When the Republican Party needed an extra $500,000 in a hurry to help pay for President Nixon's Inauguration festivities, it turned to Boston Entrepreneur Thomas Anthony Pappas. He raised the money in nine days of hectic telephoning to other friends of the G.O.P. Then Tom Pappas dropped in on some old acquaintances. He visited Ike and Mamie Eisenhower at Walter Reed Hospital, chatted with Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge, and with Secretary of State William Rogers went over the names of some candidates for the post of U.S. Ambassador to Greece.
Greek-born Tom Pappas has made a lifetime habit of cultivating the powerful. Now a cherub-faced, grandfatherly figure of 69, he has become a power himself —though not always quite so potent as he likes to let on. He says: "Spiro followed my advice and switched from Rockefeller to Nixon." The largest U.S. firms seek his aid before doing business in Greece, where Pappas counts as the best-connected American citizen around. His close ties with Greece's strongman, George Papadopoulos, and the ruling military junta have made him an unofficial representative of Athens in Washington and in the U.S. business community.
Lunch in the Warehouse. The son of poor immigrants named Papadopoulos, young Tom started out in the grimy Greek-Italian North End of Boston. There he shortened his name, finished high school and expanded his father's grocery into a chain of 30 stores, which he sold in the early 1950s to get capital for investment in many other business ventures. Today he owns a food-importing company and a real estate firm in Boston, in addition to Atlantic Maritime Enterprises Co., which operates ten oil tankers that fly the Greek and Liberian flags.
Pappas has built all this partly on his knack for becoming well known to leaders in politics, business and organized religion—and his ability to use one contact to reinforce another. For years in Boston, many of the city's big men gathered at the daily luncheons of the "Pappas boys," Tom and his brother John, in the dining room of their food warehouse. The brothers became important back-roomers in city and state affairs. John worked the Democratic side and was rewarded with an associate district judgeship; Tom earned some personal lOUs as a fund raiser for the G.O.P., got on the party's national finance committee and was a frequent guest at President Eisenhower's White House stag dinners. There he befriended then Vice President Richard Nixon. He also became influential in the Greek Orthodox Church.