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Where the old Tammany used to pass around food baskets and coal buckets, De Sapio's Tammany makes public-minded donations to blood banks. Where the old bosses packed the City Hall with hoodlums and hacks, De Sapio helps to find good men—Tammany men, that is—to work in Mayor Robert Wagner's administration. Says Wagner: "I have never made any commitments to Carmine." Then he adds: "Of course, it's often good to get his reaction to an appointment because his advice is usually good." Where the old bosses chewed cigars in back rooms, De Sapio sees himself as Tammany's good-will ambassador ("He's to Tammany what Commander Whitehead is to Schweppes," says an admirer). He averages a dozen speeches a week (generally beginning, "I am very happy to be here tonight") before all sorts of groups, ranging from Israel Bond Drivers to the Harvard Law School Forum.
Where the old Tammany was formerly organized from the top down, De Sapio sponsored a new law which will make it much easier for insurgents to become Democratic district leaders by direct election.
Long Live the King. De Sapio had to fight every inch of the way to where he is. Even his nativity carried a brand that still sears his political outlook. He was born 46 years ago, an Italian in an Irish sea. The lower Greenwich Village neighborhood of his birth was about 95% Irish, about 5% Italian. (Today, the ratio in that neighborhood is almost precisely reversed.) His father, Gerard De Sapio, came to the U.S. at the age of ten from Avellino, some 30 miles inland from Naples. Recalls Gerard: "We were on a flat-bottomed scow, maybe like the Staten Island ferry, if you know what I mean, but I thought it was the greatest ship in the world. I used to go up on the deck and look at the sea and dream we were all going to be rich." Carmine's mother, Marietta, was born in New York of Avellinan parents, and a shrewd, enterprising girl she was: by the time she married at 17, she had bought a couple of horses, hired some drivers, and was running her own hauling business.
With Carmine, Marietta was in labor for six days. During that time, Avellinans camped anxiously and uproariously in the De Sapio apartment. Says Marietta: "When my Carmine came, God bless 'im, it was like I had a king born. Altogether, the people stayed in the house nine days—maybe 30 of them. I was very sick, but I had no time to think about it. We ate and sang and had a big party all the time. Carmine was a king."
Carmine found out soon enough that kings are made, not born, in New York's racial and cultural jungles. De Sapio still winces when reminded of the "Wop" cry that came at him from all sides in his boyhood. The fact of his Italian ancestry has followed him always. It held him back in politics for precious years. De Sapio is talking about the old Irish bosses when he says, with low-keyed but intense anger, "I was the first leader they really gave the treatment to; I had to win three elections before they would seat me."