Lawn Chairs and Tickets
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I grew up in this town. Nothing about this story surprises me.
The Village of Melrose Park decided that it would be a good idea to issue 62 tickets to an elderly couple for having lawn chairs in their front yard. The Village issued ticket after ticket, imposing fine after fine, to two eighty-year-old residents, Plaintiffs Vincent and Angeline Cozzi.
The fines were not small potatoes. Each ticket cost $500, so the Village tagged them with fines totaling about $30,000. And when it was all said and done, the Village slapped them with a lien on their house, for good measure.
The tickets faulted the Cozzis for creating a nuisance and for "unsanitary conditions." The tickets did not explain what was unsanitary about the plastic lawn chairs. But the Village claimed that they were receiving anonymous calls about "clutter" on their front lawn.
The Village of Melrose Park, it seems, reacted poorly when Plaintiff Michael Cozzi (the adult son of Vincent and Angeline) complained about the first two tickets, and about the mistreatment of his parents more generally. Michael Cozzi attended public meetings in Melrose Park, and he expressed his concerns on social media about the Village harassing his elderly parents.
That free expression led to an avalanche of tickets. The Village issued the Cozzis a $500 ticket nearly every business day from December 3, 2020 to March 3, 2021. Christmas Eve was no exception. The tickets would financially cripple the Cozzis, an elderly couple on a fixed income.
{The fact that the Village wasn't ticketing anyone else wasn't for lack of opportunities. The complaint is chock-full of pictures of other houses in the neighborhood. The surrounding lawns are adorned with used mattresses, a 15-foot skeleton with a Santa hat, garbage, and trampolines. There are reindeer, swans, candy canes, stars, pergolas, tchotchkes, and Christmas decorations at various degrees of garishness. Not to mention plenty of lawn furniture.
The retaliation stretched beyond the tickets. Michael Cozzi received a handwritten note from a police officer warning him about supposed parking violations. Several parking tickets soon followed.
And that's not all. The police surveilled the home several times a day. Michael Cozzi received threatening text messages from unknown or restricted phone numbers. Someone broke his car window. And on one occasion, the Mayor of Melrose Park, Ronald Serpico, drove by and verbally threatened Michael Cozzi with violence.
If the reader is thinking that things have, at this point, gone completely off the rails, buckle up, because the ride is not yet over. In January 2021, as the deluge of tickets rained down, Michael Cozzi went to a public meeting at the Village of Melrose Park to express his concerns. The meeting, it turns out, was recorded. And to put it mildly, Mayor Serpico responded poorly. He unleashed what can only be described as a filthy, profanity-laden tirade with racial overtones. He told him where to go, and then some.
The toxicity increased when Michael Cozzi attended a public meeting at the Village in January 2021. Cozzi intended to express his concerns to the Mayor about the treatment of his elderly parents. He came to the meeting after attending other Village meetings, and after expressing his concerns on social media.
That's when Mayor Serpico completely lost it. He lost his cool. He lost his temper. And if he has any ability to express himself without using expletives, he lost that too.
Mayor Serpico spewed the following missive: "I'm going to tell you something, you're really reaching me. So, do me a fcking favor and sit down and shut the fck up. How's that? You little fcking prck. Go on, shake your fcking head. You're nothing but a fcking punk."
Michael Cozzi responded with a simple question: "What did I do to you?" That innocent question sent Mayor Serpico into the next stratosphere.
What he lacked in elegance—and in range of vocabulary—he made up for in directness: "You're a jag off! You look like a fcking shine {a disparaging term for a black person} on 15th [avenue] because you're doing it to bust fcking balls. That's what your doing. So, go fck yourself. Go fck yourself!"
Michael Cozzi then asked about his broken window. That didn't go over well.
When it came to expletives, Mayor Serpico still had some gas left in the tank: "I give a fck about your window. Like I worry about your fcking house when I drive past it. Now do me a favor and go sit down and shut up."
At that point, one might have thought that Mayor Serpico had gotten his point across. But the Mayor apparently thought otherwise. To cement the point, Mayor Serpico told him what he really thought: "Yeah, because you live like a piece of sht. You're like a fcking hillbilly. You're like a hillbilly!"
