At the age of seven, John O'Hara was writing letters to his congressman, complaining that he paid sales tax on toys but didn't have the right to vote. Four years later, he worked his first campaign, McGovern for president, handing out flyers, and was devastated when McGovern lost in a landslide. By the age of sixteen, he was investigating malfeasance for the high school news-paper and caused a minor storm when he got the school principal fired for not having a principal's license. The story made the Daily News.

To O'Hara, muckraking and reform-cleaning up Brooklyn, changing the world-were the only legitimate reasons to get into politics. The reform movement of 1974 gave him the chance. The boss of Brooklyn then was the legendary Meade Esposito, who, like the bosses before him, became rich fleecing the system. Like them, he was fat, jolly, profane, mob-connected, vengeful as an emperor, kind to his neighborhood, and frank about his larceny. Like them, he was at one point "boss of the fucking state," as he himself said; Governor Nelson Rockefeller sent him a Picas-so for his favors. "Don't say I was honest," Esposito told reporters, "just say I never got caught."

His preferred medium of graft was the justice system itself, the lawyers and the made judges who gave the lawyers business or found favorably in their cases. It was also the local newspapers that advertised courthouse auctions. It was the landlords and developers who contributed to the party and got the zoning or tax breaks they wanted; the printers who got the palm card and petition contracts; the civil-service unions whose "merit" employment was rarely enforced. No-bid, backroom dealing sealed these relationships, all of them vaguely legal and perfectly corrupt.

The 1974 reform that hoped to clean all this up was, like most municipal revolts, messianic, middle class, sincere, and righteous. It rose out of the run-down Irish enclave of row houses and walk-ups of central Brooklyn, the neighborhoods of Park Slope and Sunset Park, where O'Hara grew up. The rebels met in an old smoky storefront that had three folding chairs, a folding table, and one phone; they traveled in a rusty van, throwing buttons from a big white bag while people threw eggs at their heads. They ran candidates for district leader, state senate, state assembly, and for governor they backed Sunset Park's congressman, Hugh Carey, whom Esposito strongly opposed. The slate swept to victory; O'Hara got his first taste of drunkenness in celebration.

By the 1980s, however, the movement had dwindled to a few recognizable figures, chief among them a Yale graduate and Manhattan lawyer named Jim Brennan, who, as the state assembly-man from Park Slope, would become known for his integrity and shrewdness. And yet, as so often happens, Brennan's reform soon became a ma-chine of its own. This wasn't in keeping with the world-shattering revolt young O'Hara had envisioned, and in its own way was an even more threatening repudiation of everything O'Hara had hoped for.