Posts Tagged Climaco
Sam Miller is the Funniest Man in Town
Posted by Roldo Bartimole in Economic Development, People on January 21, 2010
January 21, 2010… My best laugh on a trip out West for warm air came when I read online Sam Miller’s tribute to himself as part of Cleveland Magazine’s take on Cleveland’s most powerful people.
Sam’s powerfully funny. He may have lost a few steps at 88 years old but he’s still got the great one-liners. Possibly to some he’s even believable.
The man’s a genius of humbuggery. A combination of 2 percent Will Rogers and 98 percent P. T. Barnum. Maybe a touch of Henny Youngman. (The doctor says, “You’ll live to be 60!” “I AM 60! “See, what did I tell you.”)
What I can’t understand is why Cleveland Magazine doesn’t do the top charlatans in town. It would be much more interesting. Maybe it did. You just change use your imagination and switch. From Power to Faker.
“I hate journalists,” says Miller. Are you kidding? What journalist ever gave Sam some treatment other than deferential? He loves them as much as he loves politicians. Why not? So serviceable.
“Power is the ability to do good or evil. Once you depart from the path of goodness, you are now using your power for evil. You’re pulling God’s beard when you don’t have to,” he said.
Sam’s been one of the most evil men I’ve known in Cleveland. He’s done so much damage to Cleveland you couldn’t even hope to record it all. His fights with Dick Jacobs were a double dose of greed. The town didn’t matter to either of them as they grabbed whatever they could.
I hope I’ve at least recorded some of it.
I think I have. One night out for a sandwich with my wife, we went to the Eddie Sands Blueline restaurant at Van Aken shopping center. A receptionist always accompanied you to your seat. The place was empty on this Friday night. Except for one booth. So wouldn’t you know she takes us to a booth right next to the occupied one?
Occupied, yes, by Sam Miller. He sees me and gets up to shakes my hand. And he says, “Let me shake hands with the most inaccurate reporter in town.” Sam is truly a one of a kind.
Of course, I had recently written about Sam’s (and Forest City’s Ratner family) escapades at the Halle’s building downtown. It was highly subsidized by the city as have most their downtown projects.
Government has been very, very good to Sam.
The Halle’s project shows well how the game works. The city was to share profits on its $7 million loan to renovate the building. It never made a penny.
However, Victor Voinovich, brother of the saintly Mayor George Voinovich, got the job as leasing agent. The politically connected Climaco law firm got new fancy digs. The city share helped pay the salary of Forest City executives.
The city even helped pay for umbrellas in case it rained the day of the opening. Officials did disapprove the cost of a piano for the opening, however.
Give a little; get a little. Sam knows how it works. He’s perfected the concept.
Sam loves Catholics. Especially those with power. He has a wall in his office he calls his “Catholic wall.” (He has a Jewish and social wall, too. Didn’t tell about the fourth wall.) He used to deliver bagels to Bishop Anthony Pilla’s mom. Every good deed should go rewarded. Somewhere. You’ll note in his Cleveland Magazine he brags about a crucifix from Pope Benedict. “Would you like a crucifix bless by Benedict XVI?” I guess he has a bushel full of such trinkets. People love trinkets. Sam provides.
Sam’s a common man. He tells us so. Once he called me to complain that I had counted up his loot too cheaply. I hadn’t counted certain holdings he had. His wealth was larger than I had reported. Inaccurate reporting, you know.
But you have to hand it to him. He’s truthful sometimes. He tells us that you should buy politicians early. “The very person that, let’s say, is a precinct committeeman, a relative nobody politically – one day, you wake up and discover he’s a senator for the state. When you helped him as a precinct committeeman, that he’ll never forget.” Buy early, he tells us. But Sam buys early, later and latest.
I noted back in the early 2000 when a then young Joe Cimperman ruled the downtown ward how generous Sam and his cohorts were. Al Ratner gave $500; Sam $300; other family members another $3,200. Forest City was pushing Council for a convention center on its land at the time.
Yes, Sam is common guy. A man who gets his economic data from cabbies and parking lot attendants, humility lessons from Big Jim Rhodes – another charlatan – and telephone ideas from the Wall Street Journal – “answer my own phone and never ask who’s calling.” It is the common touch.
Sam says that “my power is diminishing…”
I guess it is. He lost the County administration building deal to Jacobs when the Commissioners bought the old Ameritrust buildings instead of his Higbee’s. Then he lost the Med Mart to Tim Hagan’s buddies in Chicago. Slipping?
So Sam’s power may not be what it used to be. At least not here. Elsewhere, Forest City seems to be still active and alive.
Brent Larkin Bows Out as Plain Dealer Editorial Boss
Posted by Roldo Bartimole in Media, People on June 3, 2009
June 1, 2009… Brent Larkin is receiving some deserved attention as he leaves one of the most powerful positions in our city – the Plain Dealer editorial page director.
We can’t allow him to leave the stage so easily.
Larkin – likable and knowledgeable – has been boss of the editorial page since the early 1990s. He had wanted to be the PD’s sports editor at the time he was given this crucial and powerful job.
Here’s how someone who worked with him at the time described him:
“I think there is little question that Brent had the institutional memory of the PD and editorial board. Plus, Brent remained a reporter even as editorial director. He broke more stories than anyone in the news room. Brent works the phone like no one I know. They joked about him having two phones in his ear.”
