January 10, 2003
Pimps and sharks: The real failures in the Hamister Hustle and
the Paladino Push
by Bruce Jackson
Sharks
Nursing home mogul Mark Hamister wants to acquire the Buffalo Sabres and full control of HSBC arena. He's willing to put up some of his own money and money he's assembled from some collaborators in the deal, and he's wheeling and dealing to get a very large amount of public money. It's hard to tell how much he's trying to get because the numbers keep changing every time anybody says anything about this, but they are consistently big: $25 million, $30 million, $35 million, $40 million, maybe more.
Carl Paladino and some other developers are hot for the city to turn over a large segment of downtown taxroll property to the Senecas for a gambling casino. They've spent a lot of money prettifying the deal and trying to get rid of politicians who might interfere with it. They seem to figure that if a casino goes in downtown they'll make a lot of money. That has nothing to do with what the Senecas and their Asian backers will be sucking out of the city. The money Paladino and the other developers are looking at is other money that will go someplace it won't do any of the rest of us one bit of good..
I may have said some bad things in the past about the greed and bullying tactics and contempt for ordinary people evinced by both Hamister and Paladino. If I did, and if I was excessive, I want to apologize to both of them.
I've been giving it a lot of thought and I've had some conversations with older and wiser heads and I'm coming to think that there's nothing necessarily wrong in nursing home mogul Mark Hamister's attempt to scarf up somewhere between $25 and $40 million of the public's money to flesh out a deal that he's entering for his own amusement and profit. And perhaps neither is there anything necessarily wrong with downtown real estate mogul Carl Paladino spending a small fortune to push out of office politicians who won't give him what he wants, or tearing down fully functional buildings to make parking lots for his higher-paying clients in other buildings.
One's a very rich guy looking for a trophy toy; the other's a rich guy who is trying to become richer. Rich guys buy trophy toys. Rich guys who want to get richer dream of ways to make money the way other people dream of making art or love or of helping people in need.
That's what those guys are; that's what they do. They're just doing what they're supposed to do. If virtue is, as Aristotle had it, the fulfillment of function, then in a way they're even virtuous in their relentless pursuit of what they want. It's not their fault they're who or what they are. As Little Richard famously said, "You can't help who you are. If you could, you'd have been somebody else."
I keep thinking of the shark scientist Hooper in Jaws, played by Richard Dreyfuss, who tells the deep-in-denial mayor that "What we are dealing with here is a perfect engine. An eating machine. It's really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks, and that's all."
Pimps
That doesn't mean nobody should be blamed for anything. This city is going to hell and several people who are supposed to be protecting us or helping us reverse course seem to be just greasing the downward slide. People like Hamister and Paladino may not be doing evil by doing what they do, but public officials who support them mindlessly or carelessly, in direct contradiction of their stated responsibility to the public, are another matter entirely.
Governor George Pataki, whose January 8 State of the State report suggested big cuts coming because of the State's financial woes, leaked word early Thursday that he stood ready to help his old friend Mark Hamister, who was a big contributor to his most recent campaign. Later Thursday a supplemental leak indicated that Albany might pay for stadium improvements, if Hamister can make a convincing case for them, but it won't take the heat that would come from paying off Rigas loans.
Erie County Executive Joel Giambra, who has been pushing for imposition of the most regressive form of taxation there is, a sales tax that hurts the poor far more than the comfortable or the wealthy, has been working constantly to help deliver this hockey team and arena to his old friend Mark Hamister, who was a big contributor to his most recent campaign.
Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello, who has been poormouthing and cutting basic city services, has been willing to give Mark Hamister anything except the ground rent on the building in which the Sabres play, which he knew in advance the Common Council wouldn't let him give away. I don't know if Hamister has been giving Tony Masiello money for his campaigns.
Masiello has also been pushing for a gambling casino directly across the street from City Hall and adjacent to several federal offices. This casino would remove from the books a huge mass of real estate on which taxes are now being paid. The city would receive a pittance from the state and the casino operators in exchange for this gift, not nearly enough to pay the city for what it will have to spend to keep it going or compensate the city for what it will lose in tax revenues.
