By Julie Shapiro
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
LOWER MANHATTAN — Anne Compoccia, the outspoken former chairwoman of Community Board 1 and longtime Little Italy leader, died last Thursday after a battle with cancer. She was 62 years old.
Compoccia used her trademark no-nonsense manner, tempered by a dose of humor, to chair CB1 from 1988 to 2000. She oversaw the neighborhood's metamorphosis from a business district to a residential community, advocating strongly for schools, parks and other basic services.
"She was very forceful [to] make sure the concerns of the residents were heard," said City Councilwoman Margaret Chin, who was a member of CB1 under Compoccia in the early 1990s. "She didn't let anybody get away with anything."
Compoccia's legacy of community service was complicated by an embezzlement conviction in 2000, in which she pleaded guilty to stealing about $85,000 in city funds to bolster Cafe 121, her family's struggling restaurant. She was sentenced to five months in a halfway house and community service for pocketing money from Little Italy merchants that was intended for permits for the Feast of San Gennaro.
Compoccia withdrew from her official roles after that, but she continued to attend Downtown Independent Democrats meetings and fire off all-caps e-mails whenever she heard of a local problem, from the closing of St. Vincent's Hospital to the lack of heat in affordable housing apartments.
"When she needed to enlist my help with something, she didn't ask if it was possible," said Diane Lapson, president of the IPN Tenants' Association, who knew Compoccia for 30 years. "She would just say, 'We have to fix this problem.' No wasn't an option if someone was suffering."
In her decades of public service, Compoccia was equally comfortable chatting up top city politicians and fishmongers at the South Street Seaport, never altering her manner or feeling the need to censor herself, friends said.
"She was really funny," said Paul Goldstein, the former district manager at CB1 who worked closely with Compoccia. "She was charismatic, she was unpredictable, the opposite of PC, outspoken, outrageous, you name it."
Once, Goldstein recalled, during a dispute between the community and the Port Authority, Compoccia started a formal letter to the Port's executive director with the words, "What's your problem?"
"That summed up who Anne was," Goldstein said. "She was not afraid to speak her mind. No matter how powerful you were, she would tell you what she thought."
Others recalled Compoccia's quieter offers of help when they were struggling with a sick relative or had nowhere to go for a holiday.
"I think of Anne as a cactus: thorny and prickly on the outside but soft and tender on the inside," said Sean Sweeney, former president of the Downtown Independent Democrats.
A Little Italy native and a devout Catholic, Compoccia was always known in that neighborhood as "Baby Anne," even after she had grown up and moved to TriBeCa's Independence Plaza North, where she lived for over three decades.
She had no children but was quick to advocate for the neighborhood's burgeoning population of young families, said Bob Townley, executive director of Manhattan Youth.
"All the kids in the neighborhood were hers," Townley said.
John Fratta, a CB1 member, now plans to ask the city to name a corner of Mulberry Street in Little Italy after Compoccia.
At Compoccia's packed funeral Saturday at the Church of the Most Precious Blood in Little Italy, there were plenty of tears but also lots of laughter as well, as people shared their memories, attendees said.
Compoccia is survived by her brother, Anthony Compoccia, and many nieces and nephews.
