Diane Modica

A close race where politics are brutal

by Yvonne Abraham

You want rough? East Boston city councilor Diane Modica knows rough. Her first council run, for instance, when her father took to disappearing. He was 80 years old then, and suffering from the dementia that's since put him in a nursing home. Several times during the 1993 campaign, somebody picked him up, took him for a little ride, then set him free. Modica would then get reports that he was wandering, aimless and confused, in places he couldn't have gotten to by himself. In the same campaign, one of her worker's tires were slashed, and a supporter's car suddenly went up in flames one October night. Not nice.

Modica looks a lot like Ann Bancroft, with dark, curly hair and deep shadows under her eyes. She grew up and went to school in East Boston, back when her father and her uncles were all longshoremen, and she still lives there today. Ask her how she'll handle what looks to be her most difficult election yet and she laughs. "If we got through the 1993 election," she says, "we can get through this."

Still, this time it's a little different: in a year when the mayor and most city councilors look set to sail right into another term, Modica's one of the few municipal politicians with problems. Her bid for a third term pits her against lawyer and North End native Paul Scapicchio.

Scapicchio has some serious political heft, and in Modica's own neighborhood, too: a good campaign organization (he says his workers number 200 so far) that includes his uncle, Louis Scapicchio, an extremely popular former East Boston police captain. He also enjoys the support of former councilors John Nucci (now Suffolk Superior Court clerk-magistrate) and Richard Iannella (now register of probate). Scapicchio had weeks to collect the 200 signatures needed to run for council. He got 600 names -- 200 each from East Boston, Charlestown, and the North End, which together make up the district -- in one day. "We wanted to send a message," he says.

Scapicchio claims Modica is most vulnerable right where she lives. "We checked the numbers," he says. "In 1993, she ran against Jimmy Costello, an Irish guy, and he beat her in East Boston." He says he has at least a hundred Scapicchio signs planted in East Boston front yards already.

"Signs don't vote," counters Modica, displaying some of the fire she'll need when the race heats up. "He's the one who needs name recognition. I've worked my whole life long in the East Boston community. When I lost East Boston, it was by 50 votes, and that was with every person behind the scenes working against me."

Scapicchio isn't the only problem; rumors of grudges abound. Word is that Menino is pissed at Modica because she's too independent, so he's giving Scapicchio's campaign a boost. That Nucci is supporting Scapicchio to get Modica back for helping vote Jimmy Kelly in as council president instead of him. That Iannella is helping him because he wants a big Italian turnout so that his sister, Suzanne, who's running for an at-large council seat, will have a better chance of garnering those votes. All of which has been publicly denied, of course, as you'd expect.

And none of which Modica particularly wants to discuss in front of her neighbors at a Jeffries Point Neighborhood Association picnic, in a tiny park at the end of her street, where an eggplant lasagna, a seafood salad, a fat Irish ham, and all manner of unnatural-colored cookies sit half-demolished on a rickety trestle table under a scraggly tree. As dusk begins to dilute the dense, wet heat of a 95-degree day, 30 people sit on benches in tenty dresses or shorts -- chatting, puffing away at cigarettes, complaining about airport noise and other tribulations of life on the other side of the harbor.

Modica does the rounds.

"Hi, Die-yann. You look classy."

Modica wears a fitted navy-blue ensemble and gold earrings. The heels of her gold-trimmed shoes stick in the grass. "How's ya mother?" she asks a short-haired, craggy-faced woman in a big pink sundress, who has temporarily broken her long chain of cigarettes for a slice of watermelon.

"Ah, it's a mess," the woman says in her tobacco-gravel voice, gnawing the watermelon down to the nub. "Some days she's good. Some days she's screwy. She injured her throat. She can't swallow."

The two old women next to her shake their heads sadly. "That's bad," they say together. As a district councilor, it's Modica's job to know if her constituents have sick mothers. The at-large councilors can afford to take on the big issues like education, Modica says. She's got to deal with the district stuff -- flight paths, the Big Dig, parking in the North End, the helping of old ladies into subsidized housing.

That's what she's doing here at the picnic -- checking in with the folks who call her office and ask her to do things for them. And trying to keep them loyal.

Unfortunately for Modica, many of those same folks also rather like Tom Menino, and she doesn't want them to take sides.

"The mayor and I have agreed on a lot of things, and I've assisted him in a lot of things," Modica says carefully, eyeing the white-haired man beside her. "There are people around him who see my style as too independent, maybe."

Still, Modica insists she's not worried. "We're confident," she says. "We're not taking anything for granted, but we'll let people judge us by what we've accomplished. . . . Property values are up an average of $15,000 from last year. All this political gamesmanship -- people will see right through it, and we'll prevail."

"What would Boston be," she asks, "without a highly contested race?"