Last week the Buffalo News had an editorial detailing what it said were the specific fiscal benefits of underwriting the Hamister deal. Why is such information being released to the public—if real information it is—in an editorial of the Buffalo News rather than in the voice of a responsible public official willing to stand behind those numbers?
The Buffalo News has not been a simple reporter of facts in these matters. It has relentlessly pimped the Hamister deal, not only in its editorial columns again and again, but also with puff pieces on its front pages. Sometimes it's been forced to present some facts. There was, for example, an excellent page one piece on January 9 by Mark Sommer, "Will updating draw more concerts?" in which Sommer quoted several of the area's top promoters saying that Hamister's statements about the need for improving arena facilities were nonsense. If the facts in the article are correct, and there is no reason to suspect they are not, then Hamister either has no idea what he's talking about when he tells us he needs millions of public dollars to make the arena usable or he's just blowing smoke, trying to scarf up a bunch of public money he doesn't need which he'll figure out how to spend once he's got it in his pocket.
Sommer's very good article basically restated Jamie Moses' very good article on the same subject published two weeks earlier in Artvoice, "Mark 'Pinocchio' Hamister: The Nose Grows...and grows..." (December 26, 2002). It's a good thing that the News is reading and redoing in its own voice important articles that previously appeared in the area's alternative press (would that they did it more often), but what the news page editors gaveth the editorial page editors tooketh away in the very same edition of the paper. The editorial writers of the Buffalo News argued their own page one story, saying Thomas Golisano should go away and stop talking about his alternative proposal, that the Hamister deal was necessary, and that Hamister's requests were reasonable.
What are the facts undergirding all those orders for silence and obedience? They didn't report any. They just asserted their orders, like God talking to Moses or a military officer talking to grunts. Editorial page writers aren't bound by facts any more than God or military officers are bound to explain. Editorial writers are bound only by editorial board policy.
This is the editorial board that told us to shut up and go along with the steel twin span. And this is the editorial board that told us to shut up and go along with the closing of Children's Hospital. They told us that if we knew what they knew we'd say what they were saying. As it turned out, we found out what they knew, and what they were saying was dead wrong.
These are the same editorial writers who, in the name of saving us $200,000 a year, joined the Buffalo-Niagara Partnership and Carl Paladino in a very well-funded campaign to abolish Buffalo's at-large representation—so we lost the only citywide political officials in a position to challenge quick and easy deals cut in secret in the mayor's office. They are the same editorial writers who savaged Common Council President James Pitts as obstructionist when he suggested the Rigas construction deal might not be as sweet as the dealmakers said it was and argued that the city should get guarantees against nonperformance from the Rigas family. They are the same editorial writers who have more recently argued that we should abolish the city comptroller's office—thereby removing the only elected Buffalo political official empowered to audit checks the mayor is writing on our account.
Those editorial writers who have worked so diligently to demolish the only safeguards local government had against mayoral incompetence, connivery, foolishness and old-fashioned corruption are now saying we should, with no reliable information or promise of accountability, give a private investor $20 or $30 or $40 or $50 million of public money, and that we also should refuse to listen to any information offered by any other potential investor in the same property. The investor they back, Mark Hamister, is chairman of the board of the Buffalo-Niagara Partnership. Warren T. Colville, president of the Buffalo News is a member of the executive committee of the board of directors of the Buffalo-Niagara Partnership. Is there a word for this kind of dry, fiscal incest?
Who speaks for us?
Is Casino Masiello a good deal for Buffalo? Is giving millions of dollars of public money to Mark Hamister so he can buy audio equipment he doesn't need and an advertising sign from which he'll make money a good deal for the region?
Who knows? I don't and I bet you don't either. None of the base figures has been made public and not one of the public officials who wants to give Hamister our money—Pataki, Giambra, Masiello—has been willing to come forward and say: "Here's what they're asking, here's what I think we'll get, here are the risks, here's what I think we ought to do and why."
