Frank Coconate was an authentic anti-Daley gadfly who talked to reporters and refused to be just another ‘yes-man’ from the precincts. He died recently at age 65.
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Frank L. Coconate, age 65, passed away unexpectedly on June 24, 2023. Frank was the beloved husband of Ann M., nee Bosco, for 33 wonderful years; loving father of Antonina Rose, Lucia Gabriella and Frank Coconate, Jr.; dear son of the late Roselyn and Gabriel Coconate and son in law of Josephine and the late Joseph Bosco; dearest brother of Gabriel (Gerri) Coconate, Pamela (Pasquale) Mazzone, the late James, Jeanette, and Louis Coconate and brother-in-law of Joseph Bosco; fond uncle of Roselyn Mazzone and Maria (Brandon) Seveska and Gabriel (Carla), Joseph and Vince Coconate.
Proud Alumni of Hall of Fame 1976 Willowbrook Warriors Football.
Former City of Chicago Worker, a longtime Political Activist and a Voice for people of all Communities. A true and dear Friend who will be missed by many.
Visitation Wednesday, June 28, 2023, from 3:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m. (Funeral Service 6:30 p.m.) at Cumberland Chapels 8300 W. Lawrence Ave., Norridge, IL. All services end on Wednesday evening and the interment will be private. For more information call (708)456-8300. Read Less
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By Dan Mihalopoulos | WBEZ Jun 30, 2023, 6:00am CDT
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.
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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.
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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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Alderman Gives a Critic of the Mayor a New Vest and New Duties
By Dan Mihalopoulos
- May 20, 2010
They form an odd sight on the once-mean, now-trendy streets of Bucktown and Wicker Park: The bespectacled alderman of a young, affluent ward and his blue-collar aide, popping sewer grates and wielding shovels.
Almost five years after the Daley administration fired Frank Coconate from the Water Management Department for allegedly loafing and lying about it, the unrelenting mayoral critic is again sticking his shaved head into the city’s plumbing system and wearing a yellow safety vest. Except the name written on the back of the vest is not Mayor Richard M. Daley, but rather Alderman Scott Waguespack (32nd Ward), who pays Mr. Coconate about $100 a week from campaign funds for part-time help as an “infrastructure consultant.”
Mr. Waguespack is among the more vocal mayoral foes on the City Council, and he said this week that he did not fear angering Mr. Daley by giving a job to one of the most notorious political naysayers in a town of yes men. “I can’t believe the mayor had such a vendetta that he fired him,” the alderman said, describing Mr. Coconate, 52, as a good employee.
Told of the alderman’s comments, Jacquelyn Heard, the mayor’s spokeswoman, said: “Isn’t that an easy excuse for hiring someone who has a reputation for not working? Real convenient.”
In the final stretch of his 28 years with the city, Mr. Coconate’s co-workers dubbed him “The Coconut” because they thought only a deranged city employee would dare publicly lambaste the mayor. Mr. Coconate surprised the workers further in the summer of 2005 by passing out “Jr.” buttons to encourage United States Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. to challenge the mayor. (The congressman ultimately shied away from running.)
The city fired Mr. Coconate in August 2005, just days before Mr. Jackson spoke to Mr. Coconate’s renegade political group, the Northwest Side Democratic Organization. City officials said at the time that Mr. Coconate’s reports of work sites he inspected as a safety specialist did not match the data recorded by a GPS tracker in his city truck.
Mr. Coconate’s legal efforts to get his job back have failed, though he gained some retribution when the court-appointed city hiring monitor awarded him $75,000 in 2008 from a fund for victims of politically motivated job discrimination at City Hall.
He found temporary refuge in a job in Bensenville thanks to John Geils, the suburb’s mayor at the time, who opposed Chicago’s efforts to expand O’Hare International Airport. Mr. Coconate lost that job last year, after Mr. Geils lost re-election to a candidate who dropped Bensenville’s opposition.
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Mr. Coconate — who also works part-time as a security guard and as a process server — spends three afternoons each week with Mr. Waguespack. On Thursday, they lifted sewer covers and shoveled out debris that blocked drains.
Mr. Waguespack said he engages in these acts of vigilante city service to help constituents whose complaints have not been addressed by the cash-strapped city administration. The alderman, who was first elected in 2007 when he defeated a Daley ally, declined to address rumors he is mulling a run for mayor next year.
Mr. Coconate is happy to again egg on a potential challenger to Mr. Daley. “He’s a very vengeful person,” Mr. Coconate said of the mayor. “I might not be a threat to him, but he wanted to send a message to anybody who thought of questioning his management style.”
A version of this article appears in print on May 21, 2010, Section A, Page NaN of the National edition with the headline: THE CHICAGO WAY; Alderman Gives a Critic of the Mayor a New Vest and New Duties. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