He was a political junkie.
I have to say that I liked Larkin personally. I thought him to be an honest and hard-working reporter with the Cleveland Press.
The Press had a different culture than the Plain Dealer. It was more a people’s paper. More free swinging than the staid, self-important Pee Dee.
Larkin started, as he said in his farewell in Sunday’s paper, as the Press city hall reporter during the frenzied Kucinich administration in the late 1970s. The Press treated Kucinich more fairly (well, even handedly, let’s say) than did the Plain Dealer.
Despite his likability, I have had problems with Larkin over the years.
He played politics himself. He sometimes used his position to help friends.
Here from a piece in my newsletter, Point of View, in October, 1995:
“Larkin has used his position to help friends before. He bashed the United Auto Workers on the union’s attempt to have a workmen’s compensation law tested in the courts. Some believe Larkin’s tirade was really an attack for the UAW’s opposition on a Blue Cross matter. Blue Cross is represented by Climaco, Climaco, Seminatore, Leftkowitz and Garofoli, which gets some $6 million a year in fees from Blue Cross.
“Larkin has a close friendship at the Climaco firm that makes some wonder how close. At another time, Larkin wrote a strong and strategically timed editorial supporting the Blue Cross of Cleveland’s take-over of the Cincinnati Blue Cross without the usual editorial staff discussion of the matter.”
Larkin, in an interview on the PD website Cleveland.com, said, in answer to a question about his political leaning, that he’s “this much” left of center. He used his fingers to show almost no room between them.
However, shortly after he took his position in 1993, Larkin dumped the PD’s editorial writer on national politics, Chris Colford, a liberal editorialist.
Here’s what I wrote:
“He told Colford, a prize winner, that he would be shifted to write about environment, energy, science and the arts. But that was just step one.
“Larkin, who lacks skill in dealing with people, then offered a shocked Colford a buyout in an attempt designed to usher him out the door rather than just shift his duties.”
The “buyout” got revised to an “exit bonus” after Colford went to the Newspaper Guild for advice.
I went on: “Colford, a rather gentle, thoughtful writer who loves his job, apparently has no place in a Larkin editorial staff. One veteran reporter called the move an ‘ideological’ one to get rid of a liberal voice.”
A retirement party at the PD gave hints of Larkin’s powerful position.
A number of politicians made appearances including George Forbes, Lou Stokes, both former Republican chairman Roger Synenberg and his wife, Joan Synenberg, who owes her election to Larkin’s editorials against her opponent. Even Forest City’s Sam Miller was there, I was told. Others, as Commissioner Tim Hagan, appeared in a video done for Larkin, according to a PD reporter.
Larkin played a protector role for many political and private figures.
The PD can be critical of how badly events go in Cleveland. Most criticism is aimed at politicians, who really dance to the tunes of the corporate leaders, who receive little, if any, censure.
Of course, the newspaper itself never enters the realm of self-criticism. Editorially, it keeps itself off limits. Even though it plays a key part of community decision-making – usually leading the way – for the dominate forces in the city and area.
Larkin’s most embarrassing revelation was the exposure of a trip he took on Dick Jacobs’ private airplane to Major League Baseball’s All-Star game in 1999. The plane was loaded with the city’s political and business leaders.
Here is how I described it:
“Well, we finally got them all in one boat, er, airplane.
“Playful Dick Jacobs. Was that the multi-millionaire with a large handkerchief over his face, blowing his nose? No, that’s the wealthy developer and owner of the Cleveland Indians… with a white cloth playing a Ku Klux Klansman…
“And who’s that see-no-evil, hear-no-evil and especially tell-no-evil Jacobs’ buddy? Why it’s Brent ‘Look Away’ Larkin, director of editorials for the Pee Dee. What better place for someone who has blinded himself to the inadequacies of political and business leaders in town. The user-friendly Larkin is quoted saying of Jacobs’ antics, ‘As far as I know, everybody got a kick out of it.’
“Now you have to remember that these are very sophisticated people. People whose community of interest calls for some flexibility by us of their righteousness.”
“This would only qualify as racism if someone with only a little money, little education and little power had made such a tasteless faux pas. For one it would be a crime; for the other it’s just a joke.”
It put Larkin in a conflicting position with top political and business leaders on a free trip to an all-star game. He should have been fired. But Editor Doug Clifton told me when I asked about punishment, “None given, none contemplated.”
The trip was revealed in an anonymous letter to a Plain Dealer columnist. My guess is that it was leaked by Mayor Michael White. Getting revenge on so many enemies must have been delicious for the mayor.
Larkin wrote when Gateway passed and made Jacobs even more of a multi-millionaire than he had been, “Now, do it right.”
He continued: “Negotiate fair leases with the Indians and the Cavaliers… Turning those promises into performance is the best way to make monkeys out of Gateway’s visceral opponents.”
However, the Larkin editorial page went easy as could be on Gateway as it sank deeper and deeper into debt and into the pockets of county taxpayers. No harsh criticism for his buddy Hagan or the rest of them.
That’s the way with big players. No criticism. No blame.
We suffer the consequences of this No Blame policy. We see the results all around us.