Bilal Beasley

Team Irvington chief D. Bilal Beasely, center, campaigns for Corzine with Assemblywoman Cleopatra Tucker (D-Newark) and Corzine Campaign Director Phil Alagia

IRVINGTON - The early word from Irvington is that the Newark neighbor is poised to receive almost the same number of votes as it did four years ago.

Corzine in 2005 received 9,200 votes in Irvington. Operatives who have been following the numbers all day anticipate the governor receiving nearly 10,000 votes in the city.

"I believe Corzine's going to win," said Council President John Sowell, an ally of Team Irvington leader Councilman D. Bilal Beasely, the chief GOTV point person in Irvington.

But Essex County party operatives continue to worry about GOP candidate Chris Christie's performance in the suburbs of Essex County, where he was raised and attended high school.

Gov. Jon Corzine with Irvington Mayor Wayne Smith, left, and Team Irvington founder Freeholder/Councilman D. Bilal Beasley.

IRVINGTON - Gov. Jon Corzine's informal endorsement tonight of Mayor Wayne Smith when the two walked on Springfield Avenue came shortly after Smith heartily endorsed the incumbent governor on the steps of City Hall as someone who understands the plight of this Essex County town of perennial hard knocks.

The knock on Smith usually comes in the form of a whisper.

"We've been together from the beginning," the governor said of the mayor, who for almost two years has heard the murmurs when he walks past - "Keith Reid named him in court as Irvington Official #1," and inevitably fielded reporters' repeated phone calls asking him if he plans to resign.

If not today, what about tomorrow?

"What you learn in this business is a public official can be accused of anything," Smith told PolitickerNJ.com. "You live with these things and you live through them. I haven't heard anything from the U.S. Attorney's Office, but more importantly, I didn't do anything wrong."

Newark Mayor Cory Booker

NEWARK – Television star Oprah Winfrey’s decision this month to drop a $500,000 gift on Steve Adubato’s North Ward Center effectively stamps out the fuse on a standoff between the North Ward Democratic leader and Winfrey confidante Mayor Cory Booker, in a resolution that underscores the political strengths of the two main combatants.

If Adubato, native Newarker and a grizzled guru now in his seventies, proved his relevance by waging a war in the streets and alleys he has known since childhood, Booker the Bergen County outsider turned Newark activist and statewide star, proved his manna from Heaven connections. 

And the community won in the end, according to sources from both camps, as Adubato’s Blue Ribbon charter school, the Robert Treat Academy - whose students consistently rate higher math and science test scores than students in schools in all of urban New Jersey and all of Essex County - stands to get an unprecedented infusion of funds.

The contribution came with a back story.  

For almost as long as Booker’s been in office, Adubato poked, prodded, cajoled, and chest-thumped in the face of the young star’s particular power, and now sources close to the North Ward leader say he intends to endorse the first term mayor for reelection next year.

It’s been an odd relationship.

North Ward Councilman David Lyons in his campaign headquarters on Monday night. 

IRVINGTON - Gene Etchison approaches a sprawling old house on the corner of Clinton Avenue and tells the resident when he steps outside, "I love your grass. It’s cut real nice. I love to lie down in the grass, that’s why I always notice it when I go by here."

The man shakes the candidate's hand. He knows it’s the day before Election Day.

He confesses he has a problem with the way Mayor Wayne Smith’s administration is running the town, and he tells Etchison he’d like to go to Town Hall and tell them they need to improve the sanitation department - and everything else for that matter, but he just doesn’t have the energy anymore.

Sen. Ron Rice (D-Essex)Sen. Ronald Rice (D-Essex) hopes his written request to Attorney General Anne Milgram for an investigative audit of Irvington, cc’d to voters, will give North Ward Councilman David Lyons a leg up in Tuesday’s municipal elections.

A vocal critic of Mayor Wayne Smith’s management of the Essex County town and often the lone dissenting vote on the council, 12-year incumbent Lyons is in a competitive race with Newark Det. Gene Etchison.

Lyons has questions about his town’s obligation to pay the state back $8 million over a 20-year period, a result of the Smith administration’s bonding without the permission of the state Department of Community Affairs.

