William Lantigua

Hello, everybody.

Welcome to No Gods, No Mayors.

Neither gods nor mayors are welcome in here.

Uh-huh.

Sorry, sorry.

Uh-huh.

Stay out, ye gods and ye mayors.

Monet pass.

November, do you have something you want to share with the class?

No, no, no.

I'm good.

Sorry.

I think you're good.

Was it my weird sip of water directly in the microphone?

Yes, it was your weird sip of water directly in the microphone.

Yep.

It was, it was, Mattie,

stop distracting the class with your weird waterways.

I've got the way of water.

I've got my cup right here, and I'll do it again.

I also have a cup right here as well.

That's all they can say.

Hey, together.

Hey, cheers.

Hydration.

Hey, what's in everyone's glass?

That should shake out all of the latent mesophonics here.

Yeah.

I've got a beautiful glass of new york city tap water which i've transmuted into seltzer and i've got it in my us open 2024 gray goose honey deuce commemorative cocktail cup good lord uh november what's in your glass today i'm what are you flexed on here well this is a pre-manufactured aluminium can of pepsi max uh which has

Yeah, it's a tie-in with the women's Euro championships in Switzerland, which are happening this year.

And it has a footballer on it whose first name is Lauren, but it does not have her surname.

And I do not follow women's football enough to know any female footballers.

Yeah, so I know who that is.

That's Lauren Bacall.

Yeah, so it has a picture of Lauren Bacall here, as you see, and it just has the word Lauren, which I think should also be the wrap for

Rudy Giuliani's Mercedes.

Yeah, well, those pole workers, Mercedes now.

That's true.

That is true.

That's true.

That's true.

I was consuming

an increasing source of worry for me.

Okay.

You were consuming an increasing source of worry.

Well, in many ways.

Yeah.

It has joined all the others

in the worry dome.

And it is a giant glass of coconut water from one of my lovely glasses that I have.

And I love coconut water.

I think it's delicious and I love to drink it because it's a great.

refreshing, non-alcoholic drink of an evening.

Very healthy.

Very good for you.

Very, you know.

What if it's not?

Is my good.

I think someone would have, would have warned you if that were the case.

I think, I think probably any of the people that we know who know about these things would be

like, hey, I've noticed that you are showing the early symptoms of coconut water poisoning, which is not a common or well-understood thing, but like...

Yeah, you're growing the fibers out of your nose and ears.

Yeah, I'm becoming a coconut.

Sorry, one second.

I'll text my wife about this because she will know.

Right.

Can you die of drinking too much coconut water?

No context, please.

Okay,

I won't even tell her that

I must go on your behalf.

That's privileged, like clinical information.

That's right.

I think we should all sit silently and wait.

Yes.

My worry isn't so much that I'll get like, you know, coconut water poisoning.

My worry is that it's just really high in sugar and I'm basically just like chugging juice all the time because my understanding is that it's like drinking a gator read right okay gwen gwen is gwen is responding uh her response is uh like u-h like uh

okay sounds like so it sounds like should i clarify or should i not should i just leave that to to her sort of clinic i feel like i said i said what i said okay yeah did i respond uh did i stutter

Are you trying to maneuver me into an argument with my wife over text about like coconut water i just think the sort of we're you know we're running out of room on the metatextual making riley transition so i'm thinking for a new b plot i'm making i'm trying to break your marriage apart oh oh okay sure is that fun is that a fun thing for me to be doing

that happen once and it was it was uh you know an interesting experience so yeah the the second divorce i don't know i i think i think twice divorced is a little county for me but i would be very sad is the thing So

I would rather not.

I'm fond of remaining married to my wife.

Those were our vows.

Sorry, this is just, I was just doing, you know, like

brainstorming in which there are no bad ideas.

Okay, sure.

I'll scrap the idea.

That's fine.

That's fine.

Yeah, it's fine.

We can come up with some other stuff that isn't me getting divorced again.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, like, you know, you got a lot of road to run on, like, hey, let's, you know, let's see if we can flip Riley over.

Riley's waving his syringe around like, I'm over here.

In a situation where we realize that like we're running out of mayors and we're running out of prompts for mayors and we're just trying to stir like interpersonal drama to the point that it's like, you know, coming onto the thing, like, who's today's mayor?

Well, we don't have time for that because I got shot today.

I got shot today by November.

I didn't have enough time to research the mayor for this episode because.

I've actually become a beloved comics artist.

I'm actually in the middle of the going the other way on that, where I'm, I was a beloved comics artist and I'm becoming a comics.

Okay, so now I'm a little worried about the second divorce because I have asked,

can you die of drinking too much coconut water?

And I've got the response, and then I said, Riley is worried it has too much sugar in it, so I said I'd ask.

And silence.

So

now

I'm concerned.

Now I'm worried.

Yeah.

As you should be.

Yeah, yeah.

I think this is troubling.

This is troubling news.

This is troubling information.

Yes.

Riley, have you considered getting into a very like into a marriage that the podcasts then make very tense uh

yeah actually yeah so so you could give that a go maybe why do you think i record in the shed and the bottom of the garden i thought it was because you were just like shed pilled i thought you just like what did you say the bottom of the garden as opposed to the ceiling of the garden sorry What is the bottom of the garden?

Like the end of a garden.

Like you have a

not to Docs Riley's house, right?

But he has a garden.

I know, bourgeois, right?

But he has a shed at the end of that garden with a microphone in it, and he goes into that shed and he records in the shed.

The bottom of a garden,

to me,

refers to a Z-axis maneuver.

Oh, no, right.

No, no, no.

So, like at the end of a garden,

we've reached the sort of problem where

every couple of episodes, we all remember that we actually don't technically speak the same dialect of the same language.

Item, item, item.

Gwen responded.

The short answer is nah.

The long answer is, and she's typing.

The long answer is ya.

But instead of, but I actually have instead of a nah or a ya, I have a yeah.

This is municipal roundup.

Just a quick

it is.

Yes, it is.

That's the name of the segment.

I just, I went into my head and I checked and it is.

Yeah, i've i've never gotten it wrong it is you two chuckleheads and oves that get it wrong

it is you two borish

what was the phrase borish chums

i'm sorry i was listening to that an hour ago um okay so in new jersey mayor roz baraka was arrested for uh protesting an immigration ice facility there, which is just a municipal municipal thing that has happened.

Yeah, I mean, it's rare to see a mayor do something good.

Yeah, I was, I was just, to me, shocking to be like, well, I don't know.

This might be the only mention in the Meritaculus of Mr.

Baraka, because if he's doing things like this, I don't know if he's going to be doing anything horrible, though.

You never know.

Yeah.

You never know.

He may be a good mayor.

I mean, this is the other thing is.

