A lot of ink and bluster have been spilled over yesterday’s confrontation between Councillors Giorgio Mammoliti and Gord Perks. I won’t add to it other than to say that Jack Lakey, the Star’s Fixer, wrote a blog post detailing a spat between his younger self, when he worked the City Hall beat, and Mammoliti:
At one point [Mammoliti] told me – in front of other people in the council chamber – that I wrote the stories because I was anti-Italian. And then he walked away.
I was livid, not just at the comment, but at his timely evacuation of the danger zone.
In those days, I was a lot more jumped up and charged with testosterone. It was a serious challenge not to chase him down.
I called aside his executive assistant at the time, a good guy named Anthony Cesario, and asked him to pass along a message to George: If he ever said anything like that again, I’d drop him.
I was quite capable of it, and George knew it; he never came near me for months afterward.
If he’d followed through, Lakey would certainly have come to be known as The Fixer, but different reasons than he is now.