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Howie Carr column ping

Wake me up when there’s another pol like Dapper
Recalling the last of a dying breed
By Howie Carr | Sunday, December 23, 2007 | http://www.bostonherald.com

What’s happening at Gormley’s this weekend is Dapper O’Neil’s party, although surely this is one wake the Dap would have been more than happy to have skipped.

But Dapper wasn’t alone at City Hall all those years - there was a whole crew of wacky characters, including the Kerrigans, John J. and John E., and Kitty Craven and Pat McDonough, whose brother was the sticky-fingered School Committee member John, and if you ever started listing that crew of pirates from 26 Court Street, you really could almost go on forever - Louise Day Hicks, Pixie Palladino, Paul Ellison drinking himself to death after a stretch in the can.

But in the days since the Dap has passed, the pol I keep remembering is the late City Councilor Freddie Langone, an undersized, cigar-chomping street fighter from the North End who could drive Mayor Kevin White to absolute distraction.

Freddie and the Dap were allies, at least as much as any two guys who had to run against each other citywide every two years could be. Dapper was Mr. Outside and Freddie was Mr. Inside.

See, Dapper was not exactly a details guy. He knew how to swing a liquor license. As the former chairman of the Licensing Board he’d find out which abutter was objecting to some pal of his opening a much-needed saloon in the neighborhood. Then Dapper would walk upstairs from the council to his old office and sweet-talk the secretary into handing over the letters informing the abutters of the date of the key vote. The Dap would pocket the letter addressed to the objecting neighbor and tear it up. When the vote came a week later, no one would appear to object.

Freddie, on the other hand, was shifty. He loved to pore over the city budget. If he were alive today, they’d call him a “wonk,” a wonk who thought the plural of “you” was “youse,” and who addressed the subject of crime in the inner city by yelling at his liberal colleagues: “Don’t you tell me about them! They stabbed me!”

Like Dapper, Freddie went back to the days of James Michael Curley. His father, Joe, was a state senator, and later elections commissioner. In 1949, Curley refused to endorse 26-year-old Freddie for the Council, and his father went off the reservation. As Jack Beatty wrote in “The Rascal King,” Joe Langone climbed up on the Scollay Square subway kiosk in a rage and “vowed to send Curley to Alcatraz, adding, ‘I might go too. But I’ll take a lot of them with me.”

Like father, like son. When Freddie broke with Kevin White, he too vowed to bring down his ex-patron. He called White’s Council supporters the “Harmony Clique,” and he particularly detested Chris Iannella, the more-assimilated, Harvard-educated, go-along-to-get-along councilor.

“Look at him!” Freddie would bellow at Iannella on the Council floor. “He’s got a yellow streak down his back a mile wide.”

Nobody ever said that about Langone. Freddie’s greatest moment came during his Parkman House hearings, when he exposed Mayor White’s profligate spending at his palatial home away from home.

“Who ate at the Parkman House?” Freddie thundered, his unlit cigar clenched in his teeth. “H-W-O-H - who?”

Dapper was involved too, of course. Only his MO was to wait until White left town. Then the Dap declared himself acting mayor, drove over to the Beacon Hill mansion with a couple of newspapermen and “fired” everyone inside. After making sure the cameramen were ready, he looked under every bed and rifled every drawer before finally taking a break to light up a Kool and pour himself and the reporters stiff drinks from the mayor’s top-shelf liquor cabinet.

For Freddie it all ended in 1983, when the nine-member at-large council was expanded to 13, with nine district councilors, but only four at-large. Even in his heyday, Freddie had never finished higher than fifth, and his path to the North End-East Boston district seat was blocked by one of White’s Eastie precinct captains, Bobby Travaglini.

So at age 60, Freddie made a suicide run for mayor. Everyone smiled and patronized him. One day he held a press conference and nobody showed up.

“What have I got?” he yelled. “Political AIDS?”

Freddie lived on after leaving the council, unsuccessfully running a coffee shop, writing a book about the North End, visiting his old pal Dapper in the hospital when he first got sick. I’d like to think that somewhere, somehow, this Christmas, Freddie and the Dap are finally back in business together again. And if they are, wherever they are, I know there’s one sign they’ve already ripped down off the wall.

The one that says, “No smoking.”
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1062332