American Gangster (21 page)

The great takeover of 2005 inspired no rampart-mounting. No one at the
Voice
seemed to know much about the impending merger, and when the announcement did come, staffers had to read about it in the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
, the
Voice
's once lively “Press Clips” column apparently not deemed worthy of a scoop. Few were even aware Lacey was in the building.

This was too bad, since Michael Lacey, Jim Larkin, and their New Times papers offer much potential fodder for traditionalist
Voice
fear and loathing. First off, there was the old Clear Channel saw, how the New Times–VVM merger would further inhibit the already highly constrained alt-media world, all but stamping out the woolly idiosyncracy prized by what back in the Stone Age used to be called “the underground press.” This owed to the troubling “cookie-cutter” nature of the New Times model, the fact that NT publications in such disparate locales as Broward County and Dallas tended to bear a strong resemblance to each other. Critics charge
this is all part of NT's lean, mean business model orchestrated in no small part by its national-advertising arm, the Ruxton Media Group. Politically, the NT approach also raised hackles. Lacey detractor Bruce Brugmann, editor of the independent
San Francisco Bay Guardian
, summed up NT's stance to the current political landscape as “frat-boy libertarian, leering neo-conism. They don't endorse political candidates. To them it is one big, cynical joke.”

Beyond this, despite a consensus that New Times often published excellent local investigative stories, there was the sense that Lacey and Larkin's papers were vicious corporate sharks. “These guys don't want to compete, they want to annihilate you, put you out of business,” Brugmann said. This recklessness sometimes spilled over into the copy itself, such as in the recent Arthur Teele Jr. tragedy in Miami. The Miami
New Times
ran a story saying that Teele, a city commissioner indicted on corruption charges, had had numerous meetings with male prostitutes. The piece, called “Tales of Teele: Sleaze Stories,” was based primarily on specious, unproven police reports. Many considered the story unnecessarily scurrilous, especially after Teele committed suicide the day it appeared.

Lacey acknowledges the Teele story as a disaster. “You can't publish unsubstantiated police reports. We were irresponsible.” A month later, the Miami
New Times
editor of eighteen years, Jim Mullin, resigned.

But you rarely find Mike Lacey on the defensive. Born in Binghamton, New York, son of a construction worker, attendee of Essex County Catholic schools in Newark, which makes him by far the bluest-collared owner in
Voice
history, Lacey likes to mix it up. Verbally, physically, emotionally, it is all good to him. In response to Bruce Brugmann's attacks, Lacey published a many-thousand-word rejoinder in his Oakland-based
East Bay Express
titled “Brugmann's Brain Vomit.” Warming up by comparing Brugmann to “a needy ferret blogging,” Lacey called his fellow editor “a bull-goose loony” and wondered why he was even wasting his precious time “engaging a homeless paranoid in conversation about the contents of his shopping cart.” For good measure, Lacey fingered one of Brugmann's backers as the late Donald Werby, who in 1989 was “indicted on 22 counts of having sex with underage prostitutes and paying for it with cocaine,” the
same Donald Werby who was “a friend and patron of Anton LaVey,” who “underwrote LaVey's efforts in the Church of Satan (no, really).”

It was this spirit of healthy confrontation that left Lacey frustrated at not being able to set the record straight with the legendarily chippy
Voice
staff. As it was, all Lacey got to do was ride up in the elevator, discuss a few generalities with some
Voice
higher-ups behind closed doors in the office of current editor Don Forst, and “check out the urinals.” Later on, Forst, the grizzled former daily-paper guy who has resided incongruously atop the
Voice
masthead for almost a decade, took Lacey on a small tour. They walked past Cooper Square, where in February of 1860 Abraham Lincoln delivered his most important antislavery addresses, to the true key juncture of the neighborhood, the Starbucks on Astor Place.

“Forst said this was where it was at,” Lacey related, “because that's where NYU kids go, our supposed target audience.”

