Listen to this articleWhen Thomas Minkin stepped into Peter Angelos’ two-office suite at Baltimore’s Equitable Building in 1966, he had the little idea that he was embarking on a journey that would land him at the heart of groundbreaking mass litigation and end six decades later with his boss owning both the city’s baseball team and the downtown high rise where the law firm eventually settled.
As job interviews go, this one was odd. Angelos didn’t ask Minkin, a freshly barred Maryland attorney, about caselaw or legal theories. He just wanted to know if Minkin had ever been a member of a union.
Minkin had. Like Angelos, he worked his way through law school while taking classes at night, and at one of his jobs, Minkin had been a member of the meat cutters union.
Angelos extended an offer, kind of — he gave Minkin his word that he would hire him in a few months. Minkin didn’t know this man, but something told him he could trust the promise. Three months later, the job offer arrived.
“I didn’t know anything, but he hired me and he spent the first couple of months fundamentally teaching me how to be a lawyer,” Minkin said. “I learned everything from him. He made me a lawyer.”
Those were the days before Angelos, who died Saturday at 94, became the legal giant known for taking on asbestos litigation that no one else wanted, before he became a billionaire and bought the Baltimore Orioles in typical underdog fashion.
Those were the days, after a stint in city politics, when Angelos was still handling auto accidents and workers comp cases and slowly building a reputation as the go-to lawyer for union guys.
The son of two proud steel towns — first Pittsburgh, where he was born on July 4, 1929, and then Baltimore, where he grew up and spent his career — Angelos’ work was deeply entwined with the trade unions that came to rely on him as their legal champion.
“He was a man of the community before he became the wealthy asbestos tort lawyer,” said José F. Anderson, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, where Angelos graduated as valedictorian in 1961.
When medical malpractice cases began to trickle in, Angelos taught himself how to handle them rather than farm them out to other firms, Minkin said. As the attorney for the United Steelworkers local, Angelos got the call when an industrial hygienist began raising alarms about asbestos-related illnesses among Bethlehem Steel employees.
At first, according to Minkin, Angelos didn’t want to take on the case. He didn’t want to have to tell blue-collar workers that they were suffering from mesothelioma, an incurable form of cancer primarily caused by asbestos exposure. But the unions eventually came back, turned away by other law firms who only wanted to take on the most clear-cut cases, Minkin said.
“His greatest legacy, I think, is that when other people turned away the steelworkers who were getting sick on Sparrows Point, he kept those cases,” Anderson said. “His biggest legacy is looking out for workers. The idea that a lawyer would hang on when he thought something was wrong and maintained enough vision to try to help that class of people is really, for me, where it begins and ends.”
“He was a man of the community before he became the wealthy asbestos tort lawyer.”
— José F. Anderson, University of Baltimore School of Law professor
Even when asbestos litigation seemed unlikely to succeed, Angelos kept at it, eventually building a group of plaintiffs so large that the courts had to take unusual steps to handle the ballooning caseload.
He pioneered lawsuits aimed at holding asbestos manufacturers accountable for their product’s deadly health risks and what they knew about it.
“He was brilliant,” Minkin said. “He was a typhoon in the courtroom.”
He took one case to trial that had more than 8,500 plaintiffs, including steelworkers and shipbuilders who had been exposed to asbestos on the job. After resisting settlement offers for years, he won big, taking home an estimated $330 million for himself.
The money would help him buy the Orioles for a then-record price of $173 million in 1993.
Later that decade, Angelos also represented the state of Maryland in a lawsuit against tobacco companies, once again taking on industry giants. The state ultimately settled for more than $4 billion, and although Angelos was originally set to receive a 25% contingency fee, he eventually agreed to be paid just $150 million in a deal that always ranked him.
“He revolutionized litigation,” said William H. “Billy” Murphy Jr, a friend and legal collaborator. Angelos was “fiery about justice, ttotally committed to working people and their access to the courts,” Murphy said.
He was also disturbed by the racial segregation he saw in Baltimore and spoke out against it, Murphy said. Angelos ran for mayor in 1967, sharing the city’s first racially integrated ticket with Clarence M. Mitchell III, but lost to Thomas D’Alesandro III.
Orioles business eventually pulled Angelos away from day-to-day lawyering but his firm flourished, opening new offices and planting its headquarters at One Charles Center in downtown Baltimore.
His legal legacy extended to philanthropic efforts. A major Democratic donor, Angelos also turned his eye toward his alma mater, the University of Baltimore School of Law, and other city institutions.
Angelos donated $15 million toward the construction of the UB’s John and Frances Angelos Law Center, named for his parents. He also supported the Fannie Angelos Program for Academic Excellence, named for his sister, which was designed to create a pathway from Maryland’s historically Black colleges and universities to law school.
“He supported students and often supported them quietly,” said Ronald Weich, the law school’s outgoing dean. “He didn’t demand public recognition, but he basically saw many needy students through law school and helped create the next generation of passionate advocates in this legal community.”
