BOSTON -- David D'Alessandro is not a typical insurance executive. Known for his jazzy ties, he once startled his sales force with a videotape of himself and top aides pirouetting in ballet tights. "We wanted to get their attention," he said.
D'Alessandro, the president and chief operating officer of the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company, seems to make a habit of going against the grain. He roots for the Yankees in a town that worships the Red Sox. Unlike many corporate executives, he shies away from sports celebrities, figuring that getting caught up in the glamour circuit could cloud his business judgment. He says he prefers personal contact to e-mail, though he loves nothing more than surfing the Web at 3 a.m.So it is no surprise that D'Alessandro is leading the corporate charge to clean up one of the worst stains on the modern Olympics, the Salt Lake bribery scandal. It is a cause fraught with controversy and thus anathema to the corporate mind-set. But not to D'Alessandro's.
Because his company has spent millions to join its fate with that of the Olympics, plastering the Games' logos on everything from its advertising to its annual reports, D'Alessandro sees his campaign as defensive.
"It's only a matter of time before this splashes over onto the corporate sponsors," he said in an interview last week in his 59th-floor office suite overlooking Boston Common. "You can just hear people saying, 'What about you big fat-cat sponsors -- where's your social responsibility?' "
But there is nothing defensive about his tone. Where once he suggested changes in the International Olympic Committee, the governing body of the Games, he now makes demands: for the resignation of Juan Antonio Samaranch, the IOC president; for an end to lifelong appointments to the committee and for an independent investigation of allegations of corruption in Salt Lake City's bid to win the 2002 Winter Games.
While he has not withdrawn John Hancock's sponsorship of the Games, either in Sydney, Australia, next summer or in Salt Lake City in 2002, D'Alessandro backs up his push for change with an implicit threat. He has taken the Olympic logo off John Hancock's billboards and TV advertising and is keeping it off the 1998 annual report. He also has frozen negotiations on buying $20 million of TV advertising for the Sydney Games.
Some of the 10 other corporate sponsors, which with John Hancock contribute about $200 million annually to the Games, have raised concerns about the scandal. But, unlike D'Alessandro, who once was so hard-nosed in a John Hancock labor dispute that he was given police protection, they have pulled their punches.
D'Alessandro, 48, went on the warpath this month after the committee, while bowing to pressure and expelling six members linked to the scandal, formed a reform commission that would be only partly independent.
"They lied to us," D'Alessandro said last week. "They told us the scandal would be put behind us. But their version of reform doesn't appear to be anybody else's."
D'Alessandro grew up in an apartment over his family's delicatessen in Utica, N.Y. He is married and the father of three sons, and he knows something about sports. He earned high school letters in track and tennis, and his office walls are covered with memorabilia like one of Joe Louis's punching bags (as well as nonsports mementos like a Jimmy Cagney top hat).
For D'Alessandro, who started at John Hancock in 1984 as chief spokesman, a lot is at stake. His career benefited hugely from his campaign to make John Hancock the principal sponsor of the Boston Marathon, and he was the prime mover in the decision to concentrate most of the company's promotional budget on the Olympics.
After taking charge of sales in 1991 and revamping John Hancock's way of doing business -- changing agents' pay structure and going directly to customers by phone and the Internet -- he was named to his current posts last year. He is expected to succeed Stephen L. Brown when he retires as chairman and chief executive in 2002.
D'Alessandro doesn't want a festering problem at the IOC to rekindle memories of the company's own brushes with scandal in the last decade. Like most big life insurers, John Hancock was sued by policyholders contending that they had been sold policies they did not need; it ultimately settled for $350 million. It also paid $1.1 million to settle federal and Massachusetts state charges that its lobbyists illegally gave state legislators golf outings and other gifts.
D'Alessandro's main job these days is working with Brown on the conversion of John Hancock from a mutual company, formally owned by policyholders, to a publicly traded one next year. A public relations disaster could hurt the price of the stock, making John Hancock vulnerable to an unwanted takeover.
And D'Alessandro is determined not to let that happen. Though he hopes inaction by the Olympics leadership won't prompt John Hancock to end its sponsorship, he said, "If they continue down the path they're on, we certainly won't renew."