The Public Ethics of Bryant Prentice IIIby Bruce Jackson
Why Mac's partner didn't get killed
When I read the letter defending his ethics that Bryant Prentice III, former Kaleida Health and Millard Fillmore Hospital board chairman, published in the March 20 Buffalo News, I remembered a story a Texas safecracker named Mac told me one hot and muggy July afternoon 35 years ago in the dentist's office of Ramsey prison farm, which is located in the Brazos river bottomland southwest of Houston.
The safecracker was two-thirds of the way through a 12-year sentence. He described a string of burglaries—"scores" he called them—and told me how careful he was about not traveling with burglary tools in his car and other things he did to avoid capture and, if captured, to avoid conviction. The reason he was in Ramsey and I was getting to talk to him was, the Texas Rangers had arrested his partner and beaten a confession out of him. "It didn't matter how they got a confession in those days," he said, "if they got it, it was good."
After the partner confessed, the Rangers picked up Mac and brought him to a place where he saw on a table all of his burglary tools, the loot from some recent scores, and his drugs (he liked pills, all kinds of pills). In the middle of the table Mac spotted his hunting knife. His partner was sitting in a chair near the table. There were no policemen or Rangers close to Mac, his partner, or the table, so he moved closer to the table to get the knife.
I’ll come back to this, but first I have to tell you about Bry Prentice and what he did, and what he said about it.I walked over to the side where he was. My hunting knife was on the table. I was going to kill him. I was so mad, you know? When I got right next to him, he said to me, "Don't worry about anything. I didn't sign any statements on anybody but just me and you." Man, I just slumped. I didn't know what to do.Buffalo Heat
“Bry” is what he’s called by his long-time friends and the physicians at Children's who feel he sold them out. I’ve never heard anyone refer to him with both syllables of his first name, though I suppose there must be occasions when they would be uttered.
Bry Prentice chaired the committee nearly two years year ago that recommended closing Children's Hospital on Bryant Street and moving it to an as yet unbuilt building on High Street close enough to Buffalo General Hospital for the two institutions to be connected by a foot-bridge. Shortly after that report was submitted, Prentice, who was then chairman of Kaleida’s board, sold Kaleida a building on Main Street that he had been unsuccessfully trying to unload for more than a year.
Some opponents of the Children's move questioned his ethics: Wasn't he profiting from his own committee's recommendation? What use would Kaleida have for that property if it didn't expect that, with Children's located there in a brand-new building, the High Street Medical Corridor Dream then being bruited about might really come to pass? Was this Kaleida's way of paying Prentice off for services rendered, the sort of thing people like that do all the time?
And some of Bry Prentice's friends who trusted his ethics questioned his good sense. Even if there was nothing legally wrong with the sale, they said, it seemed to violate the arm's-length rule usually adopted and taken seriously by businesspeople working on the boards of nonprofit institutions: not only do you avoid using your position in the nonprofit to make money, but you avoid the appearance of it because it can hurt the organization. A nonprofit known for insider wheeling and dealing finds gifts and grants much harder to come by.
Then the ground shifted and the whole thing bordered on being a joke: Kaleida didn't have the money to build a new Children's Hospital on High Street after all, and its debt was increasing at such a prodigious rate it wouldn't be doing any new construction for years. The whole project fizzled and the building on Main Street that many people thought a white elephant before the Children's-on-High-Street-bubble became a white elephant once again. Kaleida was going to be hard-pressed finding a use for that building, and the two others it had purchased about the same time. Whatever Bry Prentice got out of the deal, the fact of it was just one more piece of evidence that the people running Kaleida were running around in the dark.
I think the noise would have gone away had it not been for two events. First, Kaleida's killer shark consultants, the Hunter Group, recommended closing Children's Hospital and moving some segment of its services into Millard Fillmore-Gates Circle or, if that couldn't be accomplished, into Buffalo General Hospital. Second, federal, state and corporate funding for the proposed bioinformatics center on High Street started falling into place. If that center got built, there might be life for the High Street neighborhood yet.