When you leave with the sentence, New Jersey mayor arrested for, I go, yeah, yeah, of course.

Of course.

The metaculous is full of New York, is full of New Jersey mayors, you know, arrested for things.

Yeah.

Newark specifically, too.

Or like Union City or something like that.

Yeah, this is like the corruption belt of New Jersey.

There's like five small cities just outside of the New York metro that are just like the corruption zone.

Yeah, you can see a documentary about that called American Gangster featuring, I think, Russell Crowe as

like a Newark, New Jersey detective.

But so, yeah, instead, he got arrested doing something good and on purpose.

So this is positive.

And of course, we are calling for like total solidarity, right?

Because if we're at the paragraph of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer poem where they come for our nation's mayors, you know,

we've established as a protected class.

Yes, yeah, exactly.

Then, you know,

there's going to be no one left to govern the cities.

Also, Riley, I have your clinical results here.

Long answer.

Coconut water has less overall sugar in it than most drinks going.

And even then, the idea that sugar equals diabetes equals death is fallacious.

You can technically die from it the same way you can die from drinking too much water, but that's not the point.

Yes.

I'm more of just a sugar avoidance thing

because of calories.

But it seems like the best of the taste drinks that aren't water, it seems like the best option.

It must be so cool to have the medical knower wife to be like, yes.

Hey, can I die from smoking too much weed?

And someone there is like, actually, no, here this is the paper.

Well, the problem is, like, obviously you're right.

This rules, but she's funny.

And this is a problem because then you go,

clinical wife,

how long will I be high for?

And she goes, 14 million years.

And you go, oh, and then you, yeah.

So, so, like, yeah, it's very unfortunate that she has a sense of humor, but I love her very dearly.

Recently, she also saved my life with a dumb question.

So,

when I accidentally injected 0.2 milliliters of straight-up air into my thigh and thought I was going to go to the hospital and die,

the thing is, what happened is I somehow got the most beautiful woman in the world to like fall in love with me.

And also, she has a great deal of like clinical experience and can provide like some kind of like healthcare advice and stuff like that.

And that is single-handedly keeping at least a half dozen podcasters alive because we would die on our own.

Oh, yeah.

I would be like, oh,

there's no upper limit to the amount of potassium I can enjoy.

Bring on the coconut water.

Don't be fooling.

Riley, you would be found dead in like a bucket full of supplements.

I would have died of some kind of misadventure.

And

you would just be like tangled on a fence and you starved to death because you just got stuck.

Remember to check all of your snare traps for podcasters.

Given myself an anxiety attack so bad that I died.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I would have had so much Resveratrol that I just like, I turned inside out.

Resveratrol is the drug you take when you're trying to get really good restaurant reservations.

It's a limitless pill for restaurant reservations.

I would like you wouldn't take that.

Your eyes roll back into your head and you're tapped into the Resi servers with your mind like a dune navigator.

Oh, God.

It'll be so cool to describe booking a reservation for a restaurant online like you're William Gibson.

As I sail through the towers of ice,

I see a couple of console cowboys trying to...

trying to book the 8 p.m.

at Noble Rot, but then they're both electrocuted.

Hey, yeah, not now.

I'm entering a restaurant space.

Look.

All right.

So that's municipal roundup.

Yeah.

Item complete.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Cheers to the mayor of Newark.

Jeers to ICE.

Yes.

Yes.

More than jeers, we hope, but certainly jeers in the interim.

And hey, now we're going to find out whether it's cheers or jeers for this week's guest, William Lantigua.

Please welcome to the stage, William Lantigua.

Now, William Lantigua was, I'm afraid he is no longer, the one-term mayor of Lawrence, Massachusetts.

Lawrence, if you're not familiar, is a, was founded as a sort of semi-company town by a consortium of textile mills.

And it was like a hotbed of labor organizing in the 19th and 20th centuries.

There was the

strike, their textile strike in Lawrence in the 19th century.

And the struggle or struggle between like mill owners and unionized workers became one of like national importance.

It was a huge deal.

This is an industrial industrial city.

Okay.

Oh, it's just up the Merrimack River from Lowell.

So this is like the textile belt of New England, right?

Yeah.

Correct.

So after the Second World War, the town completely deindustrializes.

Its population shrinks by a fifth.

It's true at the 1990s through a series of like sort of hair-brained regeneration schemes.

Whole areas of the downtown get like raised and rebuilt and parking structures park.

The whole downtown gets turned into like parking.

Yeah.

And parking for like big buck stores.

So it's like rust belt, except, you know, instead of they were making steel, it's like sweaters or whatever.

It's like the

moth belt.

Yeah.

By the way, a hair brain is what happens when you drink too much coconut water?

Ah, no, no.

We've got hair on the brain.

The city also becomes primarily Latino from the 60s onward, just as people come to work in the mills when the mills close.

I understand that you're referring to a

process of population exchange, but in my head, when you said that, I envisioned just the entire city of the same white people deciding to get a little Latina with it, like the boat.

Yeah, they, they, they, they, they get like, they get really into salsa.

Yeah, we all, we all did the Inca Trail together as a town.

And we're, um, we had kind of a spiritual experience at Winneguana, just across from the main peak.

The, the clouds roll in and it's really beautiful.

And I felt like it was very connected to the land.

So I bought this poncho.

Imagine being the town burglar when everybody from the town takes vacation at the same time.

It's Christmas every day.

He's there with them burgling their tents.

He's like,

oh, he's like, hey, I'm not on the clock right now.

Right now, I'm just Ray.

It's more of a sort of a burglar's holiday, you know, and that you're working while you're supposed to be relaxing.

And it's like, look, don't, going up to the doctor and being like, look, I don't ask you for medical advice when you're on holiday.

Stop talking to me about whether or not I'm going to burgle your tent.

I'm also on holiday.

As mentioned earlier, most of what people do to doctors when they're not working is is bother them for medical advice

going up to like a neurosurgeon and being like hey can i have is it possible i have too much coconut water

so anyway there was a bunch of like race riots in the 1960s again these were like national news it was a very big deal at the time but that's the backdrop that we have right this city that's been hit very hard by deindustrialization like a rust-belt city in new england um that's now very very very latino

yeah i mean you'd think that the entire town going on its kind of like spiritual quest to Peru to become Peruvian would lead them to, you know, bring some of the jobs back for like poncho making, but seemingly not.

And so the, and so the other thing is, it has a lot of pretty bad superlatives.

It's Massachusetts's poorest city.

It faces a $27 million

operating deficit in 2010, where the state has to step in to like legislate.

to buy the city a bunch of bonds and then appoints a fiscal overseer to put it back in order.

Like it is things are bad.

We're talking about, we, we understand a deprived town here.

