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NICK GIANNONE
Activist poster boy
BY CAMILLE DODERO

It was around this time last year that Nick Giannone ended up as the face of the Democratic National Convention protests.

The 29-year-old Quincy resident was arrested for assault and battery on a public official amid a shutter-snapping pack of deadline-driven photographers on Canal Street. Since then, Giannone’s face has been used to illustrate an inaccurate Boston Herald article about an ominous "anarchist cell," and he has been found not guilty on that assault-and-battery charge. Despite all the hullabaloo, Giannone is a pretty straightforward guy. At the end of the day, he’s really just a person against assholes.

"I was always a troublemaker in school, and my problems with authority followed me into adult life," he says on a recent Saturday at Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square, wearing a black T-shirt with the warning danger police in area below a policeman shooting a person. "I just became more methodical about them."

A Weymouth native who works as a union boilermaker, Giannone says that one of his proudest accomplishments came in 2000, when he helped organize Weymouth High School walkouts in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Before the event even happened, he made headlines when Weymouth police arrested him for violating the city’s "tagging" laws by fliering telephone poles with protest announcements.

"You’re getting this mostly white suburban school taking a stand for a former Black Panther accused of killing a cop," Giannone says of his Weymouth coup. "It’s one of those it-can’t-happen-here things."

When John Ashcroft descended on Faneuil Hall to defend the Patriot Act in 2002, Giannone printed up fliers with Ashcroft’s head transposed over Jack Nicholson’s infamous "Here’s Johnny" shot from The Shining and credited them to the fictional organization People Against Assholes. Two years later, during the presidential election, Giannone designed white T-shirts with the proclamation they both suck beneath Bush’s and Kerry’s faces. He likes that sort of blunt tone. "It makes people laugh and it shows profound disrespect to [people] who deserve it."

Then the DNC came to town. During a Canal Street protest march on the convention’s last day, Boston Police superintendent Robert Dunford’s navy-blue hat went flying off his head. All hell broke loose, and suddenly cops had Giannone pinned to the ground. Since this confrontation happened in the midst of a national news story that really wasn’t generating much news, images of Giannone’s arrest — grimacing painfully as a beefy police officer pulled a thick strap around his neck — became the news.

"It looked worse than it felt," says Giannone, who does see a benefit to having a picture of a cop strangling him all over the media. "Sometimes you have to see some confrontation on the streets so that people who aren’t around to see it know that there’s opposition."

A few weeks ago, after nearly a year of court dates, a jury found Giannone not guilty of assault and battery. But the drawn-out process wasn’t without its ongoing repercussions. Last February, the Herald ran an inaccurate story about an "anarchist cell" that had been operating in the Hub and used a file photo of Giannone at the DNC — connecting the two because supportive anarchists had called him a "comrade" online.

Giannone didn’t testify at his own trial. Recalling the day he was arrested, he confesses, "I won’t say my behavior was entirely lawful, but I didn’t assault anyone. And that’s what I was charged with." But did he toss Superintendent Dunford’s hat?

"Someone definitely threw a hat," he says matter-of-factly. "I saw it land."


Issue Date: July 22 - 28, 2005
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