Kaleida released Hunter’s recommendation to move Children's to Gates Circle, but I don't think the Kaleida board ever seriously considered that as an option. Hunter’s recommendation was based almost entirely on abstract numbers, not on medical needs or medical politics. They had a large team here for a lot of hours ($2.1 million worth), but, if you read their huge report, you'll see they never paid any attention to the realities of life in Buffalo. How could they when they only talked to 20 people outside Kaleida management and medical staffs?
The Kaleida Board has a very good sense of Buffalo and their plan was to move Children's to Buffalo General, to use Children's staff and patients to breathe some kind of fiscal life into the biggest money-loser in the Kaleida system. Once that happened and once the bioinformatics center (which UB officials are now calling "UB's third campus") broke ground, real estate values in the Main-High area would once again start escalating. Kaleida could then point to their purchase of Bry Prentice's white elephant as rational.
The Hunter report and the bioinformatics buzz got people looking at the High Street machinations once again, and this time it wasn't just rumors by enemies and tongue-clucking by friends. On March 2, the Buffalo News published an article by Lou Michel, "Ethics issue cited in Kaleida building purchase." The sniping and sighs had become news.
What the Buffalo News said
Lou Michel’s lead was simple, uninflected, accurate, and therefore brutal: “A businessman who headed a Kaleida Health advisory panel that two years ago recommended building a new Children's Hospital on High Street later sold Kaleida a piece of property on Main Street near the developing medical campus.”
Michel said that Kaleida critics found a conflict of interest in Prentice's three roles as board member, advisory panel chair, and seller of real estate that increased in value because of a decision made by that board on the advice of that panel. Prentice, the article said, denied any conflict of interest because he didn't take part in the vote to purchase his property.
The article quoted Assemblyman Sam Hoyt and Children's pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Margaret H. MacGillivray, both of whom questioned the deal. "It does seem to me inappropriate that an individual who chaired an advisory panel may profit from the recommendation of that committee," Hoyt said. MacGillivray said even the appearance of "conflict of interest should have been enough for Mr. Prentice to withdraw from the advisory panel of which he was the chairman. He shouldn't have been on it at all."
The building, Michel wrote, belonged to Bryant & Stratton, of which Prentice is controlling stockholder. Prentice said he had an offer from McDonald's Restaurants for $330,000, but it wasn't a straight purchase, so the deal never came about. Then Kaleida offered him $300,000 with no contingencies."Prentice said he accepted Kaleida's smaller purchase offer of $300,000 because of his family's long affiliation with Children's, Millard Fillmore Gates and Millard Fillmore Suburban hospitals, which became part of Kaleida when it was formed in 1998."
Maybe. It may also be that Prentice accepted Kaleida's smaller purchase offer because it was there, and the McDonald's offer never got beyond the contingencies. Every day that building went unsold was another day Prentice was paying taxes and maintenance on it. $300,000 in hand was, in real terms, worth a good deal more than $330,000 one or two years later.
Prentice defends
Which brings us to Prentice's letter in the Buffalo News on March 20.
The letter was headlined, "There's no ethics issue in Kaleida deal," which I assume was provided by a Buffalo News editorial page editor rather than Prentice. This is the letter in its entirety:
Every day that the Kaleida controversy continues, Buffalo Niagara residents are seeing their largest health care system immobilized and potentially destroyed by a group of physicians at Children's Hospital.These are the same doctors who earlier rejected the recommendation of an independent regional committee, which I chaired, to build a stand-alone Children's Hospital adjacent to Buffalo General Hospital. That would have been an ideal solution for improving children's care as well as for providing quality care for women.
Recently, an independent consulting group concluded that Children's Hospital cannot survive on Bryant Street without a $10 million to $15 million subsidy each year. Again, these physicians say that is not true.
