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I couldn't help but feel a twinge of sadness last Wednesday when Adelphia Communications CEO and former Buffalo Sabres owner John Rigas was led handcuffed from a federal court in Manhattan after being arraigned on securities, wire and bank fraud charges.
It wasn't necessarily Rigas that I felt sympathy for; although, guilty or not, it's difficult to watch a once-proud, 78-year-old man attempt to hold his head up high after being stripped of his necktie, shoelaces and belt, while CNN beams the image of him, hands manacled in the front, from coast to coast.
No, after some introspection, I came to the conclusion that it's Western New York and its citizenry that I feel for.
John Rigas was just the last in a recent line of national figures linked to Western New York to besmirch and defame the left coast of the Empire State.
First it was O.J. Simpson, Buffalo's greatest sports star, who went from national celebrity to national pariah, after bleeding all over his Ford Bronco before catching a red-eye flight to Chicago.
Next it was Niagara Falls' own John Wayne Bobbit, who made the mistake of falling into a deep sleep while his abused wife was inspecting the new Ginsu knife set, which had just come in the mail earlier that day.
When the dust settled on the Oklahoma City bombing that left 168 dead, Western New Yorkers were shocked to discover that Pendleton native Timothy McVeigh was directly involved in the plot to carry out the bombing.
Finally, when one or more misguided religious right zealots decided that the best way to prove that killing an unborn fetus is a sin was by murdering an OB-GYN who performs abortions, they chose Amherst doctor Barnett Slepian as their victim.
All in all, it's been a pretty ugly run of the national headline table.
Only the Sept. 11 tragedy spared Western New York, and it wouldn't entirely surprise me to learn that Osama bin Laden's been hiding out in a garage somewhere in Sloan or Eden.
Sometimes you have to wonder just what sort of a curse has been placed on the Niagara Frontier.
We've got a decimated economy, double-digit unemployment and winter weather that would scare Yukon Cornelius.
We're also saddled with local governments that can't handle tasks as simple as balancing a budget, trimming a common council or spurring business development in a city with 15 million annual visitors.
Now you can add the name John Rigas under the afflicted file of the Western New York curse.
The Rigas saga reminds me of Hans Christian Andersen's story of the emperor with no clothes. You know the story: The king paraded in front of his loyal subjects wearing nothing but a smile. Because his close advisors tell him that the royal threads look great, the king disbelieves what his own eyes tell him, convincing himself that he is indeed sharply dressed.
Looking at Rigas last Wednesday, you could still see remnants of the internal fire that must have burned brightly when he was a young man.
His face appears chiseled from granite. His strong jaw line and bushy eyebrows reflect his proud Greek heritage. His gait and posture hearken back to a bygone era.
Rigas possesses what drama teachers call the ability to exude presence. In the old man's eyes still dance a young man's desire. Residing there are the hopes and determination that carried Rigas from a low-paying job making television tubes for Sylvania to the CEO of the nation's sixth largest cable franchise.
Along the way, he turned the sleepy town of Coudersport, Pa. into a nationally known location, sold Buffalo Sabres fans the dream of giving Dominik Hasek the tools he needed to able to hoist the Stanley Cup on this side of Lake Erie, and tickled Buffalo's fancy with the promise of an Adelphia high-rise office on the waterfront.
In the end, the Cup and the high-rise evaporated like spilled water on July concrete. Coudersport -- which in the last year has fought efforts by white supremacists to set up a sort of national headquarters there -- had two more Adelphia bigwigs arrested by federal agents on Wednesday, and the town probably wishes it had never heard of the Rigas family.
Watching John Rigas blink into the glare of the television cameras, it became apparent that, for the first time, the emperor realized just how naked he stood before the world.
Alas, the fable has no happy ending for the long-suffering denizens of Western New York.
As the Rigas name completes the turn from fame to infamy, the former emperor, now a broken old man, becomes the whipping boy for corporate crime, and loyal citizens once again stand red-faced in the national spotlight.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | July 30 2002 |