To Ocean County’s political folklore, add the cannoli moment. Joe Vicari, proud of his Italian and Jersey City heritage, must be feeling the heat in his bid for yet another three-year term on Ocean County’s all-Republican freeholder board. Sponges used to be his campaign mainstay. “The guy with the most sponges wins,’’ he likes to joke. Only this year there’s no guy trying to unseat him. Instead it’s Michele Rosen of Waretown, who once served on the old Dover Township Committee before Vicari, the late Tom Renkin, and political sniper Robert Haelig put the Grand Old Party back in control of …

The massacre of Toms River’s reputation in October 1972 was bloodier than the British attack on the village and its defenders during the waning days of the Revolutionary War. And it's impact reverberated throughout Ocean County. The despoilers did not arrive by longboat through Cranberry Inlet. Loyalist William Dillon of Island Heights did not lead the murderous pack to the village. Instead they came overland, from Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, led by Maury Levy, a writer in search of a story, even if he had to make one up. “Death at Toms River,’’ screamed the headline over the …

There are trials you don’t forget, especially if they have sex, violence, organized gangsters and great lawyers. The trial of a North Jersey wiseguy reputed to be Joe Pesci’s model for his role in “Goodfellas,’’ was one of them. I didn’t know it then, but Robert “Cabert’’ Bisaccia, was a mobster on the rise when he was hanging out “down the shore’’ in 1974, moving from motel to motel and looking for prey. He found it when a Seaside Park doctor went looking for somebody to collect money from a contractor he loaned money. The contractor owed the doctor money. So Dr. Gerald F. Wolfe asked …

Few issues have shattered the political tranquility of Ocean County and Toms River the way the controversial plan to build a new $315 million toll road from South Brunswick to the Garden State Parkway did in the early 1970s. Plans for the Driscoll Expressway, named for the former governor and father of the New Jersey Turnpike, seemed like a runaway train that could not be stopped. But stopped it was. The so called Parkway Spur was authorized by New Jersey lawmakers in 1965, but the New Jersey Highway Authority, which operated the Garden State Parkway, did not have the money to build it. …

Ocean County needs a place to remember those who color outside the lines: a Citizen Activist Hall of Fame. There are dozens of nominees, mostly now forgotten, who battled the status quo against abuses real and imagined, and in some cases made huge differences for others who heard and adopted their cries for reform. I got introduced to the species early, on Long Beach Island, where the likes of Capt. George Clover, Joseph Transue, and Wesley Kenneth Bell railed against some of the policies of the Long Beach Township Board of Commissioners. Transue was a frequent critic of the amount of money …

There was a role reversal Wednesday when what was new in Ocean County government took place in its oldest public building, while what was being renewed took place in the more modern Administration Building. First the new, or the old. Historic Courtroom One was all gussied up, looking as grand as it ever has, for Scott M. Colabella to take the oath of office from Superior Court Judge Vincent J. Grasso as County Clerk. Nobody has put a final number on the cost of renovating the grand old courtroom, but it’s north of a million dollars, according to the most informed speculation. It would still …

Politicians do the dumbest things. One of the classics I uncovered was the plan to put a septic system in the middle of Barnegat Bay. Huh? Yep, Ocean County's freeholders were moving ahead with a plan to do just that – at Berkeley Island at the end of Brennan Concourse. At the center of this bungle was then-Freeholder Director Joseph S. Portash, the former Manchester mayor and administrator who was later accused of gambling away about $500,000 in municipal funds at Atlantic City casinos. The county bought the sedge island, which had been covered with dredge spoils, as a park. What a great …