Why do William McGuire, Kaleida's new president, and its board of directors believe that this group of doctors is now open to coming to some compromise agreement? This is the group that attempted to impugn my reputation in order to advance its agenda by trying to turn Bryant & Stratton's substantial donation to Kaleida into an incident of questionable ethics.
Bryant & Stratton sold 1028 Main St., a building we had owned since 1921, to Kaleida, at Kaleida's request. The price of $300,000 was less than its value prior to the regional committee's recommendation. Bryant & Stratton had listed the property for $395,000 in 1999 after our campus was relocated downtown. The property was reassessed after the relocation at $575,000.
If a value after the recommendation were used, based upon a $300,000 sale in the same block of Main of a building one-fourteenth in size, situated on a parcel one-third in size, Bryant & Stratton's donation to Kaleida was at least $500,000.
This was hardly an unprincipled action by me, a longtime supporter and former chairman of Millard Fillmore Hospital and of Kaleida.
Our region will suffer immeasurably, not only from a health care perspective but also economically, if Kaleida Health, which employs 10,000 people, does not remain viable.
BRYANT H. PRENTICE III, Buffalo
Deconstructing PrenticeI've been an English teacher for 40 years. People in my profession have a lot of different approaches to their work, but one thing we all do when we teach or when we do research is look carefully at the things people say and write and how they say and write it. Sometimes we also look at and draw our students' attention to things not said or written, to the silences and the omissions in a text.
Let's deconstruct Bry Prentice's letter, both the things said and the things unsaid.
Every day that the Kaleida controversy continues, Buffalo Niagara residents are seeing their largest health care system immobilized and potentially destroyed by a group of physicians at Children's Hospital.
He begins not with the ethical questions raised about his own behavior, but with an attack on a group that didn't figure in Lou Michel's article at all: “a group of physicians at Children’s Hospital” are immobilizing and destroying the region’s "largest health care system." Not a word about how Kaleida took several hospitals with marginal debt and worked them into a system at the brink of financial ruin. Not a word about his own questionable business behavior. Just a simple statement that this “group of physicians” is bringing this huge corporation to stasis.His gambit isn’t new, though you don’t usually encounter it in medical matters. It’s common in litigation. Trial lawyers say, “If you can’t argue the evidence, challenge the law; if you can't challenge the law, attack the witness.” Why begin with this monstrous plot by fiendish physicians? To move the heat somewhere else.
It reminds me of a well known moment in Christopher Marlowe's play The Jew of Malta. Just after setting fire to a nunnery in the hope of murdering his daughter, Barabas is stopped on the road by a priest, Friar Bernadine, who says, "Barabas, thou hath committed – " Barabas interrupts him and finishes the sentence with something completely irrelevant: " – Fornication. But that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead."
This is a syllogism. A syllogism is a logical construct that has three parts. The first line goes, “If A, then B.” The second line goes “If B then C.” The third line goes, “Therefore, if you have A, you have C.” The logic in syllogisms is perfect; the potential fallacy inherent is in the “if” clauses, which is to say, the problem isn't in the argument, it's in the connection the argument has to reality. What if one of those “if” clauses isn’t true? People who argue by syllogism run it all by you so fast you don’t have a chance to say, “Well, can we talk about those premises for a minute?”These are the same doctors who earlier rejected the recommendation of an independent regional committee, which I chaired, to build a stand-alone Children's Hospital adjacent to Buffalo General Hospital. That would have been an ideal solution for improving children's care as well as for providing quality care for women.Would that “stand-alone Children’s Hospital adjacent to Buffalo General Hospital" really "have been an ideal solution for improving children’s care as well as for providing quality care for women?” No specific design of a High Street Children’s Hospital was ever produced; the whole thing was never funded; it was never more than an idea, a suggestion, an extended speculation. Children’s Hospital physicians said, if the new hospital has space and functionality no less than what we have now, sure, let’s move, but show us the plans. There were no plans. The “ideal solution” Prentice writes about was just that, an ideal; it never reached the stage of specificity. What sane businessman would agree to move his factory from a place where it worked fairly well to a new location when there were no specific designs or plans for the new location, no money to create a new building at the new location, and no guarantee that moving to the new location would serve any end other than the fiscal needs of a separate organization in deep financial trouble?
