The reform machine in Brooklyn made no such error, positing itself as the honest alternative to the "regular" machine that chugged on even after Meade Esposito died in 1993 (eighty-six years old and $6 million richer). The reformers thrived as a result-won elections, got posts, drew state money-but to an outsider they looked more like a toothless minority party that, true to reform's finest tradition, never got much done.

Such was the relative value of honesty. As for John O'Hara, he had a premium on the stuff; by the mid-1990s he was considered a failure in politics, a perennial loser. His base, the elderly Irish and Italians of Sunset Park, had died off or evaporated to the suburbs, replaced by Hispanic power that the reform machine had channeled to its own ends.

Somehow, though, he managed to get on the ballot year after year. In the demented labyrinths of New York state election law, this can amount to an epic act, for New York allows nominating petitions to be challenged by one's opponent on the most picayune grounds (a bungled address, a typo, an unsigned cover sheet). Each year, vast sums are spent on eagle-eyed election lawyers, who at $400 an hour invalidate one by one the signatures on the green sheets, nullifying entire candidacies under the pall of court-clogging "petition fraud" lawsuits. The result of this often inane rite is that the state of New York for years produced over 50 percent of all election litigation in the United States. Ironically, these traps and pitfalls, designed to prevent the wholesale election frauds perfected by the old machine, are now the chief machine weapon to quell insurgency.

In election year 1996, the year of his arrest, John O'Hara had fought from under a particularly long and brutal petition challenge by Jim Brennan. He was also under investigation by the Brooklyn district attorney. Men from the D.A.'s office had shown up at his mother's house, banging on the door, asking for her, for him, but his mother was too frightened to answer. The detectives visited his campaign headquarters and his apartment, where they'd rifled his garbage, tossing it in the street. O'Hara kept on the move, staying with friends, living on couches, convinced that his phone was tapped.

The election itself, on September 10, was "the worst electoral debacle in modern city history," according to the Village Voice. By mid-day, polling places had collapsed into chaos, following the late arrival of some 1,700 voting booths that were expected to be delivered overnight from the city Board of Elections. Crowds of angry voters queued in the unseasonable heat and were finally sent home, and investigators later concluded that at least 10,000 Brooklynites, and possibly many more, were disenfranchised, victims of an internecine war over control of the patronage-rich surrogate's court. Fittingly, a local newspaper soon ran a cartoon showing U.N. blue helmets marching into Brooklyn with guns drawn.

O'Hara's own paranoia proved prescient that day as well, when his girlfriend was attacked on the street as she handed out flyers for his campaign. Court records identified the assailant as John Keefe, the chief of staff to Assemblyman Brennan. According to O'Hara's girlfriend, it was Brennan himself who piloted the car in which Keefe fled after tearing up her posters and knocking her to the ground. Brennan would not talk to me about this incident, nor would Keefe. Standing amid the police officers and flashing lights and watching his weeping girlfriend give a statement, O'Hara for a brief moment wanted to get in a car and find Brennan and his maniac staffer. But that wasn't his way. The courts, he vowed, would settle things.

Keefe was soon the beneficiary of an oddly lax justice, courtesy of the Brooklyn district attorney. Indeed, charged with assault and sex abuse in the third degree, Keefe failed to appear at the many hearings, in contravention of basic procedure (criminal defendants are normally al-ways required to appear in person). After a year of adjournments, the main witness for the girl-friend moved to Florida, Keefe copped to a minor harassment plea, and the D.A.'s assistants would not be further distracted. They were apparently busy on a more pressing matter.

Six weeks after the events of September 10, John O'Hara received word from the Brooklyn D.A. that he was a wanted man, for charges unknown. O'Hara surrendered in a kind of fugue shock, riding the subway to the Court Street station, to the D.A.'s office tower, where an aide brought him to a room of peeling plaster and sat him down and handed him the indictment, which told an odd story. From October 1992 to October 1993, O'Hara lived in two apartments in Brooklyn; O'Hara had registered to vote from the second of these two apartments. This second apartment, unfortunately, appeared not to fit the parameters of what the law defines as a "fixed permanent and principal home." In the ridiculous language of New York state election law, a "fixed" home derives its legitimacy by being the place "to which [the voter] wherever temporarily located always intends to return." In essence, the law states that a citizen with no fixed location-say, someone living in a hotel, or a transient in a shelter, or studying in a dormitory, or someone with two homes (since only one of these can be "principal and permanent")-forfeits the right to vote. Like much of New York state election law, the statute is absurd and imbecilic, and has long been determined unconstitutional under federal law. For this reason, no one in the annals of the state had ever been successfully prosecuted under its rubric-until People v. O'Hara. (Incidentally, John O'Hara is the only New Yorker to be convicted of illegal voting since 1873, when suffragette Susan B. Anthony was tried and convicted.) And if voting was the crime, O'Hara was a model recidivist. He had voted in every election for which he was eligible from age eighteen on-scores of ballots over a life-time. But now a detective fingerprinted him with a worn-out ink pad, flashbulbed him for a mug shot, cuffed him, and took him to a holding cell. The prisoners, three black men, laughed when they heard the charge, and someone muttered, "Glad I don't vote."

Thus began a legal odyssey that has lasted eight years. The case originated in the office of O'Hara's nemesis, Brennan. It was pursued as a favor and then as part of an ultimate calculus by another Irishman, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles "Joe" Hynes, who today remains a pure creature of the Brooklyn machine. D.A. Hynes would regret having ever touched it; he himself turned out to be guilty of almost the very same crime, having once registered to vote from his Brooklyn office (most certainly not a legitimate residence, since he never lived at the location)." Hynes expected O'Hara to plead out to a misdemeanor. But O'Hara was belligerent, and when the case went to trial O'Hara openly mocked his prosecutor. The judge offered him a second plea deal, a variant of a no contest, but this, again, meant standing down, admitting guilt. "Fuck that," O'Hara said. When he was finally convicted in July of 1999, after a mistrial and a reversal on appeal, the court in its ire fined him $20,000, gave him probation, and told him to clean the borough's garbage. Certain of vindication, O'Hara appealed the decision a total of ten times, through three state courts and two U.S. appellates, until at last the U.S. Supreme Court, in January 2004, declined to hear his motion to dismiss.

* So, too, was George Herbert Walker Bush, who while he was vice-president in Washington, D.C., maintained a "residence," for voting purposes, at the Houstonian Hotel in Houston, Texas. In fact, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people could be indicted under the O'Hara precedent, most prominently the poor in urban enclaves, the minorities and immigrants who are historically nomadic but often within the same voting district.