Yeah, I always like when we kind of get a bit of a briefing on the city beforehand, like, you know, like as a kind of a contrast, like with Squin, you know, like we kind of, you know, the city is almost like a character

in the episode.

Indeed.

And so, but this is, this is like, this is good to understand the background because it's going to, it's going to lend some extra depth to talking about Mayor Willie Lantigua's antics.

And he loved antics.

He was a very antic mayor.

Okay.

And yeah, yeah.

So he's, so this town is, yeah, it's, it's like, it has some of the worst schools in the country.

Like it's got everything is on the floor here, basically.

Yeah.

Now, William Lantigua is Dominican.

He was born in 55.

He moved to the U.S.

in 74 and he settled in

Lawrence working like as an

electricity technician for like 23 years before becoming a full-time politician.

While he was an electricity technician, he doubled as like a community organizer, campaign strategist in local and state elections.

So he's like in the Democratic Party machine in like,

he's in the Latino Democratic Party machine in the like cloth belt of New England.

Sure.

And in 2002, he gets his first political role.

He's elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives and was re-elected four times before announcing his candidacy for mayor of Lawrence in 2008.

Why mayor?

You'd think that would be a step down from like state representative, no?

Hold that thought.

Okay.

Hold that thought.

You'll see why he tried to do this in a moment.

But I also wanted to say before he was elected to the mayoralty, right?

He loved getting jobs for women.

Specifically.

I mean, I, yeah.

America can be defined in a single word.

And that word is.

I tried to say perfect and fantastic at the same time.

And every time this happens to me, which is more and more often, I I become keenly aware that I was old enough to eat beef and geographically located in the United Kingdom in the 1990s.

And then I start googling things like painless methods of suicide.

So prophetic.

Yeah.

I was also going to, I'm going to, I'm going to just text my wife about this one second.

I was in England in like 1998.

So again, we might all be having the same problem.

This, this is the, in many ways, the program of feeding cows' brains to other cows was the ship that launched a thousand podcasts that's right so specifically however he liked to get jobs for women related to or married to him uh in this time classic that's that's more of a kind of a you know less patronage more like harem kind of situation you know so well so he his ex-wife was a but like he got his ex-wife like a thirty five thousand dollar a year job as a meter maid while he was um into his well he was a little while into his state rep rep tenure that's that's a pretty decent job i I mean, it's not like you know, crazy when I compare that to Eric Adams's kind of corruption jobs, you know.

This is the thing.

Again, hold that thought in your mind as well, because I will come back to that.

But the reason he did it, the reason he did it was so she would stop chasing him for child support payments.

If you just take it out of the city's end, I mean, like a meter mate is not a bad job if you like driving a little car around.

And who will

and I'm not just saying that this is documented.

Like he said, my assistance with Ms.

Fawcett's employments helps us to financially provide for

our daughter, Vanessa's best interests.

It's like, this is what I'm contributing as I pull some strings to get you a job.

But

his ex-wife was like grateful.

She was like, hey, this is how he's helping the family.

He got me a job to help the family.

It's great.

His current wife, Maria Lantigua, works and the, again, doesn't make much money, only $2,400 a year, but...

She

has a seat on the liquor licensing committee, which regulates like bars and stuff.

Yeah, that's kind of a situation where like you get paid a a lot in kind, so to speak.

Excuse me.

A licensing committee, which does bars and restaurants, but also car dealerships.

You don't want to co-locate those things.

Yeah, that's one hell of a test drive.

I want to test drunk drive this, yeah.

Yeah.

Be like, oh, yeah, you, you get there and you're, you're just like, oh, I'm, I'm deploying to Afghanistan in two weeks.

Oh, you'd like to test drunk drive this, of course.

Yeah, I guess.

Getting upsold on both the clear coat and loaded fries.

Getting upsold on the clear coat and also getting a premium whiskey as opposed to like, you know, just Johnny Walker red.

So, also in 2005, Lorenzo Ortega, not at the time known, but now known to be the woman Lantiga was having an affair with, also landed a clerk's job in the city water department.

So, so other thing we know about this guy is that he fucks to be

good to us.

Yes, okay, good.

Absolutely.

I'm not hearing a downside here.

Yeah, I feel like mares can only be completely sexless or like absolute hounds and like nothing in between

oh yeah yeah i buy that or i think i think you can get like a monogamous mare if the if they're weird enough with it if they're personally freaky enough with it like um for instance sam yorty right but like sure yes sam yorty's a he's a he's a fuck mayor but he's not poly yeah like he's a fuck mayor but for his wife yeah

but he extremely fucks but the stamp licking thing yeah

exactly that's that's like a kind of a signal that suggests like like i am the only guy here in the 1940s or 50s or whatever it is who knows what canalingus is like yeah i don't do it but i do know what it is yeah exactly so this is also from his biography which for reasons that will become clear has been completely scrubbed from the lawrence massachusetts website i had to access it via archives okay okay you love to hear that in november 2008 after being overwhelmingly re-elected to his fourth term as state representative lentigua announced his intention to run for the mayor of the great city of lawrence for that year Willie ran one of the most intense grassroots campaigns ever seen in the city.

All walks of life joined on the campaign trail as Willie pledged his commitment to the people of Lawrence.

And on January 4th, 2010, he was sworn into office as mayor of the great city of Lawrence.

His inauguration speech focused on uniting the city of Lawrence, community involvement, and putting the city on a course to fiscal recovery.

With this accomplishment, Lentigua became the first person to hold three elected positions at once: state Democratic Committee member, state representative, and mayor.

Ah,

okay, So it's not a demotion.

He's just, it's additive, you know?

He's getting mayor as a side hustle

in a city that is like in crisis.

Well, you know what that is?

That's, that's vertical integration.

I was going to say it's sort of like a catamari ball of positions I have, just sort of pushing it across the state.

It's like me and podcasts, you know, you want to try and get as many different jobs going as possible.

Well, he made money from all these through Patreon.

Through 2010, Patreon?

I, I'm, yeah.

I think they were just called patrons back then.

Patronage, excuse me.

It's a great idea to make all of your income depend on Patreon.

You will certainly not regret making all of your income depend on Patreon.

Except in this case, it's like different arms of Massachusetts government.

With limited resources as mayor, he focused on cost-sharing measures, downsizing positions, and wasting the city government.

His office has always been a refreshing open door for the people of Lawrence since January, following in the concept of his trademark district office in the heart of downtown Lawrence.

Since taking office, he's been visited visited by thousands of residents seeking assistance, bringing complaints, or just wishing him well with a wave or a handshake.

I love to go into the mayor's office during his like office hours and give him a handshake.

Yeah, I love to stop in and wish someone well on my way.

I think it is.

It probably is an open-door office if you are currently or have formerly slept with him.

Like, that's which is, you know, at least that's some of the people, you know?

