Rider on a Storm

"THERE ARE THREE THINGS that make this country great: education, law 'n order and civil service...the liberal conspiracy has destroyed two of 'em and almost the third." Boston City Councilor Albert "Dapper" O'Neil was engaging in his favorite pastime, entertaining a reporter. Fellow City Councilor John Kerrigan added, "Capper will do anything for publicity, get a raincoat and flash." Kerrigan was flapping the labels of his leisure suit and making a long stroking gesture.

O'Neil is one of the city's best-known politicians. His stereotypical Irish pol looks--stocky build, slick white hair, and bulldog face--constant jokes and vicious racism make up his now familiar act. While newspaper articles on O'Neil recount his actions humorously, few seriously examine and explain the rise of this well-publicized but rather ineffective politician.

Dapper's path is easy to follow. As a ten-year campaign stalwart for former Governor Endicott "Chub" Peabody, O'Neil was rewarded in the mid-'60's with a position on the three-member Boston Liquor Licensing Commission. Later, he became its chairman. During his tenure on the commission, O'Neil got into a feud with a newspaper editor whose paper had slandered Dapper on several occasions. The editor was allegedly having an affair with a Chinese woman, and the politician drove around the paper's building shouting through a megaphone "...likes Chinese food, he eats Chinese every chance he gets."

In the style of an Elliot Ness, Dapper often led liquor board raids on uncooperative bars and once raided a B.U. dorm for cohabitation. "If I had a kid going to college they'd live at home. Send 'em to a college dorm and they come back a fag or a dyke," he said last week.

One evening Dapper hit a car driven by a black man who had stopped at a red light in Roxbury. According to the widely accepted account of the incident, O'Neil got out of his car, enraged, pulled his ever present gun out of his belt and placed it at the man's head. Later he claimed it was only a pen. Boston Mayor Kevin White--whom O'Neil describes now as "...a mental case...He makes Jesse James look like an amateur"--once introduced the councilor to an audience as "The man who once again proved that the pen is mightier than the sword."

The comic stories about Dapper are endless, but they tend to obscure the vicious side of the affable councilor. A Wallace supporter since 1968 (years before busing had won the Alabaman many Massachusetts votes), one political insider said O'Neil was with him "every time Wallace was in Boston." In the collection of country western singers and intellectual lightweights that formed the Wallace campaign, Dapper was only good for handshaking pictures for The South Boston Tribune. His advice was never solicited and his responsibilities were nonexistent.

MASSACHUSETTS STATE representative Barney Frank '61 said last week Dapper "is not an amiable joke.... There is nothing positive about him." O'Neil blasts other public figures with abandon. He claims Reverend Ralph Abernathy is a "perverted degenerate" with a preference for 15-year-old girls, black activist Bayard Rustin a "homosexual fag," and that the two sons of Tom Atkins, leader of the Boston chapter of the NAACP, were arrested for pursesnatching. The lawyer to whom he said he had shown a transcript of Abernathy's and Rustin's sex trials said last week she has no recollection of seeing the documents, and workers at the NAACP office said they knew nothing of the alleged arrests.

While personifying some of the worst characteristics of the city hack, O'Neil lacks the political sophistication that usually makes urban machines work. He has no allies, contacts or organizations. Former Boston Mayor James Michael Curley is his idol, he says, and Dapper claims to have been a good friend of Curley's. Representative Frank, perhaps remembering that Curley was once elected from a jail cell, commented, "Curley was a pretty indiscriminate fellow, so it's quite likely."

O'Neil lost seven city races before he was given what was left of Louise Day Hicks' council term when she left the position and he won re-election in '75. He got the post because he had finished tenth in a race for nine spots. The loudest, most unrestrained of the candidates in any race he has entered, the media portrayed O'Neil as a joke, and like Dr. Frankenstein, it lost control of the monster it had created. His antics have gathered a following, and the reason can be found in the shifting social pressures in Boston.

O'Neil was raised in Roxbury off Blue Hill Avenue, in a community where Jews were easily block-busted and the Irish were slowly driven out by the immigration of Southern blacks, Puerto Ricans and other non-white minority groups. To the Irish and other white ethnics with blue-collar jobs and modest neighborhood homes, O'Neil is the man who battles the pro-busers, the suburban liberals and the Yankee businessmen. Members of the gun clubs, American Legion posts and bowling alleys think Dapper is Boston's only honest politician, the one who talks their language. He is a veteran too, and says proudly, "That's why I'm a great American."

