PERTH AMBOY - Cops told political operative Jim Devine he was illegally parked and asked him to leave when he tried to engage Perth Amboy Mayor Wilda Diaz following her press conference.

"I have a right to speak," Devine shouted, before police escorted him from the scene.

"Mayor," Devine tried as Diaz ended the press conference. "Mayor. Mayor..."

"Pay your child support," a woman shouted as Devine went to move his car.

A political consultant for Billy Delgado, who's running against Diaz in the November mayor's election, Devine showed up uninvited to the event where the mayor and Democratic elected officials criticized the operative for sending the mayor email denouncing her as too dumb for her job. 

Diaz demolished Devine at the outdoor podium.

"I have been receiving emails, disrespectful and actually an embarrassment that I would be receiving, the chairman of the board, the person that has to deal with the worst corruption the city has ever seen," said the woman who beat the jailed Mayor Joe Vas. "I was receiving those emails calling me stupid and saying I couldn't be with my counterparts. I knew I had to put a stop to that. I'm proud to be elected the first woman in the history of Perth Amboy."

Then Devine tried to speak, blocked out by the jutting shoulders of approaching police officers.

After moving his vehicle, he later returned, sat, and took questions from the media.

“Billy Delgado didn’t see the emails,” Devine said, in reference to his mayoral candidate.

Fighting off a murmur of disgust created by his presence on the green, the controversial operative ackowledged he went through "a messy divorce."

His ex-wife Dawn filed a complaint in Union Township in 2007, charging her husband with beating her up, "striking her in the stomach with his elbow, pinning her against the car, causing a bruise to the arm and elbow," according to the 2007 complaint.

Devine said the court found him innocent of domestic violence seven times.

"I was never guilty," he said.

He decribed himself as an ardent feminist.

"The women there castigating me today disappointed me," Devine said later. "They don't know me."

The operative also objected to police preventing him from addressing the mayor at a public event.

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