By Jim O'Sullivan

When Arthur L. Sutton was a younger man, there was in his neighborhood a man old enough to be his father who sold Venetian blinds in a shop along Humboldt Avenue. Sutton attended Patrick L. Campbell Junior High School, as did the shopkeeper's son, and was friendly with his other sons.

Sutton, 60, recalls that it was one of the few black-owned businesses in the area, a point of pride.

"I would always watch him," Sutton says of the shopkeeper.

Now he's watching the shopkeeper's son &emdash; training a critical eye on him, in fact. Sutton is running for the District Four City Council seat and one of his opponents is the incumbent, Charles Yancey, the shopkeeper's son.

His other opponent is Ego Ezedi, and nearly all of the ink spilled on this race &emdash; and there has been a good deal more than on any other race &emdash; has centered on Yancey and Ezedi, touting a contest between old and new, and focusing on a variety of other storylines.

Sutton flies below the radar, expected in the conventional wisdom to be the answer to a trivia question come the morning of Wednesday, September 24, when the preliminary election will have narrowed the District Four field to two.

But Sutton doesn't let the long odds keep him from kicking up a fuss. "I think my chances are a little better than Ego's," Sutton says, adding that he is "distressed" by the perception that Ezedi's candidacy is boosted greatly by politicians from outside the district.

Ezedi held his fire on Sutton, saying he thinks the community is the ultimate winner in a crowded field. Of Sutton's chances, Ezedi says, "It's like anything, it depends on how hard he works. He's going to have to work hard. If he's going to work hard, then the district is going to benefit from it."

Sutton has no such diplomacy, only scorching tones for his former schoolmate, saying Yancey has "no regard for his constituency" and calling for his resignation.

Yancey throws similar heat coming back the other way, saying that Sutton "seems to be a "strange individual" and "a troubled individual."

Sutton, a father of two and resident of Athelwold St. near Codman Square, is also a newspaper publisher, a licensed builder, an accomplished practitioner of jiu-jitsu, and the provider of free piano lessons to 40 youngsters each year.

And he has a history with Yancey. He counts Yancey as a distant relative. He worked for Vikki Middleton in her challenges to Yancey. He had a confrontation with Yancey's staff on City Hall's fifth floor, which led to the 1996 founding of The Boston People's Voice, a biweekly whose first edition trumpeted "Taxation Without Representation."

There is no sleight-of-hand here, no shadowy affiliations, no special interests lurking with hidden intent. The front-page headline of a recent Voice stated succinctly, "We Need a New Councilor."

The article's author? Arthur L. Sutton.

"Is the campaign a personal vendetta?" Sutton asks rhetorically. "To get involved in any campaign and not say you're personally involved, you're crazy."

"I've been talking to people, putting up signs, expressing ideas about ways I think the community can and should be served," Sutton says. He seems bemused by questions about the legitimacy of his campaign, whether it's an ad hominem assault on an old neighborhood rival or grounded in a substantive desire to better the district.

"I've done a lot of things in life and I have expressed interest into so many things in life, and I've seen how it should be done," he says. "I never wanted to be in politics in my life. But I'm so sure of myself in terms of what I can do that I tell everyone that I represent the best in my community."

Sutton's activities rank him as a quality neighborhood guy. Every summer, kids from the area study piano under Sutton once a week for three months, a project he designed and conducts along with the Codman Square Health Center. His wife runs a daycare center out of their home. That's upstairs; downstairs, Sutton publishes, with his family's help, the Voice, packed with public service announcements, wire stories that appeal to the public interest, and health tips.

But it's also packed with the kind of campaign rhetoric that you don't hear much anymore without flipping on FOXNews. A sampling from a recent Sutton diatribe charges Yancey with "racist attitudes" and with suppressing voter turnout by "having [voters] think that politics is dirty and nasty. The only thing that is nasty about it is the lies that Yancey and his group have constantly told people in his District."

The editorial is entitled "Campaign Slurs." Sitting in his basement, Sutton knows how it sounds when he tells people the backstory between him and Yancey. It sounds like a personal vendetta.

Sutton had worked for Middleton's campaign to unseat Yancey in 1995, which died a messy death. Shortly thereafter, Sutton went to Yancey and asked for his support during a Zoning Board of Appeals hearing, which Sutton later won, about the use of a garage in the Sutton home. (It is customary to ask city councillors for support in such issues.) Sutton claims Yancey and his staff were discourteous, that they refused to represent him, and that a member of Yancey's staff slammed the office door in his face.

If not a vendetta, then, this is, at the very least, personal.

Sutton alleges that Yancey should take time off from his City Council job in order to run for re-election. Asked if this would leave Yancey vulnerable to charges that he isn't doing the job properly, Sutton says, "I don't know."

"I mean, he had 20 years to make it or 20 years not to make it, but in 20 years his district is the worst in the city of Boston, and I mean streets, crime, schools," Sutton says.

Sutton alleges that Yancey will resign after the election even if he retains the office, Yancey denies it flatly, and says, "I'm not exactly sure why he's running, other than to get me out of office."

Sutton claims Yancey's staff did him a disservice by refusing to represent his interests.

Yancey says, "I don't think there's any more truth to that allegation than there were in the many other allegations he's been making in his newspaper."

Sutton says that one of his second cousins is married to one of Yancey's wife's cousins.

Yancey says that's not true, but that they may be related another way.

It is a family affair, then, laced with the type of vitriol found over the most poisonous of Thanksgiving tables.

Sutton compares himself to Mike Tyson, doing whatever he must to win. With one difference, he says: "I'm not going to bite anybody's ears, 'cause I don't want to get that close."