[3] He was the Democratic nominee for Mayor of Hartford, while serving as the city's party chairman, in 1912, losing to Col. Louis R. Cheney in a spring election.

President Woodrow Wilson appointed him United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut to fill the unexpired term of Frederick Scott in 1915.

[8] After his return from Europe in 1919, Spellacy was appointed Assistant Attorney General of the United States and was in charge of the enemy custodianship department.

Just two weeks before the 1920 election, John R. Rathom, publisher of the Providence Journal, charged that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democratic candidate for Vice President, had acted improperly while Assistant Secretary of the Navy in releasing sailors convicted on morals charges in the Newport sex scandal from Portsmouth Naval Prison.

Spellacy, along with Francis G. Caffey, the U.S. Attorney in New York, released information from Justice Department files that discredited Rathom.

[11] After leaving government service in February, 1921, he became the law partner of two other officials involved in the custody and liquidation of enemy property seized during the war, forming the New York City firm of Garvan, Corbett and Spellacy, with its office on Wall Street.

[12][13] Connecticut's Democrats nominated Spellacy for the United States Senate in 1922, but he was defeated by the incumbent, former governor George P.

On June 18, 1943, he made good on a threat to resign if he could not get the Board of Aldermen to adopt his proposal to require residency in the city by municipal employees.

He served in that position until his death in New York City while attending a conference of state insurance commissioners on December 5, 1957.

[27] John Gregory Dunne, a Hartford native, named one of the protagonists in his 1977 novel True Confessions Tom Spellacy.