(Getty Images)"> When the Transom first encountered former congressman Joe DioGuardi, the Republican who is making a primary bid to challenge Kristen Gillibrand for her Senate seat, he was talking about a severed head. The head belonged to the top lieutenant of General Gjergj Kastriadi, a.k.a. Skenderbeg, and had been delivered to the general in a valise from the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II, after Skanderbeg had dispatched the lieutenant to deliver the terms of a truce. There would be no truce, and the Ottomans would continue battling the rebel general until his death in 1468, only then regaining their hold of his native Albania.
If that sounds like the stuff of a Hollywood epic, Mr. DioGuardi agrees.
"It's like Braveheart," Mr. DioGuardi told the Transom. "It's a story about freedom that Americans need to hear. That's why we have a movie in development.
We were standing on the deck of the U.S.S. Intrepid, where Mr. DioGuardi was regaling a table of Republican well-wishers, gathered for a fund-raiser for Iraq Veterans for Congress, with tales of the Albanian hero. They were taking a break from enumerating the failings of Senator Chuck Schumer and President Obama to linger on an obscure episode from medieval Balkan history.
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