‘Connecticut Has Dodged a Bullet. Now, Can We Defeat “Linda McMahonism”?’

[originally published at Beyond Chron, October 18, http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Connecticut_Has_Dodged_a_Bullet_Now_Can_We_Defeat_Linda_McMahonism__8598.html%5D

 

by Irvin Muchnick

World Wrestling Entertainment, the company of the Republican Senate candidate in Connecticut, Linda McMahon, and her monomaniacal husband Vince, has been known to use ex-FBI agents and Fairfax Group goons in its “risk mitigation” department. So all bets are off if, between the publication of this piece and Election Day, they come up with video of Linda’s Democratic opponent – state attorney general Richard Blumenthal – humping Eliot Spitzer’s call girl.

Short of that, one of Campaign 2010’s wackiest races is over – and President Obama can exhale again, confident that his party at least will retain a majority in the Senate on November 2.

In a summer of inchoate voter rage, McMahon had seemed to be capitalizing on her $50 million of “self-funding” and a mendacious outsider message. (Vince and Linda had declared bankruptcy in 1976, defaulting on a million dollars in debts because of bad business decisions and tax shelters. But Linda tried to paint herself as some kind of former welfare mom, and organs like Tina Brown’s Daily Beast enabled the lie.)

Perhaps it was fool’s gold all along, as it turns out that Linda’s supposed Kryptonite, the women’s vote, is breaking 2-to-1 against her. Nutmeg Staters became sick and tired of her dumb, saccharine TV commercials and her near-daily mailers labeling Blumenthal a congenital liar because he hallucinated a few times about serving “in” Vietnam rather than in the Marine Reserves “during” the Vietnam War.

McMahon’s tightly scripted campaign was doomed as soon as she held a press conference to announce her endorsement by a business trade group and, in answer to the most obvious questions, rambled in a way that suggested she would consider advocating a reduction in the minimum wage. During the same medium scrum, she called her WWE – a New York Stock Exchange-traded multinational with a billion-dollar market cap, where last year she and Vince took home $46 million in compensation and Bushie low-taxed dividends, while laying off 10 percent of the office staff – a “small business.”

I don’t know whether the mysteriously passive Blumenthal knew what he was doing by sitting back and letting the summer’s stories of WWE death and scandal percolate on their own, and I don’t care. For once, the sheer length of American campaigns proved a godsend. Our short national nightmare is about over.

At last Tuesday’s third and final debate, Blumenthal finally attacked McMahon on such issues as WWE’s abuse of independent contractor classification for the wrestlers it employs. (The state is now investigating the company for this – probably an unintended consequence of this pop-culture juggernaut’s overreach for temporal power.)

It was music to my ears when Blumenthal said, “I can’t believe that I just heard Ms. McMahon brag about this ‘wellness policy’ at WWE. She requires all wrestlers to sign a death clause that absolves WWE of all responsibility if wrestlers are killed in the ring and if the company is at fault … There have been seven dead wrestlers since she started campaigning …”

Linda’s rejoinder was that WWE does all it can for the “soap opera” performers who have turned her into a near-billionaire while croaking by the bushel. She added, both callously and ungrammatically, “[T]he consequences of death is a very sad thing when that happens …”

What remains to be seen is whether American politics and society, having pinned Linda McMahon, can prevail over Linda McMahonism. Unlike some others, I don’t see the problem as primarily partisan. Lowell Weicker, the former Republican senator and governor from Connecticut who is now on the WWE board of directors, to his credit refused to endorse McMahon because of her opposition to health care reform; and in a recent article about the Senate race in The New York Times Magazine, Weicker rightly dismissed the state’s Republican Party, whose nomination McMahon all but literally bought, as a “non-entity.”

Linda and Vince’s political legacy is as bipartisan money-grubbers who have spent more than a million dollars in Washington lobbying, and contributed widely to Democratic as well as Republican candidates for office. They even donated to Connecticut’s other senator and the McMahons’ flip-side “family values” head case, Joe Lieberman.

My celebration of a Blumenthal victory, assuming it’s not premature, therefore will be short-lived; the factors that will have gotten him elected hit deceptively deep themes in our public life. The independent contractor scam – which Obama himself has identified as something that both gyps the tax rolls and lowers the quality of life of American workers – is only one of them.

Another is the new consciousness surrounding health and safety in all of sports. The McMahons have complained that pro wrestling is being unfairly picked on when it comes to eradicating steroid and painkiller abuse, as well as occupational concussions; they may have a point, though it’s not one that speaks particularly well of them. WWE’s own medical director, Dr. Joseph Maroon, heads the team of mostly University of Pittsburgh Medical Center docs who give PR cover to the company’s joke of a “wellness policy.” Maroon and at least one other WWE doctor from UPMC also have other shaky outside business interests, including with the National Football League’s Pittsburgh Steelers and the NFL’s concussion policy committee.

Linda and Vince McMahon’s gift to civic dialogue was in finally putting their seedy business practices squarely on the radar screen. Have Democratic politicians been hypocritical this season in jumping on the anti-WWE bandwagon – as Vince started whining last week with the self-pity of a loser? You bet your life. But at least, for once, power and money fumbled in a phony populist’s disfavor.

Once Blumenthal completes the task of blocking Linda’s move from Titan Tower in Stamford to Capitol Hill in Washington, one of his first obligations will be to pick up the ball of Congressional investigations of WWE occupational health and safety, which Democratic legislators made noises about but dropped in the wake of the sensational 2007 double murder/suicide of star wrestler Chris Benoit.