Though he calls himself a conservative, O'Neil's politics are exceedingly shallow. His only national connection besides Wallace is John Wayne: he has a poster of Wayne in a cowboy outfit endorsing the Young Americans for Freedom and a postcard addressed to "Dapper" hanging on his office wall. A friend of YAF "When they were kids," O'Neill says he dislikes the John Birch Society although "a lot of the things they said are coming true." During the day I spent with him his only unsolicited comment on national politics concerned Earl Butz: "He shouldn't have resigned, he was only telling the truth."

Before State Secretary of Education Paul Parks, a black, left his post as director of the Model Cities Program in the White administration, he was O'Neil's favorite target. Throughout 1973, Dapper threatened that he would have Parks indicted for stealing $23 million, but no case ever materialized. After Parks left, reform-minded Police Commissioner Robert diGrazia--"The fuckin' Messiah," Dapper says--became his target. O'Neil maintains that diGrazia and his corps of civilian advisors are part of a domestic CIA conspiracy organized through the National Police Foundation. As evidence, he points to diGrazia's friendship with MBTA Director Robert Kiley, a former CIA official.

THIS KIND OF BEHAVIOR has made Dapper the Joey Gallo of the City Council. Though he has no allies, O'Neil refuses to make deals or cooperate with the Mayor. "White can shove that patronage up his ass," he says bluntly. While Kerrigan and Council President Hicks have carefully built up their patronage machines and index card files, Dapper performs favors without collecting IOU's. When many Councilors spent over $40,000 in their re-election campaigns, Dapper limited his budget to $1800 and hired no employees. The media has an unofficial black-out on his many charges, but he is occasionally seen on television or heard on a radio talk-show--the councilor cultivates his grassroots support by constant performances, not seasonal campaigns.

Dapper picks up on legitimate issues that worry many Boston voters. In a city where 62 per cent of the property is untaxed and businesses like the Prudential and John Hancock Insurance Companies get substantial abatements, he is the most vocal opponent of tax-free church property and college dormitories. With the property tax rising 25 per cent this year, the problem is acute.

The scandal-ridden city administration that gives Mayor White three cars, a private boat, a near-million-dollar entertainment center called the Parkman House, and unlimited patronage is a deserving target for anyone's tirades. The nine-member city council itself--made up of seven lawyers and an undertaker, all of whom are sometimes too busy to work full-time and are always too close to the Mayor--is a body that deserves strident criticism.

The little people in Boston--the garage attendants, janitors, longshoremen and city employees--like the Dap's style and feed him information as well as votes. He knew a teacher had been attacked in Hyde Park High School before School Superintendent Marion Fahey did. The workers at Dorchester District Court sent him an anonymous letter alleging improprieties that made the presiding judge call O'Neil nervously to explain. He claims to know every Boston cop by his first or last name, which is how he discovered that 14 city tow trucks bought, insured and registered over two years ago have never been used. He brags, "I got a dossier on every son of a bitch in this city."

Like many publicity hungry Boston politicians, he was a leader of the anti-busing movement. Blaming all of the city's problems on busing, whether the issue is economic, political or educational, O'Neil was always at the head of the protest rallies and marches, stirring up the crowd and gaining votes.

WHILE HE RILES against the Boston press as "maggots," he likes reporters and blames only editors for his troubles. "Nobody wants to print the fuckin' truth," he says. Although they had never met, Dapper had an ongoing feud with the elegant Boston Globe columnist, the late George Frazier '32. "He's where he belongs," O'Neil says. "I pissed on his grave one night...sure, I was sober.... He was a fag with that fuckin' flower."

A bachelor, Dapper humorously flirts with most of the white women he meets, including Wallace's sister-in-law. He seems preoccupied with homosexuals and black women, often commenting on their looks or just impolitely staring, saying "that black cunt" or "There goes a big red mama."

Dapper's mentality is like that of any good Roxbury Memorial High football lineman: he sees himself pitted against the world, fighting hard. "When I get someone by the fuckin' throat, I never let go." But to whites with a Boston accent and preferably a blue-collar background, he can be crudely pleasant, almost charismatic. Extremely friendly and accessible. O'Neil is as close to a Ralph Cramden as he is to an Archie Bunker.

This elected prankster is not unique in the city. School Committeewoman Elvira "Pixie" Palladino ("She's got balls," Dapper says) achieved her notoriety by slugging Ted Kennedy at an anti-busing protest rally. There are plenty of clowns at places like Whitey McGrail's and Kelly's Tavern who help make the beers go down more pleasantly. By a series of accidents, the media and voters have launched O'Neil into perpetual orbit. A politician who cannot mobilize support, cultivate influence or avoid social solecisms, he was spawned by the social, political and economic problems that trouble the frightened white urban working class. As Barney Frank explained. "He's one of the prices we have to pay for busing."