Remembering John Xifaras, a New Bedford immigrant’s son

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Great men whose achievements were accomplished long ago sometimes do not get the recognition they deserve on their passing. This is especially so if a lot of their great work was done for little people whose stories are little known. 

Such is the case with John Xifaras, who died March 18, a little less than a month before his 89th birthday.

At the time of his death, John X., as he was fondly known for decades in New Bedford political and legal circles, was long retired and the focus of few but his devoted family and close friends.

But in his heyday, John M. Xifaras was a legend around city courtrooms and the halls of local political power. For decades he was one of the most successful lawyers in town. Then he went on to be both a respected superior and district court judge, and in his latter years worked as an expert mediating thorny legal cases. He was an important Democratic Party activist, as well as a onetime chair of the New Bedford School Committee.

These are all things that many people might carry on a resume line.

The thing about John Xifaras that people in New Bedford really admired was the work he did in which his empathy and leadership set a standard. 

In his early adulthood, Xifaras was a civil rights, labor and admiralty lawyer — in an era when many in New Bedford would not put themselves out there on an issue to speak for people of color, or for working people, for that matter.  

The son of hard-scrabble Greek immigrants, Xifaras helped register Black voters in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964. That was an impressive thing for someone from a place as culturally conservative as New Bedford in the mid-1960s.

A graduate of Tabor Academy and Babson College, Xifaras ably represented union workers when his own pedigree could have enabled him to live a life representing the wealthy and the powerful.

His longtime law partner and devoted friend, former Mayor Scott Lang, captured the kind of guy John X. was, with a comment that resonates strongly in the present troublesome political climate. “The true measure of a friend is whether they will hide you in the basement when the fascists come.” That was John Xifaras, Lang said.

Xifaras was a guy who put himself out there for things that were important to scores of humble city residents.

Here’s a story about that: When he was a judge, Xifaras quietly handled many of the abortion cases that his Catholic colleagues on the local judiciary declined, his obituary noted. He heard the “judicial bypass” cases of pregnant young women who needed a judge’s OK to get an abortion. 

“He handled those ‘Mary Moe’ cases in chambers, removing his black robes to minimize his intimidating presence for the teenaged girls, as he gently questioned each to make certain she fully understood what she was doing and acting with free will,” the obituary read.

In the 1970s and ’80s, John Xifaras was the most sought-after attorney in New Bedford when it came to progressive causes.

Among those he represented “pro bono” (for free) was the New Bedford NAACP during a thorny period when it was struggling to survive in the aftermath of the Civil Rights era. 

Somehow, and one wonders why, the City of New Bedford wanted to tax the headquarters building of the local chapter of the NAACP. Its building was used for a number of community purposes and it took a while to establish the association’s nonprofit tax status with the IRS.

Former state Rep. Bill Straus was a young lawyer working in the same building as Xifaras. He remembered the more established lawyer pulling him into that and a number of other cases.

“John may have looked a bit rumpled with a stray cigar ash here and there, but he was all work and held a passion for defending those in need of the law’s guarantees,” Straus wrote me.

The city’s tax stance with the NAACP was endangering its ability to retain its building, former NAACP president Lee Charlton remembered. No matter what the organization did, it could not get city officials to change. But eventually, after Xifaras and Straus pressed the case, the city backed down.

Xifaras knew first-hand where working people were coming from. 

Born in 1936 to a family living in a triple-decker on Washburn Street, he was the son of an immigrant tavern and restaurant owner in one of the grittiest neighborhoods in New Bedford.

The Xifarases were originally from the Greek Peloponnese region, specifically the Mani Peninsula, the only part of the cradle of Western civilization never conquered by invaders. One need not wonder, then, how this child of immigrants got from Washburn Street to Tabor Academy and Babson College and finally Suffolk Law School — or why he never forgot his father’s admonition to always remember where he had come from despite his own achievements.

Although he was a champion of the little guy, Xifaras, according to Lang, had an in-depth knowledge and experience of the law that allowed him to comprehend both sides of a legal argument. Far earlier than many other judges, he left the bench at just 64 to work as a mediator and arbitrator at JAMS, an alternative dispute resolution firm. “He had opinions but he always understood the other guy’s point of view,” Lang said.

Before he hung up his black robe in 2000, Xifaras conducted one last duty that seemed to perfectly encapsulate his family’s story. At a naturalization ceremony aboard the Battleship Massachusetts in Fall River, he swore in a group of new immigrants as citizens.  

The Standard-Times on that day quoted Xifaras saying that welcoming new Americans was one of his favorite tasks. “The promise of America is always its most recent immigrants,” he said. “You feel it and see the hope in their eyes.” It was a coda worthy of the success story that Xifaras had been for his own parents.

As they remembered him after his passing, his colleagues also reflected on John X’s larger-than-life personality outside the courtroom. 

When Lang came up from doing national Democratic Committee political work in Washington, D.C. to work for Xifaras, it was John X. who taught him how to do the legal work of day-to-day practice. In his inimitable style, he took the young lawyer on a wild tour of downtown New Bedford. 

The senior lawyer proceeded to sideswipe five or six cars in a row on Purchase Street, and then, pulling to the side of the street, took six or so of his attorney cards out of his wallet, wrote on them, and left one on each car. “Sorry I hit you. Call me. We’ll straighten it out.”

On another occasion, while Lang and Xifaras were on their way to Boston to try a big case, Xifaras stopped for an ice cream cone at the old Howard Johnson’s on Route 24. He promptly proceeded to dump his two scoops on his shirt. He went into the restroom, washed his entire shirt and then pleaded his case in court, sopping wet. “He goes in and argues the case and wins the case,” Lang recalled. “He was old style.”

When Xifaras first started dating his wife, the late Democratic activist Maragret “MarDee” (Strahorn) Xifaras, Lang remembered that she was shocked to find raunchy magazines all around his office. He was representing a pornographer.

“He would represent anyone on a freedom of speech case,” Lang said.

The Xifarases were legendary for their big fat Easter celebrations at their oceanside Marion home, complete with an entire roasted lamb and Xifaras ending it with a glass of Metaxa and a thick Cuban cigar. 

Xifaras was a man for all seasons, Lang said. He knew all about Greek classical history and literature.

“It didn’t matter. You could talk about anything to him. He had a specific chapter and verse to tell; he had a war story.”

Xifaras’ son, Michael John, “MJ,” like his grandfather, is a restaurateur and entrepreneur. He said his father taught him about roots and pride and New Bedford. “He was proud of his heritage and upbringing and was happy to help New Bedford,” he said.

As John Xifaras slipped into the long goodbye of fading memory that overcomes so many seniors, Lang and Xifaras’ family arranged one final tribute a couple years ago.

His portrait had been hanging in the basement of the new Superior Court complex in Fall River, a place where Xifaras had never sat as a judge. They arranged for it to be transferred to the New Bedford Superior Courthouse on County Street and hung in the big second-floor courtroom along with those of his colleagues, other renowned retired local New Bedford judges like Jack Tierney and Jack Markey.

Lang recalled how Xifaras, when he became a judge, had sacrificed all his political activism in order to follow the judicial code of neutrality. He never commented publicly about politics for the more than a decade he sat on the bench. He was so serious about the court and doing things with integrity, he said.

“He was just a really good man,” Lang said.

A celebration of life for John Xifaras will be held at the Chapel at Tabor Academy at 1 p.m. on Saturday, June 14. 

Email columnist Jack Spillane at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.

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