Bruce and I were in our fabulous Niagara Business Center offices one afternoon recently when a curious hubbub arose. Around the open door of our suite, a mob of people, apparently with nothing better to do at 1:30 on a weekday afternoon, began to gather. Cameras were flashing and people were talking in excited voices, as if something momentous were about to occur. Bruce, who was at his desk and couldn't see what was taking place, looked up.
"What's the rumpus?"
"Dunno," I said, swinging my legs down from the conference table in Bruce's office. The crowd became louder, talking and laughing now, and some of them were running up and down the stairway. I walked over to the window and looked down.
"Must be rich people," I said. "Looks like they came in a Mercedes."
In the parking lot out front, a big Mercedes 420 sat idling, sending exhaust fumes rising in the freezing air like a fog machine at a championship fight. People were coming out of the building, conferring with whoever was driving, and coming back in.
"Maybe it's the Germans," Bruce said.
I walked out through the reception area and leaned against the open door. The people seemed to be trying to get into the offices of Niagara Falls Redevelopment, although the lights were turned off and there wasn't anyone seated at any of the desks.
Although they were strangers to me, one guy looked familiar. He was an older white guy, around 60, at once balding and hairy, and wearing a leather jacket with a big eagle on the back of it. I wondered where I'd seen that guy before.
Pretty soon, a security guard who works in the building showed up. One of the guys in the group, I guess there were about 20 of them, demanded to be let in to NFR's office. The guard told them the office was closed. I suppose the mob had no way of knowing, but NFR has always kept fairly irregular hours around the holidays.
The same guy who demanded to be let into the closed office shoved a business card at the security guard. "Well, you tell them to call me, because we'll be back," he barked. The guard shrugged.
At length, the mob began to realize that whatever it was they'd hoped to accomplish by barging into a business office in the middle of the afternoon had not, in fact, been accomplished, and their mood became somewhat deflated. I walked back over to the window as some of them exited the building and gathered around the Mercedes.
Some guy came in and handed me a piece of paper. He was smiling and didn't look like a process server, so I took it.
"WHAT KIND OF NEIGHBOR IS ROGER TREVINO?" the paper read. Then followed a half-literate diatribe accusing Trevino, who is NFR's executive vice president, and company attorney John Bartolomei of just about everything short of the Lindbergh kidnapping.
"They should have had their libel lawyer vet this," I said to Bruce, and dropped it on his desk.
Despite the inflammatory rhetoric, the flyer basically said that NFR was attempting to buy up properties as cheaply as possible in order to sell them at a profit at some future date, which is true. It also said they did this using the power of eminent domain, which is untrue. Finally, the flyer insinuated, Trevino and Bartolomei were racists, personally, and that is slander.
These were the same themes being spewed all that morning by Roger Spurback, a retired white man who goes around claiming to be the voice of the black community here, on one of the radio talk shows. He'd been telling people about this big demonstration at our building and urging them to come down and cause trouble. I hadn't heard it, but Bruce had, and he told me about it.
Just then, the guy I thought I'd recognized earlier came barging into the office, and it hit me. I did recognize him, though he was much changed. It was a long time ago, I thought, almost 30 years, and he was some kind of young commie or anarchist or socialist or something trying to co-opt the Cleveland new music scene into some kind of moneymaking mechanism to further the cause.
Most of us who actually played music then were trying to turn the music scene into a moneymaking mechanism for ourselves, not that we weren't altruistic and all that, but there was a little bit of violence, and I think once or twice the cops showed up.
His name was Pete DaSilva, and now he was standing a few feet away from me in Bruce's office.
"Hey, can't you see I'm trying to run a business here?" I asked him.
"Did you get one of our flyers?" he responded, holding one out, like some Moonie Hare Krishna at an airport.
"I'm trying to run a business here," I said again. He put his hands up like I'd pulled a roscoe and backed on out of the office.
When I turned around, Bruce was on the telephone.
"Hey, some friends of yours were here," he said to whomever he was talking to.
I went in the other room and started Googling Pete DaSilva and the organization he was now associated with, the Gamaliel Foundation. Most of the articles that popped up heaped praise on the organization for helping bring freedom and equality to local neighborhoods. The articles were published in The People's Weekly World, the official newspaper of the Communist Party USA.
Pete himself had apparently gone on to become a professional agitator, traveling from place to place and getting his name in the newspapers. In April of this year, he was bothering people in Scranton, Pa., fronting an outfit called Faith Speaking, which various news clips indicate is similar to our own pulled-out-of-thin-air NOAH organization.
Niagara Organizing Alliance for Hope (NOAH) is supposed to be addressing problems in Niagara Falls, though its leaders are the Rev. Rex Stewart, whose church is in Youngstown, and Bishop Stephan Booze, the driver of the Mercedes that was in our parking lot and, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles, a Town of Niagara resident.
Maybe I'm screwy, but it seems to me that if you go around saying how much you care about Niagara Falls, the least you can do is live here.
Anyway, these guys seem to think that, because NFR paid the city a lot of money for what was formerly a public park and a gymnasium, the company is now somehow indebted to them.
Why NOAH is going to NFR rather than the city in its shakedown effort is beyond me. The city owned the property, the city sold the property, and nowhere in the sales agreement is there a clause in which NFR agreed to take over responsibility for the city's parks and recreation programs.
If NOAH has a problem, it's with the city, though of course the city's broke, and Bishop Booze has those pesky Mercedes payments to keep up.
Me, I'm just trying to run a business here. And I'm pretty sick of people trying to inject religion into politics. Over the past two millennia, such unholy alliances have been responsible for the crucifixion of Christ, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the imprisonment of Galileo, the Salem witch trials and the administration of George W. Bush.
And those are only the high points.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Dec. 11 2007 |