A friendly warning July 3, 2012
I met Tom today during my stroll through Liberty State Park.
He’s an operative for the county (some say) political
machine, and when he saw me, he pulled me aside, telling me we had to talk.
He said he’d heard rumors about the company I worked for and
wanted to know if they were true.
We get this a lot, partly because we are the only regular
media in a lot of small towns, especially up county which largely falls in a
waste land between the local daily and the big cheese daily in Bergen County.
Tom said rumors claimed we’ve been taken over by a political
cabala from one of the northern County towns.
I told him the male owner of our newspaper was too inept to
get taken over by a political organization.
“My boss has the political instincts of a pet rock,” I told
Tom.
While our company frequently took sides in elections, it
almost always depended on which side had the bigger bank roll. For the most
part, the male owner almost always picked the losing side.
He was the kind of man who tended to trust the worst kind of
scallywag, the unreliable, untrustworthy sort who hooked his nose and led him
down a garden path away from any kind of political credibility. Yet somehow,
our owner still believed he had his fingers on the political pulse.
If there is a self-promoting, totally corrupt political
operative chances are our owner considered him close friend, whose word he took
on faith for everything.
But as for a political cabala from a small town, even our owner
might not fall for anything like that.
“Anyone with a big enough check book can have anything they
want from our company,” I told Tom.
But Tom was serious. Unlike the owner of my company, his
political instincts were finely tuned, and when he said he believes something
true, it generally was.
The cabala, he meant, came from one of the upper county towns
that had recently elected a maverick mayor in one of the biggest political
upsets in recent history.
This dirty dozen had come from far and wide to latch onto a virgin
mayor they saw the goose who could lay them some golden eggs. Tom had mobster
names for them such as “Joey D.” They had very little in common with each other
except for their greed and they belief they could bleed the administration for
contracts over the next four years – only realizing too late what a boob the
mayor was.
Although a political maverick, the good mayor had almost
nothing to do with his own victory. He was the end result of a much larger
county-wide political war that pitted the county machine against the might of
four very powerful political figures: U.S. Senator, a state senator, a congressman
(a former popular mayor in that same town) and a neighboring mayor along the waterfront.
Within months of being sworn in, the maverick mayor had
managed to offend all of these allies and to get himself arrested on campaign
charges to boot, leaving those power brokers quietly looking to somehow replace
him. But this only entrenched the cabala of snakes, who hoped to hold on long
enough to squeeze out of him and the town enough to justify their having come
there in the first place.
I told Tom such plots were beyond my pay grade, but added my
doubts about the validity of such an attempt to take over our company since –
as big a buffoon as our owner was, he would not see any profit in, since most
of the cash still resided in the county political organization to which he had
sold his sold long ago.
“I’m not talking about your owner, at least not yet” Tom
said. “I’m talking about the girl you’ve got working up there. She’s
romantically involved with one of that crew.”
This talk made my extremely uncomfortable and I told Tom I
didn’t know anything about that either.
Always a political opportunist, Tom said he intended to
broker his information with the Maverick mayor’s former political allies.
“I’m sure they’ll find the information valuable,” Tom said. “I
just wanted to warn you, so you don’t get caught in the cross fire.”
I thanked him. But secretly I suspected I already was.
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