dearly, but he created a lot of his own problems,” Stewart said. “He had his ways. He was stubborn.”
Bowers, who worked with “Mando” 31 years, agrees that he cared about officers first.
“His No. 1 priority was the men and women of the police department, and if any of them were abused, it was the same as abusing him,” Bowers said.
Stewart also knew Mando well, working seven years with him in the narcotics division of the Warren Police Department and keeping in touch with him after Stewart moved on to the sheriff’s office.
“I tried to talk him out of being police chief because I didn’t think he could handle the position,” Stewart said Monday.
“He tried to be right with everybody. He was pro-union all his life. When you get into a management position you have to do what the service director and mayor want you to do.”
There were warning signs at the time Mandopoulos became chief that his tenure might be rocky.
By the time he became chief at age 52 in December 2000, he already had undergone open-heart surgery and had confronted authority figures to the extent that he had been banned from city hall.
In 1997, Mandopoulos confronted Mayor Hank Angelo because of a proposal to eliminate the work of detectives on holidays.
“It was a very heated issue at the time and one that John was very upset about,” former chief Albert J. Timko Jr. said in a Vindicator article in 2000. “John’s speech bordered on being disrespectful, and I didn’t want him to get suspended, so I felt it was better that he stay away.”
Mando already was suffering from diabetes when he became chief, and the stress of being police chief made the diabetes worse, Stewart said. He believes Mando’s “terrible diet” was one reason for his health problems. A lifelong bachelor, Mando ate mostly fast food, Stewart said.
He also was a “creature of habit,” Stewart said, which made him sometimes difficult to work with in narcotics.
“He always wanted to be out in the dark hours. We’d fight all the time. He was set in his ways and wasn’t nobody going to change him,” Stewart said. He saw that same mentality when Mando sat in contract negotiations, Stewart added.
As a narcotics team, Mando, Stewart and others were successful, especially in the mid-1980s, when crack cocaine was starting to come into Warren.
One bust on Wick Street Southeast netted $250,000 worth of the drug and resulted in lengthy prison sentences, Stewart said.
But Mando’s predictable hours and enthusiasm for “grabbing people” sometimes backfired, Stewart said. Instead of working covertly to catch the suspects in a major drug enterprise, Mando frequently arrested suspects on smaller crimes, Stewart noted.
“He was a good police officer. He meant well, and he hated drug dealers,” Stewart said, adding that Mando was seen as “intimidating” by criminals.
Toward the end of his 81/2 years as chief, after a number of federal civil-suits had been filed against the department alleging excessive use of force against suspects, Mando started to feel betrayed by many of his own officers, Stewart said.
“He felt he couldn’t trust anybody. It made him sick,” Stewart said.
Bowers said Mandopoulos, who was hired in the 1970s, “was stuck in the 1970s” and failed to adapt to changes in law enforcement.
Stewart said Mando wasn’t prepared for the way video cameras began to shape the public’s attitudes toward officers’ use of force against citizens.
Ultimately, Mando was forced to retire in April 2009 after the city administration listened to a November 2008 voice mail from Mando to Capt. Tim Roberts in which Mando ordered police employees to ban Mayor Michael O’Brien, safety-service director Doug Franklin and human resources director Gary Cicero from the police department’s detective bureau.
The profanity-laced voicemail came while the city administration was finalizing plans to lay off 20 police officers, along with other city employees, to offset a recession-induced budget shortfall.
Deanna Sferra, a police records clerk, said Mando was “the end of an era” and liked to “ruffle your feathers,” but he would also “give you the shirt off his back.”