Tom Carr: A Sneakier Mark Sidran?

Dave Osgood remembers his enthusiasm when Tom Carr first ran for City Attorney in 2001. "He was a new face, a fresh voice," says Osgood. "He seemed to be open to discussion and reason."

Those were qualities that Osgood, an attorney who frequently represents nightclubs, says were missing from the approach of then-reigning City Attorney Mark Sidran, Seattle's answer to Rudolph Giuliani, the New York mayor who waged war on low-level street crimes. Sidran ranks as one of the most controversial city figures of recent years. He promoted a set of "civility laws" that criminalized aggressive panhandling, lying on downtown sidewalks, and other quality-of-life nuisances—laws that inflamed some homeless advocates. And he tried to stop drug dealing and violence around predominantly African-American clubs by shutting them down through a law that allows for the "abatement" of dangerous establishments.

Carr was then a commercial lawyer best known as the chair of a citizens' council charged with building the ill-fated monorail. In the city voters' pamphlet and elsewhere, he pitched himself as someone who would "take a more moderate approach" and act as a "mediator."

But after Carr took office, "I rapidly found that I was missing Mark Sidran," Osgood contends. As he sees it, Carr also went after clubs—masterminding the sting operation known as "Sobering Thought"— but did so "in a very passive-aggressive fashion."

"In retrospect, Mark was great," Osgood says. "He would say, 'Hey, Dave, here's a knife that I'm going to wield precisely this way.' You knew what he was doing. With Tom, you have to turn your back and wait."

It's an extreme characterization of the man who is now facing a heated campaign in his quest for a third term in office—he sailed into his second term unopposed. But it's one that gets at the two sides of Carr that make him something of a puzzle, especially compared to his predecessor. "Mark was so strong and clear in his statements," says City Councilmember Nick Licata. "Tom is more nuanced."

The 52-year-old Carr has a hulking frame. Balding and bespectacled, he avoids the limelight that Sidran embraced, often speaks in measured tones, and can wax thoughtfully and compassionately about the problems of the homeless and addicted. His signature achievement in office has been the creation of a new court that attempts to help defendants, through access to social services like drug treatment and housing, rather than jail them.

Yet Carr can verbally pounce on critics too. As Licata puts it, he has at times a way of drawing "a line in the sand" that has given him a reputation as a stealth law-and-order man—tough, unyielding, and resistant to attempts by the press and public to examine the details of city business.

As in all puzzles, the two sides fit together. But to see that, it's helpful to know where Carr came from.

Bob List met Carr at New York Law School (not to be confused with neighboring New York University). They went to night school, not the more rarefied environment of day classes. Students of List and Carr's ilk needed to work during the day; they didn't come from privilege. List worked as a paralegal, Carr as a computer programmer for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.

"Of all the backgrounds of all the folks," says List, who became a close friend of Carr, "Tom came from the most modest."

Carr hails from New York City's rough-and-tumble south Bronx, part of a big Irish-Catholic family who squeezed into a one-bedroom apartment. His parents slept in the living room on a pull-out couch. His sister unfurled on a daybed in the hall. He and his two brothers took the bedroom, for a long time sharing a single bed. The three boys formed an upside-down "T" with their bodies, Carr and one brother sleeping lengthwise and the other sleeping crosswise at the bottom.

His mother was a stenographer for Metropolitan Life, where Tom later found employment. His father "didn't do very much," Carr says. "My dad was an alcoholic."

"He was a big guy, like me," Carr adds. "At 17, he volunteered for World War II. He had his 18th birthday in a place called Anzio [an Italian beach town that became a battleground], served throughout the entire war, and came back and drank a lot."

One day when Carr was 14, he watched his father head to a party. It was a noteworthy sight: His dad was sober. But he drank too much at the party and fell down a flight of stairs. The accident was fatal. His mother gamely took up the challenge of raising the family on her small salary. "She got three of us through college," Carr says.

Despite all this, Carr remembers his childhood as "idyllic." Living among large apartment blocks full of hundreds of families, he was surrounded by friends. But when asked how his background shaped him, he circles back to his father. "Having lived up close with what alcohol does, and now seeing all the defendants I see who are addicted to alcohol, it does shape my desire to try to help folks with addictions," he says.