TAMPA — Angela Alderman Wynn has long asked the Tampa City Council for help with a question: Did ground-penetrating radar of a parking lot owned by the Italian Club find the erased College Hill Cemetery, home to more than 1,200 graves for pioneering Black and Cuban residents, including her great-uncle?
Yet while she and other residents have pleaded for answers, a City Council member’s public relations firm has worked for the embattled social club, which he has not previously disclosed. And he won’t describe the specific nature of the work.
Council member Bill Carlson is president of Tucker/Hall, and the firm has been working “pro bono” with the Italian Club, including “a small paid component a few months ago to help defray costs,” Carlson wrote in an email to the Times.
“Due to confidentiality, we don’t disclose the nature of work we do — even on pro bono projects — but our firm’s assistance was not related to any city business and I was not personally involved,” he wrote.
But the revelation is troubling to Alderman Wynn.
“This is rather disturbing and raises huge concerns for me,” she said. “If you want to sit and say you stand for the lost of College Hill why are you so close to the very ones who … refuse to cooperate with results of the scan and where the bodies are?”
Federal and local records indicate that College Hill Cemetery was once located on what is now the Italian Club Cemetery’s parking lot in East Tampa. Established in 1889, headstones were last documented there in 1941, although it’s unknown when they disappeared.
The Ybor-based social club celebrating Tampa’s Italian heritage purchased that land in 1950 and added it to their cemetery. They built a mausoleum on it in the 1970s and have since used the rest of the property for parking.
Carlson, a second-term council member from South Tampa, had stirred confusion in recent months as he began leaving the board’s meeting room when the subject of the Italian Club and erased cemetery was brought up at the City Council.
At a late March council meeting, Carlson walked out during a discussion between city legal staff and council members about the cemetery’s lingering uncertainty.
At a meeting in early May, Carlson joined his colleagues in a unanimous vote asking the Italian Club to publicly report the findings of their search for graves in August.
But later that day, just as another council member was about to make a motion for the city to consult with an archaeologist to review city-owned property near the contested site, Carlson sprang from his chair and said: “I’m a member of the Italian Club and I’m going to abstain because of that.”
(The motion was ultimately not voted on because another council member requested more time to review the matter.)
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Explore all your optionsA week later, Carlson missed an evening meeting during which Alderman Wynn, among other residents, had asked the council to take action on the matter.
The next week, on May 16, Carlson abstained when the council voted for the city to report on the feasibility of searching for the College Hill Cemetery on the nearby city-owned property.
He “abstained in an abundance of caution,” he told the Times by phone Wednesday morning, because he had not yet had a chance “to consult with the City Council attorney” about whether his club membership amounted to a conflict of interest.
He joined the club within the last year after members asked him to, he said.
Tucker/Hall’s offices are located in Ybor City, like the Italian Club, and he is heavily involved with efforts to preserve and champion the historic district, he said.
When asked if the club was one of the firm’s clients, Carlson said no.
Have they ever been?
“We’ve done some pro bono work for them in the past,” he replied, adding that no work he’d been involved with related to the ongoing cemetery dispute.
Asked whether his Tucker/Hall colleagues worked on matters connected to the cemetery, Carlson said, “I don’t know.”
Hours later, he followed up via email.
He’d double-checked with his colleagues, he wrote, and learned the pro bono work included a paid component.
Related: Is Tampa’s Italian Club looking for 1,200 missing bodies?
“We regularly provide pro bono work to nonprofits in Ybor City and throughout the community. Right now these include YCDC, the Ybor Chamber, the Ybor City Ad Hoc Arts Group, the East Tampa Partnership and many others,” Carlson wrote in his email to the Times, sent from his Tucker/Hall email account, not his City Council one.
He added that the City Council attorney has reiterated to him that “there is no conflict related to membership, pro bono work or work not connected to the City.”
Of Carlson, Alderman Wynn told the Times: “I find it rather ironic that he is now a member of the Italian Club and his firm has ties to pro bono work with them.”
Italian Club president Sal Guagliardo did not respond to repeated phone calls from Times reporters Wednesday.
The Times first identified the club as the possible College Hill Cemetery site in 2019 and again wrote a more detailed report in 2021. In February 2023, a Times reporter happened to drive by the Italian Club Cemetery and saw ground-penetrating radar being rolled across the property.
The club has not commented on the findings to the Times or city of Tampa since.
