Robert Cappucci. Georgia Epiphaniou photo.
Robert Cappucci has been campaigning for public office for more than five decades, with runs for state representative, Congress, City Council and now, for the fourth time, mayor of Boston.
“A winner, as they say, never quits, and a quitter never wins,” says the 80-year-old one-time Boston Police officer.
He has been successful twice: In 1987, and again in 1989, he was elected to the Boston School Committee. He didn’t have an opportunity to win a third time because membership on the school panel became an appointed position in 1991.
Before, during, and in between his attempts to win public office, he has had his hand in different lines of work. In addition to his time with the BPD, he was a substitute teacher in the for Boston Public Schools and, for several years, he was involved in real estate.
A lifelong East Boston resident who grew up with four siblings and served in the US Navy during the Vietnam War (1968-1974), he has never been married. He describes himself as a “workaholic.”
In 2013, he announced a campaign for mayor but failed to turn in enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. In 2017 and 2021, he made the ballot, but did not advance beyond the preliminary municipal elections, receiving 6.7 percent of the vote in 2017 and 1.1 percent in 2021.
Cappucci has roots in electoral politics. His father, Enrico, represented East Boston as a Democratic member of the Massachusetts House from 1937 to 1949. He says his father told him that he wasn’t cut out to be a politician. “I guess he knows what a politician is, and I don’t.”
Still, Cappucci didn’t know exactly what his father meant by his assertion – Enrico died in 1976, two years before his son’s first run for public office, for state representative – but he later interpreted it to mean that politicians pander to different audiences.
“As I got older, I think of a politician as someone that is pretty good with their words, so they don’t really commit themselves,” Cappucci says. “A politician to me seems to have no — I hate to say it — conscience.”
He is running as a conservative in a city that has had a Democrat in the mayor’s office continually since James Michael Curley took office for the third time in 1931. But Cappucci has never been deterred by the political makeup of his city, where 39.7 percent of voters are Democrats, 55.2 percent are unenrolled, and 4.3 percent are Republicans.
“Although it’s a liberal city, there are plenty of people out there that have my way of doing things,” he says, “a conservative way.”
John Dillon, a self-styled “liberal,” has supported Cappucci the office-seeker from his first run for School Committee through his bid for mayor in 2021. A knee injury has kept him on the sidelines this year.
“He did his service on a nuclear submarine. Do you know what you have to do — to go through — to do that?” Dillon asked. “You’re put through all sorts of psychological tests and everything else, so it told me he was a real bright guy. And the fact that he always wanted to help the poor was another thing that really hit me.”
Cappucci says he is running as a “unifier candidate,” which to him means bridging the gap between Democrats and Republicans on certain issues.
In 2021, he was a critic of so-called “sanctuary cities.” Though he didn’t clearly lay out his stance for his latest campaign in this interview, he did say he favors President Trump’s efforts to increase arrests and deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“He’s going after, from what I have been observing, people that are very bad,” Cappucci said. “They’re killers, they’re murderers, they’re rapists. That’s who he’s targeting.”
When pushed on this statement with examples of detentions involving undocumented individuals without criminal records — like Marcelo Gomes da Silva, a Milford teen who was detained by ICE on his way to volleyball practice in May — Cappucci said he wasn’t sure that media accounts were accurate.
“As my father always told me, being an attorney in politics, he said, ‘Don’t believe everything you read,’” he said. “So, when you get situations like that, I’m not sure we’re getting the truth.”
Cappucci is a critic of incumbent Mayor Michelle Wu, especially with respect to her handling of the situation at Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard, an area with a history of rampant substance misuse.
Richard Masterson, a Cappucci supporter and lifelong Roxbury resident, said no one is solving the problem.
“It seems like they just push it from one area to another area to another area,” he said. “There are people shooting up drugs, needles hanging out of their necks and out of their arms, and sitting on the curbs. They have nowhere to go.”
Cappucci holds Wu responsible for the ongoing problem. He told Masterson that, if elected, he would seek to reopen Long Island Hospital, which offered addiction treatments but was closed in 2014 when officials deemed the bridge to Long Island to be in poor condition.
Among his other concerns about Wu’s mayoralty is the ongoing redevelopment of White Stadium in Franklin Park. “I really have a problem with trying to do things when you’re giving away the tax dollars,” he said. “We need that money for so many reasons.” He said housing, education, and infrastructure should take precedence over the stadium.
Although wins and losses are out of his control, Cappucci says that running for office is what he wants to do for the rest of his life.
“As a Catholic, I’m trying to do the best I can. So when I go before him — when I pass away — he can say, hopefully, ‘You did a good job.’”