Some Facts About Lee Alexander

Lee Alexander was mayor of Syracuse from 1970 to 1986. He is remembered as a crook, or as the greatest mayor Syracuse ever had, depending on who you ask.

[People think my suits were tailored.]
As a matter of fact, my suits came off the rack. They just looked better on me.

Syracuse Post Standard, November 28, 1978

I want you to describe Lee Alexander to me.
Handsome, intelligent, very virile (Laughs). Don’t think those guys weren’t jealous. Don’t think there weren’t a lot of guys out there who weren’t envious.
Sure, when they saw the beautiful women…
Yeah. That ate their hearts out. It killed ‘em. And it killed ‘em because I was my own man I wasn’t a yes man to anybody. Oh, I compromised. That’s the art of politics. Compromise. But I always got the best deal for the city. And sometimes that pissed people off.

“A few years ago, Lee Alexander pulled down his pants in his City Hall office to show me the scar the surgeon left on his thigh when a cyst was removed.”

Dick Case, Syracuse Herald-Journal, January 7, 1988 

“So then I go over to the Y, I’m upstairs running around the track, he’s up
there running, and all of a sudden, over the piped-in music, the news came on and there I am criticizing the mayor. I was a little embarrassed.”
A few minutes later, on the way to the shower, Mingolelli had to walk past Alexander’s stall, the first one in the row. “The mayor sticks his head out and calls me a vile name. I thought, I’ll just ignore it,’ but then he walked around the side and said the same thing. Two businessmen who were in the other stalls came out of the shower to see what was going on. With an audience, I felt I had to vindicate myself “

In the space of a few seconds, Mingolelli said he remembered the mayor’s
bodyguard was in the lobby, but he followed Alexander anyway “I had him with his back to the wall and I said, ‘Don’t you ever do that to me again ’ He said, ‘Why not?’ I said, ‘Because I’m going to punch you in your
face.’”

It was a belly-to-belly stand off. “I knew he had a reputation for trying to intimidate other people and I just wasn’t going to let him get away with it “I kept wondering if he was going to hit me. I figured that if he did, I’d punch him in the face, and then I’d get to the cops before he could,” Mingolelli said.

Among the small crowd that waited outside Federal Court for Lee Alexander to arrive was an elderly man in a jaunty white cap who remembered Alexander as “my favorite bartender.” It was a reference to the days, almost 40 years ago, when a much younger Lee Alexander tended bar and waited tables to pay his way through Syracuse University Law School.

The elderly gentleman declined to give his name. But he and another man recalled the youthful Alexander as a winning personality who was popular with young women.

— Syracuse Post Standard, July 17, 1987

I dressed with style because I wanted to be singled out as the mayor
of Syracuse. I wanted to be identified as someone who came into a
congressional room and had the presence to command attention. That’s
what it’s all about. If you want to sneak around and play Johnny
Appleseed, you can do that too.

Alexander found a publicity opportunity when a gunman killed a man, then took a pregnant woman and her baby hostage in a black section of Syracuse and held police off for most of the day.

After news photographers were held back by police for many hours, they were suddenly allowed to approach the house. The door opened and Alexander ran out of the house, clutching the baby. Photographs of the mayor carrying the baby to safety were displayed in newspapers across the country the next day. Black leaders complained that it was the only time Alexander had ever visited the neighborhood

LA Times, March 6, 1988

Why Mayor Koch never became governor.

Karate Day in Syracuse