Inside Tony Moreno’s quest to become Pittsburgh’s 1st GOP mayor in nearly a century

Maverick Republican Tony Moreno knows he probably won’t be Pittsburgh’s next mayor.

But the unconventional candidate, who faces Democrat Corey O’Connor on Nov. 4 at the ballot box, says he stresses what needs to be said.

The retired Pittsburgh police officer first sought the city’s top elected post — unsuccessfully — in 2021 as a Democrat.

He quickly became known for his outspokenness, shaved head and arms sleeved in tattoos. His cellphone’s ring tone blasts a cover of the song “Bad Company” by heavy metal group Five Finger Death Punch. The densely packed ink on his left arm includes the names of three Pittsburgh police officers killed in the line of duty in 2009.

After Moreno exiled himself from the party that has run city hall since the Great Depression, some Republicans distanced themselves from him.

This spring, although primary voters helped Moreno trounce his GOP rival, the Republican committees in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County refused to support his upstart campaign. Moreno was declared persona non grata after he blasted party leaders on social media for failing to invite him to a dinner.

Supporters are undeterred from backing Moreno, whose campaign letters start with four words: “I’m not a politician.”

GOP voters responded. Moreno got more than double the votes of his opponent in the party’s spring primary. The road ahead, though, is long and steep.

Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 5 to 1 in Pittsburgh.

Moreno, who often focuses on the need to bolster a beleaguered police force, insists he is not finished despite unforgiving numbers.

“They tell me I don’t have a chance to win, that’s what everybody says,” said Moreno, 57, of Brighton Heights, as he drove his shiny black Dodge Ram pickup through the city. “But I still don’t see this (campaign) as a political action. There are things that need to be changed in this city. And they’re not going to be changed under Corey O’Connor.”

Some supporters maintain an outsider can beat the establishment candidate in Pittsburgh this year. They point to Donald Trump, who shocked pollsters with his Electoral College victory in 2016.

“You look at Tony Moreno, you can see John Fetterman,” said former Pittsburgh police Detective Brian Weismantle, the GOP candidate for Allegheny County sheriff, referring to the bald, burly and tattooed Democratic U.S. senator from Braddock.

“(Moreno) is doing what he needs to do for the people,” Weismantle, 59, of the North Side, told TribLive. “You should always be doing what’s good for the people, not what’s good for the party.”

Military background

Born in southern California as the eldest of three children, Moreno enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1986 at age 17.

A paratrooper who served in Panama and Germany, Moreno was honorably discharged five years later. After the military, Moreno considered pursuing a police career in suburban Ohio, where his first wife was raised.

Moreno — who grew up in Whittier, Calif., 20 miles east of Los Angeles — yearned for a city. In 1994, Moreno moved to Pittsburgh and joined its police force shortly after.

Frequently working undercover, Moreno often resembled a biker-gang leader more than a clean-cut officer. At one point around 2000, he sported long hair and a goatee that, once unbraided, hung down to his navel.

A fall on an icy Hill District street in 2016 blew out his shoulder, required surgery and led to retirement two years later after rehab. The wear and tear of Moreno’s paratrooper days — and not the 2016 fall — led him to seek hip surgery this summer.

More than 30 years after first hitting the city’s streets, Moreno still refers to Pittsburgh police officers as “we.” The back of his pickup truck displays an emblem with a thin blue line.

In 1992, Moreno’s son, Nathan, was born. When many noted the boy’s bright blue eyes and dark curly hair didn’t resemble anyone in the family, Moreno’s parents told him: The man he called “Dad” for nearly 35 years wasn’t his biological father.

Instead, he said, his father was a Mexican-American killed in gang violence when Moreno was 3. Moreno later sought out — and met — his “birth family.”

Today, Moreno is a father to two and a grandfather to two more. He met his wife, a retired Pittsburgh police officer coming off her own divorce, at a Kid Rock concert in Burgettstown in 2011. They married seven years later.

Realsteelmayor

Nostalgia sometimes sounds like as big a part of Moreno’s campaign as his policies. The candidate and many of his backers talk about Pittsburgh’s greatness in the past tense.

“This was a hard-working community, nobody locked their doors,” lamented Tony Golembiewski, 69, a city GOP committee member who joined Moreno on a recent tour of graffiti-covered Leslie Park Pool in Lawrenceville.

Moreno wants to renovate and reopen the site.

“Now we don’t know the names of our neighbors,” Golembiewski said. “They’re all transitional. They’re here for a year. And then they’re gone.”

The way Moreno paced around the pool, permanently shuttered in 2003, serves as an apt metaphor for how he campaigns. Moreno illustrates his homespun, often practical, ideas while shooting social-media videos in city neighborhoods — sometimes bringing along voters he hopes to woo.

Moreno’s Facebook account is filled with photos from his jaunts. The dilapidated pool in Lawrenceville. A blighted row house in Homewood. Picking up trash near the iconic “Pittsburgh’s Little Italy” sign in Bloomfield.

Moreno does best when he reacts to other people rather than focusing on his own vision. After Mayor Ed Gainey, whose term ends Jan. 5, pitched plans for more recreational centers, Moreno stressed the city needs to fix the ones it already has.

After a Strip District business group took Gainey to court over a Penn Avenue bike lane, Moreno responded with indignation. He demanded answers about how much the city was paying lawyers to fight the controversial project.

Moreno tries to keep Trump, who received just 21% of Pittsburgh’s votes in last year’s presidential race, out of the conversation. When pressed, he maintains the president’s politics “just don’t apply here.”

You can see Moreno’s take on Washington, D.C., if subtly, in the optics on display during a recent TV debate.

Democrat O’Connor wore a blue tie. Moreno avoided Trump’s Republican-red tie; he wore one covered in Pittsburgh Steelers logos.