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Growing up in that town in the 1960s was like living in The Sopranos, though I didn't know it at the time, of course.
It wasn't like "Tony Soprano" town, more like Paulie.
True story...
I was an intern, sitting in a barber shop "Don of the Regency" just off Michigan Avenue, reading (cough) a magazine awaiting my turn.
This guy walks in wearing a dago-tee. With, I kid you not, a pack of smokes in the sleeve. He sits down across the coffee table from me.
"Ummm.....George?"
"Er, yeah?"
"George, it's Jim Fanone. From high school!"
"OH YEAH! Jim, how the hell are you?"
"Good! What are you up to?"
"Well, just got married, and I'm an intern here at Northwestern. Gonna start my residency in about 4 months. I live in the area. How about you? What are you up to? What are you doing?
"Nothing much, really. I (long, long silcece) have my own business."
Okay then.
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Success is measured by your discipline and inner peace. – Mike Ditka
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"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in Lawn Chairs and Tickets:
@Catseye3 said in Lawn Chairs and Tickets:
Why I hate "homeowners associations".
This isn't even a HOA, just a private house on a residential street.
You've got to wonder whether there's something else going on here. That's pretty bizarre behaviour by the Village, and even more so by the Mayor.
I was only joking
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@Doctor-Phibes said in Lawn Chairs and Tickets:
You've got to wonder whether there's something else going on here.
If I had to guess, someone "connected" to the village government, a cop or a council member lives nearby and doesn't like the look. So, they filed a complaint, hoping the get the weight of the gummint to have the chairs removed.
That's pretty bizarre behaviour by the Village, and even more so by the Mayor.
Yeah, but it's Melrose Park. And the "s" is not pronounced like a "z", but rather as in "stop the madness," by those who grew up there. It used to be very, very, Italian, but has now become largely Hispanic.
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@George-K This isn't even a HOA, just a private house on a residential street.
Oh.
Geez.
I'm with Phibes. Somebody has reason to believe they can behave any way they wish and do anything they want. It feels horridly Orwellian; you want to learn how it came to be that a system cop could leave handwritten notes with impunity.
So I of course agree with the others' comments here.
But I'm curious about the Cozzis' response to all this. Did they react? Did they defend the chairs, even if ineffectually? Did they just turtle? Did they stand up for their god-given right to uglify their yard?
And not for nuttin, that whole chair vista is pretty unsightly.
Gestapo tactics aside, what could the neighborhood have done differently to solve the problem? Did they do things differently before things got nasty? Is that the part we're missing?
What could they do now? Given the Cozzis' age, they could just laugh it off, wait it out, figuring that in the fullness (not much) of time the problem would solve itself. 'Course, with their luck, Michael would move in and carry on the tradition. Heh!
And Serpico, geez, what a piece of work! Who's enabling him? How many times has he been re-elected, I wonder?
Success is measured by your discipline and inner peace. – Mike Ditka
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@Catseye3 said in Lawn Chairs and Tickets:
@George-K This isn't even a HOA, just a private house on a residential street.
And Serpico, geez, what a piece of work! Who's enabling him? How many times has he been re-elected, I wonder?
Serpico has been mayor for
2023 years. It's the (suburban) Chicago way.https://www.melrosepark.org/ronald-m-serpico/
Ronald Serpico, believing in his grandfather’s vision of the “American Dream,” successfully ran for Mayor in 1997. At that time, Ron felt the priorities of the Village were not focused on the hopes, dreams and concerns of all its residents. Since then, Ron and the Village trustees have been working hard to make Melrose Park a community that people and businesses want to move to and not from.
Now far be it from me to rely on stereotypes, but, c'mon man!
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My fantasy:
I'm in a town meeting and I rise to voice a complaint. This annoys Serpico and he unleashes a volley of fuck-you's at my head.
Me: "No, fuck you, you fucking hack!" (With a woman-and-white-cat-meme finger stab.)
The Chicago Way oughtta work both ways, no?
