At first, I couldn’t be sure Frank Coconate was real.
When I began covering City Hall about 20 years ago, there was practically no other City of Chicago employee (aldermen included) who would publicly criticize Mayor Richard M. Daley. But Coconate was constantly calling reporters, begging us to cover him.
“I’m just askin’ for a quote, Danny. Pleeeeease. Gimme jus’ one quote,” he would say in his classic Northwest Side, white-etnik accent.
The Chicago Reader’s calendar once featured him in his orange city safety vest, almost totally submerged in the Humboldt Park lagoon, his shaved, bullet-shaped head shimmering just above water.
Back then, I wondered if Coconate actually was a plant created by the mayor to make it look like there was at least some opposition to the new Daley machine. Coconate seemed an illusion devised to subtly tell Chicagoans that only the rule of the man on the 5th Floor could prevent the certain chaos of a City Hall run by garrulous neighborhood guys like “The Coconut.”
But Coconate was an authentic anti-Daley gadfly. That became clear when the administration fired him from his job as a safety specialist for the Department of Water Management.
It wasn’t that Coconate had any deep policy disagreements with Daley. Coconate was a product of the system himself. Before turning on Daley, he was another foot soldier in the armies of city workers mobilized to knock on doors during election season for the second Mayor Daley.
Coconate freely acknowledged his main beef with Daley was that he did not get a more prominent role during City Hall’s free-spending era before the Great Recession.
The Daley administration fired Coconate days before he escorted then-U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. up to the Northwest Side, back when Jackson was flirting with challenging Daley in the 2007 election.
Daley aides said GPS data from his work truck showed Coconate was messing around on the clock. Coconate felt he was being made to pay for his outspoken criticism of Daley, and a federal court monitor later sided with him. Coconate received a $75,000 payment in settlement.
Banished from Daley’s realm, Coconate cycled through several stints with other politicians. He eventually fell out also with 32nd Ward Ald. Scott Waguespack, who hired Coconate at his North Side ward office as an “infrastructure consultant.”
Soon after I quoted Coconate gratefully praising Waguespack, my fellow reporter Mick Dumke and I spotted Coconate having breakfast with Waguespack’s archenemy. Once Coconate realized we’d spotted him in the throes of brazen political cuckoldry, he couldn’t conceal the “oh, crap” look on his face and practically sprinted out of Lou Mitchell’s diner on Clybourn Avenue.
Coconate’s own, perennial campaigns ended in defeat. He tweeted from the @PoliticalHitman handle. The last time I bumped into him, in a diner in Niles a few years back, he handed me a business card that read: “NEED SOME HELP? LET’S SIT DOWN AND TALK ABOUT IT.”
Coconate took a sharp right turn in recent years to Trumpism. In the recent debate over a new migrant shelter at a City College campus, he carped that a taxpayer-funded community college would become a “bed and breakfast” for asylum seekers.
And in 2021, Coconate appeared on local TV, claiming to represent “the Italian Americans” in defending the Christopher Columbus statue in Grant Park.
We hadn’t talked for years when I learned he died last weekend at age 65.
Maybe he decided that the old-timers on his city crews were right after all when they warned him long ago to steer clear of reporters. They admonished him, he said, not to work too hard for their municipal paychecks, and that reporters are “f------ jagoffs” who forever are “looking for trouble,” as he once was quoted telling a reporter.
We can’t quote Coconate again now.
But here’s an entire column about someone who adamantly refused to be another ‘yes-man’ from the precincts and insisted on talking lots and lots of smack about some of Chicago’s prickliest big men.
Dan Mihalopoulos is an investigative reporter on WBEZ’s Government & Politics Team.
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