Spurback Uses Facebook to Harass and Offend

Roger Spurback.

Like a bad slice of pizza you belch hours afterward in bed, or the unpleasant odor that lingers when a skunk’s been killed on the roadway, he refuses to go away.

Not really, of course. He moved away from Niagara Falls a long time ago. Doesn’t vote here, doesn’t pay taxes here, has no business here.

But like that bad skunk smell, like the lingering taste of spoiled pepperoni, he refuses to stop being annoying.

Recently, Spurback discovered Facebook, the social networking website.

He’s been using it to allege, without presenting any evidence whatsoever, that a sitting city councilman is tied to organized crime and he’s been using it to compare his own “accomplishments” with those of this reporter.

I have no more in common with Roger Spurback and what he stands for than I do with any other power mad moron with delusions of grandeur.

For the record, it’s my belief that the city’s block clubs, which suffered for 17 years under Spurback’s inept leadership, have been wholly ineffective in accomplishing anything. During that time, Spurback burned through a ton of city taxpayer dollars building up his own little fiefdom with the block clubs, which he then used to intimidate and shake down legitimate businesses.
He did that by talking loudly to the media and sucking up to whoever the mayor happened to be at the time, whether it was Jim Galie, Irene Elia, Vince Anello or Paul Dyster.

Now the majority on the city council - Sam Fruscione, Glenn Choolokian and Robert Anderson - are looking for some accountability from the block clubs, which receive money to be used specifically for “crime prevention” efforts.

The only thing that’s criminal is that organizations such as the block clubs have continued to receive public money year after year with zero accountability as to how that money is spent.

The real thing Spurback has done on Facebook however is to bring his own unique brand of stupefying ignorance to a wider audience. His teachers at Trott Vocational must cringe when reading his posts, littered as they are with misspellings, poor grammar and a profound uncertainty about the proper use of punctuation.

Perhaps it is sad and tragic that a 61-year-old man doesn’t know how to spell such common words as “defend,” “hands,” “you” and “eight,” or that he’s too ignorant to understand the spell check function on his computer, but personally, I find it comical.

And when he attempts to use a literary allusion that comes out as “Dr. Jenkle and Mr. Hyde,” the effect is hysterical.
Spurback is also apparently unaware of the spelling of “Mafioso,” which, in Niagara Falls, is a third grade vocabulary word.
So breathtaking is the depth of Spurback’s rank stupidity that it’s hard not to recall all the years of pure comedy gold he’s given us.

Who can forget his 2007 bid for the city administrator’s job, a quest he denied as soon as people found out about it.
"I've never applied, nor will I make any overtures of that fact," he said, mangling the English language in the process.
After I wrote about him in what he thought was a negative light that same year, he sent me an email.

"ATTACK ME IN YOUR PAPER, I'LL SHOW YOU ABOUT BOYCOTTS OF YOUR ADVERTISERS. I'LL WORK DAY AND NIGHT TO SHOW YOU WHAT ORGANIZING AND CRITIZING (sic) IS ALL ABOUT," he wrote.

I printed his email, called him a chump and the advertiser boycott organization he worked day and night on was so effective that we’re still waiting for it more than five years later!

In 2008, he slandered Guy Bax, then head of the city’s inspections department, with the same sort of anti-Italian slurs he’s now throwing at city councilmen.

"This guy's like a case of the herpes," noted one City Hall wag at the time. "You just can't get rid of him."

Roger Spurback is an embarrassment to a city he doesn’t even live in.

The emptiness of his head is matched only by the incredibly high opinion he holds of himself, an opinion not shared by Niagara Falls voters, who repeatedly rejected his many candidacies for public office.

It would be better for everyone if he would just go away. He won’t though, because he is one of those confused individuals who believe there is something ennobling in failure, graceful in defeat.

There isn’t, and don’t let a loser like Spurback tell you there is.