Masiello refuses to take the casino issue public. Hamister refuses to make his offer public and kvetches about the need to endure meetings with public officials other than his chosen few. The editorial board of the Buffalo News acts as mouthpiece for all of them, quoting their speculative numbers as fact, usually without any attribution at all. The News never insists that Giambria or Masiello come forward and tell the truth and neither does it pursue the facts and numbers itself. Instead of examining Golisano's numbers and Hamister's numbers under the same light, not only comparing one to the other but trying to learn the real economic impact of each, it says Golisano should "go away" and we should stop asking questions. All of them make or endorse or silently approve secret deals behind closed doors, deals that directly affect the public good and from which the public is excluded entirely.
So we have to ask: whom do they think they really represent and for whom do they really work? Whatever the ultimate value of the various secret deals, what kind of community can we possibly have where the public's good is the last matter of any concern to the city's and county's senior public officials and the city's only daily newspaper?
It all boils down to one simple question: which of them—Tony Masiello, Joel Giambria, Andy Rudnick, the editorial board of the Buffalo News—speaks for us? If the answer is "none of them", then what do we do now?
Options
There's not much we can do about the newspaper: The Buffalo News is wholly owned by Warren Buffett in distant Omaha and its editorial page will continue taking its marching orders from the guys who run the Buffalo-Niagara Partnership (Mark Hamister, Warren T. Colville, Andrew Rudnick, Robert Wilmers, etc.). Buffalo is too poor to afford a second daily newspaper. The Courier-Express, suffocated by Buffett in 1982, is never coming back.
Tony Masiello is unlikely to ever again run for elected office in Buffalo. He's betrayed too many people with his Republican kissy-kiss silly-putty endorsements and his recent contempt for the minority communities that voted for him last time around. Rumor is he's got an appointed job in Albany that will let him finish out his pension requirements and rumor is probably right. He's got to be getting something in exchange for the way he's betrayed the city. If not, he's even sadder than he seems.
So maybe we should take the next mayoral election a lot more seriously than we took the last one. If Buffalo doesn't get someone in that second floor office of City Hall who is smart, energetic and free of backroom alliances, how will things get better? If we don't get someone there who is smart, energetic and free of backroom alliances, whom can we blame next time other than ourselves?
Likewise for county executive. Joel Giambra is a Democrat who turned Republican not because he believed in Republican ideas or ideals but only because they offered him a job the Democrats didn't offer him. He made a choice for career reasons and I presume he's rolling over for Hamister in the service of that same end. Since he, like Masiello, has maintained dead silence on this issue, we can probably safely assume that principle and public service have nothing to do with the choices that are being made. Politicians talk long and loud whenever there a scrap of principle or public service connected with anything they're doing and they maintain dead silence when both are embarrassingly absent.
Maybe in the next election Buffalo voters shouldn't assume that the county executive's office matters more to the Republicans in the Southtowns than it matters to people within the city line. That's an office that can do us real good or harm and we should start taking it seriously.
Which is to say, these guys may be selling us out, but they're only where they are because we did nothing to get someone better. So let's learn something.
A second apology
I know what I've done here and I want you to know I feel really lousy about it. I've been an English teacher for 35 years and, believe me, mixing metaphors doesn't come easily to me. I tried and tried to do something else, but businessmen as sharks and politicians and editorial page editors and editorial writers who cater to them as pimps both seemed so appropriate I had to do it. I just had to.
I feel really awful about mixing metaphors like that, but it didn't seem appropriate to call the politicians and editorial page writers and editors "chummers," like the guys who toss bits of flesh off fishing boats to attract the fish, which the fishermen then capture with baited hooks. They're not just tossing tempting tidbits out there; they're giving our stuff away. And neither did it seem appropriate to call the businessmen "johns," because johns pay money to screw someone else and what's going on here is the pols are using our money so we can be screwed by the businessmen. Not the same thing at all.
That's one of the problems when you look too long at obsequious and ambitious politicians and bought-and-paid-for editorial page editors and writers rolling over for avaricious and ambitious and bored businessmen: your whole sense of metaphor just goes to hell. Along with a lot else.
Copyright 2002 by Buffalo Report, Inc.