Johnny G. goes down

Some late election news broke over the Thanksgiving weekend. “Did you hear Gregorio lost?” my brother asked me. That sounded absurd. I told him he must have read it wrong. But there it was on the Internet.
The Hon. John T. Gregorio, the Democrat who has served on and off as the mayor of Linden, N.J., since 1968, lost his bid for a ninth term on Nov. 7. He lost by 74 votes out of some 9,000 cast, to a city councilman and former ally who ran as an independent.
Linden is a city of about 35,000 in Union County, just south of Newark International Airport, with about as many Navajo as Republicans. During the opening credits of “The Sopranos,” Tony drives down the New Jersey Turnpike past several huge oil tanks. That’s Linden. It’s working-class Jersey all the way, largely Polish and Italian. The city is proud of its petroleum industry, less so of its hazardous-waste disposal facilities. It was at one time home to Safety-Kleen and GAF and a huge General Motors plant. It rivals Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for good Polish delis.
My first job as a reporter was covering Linden in the mid-1990s, and dealing with Gregorio was always a guilty pleasure, so much so that I used to entertain my family with retellings of our conversations. He would call me every week and holler, “Ducklisss! Tiss is Johnny Gee!” He looked like a chiseled Ernest Borgnine. Kids and old people loved him, and everyone else kind of put up with him. Nobody serious challenged him.
His first stint as mayor lasted 15 years, until, as the Newark Star-Ledger put it, “he was convicted for hiding a financial interest in two Linden go-go bars.” It was a felony, and the mayor, who was also the region’s state senator, was given a time-out. He paid a fine and spent two years on probation, until 1990, when then-Gov. Tom Kean, a Republican, pardoned him. Why? Don’t ask. Kean never discussed it publicly. There were all kinds of rumors.
So Gregorio ran again and won again and served another 15 years, uninterrupted and unindicted — a raid of his office by the feds here and there notwithstanding, it proved invaluable to have nothing but Democratic attorneys general in the Garden State — until this year, when he was finally bested by Richard Gerbounka, a retired Linden police captain.
I remembered Gerbounka’s name but not my impression of him. (It’s been more than 10 years, after all. By 2016, God willing, I’ll have forgotten everything I know about Dorothy Goosby.) I read that he was part of the Gregorio team until they had a falling out.
With his victory, Gerbounka promised sweeping reforms. On his Web site, www.richformayor.com, he listed some of Gregorio’s more exotic schemes while pledging, if elected, to institute a hiring freeze, cut the mayor’s salary and “Eliminate the practice of providing the Mayor with a new Cadillac every 2 years as we do now.”
Times must be good. When I was there it was a Buick Park Avenue.
“I will never order the staff of our Public Works Department to snow plow personal driveways,” Gerbounka further vowed. “They will be dedicated to keeping the streets of Linden clear and safe for the public, not wasting time and tax dollars at the Mayor’s home.”
Well, I’m glad for the people of Linden. Gerbounka may be the real deal, but he owes his career to Gregorio, and there’s no reason to believe this election will change the political culture there or even that this election was any mandate for change: Gregorio is now 80, and he barely campaigned and still almost won.
But I think what happened in Linden is what could someday happen to Long Island: the machines finally got older than the population. Gregorio certainly wasn't self-made, and the political infrastructure a hack like him needed was crumbling. People were tired of being embarrassed by their government.
We on the South Shore, on the other hand, remain contented to be embarrassed. Who was the last incumbent around here to lose an election? On Nov. 7 we re-elected all of our assemblymen, state senators and congresspeople, including a couple of true boneheads. Last year we returned to office the entire county Legislature and Hempstead Town Council. The Long Beach Demo-crats, on the outs for two years after ruling for 40, easily took back power in 2005, and Tom Suozzi’s Democrats now have the same hold on Nassau County that Kate Murray’s Republicans have on the Town of Hempstead. The margins of victory in each election remain vast, largely because the improbability of an upset scares away qualified challengers.
Eventually those young families who aren’t taxed right off Long Island will decide not to put up with what their parents put up with. They’ll see the guy mowing a town park while wearing a GOP T-shirt and not just chalk it up to the way things are. They’ll see a staff photographer follow an elected official to church the same week they get their tax bill and decide they’ve had enough.
History will decide whether Linden gets the reformer its voters think they elected. Someday a slate of real reformers will courageously present themselves to the voters of Nassau County. Perhaps the voters, just as courageously, might give them a shot.