Sure. And Jay Pomeroy just loves baseball.
I called Golob to challenge him on his sudden turn-around. “It’s a book about saving an old ballpark,” he insisted, “it’s not about pollution. Pollution is not as salable or marketable.”
“The ballpark, yes,” I said, “But it’s also about the power structure selling its own citizens down the river. The Arundhati Roy quote has been on the opening page from the beginning. What did you think that meant?”
“I never understood the Roy reference,” he said.
I felt sorry for Paul Golob. He had done a complete one-eighty on the book after our meeting with Osnos. Before then, he had never had a problem with any of the references to pollution or GE. But Paul is a nice man and I was happy to read in Publishers Weekly, a few weeks later, that he had been promoted to the position of vice president at PublicAffairs. It was a promotion that lasted a few months until Golob moved from PublicAffairs to Holt.
One more thing. During his tirade in the office, Peter Osnos had said to me, “If you don’t trust me, my integrity, and this publishing house, one hundred percent, then take your book and leave! I won’t stop you.”
Of course he wouldn’t. He’d hire a lawyer to do it. And the first thing the lawyer did was try to buy my silence. During negotiations to get the termination letter that I would need to pitch the book to other publishers, the lawyer told my agent I could keep half the money already paid to me if I promised not to talk or write about why I was leaving PublicAffairs.
“I don’t know what my price is for keeping my mouth shut,” I told Paula, “but I know it’s not $25,000.”
I guess I’m lucky that Osnos didn’t try to stop me. Otherwise it would have taken even longer than three months, plus having had to hire my own attorney, to finally get that termination letter from him.
Why did it take three months? I don’t know, but it turned out to be just long enough to make it impossible for another publisher to get the book out by the summer of 2003. Which is one of the reasons I decided to publish Foul Ball myself.
Another reason is, I can’t be sure the top lawyer for GE won’t decide to invest in the entire publishing world, which, sad to say, is down to five companies, or “groups” of imprints, each group under a corporate parent—which itself is part of a conglomerate.
That might also explain today’s standard author’s contract, which boils down to this offer: “Give us exclusive rights to a piece of your life’s work, in all formats and galaxies now and forever, and we may or may not publish your book. If we fail to publish your book within a year and a half after your manuscript has been approved and edited, which itself can take six months or more, you may request a reversion of rights by….”
The editors at the publishing companies even feel obliged to apologize for these contracts. “It’s standard in the industry,” they say, “there’s nothing we can do about it. You just have to trust us.”
On the subject of trust, nothing beats the Berkshire Eagle.
It turns out that just before Foul Ball went to press an interesting document was found at the office of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. A Release Notification Form—to be filed by property owners who find pollution on their land—showed that the property owned by the Berkshire Eagle, which it had offered to Pittsfield as the site for a new baseball stadium, is contaminated with a “release of oil” sufficient to qualify it as a “disposal site,” according to a DEP letter acknowledging receipt of the form. The entry for “Date you obtained knowledge of the release” is January 12, 2001.
January 12, 2001, was three weeks before Chip and I first met with Andy Mick and the boys from Berkshire Sports & Events at the North End Restaurant, and nearly five months before Pittsfield would vote for or against a Civic Authority that would build and manage a new stadium on that property. What’s more, a special clause—inserted into the Civic Authority Act by BS&E lawyers—would have transferred the liability for any cleanup from BS&E to the Civic Authority and ultimately to the citizens of Pittsfield.
Forget PCBs for a minute. If Vinnie Curro is only 10% right—and his estimate of “tons of automobile oil” now has some documentation—a cleanup could still cost someone fifteen to twenty million. If that’s not the case, and the Eagle had nothing to hide, why wasn’t the Release Notification Form made public at the time? Instead, what the people got was Andy Mick saying, “there’s no hidden agenda here.”
No agenda. Just a Release Notification Form.