Yeah.

That's three at least.

Yeah, yeah, certainly.

I think also it's like interesting to get elected on this kind of like make the government more efficient, like swinging cuts kind of thing as well in a very, very deprived area as well.

To be like, I am going to like balance the books.

So he didn't get elected on that because this biography was for other people.

That was written once.

It'll become clear what he got elected on.

So this is actually from an article in 2012 in Commonwealth called Lawrence City of the Damned.

Is that good?

On the night of the election, Lantigu won with 54% of the vote, Luis Medina, a campaign volunteer who was also born in the Dominican Republic and also grew up in Lawrence, was among the throng of Lantigua supporters at his headquarters.

When word spread that Lantigua had won, she said it was a joyful moment.

Said Medina, excuse me, he said it was a joyful moment.

Medina, a 44-year-old union electrician, works in Boston.

Some were crying, but everyone was jumping up and down.

It was like a party.

So people fucking love him.

They love him.

Yeah.

Sounds Sounds great.

Great episode, Riley.

Thank you.

Some kind of in a friendly way, some in a more sensual way.

That's fine.

Yeah.

You know?

And he's,

but more specifically, Spanish-speaking inhabitants of Lawrence, specifically Dominicans, fucking love him.

Okay, sure.

Yeah.

Now, I'm going to ask you both a question.

He's sworn in on January 4th, 2010, as we mentioned.

I've got a date on an article in front of me, also accessed via archive.

referring to him as embattled.

Without scrolling down to where I am in the notes, what do you think, closest without going over, is the date on that article?

January 4th is when he was signed in.

Time to become embattled.

His time to embattlement stat.

Like we were put on a baseball card here.

TTE.

How quickly could you possibly become embattled?

I want to say

January 11th.

I'm going to give him a week.

Okay.

I'm going to be way more pessimistic than that.

I think it takes you at least a couple of months to get embattled.

Like you could be controversial after a week, but like, I think you need at least eight weeks in office to become embattled.

Before you get an Eva, give me a date, please.

Yeah, like, give me, give me like March or something, like, two months.

I'm afraid it's Ghost to Maddie.

Closest without going over, February 12th.

So he, he, it took him, it took him a month.

It took him just, just north of a month to become embattled.

Wow.

I, I have grotesquely overestimated the amount of time it takes to become embattled.

The George C.

McClellan mistake.

39 days to embattlement.

Embattled Lawrence Mayor William Lantigua was forced to resign his seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives on Friday amid growing pressure from fellow lawmakers who questioned whether or not he could serve in both positions at once.

Interesting that he resigned the

representative seat rather than the mayoral team.

Because you stay as mayor for four years and the way that he ran the office, he ended up benefiting quite a bit more.

So he say, but Yantigo, of course, said, I applied for two jobs.

I went through two interviews on election day.

The selection committee, made up of the great people of Lawrence, chose me to work for them twice.

But what actually happened is that his colleagues in the House of Representatives basically say, we will not give Lawrence any bailout money unless you quit this job and our mayor full-time, please.

He absolutely did not want to do it and tried to hold on to both salaries as long as he could.

Incredible.

Here's the interesting thing.

This is where

it sort of clicked for me: is that this guy is actually the average of two mayors we've talked about before.

Okay.

Okay.

Now, this is one that is frequently pointed out about him at the time, is that he is called the Dominican James Michael Curley.

What if a James Michael Curley was Dominican?

And so City Council Vice President Dan Rivera, Lentigue was opponent for re-election in 2013 to take office in 2014, said, this is James Michael Curley.

I don't know why people are shocked.

It's not new to American politics because not only was James Michael Curley, like, did he say, okay, they're all corrupt, but I'm going to be corrupt for my, like, for you, my ethnic group, basically.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And particularly for being like, I'm going to do like six different jobs at the same time or with overlapping term limits kind of thing.

Yeah, because Curley also tried to be a state rep and mayor at the same time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

So he's like, he's often referred to as the modern-day Dominican James Michael Curley.

A little unwieldy as a nickname, but we take it.

Yeah.

But he's also, and we're going to see this, Eric Adams.

He is also Eric Adams.

In so many ways is he Eric Adams.

So you're telling me Dominican Irish-American Eric Adams, or as Eric Adams likes to think of it, Eric Adams.

So, for example, like he's...

He would do the like vote lots of James Michael Curley stuff.

Like if someone, if like a constituent is having a problem, he would just give them $1,000 in cash.

Of course.

Yeah.

But then you have to vote for him like three or four times.

Yeah.

So he's like, he's a reing out in the barbershops, in stores, in clubs.

He gives people birthday cards.

His catchphrase is hola familia.

Like he's, he is your guy if you are like closely connected to him in some way.

Oh, and you want to be because he can get you like a job or like a license to sell liquor or like own a car dealership restaurant combination yeah he is he is the guy but he again he run obviously if you're that you run city hall like it's a personal business you know he you at city council meetings before he was mayor he he would always hold up a piece of paper with his telephone number on it saying and saying for people to bypass any official channels for getting things done in the city just call him and he would lean on people until it happened he was like you need me to do something I will, I will, I will abuse my position for you.

He was going to say, city councils tend to hate that kind of behavior.

Yeah.

So the other thing, the reason I compare him to Eric Adams, though, is that he loves clubbing, partying, hanging out with his friends, his mistresses.

This guy seems cool.

We're profiling a cool guy here.

But what's fun about Lentigua from a storytelling perspective is that he's doing all of this, but in a way

smaller place than New York.

So the corruption is kind of teeny tiny because there's just not much room for it.

That makes it cute.

Yeah.

But he gets in and immediately what he does is he declares war on the police and fire department.

Let's fucking go.

They've been riding too high on the hog for too long.

Yeah, fire department too.

I don't give a fuck.

Fuck 13.

Mayor Fed smoker.

Yeah, firefighters, just a kind of cop.

Yeah.

They're fucking Chomos.

They're policing where the fire cannon can't be.

Yeah, well, they lost my sympathy when they started doing the thin red line flag.

But also, he didn't declare war on the police department so much as he declared war on the individual officers in the police department so he could replace them with his friends.

Oh, okay.

Well, I mean, that's still cool, potentially, if you're doing like, if you're like gang stalking a bunch of like Massachusetts cops.

Yeah, he was he was gang stalking like all of the Irish cops in this Latino city, essentially.

Um, it's like it's it's a it's a good police police department,

but it could be a lot more Dominican.

So this is from that article.

There's a really, this really good article I sort of went back to, a city of the damned for good context.

It says, he feuded with the fire and police departments.

This disagreements be frequently becoming acrimonious, personal, and culminating in a claim made by the mayor that police officers tried to run him over in an unmarked car.

Yeah, I believe that instantly.

