ustxtxb_obs_1978_05_26_50_00022-00000_000.pdf

‘et$ Vt e -19 ox ‘ Og ee 3.\\oi7 1524 E. Anderson Lane, Austin bonds stocks insurance mutual funds optional retirement program HALF PRICE RECORDS MAGAZINE IN DALLAS: 4528 McKINNEY AVE. 209 S. AKARD, downtown RICHARDSON: 508 LOCKWOOD FARMERS BRANCH SHOPPING CTR. SW CORNER, VALLEY VIEW IN WACO: 25TH & COLUMBUS IN AUSTIN: 1514 LAVACA 6103 BURNET RD. IN FORT WORTH: 6301 CAMP BOWIE BLVD. FARM INCOME is the SAME in 1977-78 as it was in 1974 while the price we ALL pay is inflated by 33% UP OVER 200% ON SOME FARM ITEMS THE COS PRICE WV’ 0 1-111t TO CHANG. THAT TO SCUP EVISAY11100Y IIIATA40 Texas If, Lfiai Union M 800 LAKE AIR DR. WACO, TEXAS 76710 817 772-7220 Bob and Sara Roebuck Anchor National Financial Services Laredo.. . from page 9 making the rounds until after the election. The gist of the tale told by highly placed figures in the Laurel camp is that Aldo Tatangelo secretly sold out to the local bosses even as he scored them publicly. The allegation is not directly verifiable, but the tawdry details of the story coincide at certain key points with what’s known to have happened in the course of the bitter campaign, and provide some disquieting clues to what the election may have signified for the future of Laredo politics. The Laurel people claim to know of Tatangelo’s sell-out because the kingmakers approached their man first, and he turned them down. They say that Laurel was visited early in the campaign by two members of the nouveau riche Sanchez clan, known as the ‘,petrodollar patrons of South Texas” because of their sizable holdings in the Sanchez-O’Brien Gas Exploration Group. The clan emissaries offered, so the story goes, $45,000 to underwrite Laurel’s campaign, and promised to bring in an out-of-town media consultant to package and sell his candidacy. Laurel supposedly replied that he was limiting contributions to $500 per individual, welcomed them to contribute the maximum, and added that he could manage the campaign just fine on his own. The story is that the clan was mightily miffed by this rebuff. True or not, Tony Sanchez Jr. turned up as a prominent supporter of Tatangelo soon thereafter. Laurel fans say his show of independence also alienated two more firmly entrenched power blocs. One group consisted of Martinites who headed up city departments and feared for their jobs after their.jefe resigned. To their pledges of support Laurel responded, by his own account, as follows: “I made no promises. I laid it on the line to them, told them where I stood, promising them nothing.” The pledges were promptly withdrawn, and the department chiefs quietly joined the Sanchez group as new-found friends of Aldo Tatangelo. The other political force Laurel failed to reckonor dealwith, his backers say, was the Kazen family, which lays claim to Laredo’s seat in the U.S. Congress \(occupied by Abraham “Chick” held by E. James Kazenthough he was denied renomination in the Democratic plays a key role in the local landowning and financial elite. The Kazens allegedly figured they could fill the void left by Martin’s departure if a political novice like Tatangelo took over the mayor’s office instead of an experienced and perhaps less malleable hand like Laurel. So they successfully kept down the bar rio turnout Laurel was counting on for a cushion of 4,000 votes \(MexicanAmerican neighborhood leaders were nominally supporting Tatangelo, but Some facets of Tatangelo’s Laredo career and the record of his first few weeks in office lend a measure of plausibility to this plainly self-serving scenario sketched by Laurel sources. Tatangelo started off living in Nuevo Laredo, where he ran a factory that produced plastic and ceramic trinkets for the tourist trade until labor agitation by a Mexican sindicato forced him to move his enterprises to the American side of the Rio Grande. He now makes his home in Del Mar Hills, a subdivision outside the Laredo city limits \(he leased an apartment in the city so he could run for As mayor, Tatangelo seems to have reordered his priorities for the time being. The only campaign promise he has followed through on since taking office on April 4 is a classic patronage scheme to build large parks in each of the city’s four wards. Laredoans don’t hear much from the new occupants of city hall about the 31 miles of unpaved streets that gave Tatangelo his strongest campaign issue, and no proposals have been forthcoming for dealing with Laredo’s antiquated sewage treatment plant, which is so overloaded that raw effluent flows into nearby creeks on its way to the Rio Grande. Nor has Mayor Tatangelo taken any formal steps to change the way city employees are hired. Yet it’s far too early to write off Tatangelo’s populist image as campaign pretense. For one thing, he’s had his hands full doubling as Laredo’s chief of police since the resignation of chief William Weeks, a Martin loyalist \(though Laurel diehards snidely suggest the new mayor could give the job to any one of the three people he promised it to during the establishment scourge he claimed to be, it may be tactically sound for him to offer parks and a little breathing space to Martin’s wary lieutenants before he sets out to bring down their corrupt power structure for good. Thus, there’s some reason for the hope many have that Tatangelo will keep faith with the common people whose votes put him in office. But skepticswho are already as numerous as the prickly pear that bristle on the flatlands around Laredofear that it may take another election and a different mayor to finally rid their city of the practices that characterized the Martin years. Guillermo Garcia is a Laredo native and a former reporter for The Laredo Times. He now works in Austin as a reporter for the Austin AmericanStatesman. 22 MAY 26, 1978