Observant readers will also realize that this particular Release Notification Form is not related to the 2002 soil samples rumored to have been taken by or on behalf of CVS or the 1994 test borings still being investigated by Tim Gray. More likely, it is related to the tests commissioned by BS&E to show that the property could support a baseball stadium.
This raises several questions, besides the whereabouts of the 1994 and 2002 test results. Why would BS&E order the tests whose results are cited above, if testing had already been done in 1994? Could they not find the 1994 results? Or did they not like them? As Tim Gray explains it, the deeper you go, the more stuff you find. And the corollary to that seems to be: the more stuff you find the harder it is to locate the results.
While Foul Ball was going to press, I received a call from Clarence Fanto, the managing editor of the Berkshire Eagle. Fanto had seen an uncorrected galley and wanted to tell me I had gotten some facts wrong.
“The cleanup is only going to cost $150,000 to $200,000,” said Fanto, “and not the one hundred and fifty to two hundred million you have in your book.”
I told Fanto that the Release Notification Form described pollution that exceeded the leakage you might find at a car dealership; that Curro’s cleanup estimate referred to the entire area, not just the proposed CVS site; and that if it had once been a junkyard, then PCBs are probably involved and a cleanup could cost tens of millions.
“Is it just possible,” I said, “that the reason people are forced to make guesses is a lack of openness? Or credibility?”
I asked Fanto if he knew why the Release Notification Form had never been made public by the Eagle, especially prior to the Civic Authority vote. “I have no idea,” he said, “That’s the business side of the newspaper. That’s completely separate from the news side.”
I had this sudden image of Jack Dew, the investigative reporter, grilling Andy Mick, his businessman boss. Then it faded.
Fanto also said he’d heard about the 1994 test borings and the more recent CVS borings, but didn’t know the results. I suggested it might be a good story for one of his reporters. Fanto said I could check it out myself by calling the company that had done the testing—Maxymillian Technologies, in Pittsfield. He said they could probably also confirm the cleanup costs.
I remembered the name Maxymillian from a conversation I had once had with Vinnie Curro. So after I hung up with Fanto, I called Curro to get more details about that, and the history of the property.
“Do you know anything about junkyards down there?” I asked.
“It used to be Shapiro’s junkyard,” said Curro. “All through the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, GE was dumping PCBs into junkyards. There was also a brook through there that’s been covered up.”
I asked him if Maxymillian would have that information.
“Don’t trust Maxymillian,” he said. “They do all the work for GE. They do their testing and their cleanup. They’re like twins.”
I reminded Curro that he had once told me Maxymillian had been given some land by the city.
“Yeah,” said Curro. “On East Street where they have their headquarters. There was no competitive bidding. A guy named Virgilio bid higher, but he didn’t get it. It’s terrible to have to say it.”
It’s terrible to have to write it. I thanked Curro for his time, and placed another call. This one to Peter Arlos, to see what he could remember about a Maxymillian land deal.
“That was back in the ’80s,” said Arlos, “when Charles Smith was th
e mayor. We gave it away at a cut-rate price. Cut-rate, you understand? I was the only one that voted against it.”
Where do you start with something like this?
How will the people of Pittsfield ever learn the truth? Is someone going to investigate those test borings? Can the results be believed? Will the DEP require testing for PCBs?
To show you how things work, the DEP’s Date Received stamp on the Release Notification Form reads May 10, 2002. Meaning someone at the Eagle or Cain Hibbard Myers & Cook, who handled the matter, sat on it for sixteen months before sending it to the DEP.
What’s more, the letter from the DEP acknowledging receipt of the Release Notification Form, addressed to Andy Mick and headlined Urgent Legal Matter: Prompt Action Necessary, informs Mick that he has until May 10, 2003—one year from the receive date, not the release date—to take some kind of action.
Or not.
By that time, the Eagle, in conjunction with CVS, may already have begun to develop it as a strip mall. According to a recent edition of the Eagle, plans are underway for a spring 2003 groundbreaking.