It was all pretty tame, Lacey said in his deep-throat baritone. “I didn't get anything stuck between my shoulder blades. Someone could have at least told me to fuck off. What a letdown.” But there was nothing to be done about it, as Lacey reminded, since John Ashcroft had forbidden further discussion, that is, the Justice Department had mandated that in media mergers of this size the new owner was barred from “engaging in major business practices,” for a sixty-to-ninety-day review period. This included addressing the staff or even touring the building.

Not that Lacey was shy in explicating what he
would
have told the
Voice
staff should they have brought up any number of topics, like, say, that New Times papers are conservative. “Look,” Lacey said, “just because I don't have eight reporters kneecapping George Bush doesn't make me conservative. One is enough; the other seven can be looking for dirt on local politicians. The idea is not to let politicians get away with shit. That's not liberal or conservative, and believe me
our papers have butt-violated every goddamn politician who ever came down the pike!
As a journalist, if you don't get up in the morning and say ‘fuck you' to someone, why even do it?

“Look, a lot of people think I'm a prick,” Lacey self-assessed. “But at least I'm a prick you can understand. I don't sneak up on you. You can see me coming from a long way away. Like the Russian winter.”

It was quite a performance, aided by the fact we had just downed three bottles of Italian wine, at $120 per. But what about the
Village Voice
? Not to denigrate the fine towns where New Times operates its freebie papers, but this was New York City and we were talking about the
Village Voice. The Village fucking Voice
—not just one more property for Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin to insert into their strip-mall portfolio like a Kansas City
Pitch
, or a St. Louis
Riverfront Times
, or a Denver
Westword
.

“I'm sick of that crap,” Lacey said with a snarl. “Like we're from Phoenix or some Wild West dung heap and we're hayseeds. Like we don't know what's up … of course I know we're talking about the
Village fucking Voice
!

“Listen,” Lacey said, narrowing his eyes, “we started the Phoenix
New Times
back in 1970 at Arizona State University because the campus police said we couldn't lower the flag to half-mast after Kent State. We didn't want to burn down the ROTC building, we just wanted to lower the flag because it was the right thing to do. Somehow, we thought we needed to start a newspaper to get the nuances of that point across. And to have a little fun. Throw a little spirit of
Mad Magazine
into the debate.

“It wasn't easy. I was ready to sell blood to keep the thing going. We're successful because we're smart, we outwork everyone. Our papers have broken stories. We had the thing about sexual abuse of female cadets at the Air Force Academy. We had the story about mishandling nuclear waste in San Francisco. Not the
San Francisco Chronicle
, not the
Los Angeles Times
. Us. We've won more than seven hundred awards. But I never stopped thinking about the
Village Voice
. I know what it
was
. I know what it is now.

“I've got my own focus group in this town: twenty-year-olds, thirty-year-olds. They say, the
Village Voice
, no one reads that. I can't walk around town hearing nobody reads my paper. It wrecks my day. That's got to change. We're here to play, and anyone who likes to play like we play can play along.”

Thanks for the phrase go to Cynthia Cotts, who used to write the
Voice
“Press Clips” column (she reported on New Times' failed 2000 attempt to
buy the
Voice
, calling it a “hostile takeover”). “The
Village Voice
,” she said. “It is the wound that never heals.”

This I take to mean that once you are a
Voice
Person—no matter how many years go by or the number of jobs you do—you will always be a
Voice
Person. Even those without holes in their jeans, like Ken Auletta, who once wrote the
Voice
's city-politics column, “Running Scared,” back in the early seventies, agree.

“Yeah,” Ken said. “It's like the blood on Lady Macbeth's hands.

You never know when your
Voice
personhood will crop up. A couple of years ago I was feeling extra crazy, so a friend gave me a shrink's name. I called, and this deep Donald Sutherland voice came on the line. Yes, he said, he had time, I should come by his office on Tuesday afternoon. “Eighty University Place,” he said, sonorously. Sensing hesitation on my part, the shrink asked, “Do you have a problem with that?” No, I said. It was fine. The mere fact that I'd spent four years in the building working for the
Village Voice
wouldn't interfere with my therapy, would it? Yet when I arrived for the session to find the shrink's office on the fifth floor in the back, I had to demur. “Don't think this is going to work for me,” I told the puzzled analyst.