Rice has the same questions.

Council President John SowellIRVINGTON - A political pragmatist who insists his insider knowledge of how government works does not diminish his closeness to the community, Council President John Sowell says an aggressive opponent in the West Ward doesn’t know enough about the process to serve.

An executive with the sheet metal workers union, Sowell originally thought he was only going to be running against 21-year old Keith White, political acolyte of North Ward Councilman David Lyons.

Now he’s also trying to stare down an old contemporary.

It’s a three-way race in Irvington’s West Ward with Sowell intending to fend off not just National Guardsman White but one-time ally turned vocal detractor, security guard Cedric Hunter.

Challenger Cedric HunterHunter and Sowell fell out after Hunter, a leader of the Irvington Alliance, failed to spirit the council president away from Team Irvington, a group founded and run by At-Large Councilman (and Freeholder) Bilal Beasley, who was wounded in an unsuccessful challenge last year of Sen. Ronald Rice (D-Essex).

"Bilal Beasley’s run of victories at the county level are over and soon the people who so openly supported him will besiege him to rid themselves of his disgrace," Hunter wrote to Sowell soon after Beasley’s loss. "As one of his most obedient cohorts, your name is closely aligned with his. Hopefully, you will see that the handwriting is on the wall and Bilal Beasley’s career in politics will (not) last for too much longer."

The retirement this year of Johnny Jones from the Essex County Board of Chosen Freeholders left a vacancy, which Newark Mayor Cory Booker wanted to fill with long time South Ward ally Terrance Bankston. 

On Saturday, however, the party selected Rufus Johnson - chief of staff to Sen. Ronald Rice (D-Essex), the man Booker defeated for mayor in 2006.

Johnson will run on the line with incumbent freeholders Ralph Caputo, Linda Cavanaugh, Carol Clark, Blonnie Watson, Bilal Beasley, Patricia Sebold, Samuel Gonzalez and Donald Payne, Jr.

Councilman David LyonsIRVINGTON - North Ward Councilman David Lyons and Gene Etchison started out as friends and political allies, with Etchison drawn to the older man’s fireball activism.

As president of the local tenants association, Lyons didn’t care who he offended in his drive for better housing, and he took that attitude into a run for City Council in 1996.

"We used to go door to door together," recalled Etchison of Lyons’ first campaign. "I was like his little brother."

That didn’t last.

Lyons won. But though he successfully backed Etchison for district leader, Etchison then ran against Lyons with the muscle of South Ward boss D. Bilal Beasley and Team Irvington behind him.Challenger Gene Etchison

The councilman took the challenge as a betrayal.

"When I see him around, we don’t talk, said Lyons. "I lost respect for him after that."

A police officer and Marine Corps veteran who is the godson of Assemblywoman Cleopatra Tucker, Etchison said it was only political inevitability that propelled him into the arena against a man he once admired, but whom he came to see as a chronic naysayer.

IRVINGTON - Council President John Sowell and Councilman David Lyons stepped up their attacks on each other this week, as each aggressively backs a candidate in the other’s ward in the upcoming Irvington Council race.

Sowell, an eight-year veteran of the council and friend of Mayor Wayne Smith, hopes Gene Etchison bumps Lyons off the council in north Irvington.

“Some people are tired of Lyons being condescending,” Sowell said of the 12-year council veteran. “His service is a combination of demagoguery, bad attendance and an inconsistent, contradictory voting record. I can’t tell you the number of people I meet who ask me, ‘When is this guy going to stop complaining?’”

State Sen. Ronald Rice (left) and his Democratic primary challenger, Essex County Freeholder Bilal Beasley

Although they come from the same neighborhood, these men tell different stories about their past.

They’re the same age. They graduated from high school in the same era and in their early 60s now they’re old enough to recall another Newark, distant from the one that exists. As African-Americans inspired by King and Malcolm X and the pressures of history on urban America, Ronald Rice and Bilal Beasley started their public careers in local government, Rice in 1978 on the Newark City Council and Beasley in 1984 on the council of neighboring Irvington.

They have their own scars, but their memories diverge most starkly when they reflect on what drove them into politics.