I asked Tim Gray if he thought the Eagle would get away with it. Gray repeated what a guy at the DEP had told him: “We’ve got seven hundred sites, and two guys in the office.”
“It’s a tough battle,” said Gray. “The corporations write the laws and the politicians underfund the agencies.”
The DEP guy also told Gray that they would not be happy if the Eagle property were developed without DEP approval. “Keep your eyes open for bulldozers,” he told Gray.
Good advice for us all.
A few months later the bulldozers arrived.
Nine hundred tons of contaminated soil were removed from a 2.5 acre parcel of land that, along with other property owned by the Berkshire Eagle, had been envisioned as the site of a new baseball stadium. The parcel, which the Eagle had acquired through Berkshire Sports & Events for $1.23 million, was sold for $1.35 million, plus the cleanup costs, to the CVS Corporation, which plans to build a strip mall.
The cleanup costs, originally estimated at $150,000 to $200,000, ended up being closer to $400,000. Had the new stadium not been defeated in the June 2001 referendum, the cleanup costs would have been passed along to the citizens of Pittsfield.
The contamination—mostly petroleum products—contained traces of PCBs but not enough to trigger a state investigation. Environmentalists, however, questioned the testing supervised by a licensed site professional hired by CVS.
“The entire [stadium] footprint was never tested,” said Tim Gray of the Housatonic River Initiative, referring to an additional nine acres still owned by the Berkshire Eagle. “And they only went down ten feet.”
But as far as the Eagle was concerned, the case was closed and the defeat of the stadium was everyone else’s fault. In a May 20, 2003, editorial entitled SCRATCH ANOTHER NAYSAYER LIE, Ever-Scrib wrote:
Scratch another fabrication from the heap of lies used by Pittsfield’s naysayer class to frighten a gullible citizenry into rejecting the construction of a downtown [stadium]. The [location] where the stadium would have been built is not the site of major contamination, as at least one environmentalist and one deluded South County author maintained.
Ever-Scrib’s “heap of lies” editorial had only two fabrications: (1) My involvement with Pittsfield began after the new stadium had been defeated; and (2) the possibility of a polluted site only became an issue two years later, when it was revealed in the hardcover edition of this book.
While Ever-Scrib was suffering from a time warp, the Eagle’s Bill Carey was reporting that BS&E had been fined $3,750 by the state for reporting—a year late—that its stadium site was polluted. According to BS&E attorney Michael Ostroskey (of Cain Hibbard Myers & Cook), the penalty was reduced from $7,500 because of “mitigating circumstances.”
I wondered if a mitigating circumstance might be that BS&E wanted to withhold evidence of pollution until after the vote on a new stadium.
The chances of the Eagle property ever being fully tested now seem remote. In August 2003, the Environmental Protection Agency reversed a twenty-five-year-old policy, relaxing restrictions on selling PCB contaminated land.
Meanwhile, shortly after the publication of Foul Ball, Jay Pomeroy was let go as Global Communications Manager of GE Plastics, and General Electric instituted a new policy prohibiting its employees from identifying themselves as being connected to GE when involved in non-GE activities.
And there were other developments…
CHAPTER 18
“I promise you it will be different this time”
FALL 2003–SPRING 2004
The letter on the preceding page was not a joke.
At least not right away.
On November 4, 2003, Jimmy Ruberto defeated Sara Hathaway in a re-run for mayor. The next day, Chip and I got an email from Dave Potts that read, in part:
> I’ve spent a lot of time with Jimmy over the
> last year or so and I can tell you he’s a huge
> baseball fan… and [he’s] become a believer
> in the value of retaining and capitalizing on
> the historic nature of Wahconah Park. I’ve
> been asked by Jimmy to act as a liaison of
> sorts and in the interest of covering all the
> bases (no pun intended) I’d appreciate it if
> the two of you would indulge my request for a
> face-to-face conversation with Mayor Elect
> Ruberto. The meeting will serve to either, #1,
> forever close an ugly chapter in the history
> of Wahconah Park, or #2, give birth to what
> could become one of the greatest sports
> stories ever written about.
