Today’s Headline
Meet the guy who owns half of D.C.’s filling stations
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By Christine MacDonald on February18, 2011(Washington city paper)
(Photograph by Darrow Montgomery)Fuel Sell: If you buy gas at any Exxon or Shell in the District, you’re buying from Joe Mamo’s stations.(Photograph by Darrow Montgomery)Fuel Sell: If you buy gas at any Exxon or Shell in the District, you’re buying from Joe Mamo’s stations(Photograph by Darrow Montgomery)
To hear him tell it, Joe Mamo’s move from Ethiopia to North Dakota in 1981 was accidental.
Mamo’s father, Yenberber Mamo, was a public transit mogul who manufactured buses and ran the first fleet to provide service across Ethiopia. The operation made his father’s Mamo Kacha bus line a household name in the East African country. It provided a nice life for his family. But it rendered him distinctly unpopular with the Marxist junta that ruled Ethiopia between 1974 and 1991. The elder Mamo was jailed two or three times by the regime. Some of his property was confiscated. As his son approached draft age, the patriarch looked for ways to send him overseas.
That’s how Joe, at the age of 13, found himself attending Catholic boarding school in North Dakota. (read more)
