01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Jim Mageau, acting president of the Charlestown Town Council, was all smiles in the courthouse corridor yesterday afternoon — both before and after the end of his trial on a charge of assault and battery against videographer Cliff Vanover.

He was laughing beforehand as he joked, “I pick on all you reporters equally!”

He was smiling afterward as he answered a question about whether, as the judge had just ordered, he needs anger-management counseling: “I believe that anger is an emotion that’s an equivalent of love. Do I need love-management counseling?”

And he was laughing again as he answered a follow-up question, about whether it was love he was practicing when he pushed Vanover’s camera away from him on July 14: “I wouldn’t get near that guy — I might catch something! Don’t print that!”

In between, though, the smiles disappeared, as he listened first to the lawyers giving their closing arguments, and then to District Court Judge William C. Clifton pronouncing him guilty.

MAGEAU ARRIVED at Courtroom 4 of Wakefield’s J. Howard McGrath Judicial Complex at 1:47 p.m., safely before the 2 p.m. resumption of the trial that began Thursday –– in fact, so far ahead that the courtroom door was still locked. Nattily attired in navy pinstripe suit and red paisley tie, a thin silver tie bar holding it in place, he carried a long black umbrella as insurance against threatened rain.

He asked his lawyer, Richard Corley, how long this would take; he had a meeting to attend at 5. Corley assured him he’d be out in plenty of time.

Walking with them, then taking a seat beside Mageau on a wooden bench in the corridor, was Bruce Picard, the retired Providence Gravure pressman who also is a Charlestown councilman. Picard is noted at the council meetings for his almost-total allegiance to Mageau, and for his silence during council debates.

Picard was chatty now, though, discussing people he and Mageau both know, and talking national politics with him.

“You don’t need to be shooting your mouth off all the time, like me, to have opinions,” Mageau told me. People say he controls Picard and his vote, Mageau said, but that’s not true; Picard, he said, “has more integrity in his little finger …”

JUST DOWN the hall, two benches over, sat Kate Waterman, the Charlestown councilwoman who was president for most of last year. Waterman’s outspokenness has caused her grief, and when I approached her, she drew a finger across her lips: they were zipped.

A moment later, though, she couldn’t resist making a comment.

“There’s a lot of history here, a lot of baggage,” she said. “When you’ve lived through it, it’s hard to stay detached.

“How’s that for careful?”

Reporters for three newspapers had gathered in the hallway, along with a newspaper photographer and a TV cameraman.

The courtroom door unlocked, Waterman and most of the reporters entered. Later, so did Harriet Allen, the fourth and last Charlestown council member.

Mageau and Picard kept talking. A couple of minutes before 2 o’clock, Mageau asked the time, then hurried in to take a seat beside his lawyer.

MAGEAU’S SMILE had disappeared by the time Corley rose to speak, summarizing his case by saying that he’d looked up the dictionary definition of “battery,” and this didn’t fit; that Vanover was a political enemy of Mageau’s, and not an impartial, ordinary victim.

Hands clasped over his stomach, he listened stolidly as Patrick Sullivan, representing the Charlestown police, followed Corley, advising that “Mr. Mageau needs to grow some thick skin,” and adding, “When you’re in politics, you will have enemies.”

And, though he leaned forward, his expression did not change as he heard the judge say that Mageau appeared to be claiming he’d hit the camera in self-defense, but “for the life of me … it makes absolutely no common sense” to think that the camera could have been a threat to the councilman.

The judge pronounced him guilty, said he’d file the case for a year if Mageau was well-behaved, and took the prosecutor’s suggestion that anger-management counseling might improve Mageau’s “volatile, confrontational personality.”

Corley had been right; it all took only a few minutes. Then the action was over, and Mageau was led out to the clerk’s office to deal with paperwork. (Later, he would file an appeal that meant the case would be tried again from scratch in Superior Court.)

The reporters and other council members left by the main courtroom door. Waterman walked out without commenting. Allen stayed to talk to reporters.

Picard looked around, trying to figure out the ways of the courthouse, and where he might eventually find Mageau.

“Where does he come out, over there?” he asked.

“ ’Cause I’ve got his umbrella.”

arosenbe@projo.com