“Fifth floor in the back, it was just too dense,” I told David Schneiderman when I went to see him a couple of weeks ago. Schneiderman laughed. After all, Schneiderman, whose brother Stuart is a leading American authority on the French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, was well familiar with the fifth-floor rear of 80 University Place, circa 1978. That was where the editor in chief's office was, the same glassed-in sector where I was hired by Marianne Partridge and, some years later, fired by David Schneiderman. (That should take care of any disclosure issues.)

In the days, and years, that followed I often heard myself referring to the rail-thin Schneiderman as the man who single-handedly did more than anyone to kill alternative journalism in the United States. Not that this was the time to act on old grudges. The firing was passed over as a regretful misunderstanding, a product of youth. Schneiderman was a good sport about the whole thing. He could afford to be, since he'd gone from staff-mandated exile, to editor, to publisher (under Stern), to CEO, and now
stood to make a rumored half a million dollars for brokering the merger with New Times. He didn't even flinch when I told him I knew from the moment he walked in the door he was bad news, because if there was anything a 1978
Voice
Person understood, it was, Don't hire anyone from the
New York Times
. Certainly not some deputy from the op-ed page—and never, ever, make him the editor in chief.

That's because back then a
Voice
Person didn't dream of working up to some swell job on the “Metro” section. The
New York Times
was the enemy. You knew it could send out its mirthless Maginot Line of Prince-tonians and it wouldn't matter. If you traveled light and right, you could still beat them to the spot. They could be had. Putting a
Times
man, from Johns Hopkins, in charge of the
Voice
struck me as a sick Murdochian joke, a total capitulation.

But what did it matter now? Twenty-seven years later, Schneiderman was still there, still the boss. All those wild people, all those famous bylines, and he'd outlived almost every one of them. He was the dominant personality in the entire history of the institution.

He didn't look all that different, apart from the gray hair. He was still that same lantern-jawed, hingey-looking Ichabod Crane–Sephardim in a Brooks Brothers shirt. His status had changed, though. At 36 Cooper Square, he rode upstairs in what most people at the place referred to as “David's private elevator.” Now the CEO of Village Voice Media, he'd become something of a ghost around the office. Longtime
Voice
people, including those he used to edit, said they saw him maybe once or twice a year, something like the principal of a large high school.

“I don't even know why you came over here,” Schneiderman said, smiling. “Because you're going to write the same story everyone does, how the
Village Voice
isn't what it used to be anymore. But those people say they don't read the paper, so how would they know?” He could keep using that line to his uptown friends, but it wasn't going to work with me. Because I do read the
Voice
—every week, if only because there was stuff in there worth reading: my homey Hoberman's movie reviews, the great Ridgeway, Wayne Barrett, and Tom Robbins, still kicking municipal butt. Still, it was so, the paper wasn't what it used to be. But why was that?

We batted around the usual rationales: the end of the left (Schneiderman said it was “a dead movement”), the demise of bohemia, changes in the youth culture, and the decision, in 1996, to go free, that is, give the paper away, as all “alt” papers are. Told that many writers felt that the impact of their work had been diminished when the paper went free, Schneiderman scoffed, adding that there was no choice. “We were below 130,000 circulation, down from a top of 160,000. Now the circulation is 250,000 … wouldn't you rather be read by twice as many people?” Well, yeah, but I wondered where Schneiderman got this quarter-of-a-million number from.

“Returns,” he said. “We've got only one percent returns. That's where the number comes from.”

“You must be kidding. Are you counting those hundreds of papers that are thrown away because some dog pissed on them?” How could he claim 250,000 individual readers when most picked up the paper to see what time a movie began, threw it away, and got another one for the next movie?