As Mayor Wu fends off a lawsuit alleging her administration retaliated against property owners who appealed their tax assessments, the mayor is now warning other property owners not to lease parking spaces to ICE, as WBUR and the Herald report. … She’s not adding “or else” to her warnings. She doesn’t have to. The threat of retaliation is implied – and it’s hard not to make the connection to the pending property-tax-retaliation case. …

Obviously, she’s dead wrong for doing all of this. But there are precedents of Boston mayors thinking it’s OK to harass and threaten private businesses and property owners, such as Mayor Menino’s peevish bannings of Chick-fil-A and CVC MinuteClinics in Boston. Wu, who once worked for Menino, clearly learned a lesson or two from her mentor.

Update — A reader writes in to remind me of the most infamous case of mayoral strong-arming: James Michael Curley’s threat to flood the vaults of the First National Bank if it didn’t loan the city money. Not surprisingly, the bank decided to approve the loan.