This did not come as a total surprise. Ever since our rejection by the Parks Commission in 2001, Potsy had been emailing us with the latest from the Pittsfield street. He said he was asked “almost on a daily basis, if there is any chance that the Bouton group might return to the picture.”
Our response was always the same: No thanks. No way.
The surprise was that Ruberto would accede to Potsy’s request for a meeting. Ruberto had been a prominent new-stadium supporter. And Foul Ball—which Potsy was calling “The Official Handbook of Political Chicanery in Pittsfield”—was still a hot topic, with people calling each other to read their favorite descriptions of the local politicians. One of those pols was Jimmy Ruberto, whom Peter Arlos had said was too afraid to stand up for anything, including the National Anthem.
Could the Oracle of Delphi have been wrong?
Or was this a political payoff? Apparently, Ruberto’s margin of victory over Hathaway, like her margin over him in the last election, had come from Wahconah Park supporters, and the mayor’s request to meet with us might have been his campaign promise to Potsy for delivering those votes.
Out of sheer curiosity, Chip and I agreed to a meeting. Also, I have to admit I liked Potsy’s line about “greatest sports stories ever written.”
But what were the odds of us actually going back to Pittsfield? Paula didn’t even like me going there to promote the book.
“Do me a favor,” she would say as I’d be walking out the door. “Don’t eat or drink anything up there.”
Ruberto probably hadn’t even read Foul Ball. If he had, he would have known that the people he should really meet with were Paula and Cindy. And Chip’s Mom.
“DON’T do Wahconah Park,” Maggie Elitzer emailed Chip after hearing that we’d be meeting with Ruberto. “You can’t afford the time, the money, or the passion. But I love you in spite of your lack of good judgment.”
The meeting took place at 9:00 a.m., on November 12, in the Elitzers’ dining room, next to the kitchen where the really big decisions are made. It was just the guys—Ruberto, Potsy, Chip, and me. No sense wasting our wives in a preliminary round.
Ruberto, a Pittsfield native with the enthusiasm of a twelve-year-old boy, ap
pears younger than his fifty-six years. With his square, unlined face and wire-rimmed glasses, the mayor elect looks more like a small town minister than the former CEO of a Texas plastics company, which is what he was before returning to his hometown with his wife Ellen in 2001.
After some small talk about his hopes for Pittsfield and how much he loved Wahconah Park—“it’s the centerpiece of what I’m doing”—the mayor elect had two questions: What would it take to get us to bring back our original plan? And could we put a team together for 2004?
Chip and I pretended we hadn’t given the matter much thought.
Speaking theoretically, of course—and assuming we would even be interested, which we might not be—we said we’d need to get some kind of written invitation from the city, but that in any case, it was too late for us to field a team for 2004, which might not be bad because it would give us a whole year to do it right—assuming we even wanted to do it in the first place, that is.
In other words, we could be persuaded.
With one big if: IF Ruberto promised we wouldn’t have to fight any more political battles. We said we wouldn’t even consider returning without such a guarantee. The mayor elect said he was already working on it.
“You wouldn’t believe the people he’s talking to,” said Potsy, shaking his head in awe. “Some of your biggest opponents from last time.”
“I’m telling everybody that having you guys back is in the best interest of Pittsfield,” said Ruberto. “And I firmly believe that.”
He had us believing it, too.
Almost.
Right after the meeting, Chip and I joked that it might be a trap—they were inviting us back just so they could beat us up again. But, we knew it couldn’t be a trap with Potsy involved. And Ruberto seemed so genuine. Unless he was the best actor we ever saw.
“I need to see him up close,” said Paula. “I want to look into his face and see if he’s for real.”
An inspection was planned for December 7 at the Elitzers’.
Meanwhile, Chip and I started to work on a plan. If there was no baseball in 2004, what could we accomplish by Opening Day 2005?