As it turned out, the Children’s Hospital physicians were right: Kaleida never had the wherewithal to build on High Street. It was the same kind of goofy speculation that got them nearly $100 million in debt, with another $100 million coming this year.
Remember what I said above about reading not just for what is there but also for what is not there. It may be that Children’s needs a $10 to $15 million subsidy each year. How much subsidy does Millard Fillmore-Gates Circle need? How much subsidy does Buffalo General need? How much subsidy would Children's need if it didn't have the Kaleida albatross around its neck? How carefully did that unnamed "independent consulting group" study Children's potential economic condition were it separate from Kaleida? What’s the nonsense about subsidies anyway? Just about all public institutions need subsidies. Where would UB, Canisius, ECMC, ECC, the Naval Park be without subsidies? These are public institutions. They serve the public. The public, quite properly and quite reasonably, contributes to their operations. They’re not private interests that exist primarily to make money for the stockholders. Prentice has the wrong model. This is another syllogism. Or it's a red herring.Recently, an independent consulting group concluded that Children's Hospital cannot survive on Bryant Street without a $10 million to $15 million subsidy each year. Again, these physicians say that is not true.The term for what trial lawyers do by attacking the witness when they can’t challenge the evidence, is called an ad hominem argument. Ad hominem means "to the person." You can't undermine the facts so you question the character or motives of the witnesses against you. What does William McGuire’s belief in anything have to do with Bry Prentice’s sale of his building to Kaleida Health? What “substantial donation” is he talking about? This paragraph is all over the place. Nothing has anything to do with anything else. How can anyone rational not be befuddled by it? Not all apparent incoherence is accidental; sometimes it's meant to get you fully disoriented. Did you ever watch the Harlem Globetrotters play an ordinary team?Why do William McGuire, Kaleida's new president, and its board of directors believe that this group of doctors is now open to coming to some compromise agreement? This is the group that attempted to impugn my reputation in order to advance its agenda by trying to turn Bryant & Stratton's substantial donation to Kaleida into an incident of questionable ethics.Now that you’re properly befuddled, it’s time for voodoo arithmetic:
The sale to a corporation he chaired of a building that had long been on the market and which was, in real estate terms, stale, is a donation ? A donation? He gave half a million dollars to Kaleida by selling to it for $300,000 a building he hadn’t been able to sell for anything before? This is Humpty-Dumpty mathematics. ("'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'" Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass) You can't donate what you don't have, and one thing Bryant Prentice III did not have was a buyer willing to give him $800,000 for that empty building on Main Street.Bryant & Stratton sold 1028 Main St., a building we had owned since 1921, to Kaleida, at Kaleida's request. The price of $300,000 was less than its value prior to the regional committee's recommendation. Bryant & Stratton had listed the property for $395,000 in 1999 after our campus was relocated downtown. The property was reassessed after the relocation at $575,000.If a value after the recommendation were used, based upon a $300,000 sale in the same block of Main of a building one-fourteenth in size, situated on a parcel one-third in size, Bryant & Stratton's donation to Kaleida was at least $500,000.
The fact that he had listed the property for $395,000 doesn’t mean it was worth $395,000. That only means $395,000 was his starting place for a sale. That was what he had been willing to negotiate down from. Who hasn’t set a price for something, expecting that once the real selling started you’d work your way down to a price everyone agreed was rational? The asking price is the seller’s fantasy, never anything more. He'd asked $395,000 and didn't get it, but McDonald's offered $330,000, with conditions. Those conditions weren't met, so the $330,000 deal never happened. Then Kaleida offered $300,000 and Prentice took their check. On the day he sold it, his building was worth exactly $300,000.