Sorry.

100%.

I fully believe that.

This man survived an assassination attempt.

Yeah,

undoubtedly.

The like small town Boston, the small town city outside Boston cops definitely tried to kill the non-white mayor

who was like actively trying to get them all fired.

A guy like you're kind of like typical racist cop who believes in like great replacement theory, but on the micro scale is right that the guy is trying to do white genocide to your police department specifically.

Yeah.

So he was like, he said that firefighters get paid to sleep and are very lazy, and that Lawrence police are intimidating and, and quote, also lazy.

Fucking go off.

Like, that's true.

But those are two things that are transparently true of like most cops.

Yeah, firefighters, get up, wake up.

Hey.

We got too good at fire prevention, and now we have to pay you to sit around all the time.

In 2010, he starts when he gets elected, he immediately starts firing people, but replacing them with his friends.

So one thing he does is he devotes like a veteran, he votes a deputy police chief, Mike Driscoll, who's like, again, Irish, and replaces him with a brand new hire,

a sergeant, Melix Bonilla, who'd been one of his campaign aides.

Am I allowed to say that Melix sounds very Deep Space Nine, and I'm in favor of that?

Yeah, it sounds very close to Neelix, who's my friend from Voyager.

Just a quick correction to him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so Neelix from Voyager became the deputy chief of of police.

One year later, by the way, he's just a cook.

His son,

Bonilla's son, pled guilty to using his father's service weapon in a home invasion.

That's okay, sure.

Yeah, you can't go for your dad's service weapon.

I'm not, I'm not, I mean, listen, there's not enough Talaxian representation in the department.

And okay, they're not all going to be great, but it's, it's historical, you know?

Two years later, Bonilla himself was indicted for pressuring the police chief John Romero to trade 13 high-value vehicles it had seized to a local car dealer called Bernardo Peña, who was friends with Bonilla and Lentigua for four used Impalas.

Okay, perfect.

So you have to take the stolen, sorry, the seized cars and then like sell those at a sort of healthy discount to the guy who runs the combination car dealership, Bar and Grell.

Well, he didn't even sell them at a healthy discount.

He traded them for four used Impalas.

Yeah.

You've heard of a drive-through.

This is a sort of a drive-out because you go there and you could buy a steak and a car.

Yeah.

So subsequent revelations raised questions about the car dealer's relationship with Lantigua because it was discovered that Pena donated $200 to Lantigua's campaign.

But more importantly, his company, Santo Domingo Motors, used to always fund the mayor's birthday party.

That's cool.

And for this, you get some like nice cars that the cops seize.

Yeah.

And you only have to trade four Impalas, four bad impalas it's a nice quid pro quo and the you know the cop cars get a little bit worse which is also funny why is quid pro quo bad it's fair yeah you're literally getting quid

pro something

or quo if you will yeah it seems fine anyway obviously bonilla was charged for this he never gets fired or demoted or indicted or anything he's indicted but he's like never charged fired no no discipline for bonia at all of course another defendant this is my favorite one of like the early crimes, who was charged at the same time.

It was a guy called Leonard Degnan, who was Lentigua's former chief of staff.

Where basically Degnan went to go meet with the executives of the

Allied Waste, the garbage collecting contractor for Lawrence, and said, Hey, Lentigua is going to cancel your contract if you don't donate a garbage truck to the city of Tenares in the Dominican Republic.

That's fantastic.

Cool.

I mean, yeah, fantastic.

Wonderful.

International garbage truck conspiracy.

Yeah.

So basically, what happened is that Lentigua and Degnan were vacationing together in Tenaras with their like wives, and then Lentigua made friends with the mayor of Tenaras, had it declared Lawrence's sister city, and then began like sending stuff there.

Mayor-to-mayor communication.

Yeah, it's mayor chewel aid.

I, you know, the sister city is always, I never quite understood why that program exists and what it does.

Well, this is what it's for.

As a sort of like nodule for corruption, it makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, they were like, hey, I don't think you can pressure us on the contract.

And they were like, no, we're going to pressure you on the contract.

Give this city a garbage truck or we rip it.

You have to become like USAID, but for garbage trucks.

Yeah.

And specifically to this one city where our mayor is their mayor's friend.

I'm learning that this is a great guy guy to be friends with.

Like he will absolutely do you some favors.

And this is, by the way, a pattern that repeats across different departments.

Like the superintendent of schools, Wilfredo LaBoy.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

L-A-B-O-Y, Wilfredo

LaBoy.

La Boy Wilfredo.

Sure.

Yeah.

He's arrested on eight counts of fraud and embezzlement and one count of illegal possession of alcohol on school property, which I don't think is related to the fraud.

Yeah, that one's kind of bullshit.

You're just stacking charges because when you went through his desk to find out that they had been like shipping all of the blackboards to the Dominican Republic, you also found a bottle of scotch in there.

Yeah.

And you were like, okay, well, you know, it's not like you have double jeopardy or anything.

We can just charge you with that.

At the same time, LaBoy's right-hand man, Mark Rivera, unrelated to Dan Rivera, was charged with seven counts of larceny over $250 after he was caught using the school's graphic department,

the school department's graphic designers and printers to create flyers and literature for a political campaign.

And you will never guess whose political campaign it was for.

So Lantigua had to, because of this, recuse himself from LeBoy and Rivera's disciplinary hearings.

By 2014, though, indictments pile up around Lantigua's staff.

Another city worker with ties to Lantigua's campaign, Usto Garcia,

was accused of stealing all of the money from the municipal parking garage where he worked as an attendant and then just taking it to Lantigua's office and like putting it in his office.

For safekeeping.

Like, of course.

Sometimes it's hard to know where all the money is and who better to keep track of it than the mayor, you know?

And Garcia worked as Lentigua's campaign photographer also.

Maybe, maybe he just like was taking the money for a walk and he did this sort of, because the mayor has like regular like open door office hours, he was coming in to wish the mayor well.

And then sort of a serious man style, he forgot that money in his office, you know?

Yeah, He like tripped and fell and a big envelope of money flew out of his suit and into a safe that was open because someone was cleaning it.

And then the, and then the, the, the janitor closed the safe.

Yeah.

Well, you wouldn't want a dirty safe.

Yeah.

And the guy left without the money because he didn't realize it flew out of his suit.

And while this was going on, then T was in the bathroom and didn't see any of it.

And then when he got back in his office, nobody was there and the safe was closed.

And later he found the money.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

I think that's probably what happened.

And probably probably what the grand jury that was then impaneled, because they were like, okay, I think we need to impanel a grand jury at this point.

I mean, this is Occam's razor to me.

Yeah.

So, yeah, this guy is the subject of like three different grand juries.

There's like several federal probes against him, several ethics investigations.

He was the subject of four recall elections.

