Got a comical letter last week from Matteo Anello, which was followed up a few days later by a meant-to-be ominous but equally funny phone call from his brother, Mayor Vince Anello.
Matteo's letter was all over the map. A map of where, I don't know.
"It is a beautiful country we live in. At the same time that we have soldiers in Iraq, fighting for Iraqi freedom and probably freedom for the world, we have people here at home doing and saying things from the pit of their soul and meant only to hurt and cause controversy for the sake of the almighty dollar," he wrote.
What the hell was he talking about? I wondered. It took him another paragraph to finally get around to it.
"You try to shame the Mayor and other members of my family by attempting to shed a suspicious light on his choices to do the work of the city and members of my family fortunate enough to find employment in city government," he wrote.
Now I got it. Matteo was questioning our mild criticism of his brother's decision to put half his family -- along with just about every longtime political hack responsible for the current pathetic state of Niagara Falls -- on the city payroll.
What am I, Saddam Hussein over here?
Matteo doesn't mince his words, I'll give him that. He variously refers to the Niagara Falls Reporter as "trash" and "a rag."
It's funny, really, because over the last four years he never once complained about our often harsh treatment of the previous administration. Nor did he complain about the editorial stance of the Reporter during the last election, which many in the community credit with giving his brother the victory.
I guess he must have found that old thesaurus ex-mayor Irene Elia left lying around City Hall. She used the exact same words to describe the paper and, as everyone knows, it worked out really well for her.
I'll take exception to a couple of things in Matteo's letter. He accuses us of having "slammed" his and Vince's sister, Rosalia, in the paper. In fact, her name has never been mentioned in these pages, as a quick check of the Reporter's online archive will confirm. She's a nice lady, by the way, and certainly more polite than either of her brothers.
Secondly, Matteo states that "it was partly due to the Mayor's efforts that you have been given the opportunity to publish city announcements that the city pays for."
For the record, the Reporter has never published a city announcement that the city paid for. Earlier this year, the City Council did indeed pass a resolution allowing for the publication of certain advertising in the Reporter. We took the motion as an "atta-boy" to a successful start-up city business, and never expected to see a dime from it.
Thus far, our expectations have been met.
But, as off the wall as Matteo's rant was, he was outdone a couple of days later by a phone call to the office from his brother, the mayor.
Vince doesn't call you himself, he has his secretary call. She says, "Mayor Anello calling for Bruce Battaglia."
Depending on what day of the week it is, she might just as well say, "Is Bruce there? My dad wants to talk to him."
In any event, the Redhead put the call through and our publisher had the misfortune of sitting through Vince's vitriolic tirade.
It wasn't pretty.
"You're trying to destroy me!" Vince howled. As with Matteo, the fact that we were the only paper in Western New York to endorse him in both the primary and general elections a few months ago seemed lost on him.
He was particularly cheesed about my characterization of his less-than-stellar February performance on a television newscast concerning racial discrimination in the city's Department of Public Works.
A majority of City Council members contacted after the program aired, as well as a number of others who saw the newscast, have called my assessment accurate. And I stand by it.
So why Vince decided to yell at Bruce, who hadn't written a word about it, remains puzzling. He demanded a retraction and Bruce tried not to laugh. He then called the Reporter staff a bunch of drunks, which is comical in itself, considering the circles in which he runs. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
Vince, who I would imagine taped the conversation, told Bruce that he "wasn't making any threats" and stressed that he was speaking not as the mayor, but as an "Italian-American immigrant," whatever that means.
Bruce is Italian-American, Staba's Polish-American, the Redhead's Irish-American and I'm from Cleveland. Unlike Vince, we all try to make sure we don't shake our fingers in other people's faces, don't make promises we can't keep and don't forget who our friends are. None of us has ever considered our ethnic heritage a good excuse for exercising a complete lack of manners.
Later, Vince called the Reporter's landlord, Frank Amendola, in an attempt to get us into hot water there. Vince told Frank I called him a racist in my last column. Frank said he went and read the column over five times.
"I still can't figure out what he was talking about," Frank said.
At no time did I call Vince a racist. And I don't believe he is one. What I did say is that his television interview showed a certain lack of sensitivity to a problem that's either going to be fixed or end up costing our city millions of dollars.
If Vince is calling our landlord, it's probably safe to assume he's calling our advertisers as well, another tactic tried with limited success by Elia. I wonder how long it will be before he's caught trying to remove our papers from the kiosk in the City Hall basement.
What these various self-important politicians consistently fail to realize is that we here at the Reporter don't work for them. We work for our readers, all 80,000 of them. We haven't had the success we've had by covering things up or by not asking the tough questions. That was true during the Elia administration and it will continue to be so under the Anello regime.
We'd rather go out of business than play the toady to any two-bit officeholder or petty bureaucrat.
If Vince Anello thinks the Reporter is a major problem that his administration needs to spend time dealing with, he's simply delusional. He should spend so much time worrying about why Rainbow Boulevard can only get plowed when it isn't snowing.
Or, more to the point, about how he's managed to alienate a majority of his own party's City Council members in fewer than 100 days since taking office.
It's going to be a long four years, I'm afraid. And Vince has brought it all on himself.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | March 23 2004 |