The fact that he was chairman of Millard Fillmore and Kaleida doesn't get him off the hook on this one; that's what put him there. If he'd had no connection with the hospitals at all, there's be no question about the business deal now. All of this rumor-mongering and now newspaper coverage came about specifically because of his intimate relationship with the organization that wrote him the check for $300,000.This was hardly an unprincipled action by me, a longtime supporter and former chairman of Millard Fillmore Hospital and of Kaleida.Our region will suffer immeasurably, not only from a health care perspective but also economically, if Kaleida Health, which employs 10,000 people, does not remain viable.
This is a non sequitur anyway. What does Kaleida's viability have to do with the ethics of his real estate transaction? And it is followed by another syllogism. The survival of Kaleida Health is not essential to our region’s economy. Kaleida Health thus far has been, according to its own consultant's report, a financial and managerial disaster. The region would suffer if it didn’t have adequate health care, if those 10,000 health care workers couldn’t do their jobs and be paid for their work. Kaleida is incidental in that. The problem isn’t saving Kaleida – that, indeed, is the central fallacy of the Hunter Group’s report, which addresses itself only to saving Kaleida. The central mission of providing decent health care to the region’s citizens figures nowhere in Prentice’s letter, as it figured nowhere in the Hunter report. That’s the problem with both documents.
Mac the safecracker and Bry the boardmember
Remember Mac, the Texas safecracker, who said, "I just slumped. I didn't know what to do" when his partner said, “Don't worry about anything. I didn't sign any statements on anybody but just me and you"?
How could Mac kill someone who didn't have the faintest idea how far he'd strayed from the code? How could he even begin to explain to him what he'd done wrong when the guy was sitting there oh so proud of himself because it was just the two of them going to jail for 12 years and not their girlfriends, their fence, their tipsters, and whoever else was closely or peripherally involved in their thievery? How could he kill a guy who, however wrong, really believed he’d behaved well?
I don’t know Bryant Prentice III. So far as I know, we’ve never met. His friends, some of whom I have met and like, say he’s a decent guy, that he wouldn’t have pre-loaded the Children’s Hospital report just to get rid of a building that had been on the market for longer than was comfortable. These people I know who said those things, they’re mostly smart folks, people who’ve done well for themselves. They’re people who have themselves spent a lot of time populating the boards of the various agencies that provide many key services government can’t or won’t. I’ve heard so many of them say things about Prentice that I cannot think of him as Bryant Prentice III. I think of him as Bry Prentice. A person rather than phase three in a lineage.
And that’s what is really scary about Bry Prentice’s letter to the Buffalo News. There is in it not an iota, not a soupçon, not a wisp of suspicion that there might be anything untoward about chairing a committee that immediately made marginally valuable property valuable and then, while chairman of the board, stood at the side of the room (or wherever he positioned himself—the physical placement is irrelevant) while that board he chaired bought from him a piece of property he had not theretofore been able, for whatever reason, to sell.
Whether or not Bry Prentice made money he shouldn’t in decency have made on the sale of that building to the nonprofit corporation he chaired is, in the long run, far less important than his continuing inability to understand and honor the legitimacy of the question. Why does he think his deep-embrace business transactions with a corporation the public had every right to expect would have been kept at arms-length is beyond public interrogation? Why is such interrogation met before anything else with an attack on the integrity of the physicians at Children’s Hospital?
What's really bad about this whole sorry affair isn't that Bry Prentice possibly cut a deal that might not have happened without his connections or that the whole thing has now gone public with an embarrassing news article followed by an ineffective accusatory letter of defense. What's bad is that, after all of this, Bry Prentice still doesn't get it. He still admits to no idea of what he might have done wrong.
And that sad fact maybe tells us more than anything else why Kaleida is the managerial mess its own consultants describe with such clinical accuracy: they just don't get it.
Posted 21 March 2002
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