Now, that's what I call embattled.

Yeah.

It's like, this is the most embattled mayor of all time, but he's constantly always, seems to always be having a good time and also is low-level angry.

Yeah, it still counts as embattled, even if you're winning the battles.

Yeah, one of the witnesses that was called in the grand jury is Lorenza Ortega, his long-term mistress.

And the headline I'm now going to read is probably one of my favorites.

In the summer of 2012, Mayor Lantigua married the principal witness against him, longtime girlfriend and city hall worker, Lorenza Ortega.

They cannot arrest a husband and wife for the same crime.

In this case, it was more genuinely, there is that rule.

A wife cannot testify against her husband if she so chooses.

She can choose to decline to testify.

Okay, fucking sick.

Is this the one he got the like meter made job as well?

No, this is the one that he got.

Hang on.

This is the one he just got a job as a clerk in the Department of Water.

November, you're thinking of lovely Rita.

Sorry, sorry.

Yeah.

So he basically, if you can't beat him, marry him.

Listen, yeah,

this is a very good sort of like battle, embattlement maneuver.

I'm, I'm, I'm checking into this, by the way, and I, this man is, I wouldn't consider him to be like hot, right?

Like, he's not like, but apparently,

on the women of this town, there is, there's something working here, you know, he's very, he's like able to just drop a marriage proposal in order to stay out of jail.

And that's, you know, that's impressive.

And that's the other thing.

Like, he divorced his wife to marry his mistress, and nobody was mad at him.

They all just kept scheming, like his wife and mistress kept scheming with him.

That's impressive.

That's really impressive.

They recognize that you lose 100% of the battles.

You're not M.

So this is from the Eagle Tribune, the local newspaper, who asked if Ortega was his wife.

Lentigua answered simply, yes.

When asked again, if he was married to Ortega, he repeated, yes.

During interviews in the telephone and at City Hall, Lentigua refused to say anything about the marriage, saying, quote that is my personal life perfect yeah i mean beautiful maybe maybe he's poly we don't know uh so lentigua refused also this is another eric adams thing lentigua refused to say where he lived for the first 17 months of his mayoralty giving his address as city hall whenever he spoke to the city council yeah the entire city hall just has to deal with him living full-time there you know he's like coming down in his pajamas to brush his teeth or whatever it was like a squat yeah

it's like a municipal squat house he's the mayor from the taking of pill on one two three and making everyone come into his bedroom and he's wearing his jammies.

He confirmed widespread speculation that he was living with Ortega at a state of the city address to city council when he opened his remarks by

stating his address was Ortega's condo at 86 Boxford Street.

What a speech writing technique to be like, hi, I'm the mayor.

The state of our city remains strong.

Here is my full address.

Here's a key.

Copy it.

Come in anytime.

If anyone else wants to marry me.

Well, he got divorced from her a month later as soon as the grand jury was done like taking evidence.

This is a man who has been like, as a mayor, married to the highest percentage of his like citizens, but like second in that ranking after Jim Jones.

I was going to say,

the guy we covered, Carter Harrison III, referred to Chicago as his wife.

And this guy simply instead wants to marry every citizen of the town.

Like individually.

Individually, one at a time.

That month, Ortega testified at a state labor hearing that Lentigua had been living in her house four nights a week since 2006, which then, because he then counts as living there, all of the

heating assistance money that she got from the state, they now count and Lentigua's salary is hers.

So like they, they had to pay back like thousands of dollars in heating assistance.

I now want to read to you a piece from a Boston local news site entitled The Mayor of Mayhem.

And this is about his sort of party life and or how he likes how he acts.

So he says, take, for example, incidents on Exchange Street one night last month where police arrived to find music so loud that neighbors were out of their houses and issued a ticket.

However, the people who were ticketed merely taunted the police saying, Willie, Willie, we'll see you in court.

Lantigua's in the house.

When the police returned, The partier pretended to be on the phone with deputy police chief Nellix from Voyager Bonilla.

On a third visit, a man arrested after attacking police invoked Lantigua's name, saying he was going to have the officer fired.

Cool.

So it's just, you are also responsible for, this is a classic like mayor party.

This is something very Ford, you know?

Like

all of your kind of like idiot hangers on are partying into the small hours of the night.

Yeah, because you are making them locally Teflon.

Yes.

Yeah.

Correct.

So sometimes Lantigua's name is dropped in an an empty taunt.

Other times real strings are pulled.

I talked to six officers this week.

Four said the mayor's or one of his associates had reversed actions they've taken, such as releasing cars they've towed or preventing a party from being shut down.

The I consent, I consent, I don't mean.

Lantigua has no problem with police enforcing the law, however, when it concerns people who aren't his friends.

However, he seems to spend so much.

So basically, it's like you could fuck with anybody, just not my immediate friends.

The The mayor's real classic mayor shit.

It's like these are my people.

Yeah, he's such a mayor.

The mayor seemed to spend so much time palling around with club owners

and involving himself in the nitty-gritty of police work.

You wonder how he has any time left to fix the city.

That's a classic local journalist around 2012 thing to say.

He loves nightclubs.

Why won't he fix the potholes?

Instead, he's getting the cops to like unhandcuff this extremely drunk man.

He loves partying.

This like kind of nerdy-looking older man loves partying.

Lentigua said to the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, so I go to clubs.

Big deal.

I'm not doing anything wrong or illegal.

People just love lying about me, and it keeps getting published.

I'm focusing on making the city great.

Cool.

So Lentigua is a regular in many clubs, including one called Bally's on Essex Street, where he spends so many nights there that he got permission from the owner of the dry cleaners next door to park his car there after hours.

So he also likes to drunk drive.

His 2002 Chevy Avalanche, no less.

He is having a great time.

What's wrong with that?

Seems fine.

The thing that's weirding me out here is the Chevy Avalanche because that's a like

a kind of SUV pickup hybrid, like kind of a ute, like the Mayor or Ute.

Yeah.

It sort of prefigured a large like the large Fords.

Yeah.

Did the Chevy Avalanche.

If my audio quality is worse, worse, it's because I just encountered a problem and need to switch off the microphone, unfortunately.

It'll be fixed for next time.

So basically, like what Lantigua does is this is from even when he's like a state rep, is he uses enormous amounts of political influence, like local political influence, to just like get liquor licenses for his friends.

for clubs he likes to go to.

And so he'd be like, oh, La Guera on Broadway, which we'll hear about again.

The owner is denied a permit to serve alcohol.

Lantigua then just like single-handedly reverses it.

The story happens over and over again, right?

And also, like, Lantigua's estranged wife, who he's still friends with and schemes with, is liquor license commissioner.

So she just votes for like what he says.

Some of the places that he keeps open, like they serve minors with one being identified as having 30 kids running around in a basement while just like at two in the morning.

