“We’re the smokescreen,” Dilorenzo, president of the firefighters Local 198, which has been fighting a bill that would give the state the right to terminate union contracts, said over a turkey club and an iced tea. It escaped no one’s attention that two of the men most enmeshed in the near death spiral of the seaside resort town-the debt-saddled casino owner whose multiple corporate bankruptcies had foretold if not hastened the city’s financial misfortune and the governor whose latest plan to rescue the city sounded to many like a politically driven death warrant-had found common cause on the national political stage. Now the Ducktown was packed with cops and firefighters.
The Friday before, city workers had gotten paid for the first time in a month.