Moreno’s black-and-gold yard signs, and the polo shirts he wears when campaigning, extend the theme. His website does, too. Its name: realsteelmayor.com.

His policies are more purple than red or blue.

When asked about LGBTQ Pittsburghers or racially marginalized communities, Moreno avoided policy talk but stressed how his Christian upbringing drives him to lead based on inclusivity — a decidedly left-leaning term.

On the flip side, he embraces right-leaning, even Libertarian, financial positions. When it comes to city permits and planning processes, he wants to cut red tape and advocate for a “free market” approach to Downtown development.

Even though he held conservative views, Moreno said he registered as a Democrat in Pittsburgh so his primary votes could steer the party toward spending government money more wisely or running essential services more efficiently, as a private business would.

Moreno said he became disenchanted with Democratic policies.

“I don’t think I left the Democrat Party,” Moreno told TribLive. “I think the Democrat Party left me.”

He ‘keeps the receipts’

Moreno isn’t big on policy details.

His website touts his dedication to ensuring basic services — say, plowing streets when it snows — “are provided in a timely manner.” But he doesn’t go deeply into specifics.

He says he wants to fund infrastructure improvements and tackle blight where historic disinvestment has crippled neighborhoods. Details about how he would achieve such goals are lacking.

Instead, Moreno embraces positions that resonate with voters by talking about Pittsburghers and how the city and its leaders’ decisions influence their lives.

That appears most visible in his claims that O’Connor has endangered city residents by “defunding the police.”

Moreno likes saying he “keeps the receipts” about O’Connor’s records. He points O’Connor’s votes as a councilman to support the Stop the Violence fund. In 2020, he approved moving $250,000 to the fund from the “police salaries” section of the city budget.

Moreno claims O’Connor seeded the fund by stripping money from police officers, what he called a literal definition of “defunding the police.”

O’Connor called Moreno’s claims baseless.

Moreno said if elected he would not slash the Stop The Violence program because he believes in its mission.

“But they don’t realize that part of the reason they’re suffering is they can’t call for the protection and can’t call for the service that police officers provide,” Moreno said.

Emotional intelligence

Patty Poloka wears two hats around Moreno. A real estate agent and retired Pittsburgh police officer, she works as Moreno’s informal campaign manager. She’s also been his wife since 2018.

Poloka said she’s helped steer Moreno in a guerilla campaign fueled by ramshackle funding.

In September, O’Connor had raised about $270,000 to spend on the mayoral race — 60 times what Moreno had. Campaign finance reports from that time showed Moreno with $4,000. The GOP mayoral hopeful said the mid-October tally was closer to $20,000.

With that money, Moreno can’t afford many TV ads. So he livestreams rants on social media and recycles past campaign material, using careful edits on ads he recorded for the spring primary.

Moreno and Poloka recently joined the Rivers Club, located in a Grant Street skyscraper. Their membership allows volunteers to use the club’s conference rooms to call and text voters, as well as handle administrative tasks.

More than anything, Poloka said she needs Moreno on the ground, one-on-one with voters.

“Tony has a great deal of emotional intelligence, and he’s really good at reading a room,” said Poloka, 52. “When he gets a chance to be person-to-person, he wins people over because he has a passion for this city.”

Moreno likes to exercise his skills at wooing voters.

Mt. Lebanon resident Susan Pettigrew can’t vote for Moreno. But her recent encounter with the candidate at a Strip District coffee-shop counter illustrated how Moreno sells people on his ideas.

“You need to talk about other things,” Pettigrew, 78, told Moreno. “It can’t be all public safety, public safety, public safety.”

The pair talked about Downtown development and spending on affordable housing by Pittsburgh’s Urban Redevelopment Authority. Pettigrew repeatedly interrupted Moreno with quips: “Money speaks” or “I want a different answer than that.”

As the conversation neared 15 minutes, though, the tone shifted. Pettigrew told Moreno he could sway voters like her if he held more town-hall-style events.

“I am the people who don’t like what’s happening,” Moreno said at one point. “I decided to run to change it.”

“Well,” Pettigrew responded, “I like that you are open to a conversation with anybody.”

Doing it his way

When asked about Moreno’s character, backers cite his time as a Pittsburgh cop but are light on specifics.

“I’m pro-cop all the way, have been as long as I’ve been in this business,” said Michael “Archie” Manning, 61, of Ross, who knows Moreno from interacting with officers at Archie’s, the South Side bar Manning owns. Moreno “was a fine officer … he knows the streets, he knows the people. And it’s a people business, if you’re the mayor.”

“Tony would be a great mayor,” added Pittsburgh police Detective David Honick, 52, a city resident who joined the Pittsburgh police in 2000 and served alongside Moreno in narcotics around 2005. “He’s a leader of men, he’s honest … and he’s got great integrity.”

Honick was one of four undercover detectives involved in a high-profile brawl in 2018 inside a South Side bar after drinking heavily while on the job.

Moreno also left an impression on one unlikely ally: Joseph Sabino Mistick, a Duquesne University law professor, TribLive opinion columnist and political insider who served as chief of staff to former Mayor Sophie Masloff, a local Democratic Party icon,

“Corey O’Connor is the odds-on favorite to win this race. It would be considered an upset if he doesn’t,” Mistick told TribLive. “That’s not what it’s about. It’s about somebody stepping up and engaging the voters on the issues. … I like the fact that Tony’s doing it his own way.”

Mistick, a registered Democrat, declined to say who he’ll vote for. He praised Moreno as “one of those guys who always speaks his piece.” But he added that “you have to be realistic about voter registration.”

“One of the best things about politics is you sometimes find candidates who run at windmills, who run against the odds,” Mistick said. “And that’s Tony Moreno.”