Others are barely disguised.

This is this is like the kind of Fox News nightmare, right?

Like he's doing white genocide on the police department.

He's got like a bunch of drunk kids running around in a basement.

And they all make donations for Lantigua.

He's always the guest of honor at them.

He's always the life of the party.

He always drinks for free.

And he also makes sure that they are only paying like a hundred bucks a month to rent their premises, right?

So like one just constantly has murders at it.

This one, La Guira, has so many murders are there.

So I would like to.

I would love to only pay pay $100 for my rent, but I would hate to be murdered.

Yeah.

So

Nunez, the guy who owns La Guira, threw himself a birthday party when it reopens, invites Lantigua as the guest of honor at his own birthday party.

Cool.

And then there's this one guy who's a fashion blogger who's local to Lawrence called Antonio Arevalo, who fucking hates Lantigua.

And so he went to go cover this event, right, for the Lawrence nightlife.

And then the bouncer who loves Lantigua so much, he sees one of his like blog critics and just chases him to a restaurant next door and kicks the shit out of him saying, you're a snitch and you're the man who took the mayor to court.

So it's also worth talking about the many times that Lantigua tried to get recalled.

The first recall was in 2011.

It's very popular.

And this is based on reports of like a federal probe into the handling of towing contract, one of several, towing contracts, nightclubs, taxi permits, like just that kind of stuff, right?

But mysteriously, weird, this recall election, they think they have 5,000 signatures, which is like 5,200, which is

enough for them to force the election.

However, it turns out that when the city attorney looks over it, a bunch of signatures are disqualified enough that they don't have to force the election.

Oh, well, thanks to the city attorney for checking out the money.

Yeah, that was really close.

Otherwise, they could have been.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Interestingly, it's a matter of public record that several prominent Lawrence residents, including one other city councillor, have had their signatures disallowed improperly.

Lentigua says he went over all the signatures himself to make sure there was nothing irregular.

I mean, this guy didn't like cross one of his Ts.

So his I is undotted.

Yeah.

So also, because he would, yeah, he would, every time this would happen, he would be like, everyone who's signing the recall petition is racist against Dominicans, including the Dominicans.

And yeah, no one could falsely supplant him.

Also, the the list of people who signed the petition appeared online, including their addresses.

Well, the mayor is getting, getting doxed.

The mayor's often doxing himself.

So that's true.

That is true.

Maybe this is just a man who has no concept of the idea that an address is generally private.

He's living on the moon from the dispossessed, and you can just kind of walk into whoever's house whenever you want.

In 2012, they try again, but lots of the people who signed the first one refused to sign again because they were intimidated.

One guy, Jose Hernandez, then 24 years old, was a recall organizer, found that his public criticism of the mayor,

after he publicly criticized the mayor, that his, all of his records for juvenile arrests were posted on a Facebook page, which was clearly like a picture clearly taken in the police department.

Mysterious.

Yeah, it was clearly like Bell Exponilla.

It was just like to print it off this guy's juvie record.

And then like, just there it is.

That's not known for sure, but like it was, or someone in the police department.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Come on.

Um, this effort also fails.

That's basically his term, right?

It's pure mayhem, but with the mayor being your guy, if you're Dominican, and especially your guy, if you're Dominican and know him or can do him a favor or something, he's beloved by this community specifically and only.

By the end of it, he has a lawsuit filed against him by the Attorney General of

Massachusetts, which alleges that he committed a wide variety of of campaign finance violations, including accepting cash contributions, ceding legal limits, and having public employees solicit funds in his back, usual stuff.

So this is what he got.

This is a situation going into the 2013 election.

When it comes time for the election in late 2013, he realizes that he needs to do something that's for enough people to get him re-elected because like

not every Dominican likes him, right?

Like he's decided to do the James Michael Curley strategy of being like, I will be Dominican James Michael Curley, but like I need to do something.

And so, what he does is there's a bunch of state funds for bridge and road works.

And so, he completely repaves the entire town all at once, but in December.

Okay, that's kind of like oddly satisfying, I bet, to have the entire town just like nice and smooth.

Yeah, he smoothed the whole town right on down.

I'm thinking about smoothing over all these corruption problems I've got.

We're going to commission an enormous blanket to sweep things under.

His election literature is him sweeping stuff under a big paved rug.

There are no public services to speak of.

The school's the worst in the country and like actively dangerous.

The mayor literally has like a goon beating up his critics, but the repaving is all anyone can talk about, according to an article critical of Lantigua published in the magazine Commonwealth entitled Hola Lantigua.

That's kind of like, that's local government for you, you know?

Yeah.

He's really good at this.

That's the thing about it.

It's the same reason why the like Omaha mayor's race we talked about in Mega Muni Roundup last week is like, you can win on

like, I'm going to fix the potholes because nobody cares about anything.

Nobody wants anything from them besides potholes fixed.

Although, can I tell you something very funny, please?

Is that his paving plan ends up with yet another grand jury impaneled to investigate him?

There is basically for the years of 2010 to 2014, there is just us caught, it's like full employment for grand juries investigating this guy.

If he's a joke, Joe's covered a lot of embattled mayors.

This is our most impaneled mayor.

Yeah.

So

this grand jury, this newly impaneled grand jury,

I think at some point, if you live in Massachusetts between 2010 and 2014, there's a pretty good chance you were impaneled in a grand jury that's investigating something he did.

Called job creation, Riley.

In this case, it was for illegally pressuring city officials to repave everything in advance of the election to make him look good, even where paving wasn't necessary to do and was, in fact, dangerous to do because it was December.

You can't pave in December.

Yeah.

I mean, I got to be honest, I don't know when you can and can't pave.

I don't know when paving season is.

I don't know if it's like a faux pas in the paving community, but like

if it's cold, it'll crack and break immediately.

Oh, okay.

I mean, having having the entire town like paved nice and smooth in a way that lasts until after the election and then immediately like all falls off into the gutters is that's exactly what he did.

Nice.

Yeah.

So Lantigua basically like that was his thing.

He was like, yeah, you know, you may have heard all this stuff about me, but I did repave the streets.

It's very, it's very like

this is an idea invented in a club.

Oh, yeah.

This is certainly like this is shouted into his ear while sitting around like a table in the back of, you know, La Guerra.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Like that bouncer is standing in front of you with his arms folded.

You do a little beckoning motion to the person who's coming in.

They, they yell in your ear, you should pave the town.

It's paid for by the state.

And he nods and hands you $200.

Great interaction.

Yeah.

Campaign ads also were like, it was all about the paving.

Like everything was paving.

It was all paving at this point in his campaign.

