Leticia Cantu is back at City Hall.

This development is noteworthy for a couple of reasons.

For one thing, I can’t recall any other former City Council member subsequently taking a job as a staffer for another council member.

For another, Cantu has a … how should we say this? … complicated history at City Hall.

Cantu is the new chief of staff for District 7 Councilman Cris Medina, a gig she accepted after serving nearly a year in the same position for freshman state Rep. Diego Bernal.

Medina is the fifth council member Cantu has served (not counting a short tenure in then-Mayor Julián Castro’s community office), and, based on her track record, there’s a fair chance for fireworks.

Three of her four previous council-staff stints ended acrimoniously after less than a year. Her 2008 firing by then-Councilwoman Mary Alice Cisneros instantly took on legendary proportions, with tales of a City Hall shouting match as Cantu left the building.

Cantu’s 2006 departure from the office of Delicia Herrera was even more sordid. Cantu seemingly had been implicated in the destruction of a toll-booth campaign exhibit belonging to Nelson Balido, a Republican legislative candidate challenging Joaquin Castro, for whom Cantu was doing campaign work.

A Balido campaign staffer secretly videotaped someone (who looked just like Cantu) demolishing the exhibit. A day later, Cantu left Herrera’s office, surrounded by a cloud of innuendo.

Cantu has never publicly confessed to the act of vandalism, but she hasn’t denied it either. When I asked her about it on the eve of her 2010 interim appointment to replace her then-fiance, Phil Cortez, on the council, Cantu said this: “Mistakes were made, and lessons were learned.”

More lessons would be learned by Cantu in the aftermath of her two-month council appointment. In the fall of 2009, Cantu had privately approached Julián Castro asking him to support her for a council appointment if her fiance vacated his seat to run for the Texas House. Castro said no.

A few months later, Cantu found a different route to the dais. Cortez applied for a two-month Air Force public-relations course in Maryland, and announced it less than a week before he had to leave. With little time for council members to consider their options, they approved Cortez’s suggestion that Cantu fill the seat in his absence.

At the time, Cantu insisted she had no future designs on the council seat, but a year later, with Cortez term-limited out, she launched a campaign for it. Even with Julián Castro’s block-walking help, she was upset by energetic newcomer Rey Saldaña. Even low-blow mail pieces suggesting that Saldaña (who was only 24 and lived with his family at the time) had never paid a utility bill couldn’t save Cantu’s candidacy.

Most prominent local Democrats had backed Cantu in the race, but Michael Soto, a respected Trinity University English professor and member of the State Board of Education, went out on a limb and endorsed Saldaña.

In what smelled like an act of retribution against Soto, Cantu’s close friend and former council co-worker Rafael Diaz (who lived at a Northwest Side home owned by Cantu) enlisted his girlfriend, Marisa Perez, to run for the education-board seat. With Diaz managing her campaign, Perez pulled off a surprise win over Soto.

The most curious part of Cantu’s nine lives as a public servant is that young leaders such as Bernal and the Castros, who have come to represent a new kind of politics — free of the old-school, kneecap-busting gutter politics so prevalent in South Texas — continually turn to a political operator who often seems to epitomize that old-school brand of politics. Of course, political history is filled with squeaky-clean candidates who hire enforcers to do their dirty work for them.

Ultimately, Cantu’s gift is for political organizing. Politicians hire her not because she possesses a special policy expertise (although her brief council tenure resulted in an impactful ban on texting while driving). They seek her out because of the mental Rolodex of political connections she carries around with her. And while past council bosses such as Herrera and Roger Flores Jr. came away dissatisfied with her job performance, Cantu can be a dogged, loyal foot soldier for politicians she cares about (such as Bernal and the Castros).

For better or worse, City Hall always seems a bit livelier when she’s around.

ggarcia@express-news.net

Twitter: @gilgamesh470