Dealing with "Fast Eddie"

After she voted with the Independent bloc during a City Council meeting, Ald. Vito Marzullo rushed up to 48th Ward Alderman Marion Volini and demanded to know why she had cast her vote with them.

                “You’re a fine Italian woman,” he declared (she was Irish, her husband was Italian). “Why are you voting with those bums?”

                 Marion was a nice person and polite to everybody. She had backed a Machine candidate in a previous election and had friends and relatives in the Machine, so some folks didn’t understand why she allied herself with the Independents.

                It’s possible that feeling may even have touched powerful 10th Ward Alderman Edward Vrdolyak, although most observers would have said it surely hadn’t. He was the dominant party pol in the Council.

                Marion asked him to appoint her head of a sub-committee of his Buildings and Zoning Committee to investigate building code enforcement problems. To the surprise of quite a few people, he did.

                Maybe he thought the issue needed some attention but didn’t want his political allies to be put in a position of criticizing landlords, who often supported them financially. Or maybe he didn’t want anything to be done and felt that Marion was just a nice lady who wouldn’t cause any harm.

                Well, she got results. And neither Vrdolyak nor any other Machine Alderman tried to stop her.

 Get the details in “An Inside Job: A Frank Recollection of 48th Ward Happenings” at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/992452