He's like, forget everything i paved it and city engineer andrew wall this is quoting from um the eagle tribune said on friday that he warned lentigua that much of the work was ill-advised the weather was too cold and there were no contracts in place for to pay for anything that was happening wall testified in a grand jury that lentigua threatened to fire him when he advised against moving ahead quoted as saying, I'll fire you and hire someone else who will do the job if

you don't do this, if you don't perform to my expectations.

Another Lawrence City official who asked that his name not be used because of the confidentiality of investigation said Lentigua voided the city's warranty on the paving work, absolving the contractor from any responsibility for any peace in that.

Cool.

So in addition, because the work was done without a valid contract, but only with the gentleman's understanding that once Lentigo was re-elected, he would make sure that the company, Highway Rehab, would be paid, right?

But Lentigua lost the election.

So the company never got paid the $300,000 it was owed.

Yeah, so that's pretty cool.

Anyway, there's an election.

Sorry, I spoiled it that he lost, but he lost.

God damn it.

Yeah.

This is from a New York Times piece on said election in 2014.

On election night, Mr.

Lantigua confidently took calls from supporters at his headquarters and dismissed his critics, saying, People know who I am.

The people in the city know me, and I know me.

He said he would do more of the same if re-elected.

I will party.

I will do dodgy paving work.

I will have my goons beat up my critics.

I will get my mistress job after job after job.

I will marry each and every one of you.

If you have any enemies, tell them to lay down on the road between these hours on December 14th of next year, and they will disappear.

Using an expletive, he twice jokingly threatened to beat up a photographer if the time he'd spent posing pictures caused him to lose by any by one vote.

When it ultimately became clear that Mr.

Lentigo could not claim victory that night, his aides ejected all members of the English language news media from his headquarters.

After his speech to his supporters, Mr.

Lenteago walked into a nearby bar where someone handled him a full bottle of rum.

He said, The only thing I can say is that I love you all.

It's been a long day.

This is fantastic.

More club mayors, please.

Yeah.

Dan Rivera, who I mentioned earlier towards the beginning of the episode, won the guy who compared him to James Curley.

He won the election by 60 votes.

Wow.

Fantastic.

Thank you to those brave journalists for keeping him tied up outside the club where he and that full bottle of rum were going to win another 60 votes.

There's probably 60 shots in there.

They don't count.

They don't count.

He was going to bring Miandi rules to Lawrence.

Shots don't count.

So he left Lawrence and immediately goes back to the Dominican Republic, returning with another young woman who he claimed to be his fiancé and a one-year-old baby.

And a garbage truck for some reason.

Yeah.

He drove back in the garbage truck.

Latigua then says, okay, well, I'm just going to go be a state representative again, but he's like alienated the entire Democratic Party machine and they don't like him anymore.

So he fails.

He runs for mayor again in 2017, but he's never able to open a bank account to collect donations.

Because if he ever does that, if he ever registers a bank account to collect donations for a political project ever again, he would have to pay the fines he owed the state for his campaign finance irregularities years ago.

He like owed them $5,000.

So he was like, I will hire no one.

I will accept no donations.

I assume there's still a a lot of goodwill towards me in this team.

Yeah, hashtag buy nothing, though.

Yeah.

He said, I don't think I'll have anything to file because I haven't had any financial activity.

Noting that the signs he's using are from previous campaigns.

I'm going to open the account once I clear of, once I get rid of the outstanding fine, but he never opens the account.

He still almost wins.

It's 48 to 52.

Because everyone remembers him really fondly as the guy who just handed them $150 for no reason.

You know, he's like, don't spend it all in one place.

That was like four years since he last did stuff like that.

And people are like, oh, yeah.

And he basically didn't run.

His name was just on the ballot.

He drove up to my house in a garbage truck and he said, vote for me.

I will not accept your money.

And then drove away.

He then said, this was noted as passive aggressively.

The election is over.

I hope Rivera learns from the mistakes of his first term and how poorly he managed the city.

I hope he'll do a better job.

And if he wants me, I'll always be there to help out.

When asked if he would ever run for office again, he said, I don't have a crystal ball to tell you what's going to happen next.

He does run again in 2021, but he becomes fourth in a five-way preliminary.

However, he was never charged with any crime.

They're calling him Mr.

Never Charged with any crime.

I mean, Willie Lantigua, like the modern day James Michael Curley of Lawrence, never charged with a crime, held down a million jobs at the same time, couldn't stop just getting other small-time jobs for the women that he loved.

And there he is.

This is a legend.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Look, he sure is.

He sure is.

He's one of the mayors of all time.

Yeah.

I love this guy.

I'm a huge fan.

Yeah.

I love it.

He's really good to me.

It just feels like such a sort of like supermix of like every sort of mayoral trait we've encountered already.

Yeah, it's just all in one guy, the most mayor of all time.

Every mayor.

It's all in him.

I'm every mayor.

It's all Willie.

Yeah.

All right.

Come on down to Lauren's baby.

It's fun.

Yeah.

That is the story, the ballad of Willie Lentigua.

And I once again am pleased to share this crazy little fella that I found with you.

Riley, thank you so much.

This has been wonderful.

This is tremendous.

Tremendous man.

I love a little guy, you know?

Yeah.

This is a great guy.

This is a little guy.

This is a guy.

Yeah.

He's a guy and a half.

Anyway, thank you very much for listening to No Gods, No Mayors.

All you out there.

Maddie, you have a book.

That's true.

Holy shit.

I do.

Yeah.

Simplicitybook.xyz.

Go pre-order it now or else.

That's all I'll say.

Go pre-order it now.

Or else.

Or that bouncer will come and

beat you up in a chicken plus.

Paving trucks are en route to your house.

They're moving very quickly.

You have plenty of time to buy the book, but don't forget.

forget they're coming.

Don't forget they are coming.

It's like it follows.

It paves.

All right, there we go.

A buzzer beater.

Okay, thanks.

We'll see you on the bonus feed next week.

Yeah.

I think I'm mayor again next week.

Who is to say?

Yeah, at some point I will take this back over because I am in the hell week, the first week of Navy SEAL School.

No,

I'm in hell week because I have to get my dissertation done.

Once that is done, I can start being a person again.

I can start doing things like answering DMs,

like playing video games I've missed out on, writing episodes of this podcast, thinking about things other than intrusive thoughts of self-harm.

It'll be good.

It'll be great.

Maybe it's going to get her dissertation.

She's joining the CBs, I think.

Right?

That's what I'm getting.

That's right.

That is correct.

I will be doing that.

And then I will be getting cancelled by every single person that I work with and all of my fans for feeding the military

complex.

I'll get really defensive about it on Twitter, and it'll be great.

So, keep your eyes peeled.

Looking forward to that.

Look forward to your column and the spectator about it.

Congratulations, all right.

Okay, bye, everybody.

Bye.