Irvin Muchnick, author of CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, blogs at https://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com and is @irvmuch at Twitter.

In Pennsylvania, Wrestling Deregulation Is Tied Up With Another Small Piece of Linda McMahon Baggage: Obstruction of Justice

The Linda McMahon camp is pointing out that Richard Blumenthal, as a rookie state legislator, approved Connecticut’s part in the tide of states deregulating the pro wrestling industry in the 1980s, thanks to the lobbying efforts of her company.

I’m not sure just what McMahon is trying to prove here. As my historical writing on the business has established, deregulation at the time was portrayed as an amusing legislative sideshow, the “end of an error” in which wrestling promoters had found it advantageous to lump their scripted athletic entertainment together with the (mostly) legitimate sport of boxing. [See “Muchnick Book Bonus – ‘The (Thwak!) Deregulation of (Thump!) Pro Wrestling (The Bureaucrats Behind Hulk Hogan’),” https://wrestlingbabylon.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/muchnick-book-bonus-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%9Cthe-thwak-deregulation-of-thump-pro-wrestling-the-bureaucrats-behind-hulk-hogan%E2%80%9D/.]

Blumenthal correctly notes that the rationale for deregulating the industry three decades ago has nothing to do with the need to re-regulate it today.

But Linda’s focus on 1980s deregulation gets much worse for her: it redirects attention to her 1989 memo instructing a subordinate wrestling executive to cut loose one of the then-World Wrestling Federation’s ring doctors in Pennsylvania, George Zahorian, and to tip off Zahorian that he was under federal investigation for illegal steroid distribution. Zahorian would be convicted at a federal trial in 1991. Linda’s husband Vince McMahon and their company would be acquitted of related charges in 1994.

Here’s the full Pennsylvania deregulation chronology:

In 1987, working out of the Pittsburgh office of the McMahons’ outside law firm, then called Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, Rick Santorum (later a U.S. senator) helped coordinate lobbying efforts aimed at the Pennsylvania state legislature. Linda McMahon herself testified before the State Government Ad Hoc Committee in June 1987. General Assembly Bill 1198, “Professional Wrestling Act,” was signed into law in July 1989. Among the bill’s provisions was that the attending physician at wrestling events no longer would be appointed by the state athletic commission; instead, “The promoter shall be responsible to employ a physician.”

Dr. Zahorian wanted to continue to be that physician for WWF events in such locales as Harrisburg, Hershey, Allentown, and Hamburg, Pennsylvania. For years he had been running a cash-and-carry steroid operation backstage at WWF shows. He also FedExed steroids and other prescription drugs to many wrestlers. Records at Zahorian’s trial would confirm that Vince McMahon, though not yet an in-ring performer himself, was one of Zahorian’s dozens of steroid customers within wrestling.

Anita Scales was the WWF employee responsible for hiring the ringside physician in Pennsylvania beginning in July 1989. She would testify at Vince McMahon’s trial that she immediately sought to dismiss Zahorian. Zahorian showed up on his own, begging to be retained, at a WWF event in August, which was staffed by another physician. “The boys need their candies,” Zahorian told Scales, who was unmoved.

However, on Linda McMahon’s instructions, Scales relented and WWF took Zahorian back. A November 3, 1989, letter from Scales to the state athletic commission listed Zahorian as the attending doctor for the December 26 show in Hershey.

But before that could happen, the McMahons got a tip from Jack Krill, another Kiirkpatrick & Lockhart lawyer who was working with Rick Santorum on deregulation lobbying. Krill told Vince and Linda that he had heard that Dr. Zahorian was “hot” – under federal criminal investigation. On December 1, 1989, Linda wrote the infamous memo to subordinate Pat Patterson ordering him to distance the company from Zahorian and alert him to the investigation. Zahorian’s inclusion at an athletic commission “meet and greet” was canceled, as was his December 26 Hershey booking. And around a month later WWF executive Pat Patterson called Zahorian from a pay phone and advised him to destroy the records of his dealings with WWF personnel.

The source of the leak is ambiguous. In original historical accounts, Dave Meltzer of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter wrote that the tip came from someone inside the state athletic commission. Linda McMahon’s memo to Patterson said, “An officer from the State Department mentioned to Jack Krill, one of our attorneys, at a recent fundraiser that his office would be conducting these investigations at the same time he told Krill that perhaps it was a bad idea to mention it to him because Krill’s firm represents the WWF.”

Ted Mann of The Day in New London unearthed the McMahon-to-Patterson memo this spring, and a facsimile accompanying Mann’s coverage is viewable at http://www.theday.com/assets/pdf/NL7163449.PDF. Linda McMahon told The Day that the “State Department” reference was mistaken and she meant to say “Justice Department.” She said the source of the tip was James J. West, at the time a federal prosecutor.

On April 10, West (now in private practice in Harrisburg) denied to Mann that he had told Krill such a thing. “Absolutely nothing like that would have occurred,” West said, adding that as a prosecutor would have been barred from attending a “political fundraiser … I can say that without equivocation.” (But McMahon’s memo did not say “political” fundraiser.)

In an email to me on April 20, West put it differently: “I am not commenting on something that happened 20 years ago. “

But Linda McMahon is commenting. She wants to call out Richard Blumenthal for voting for wrestling deregulation in the Connecticut legislature. For my part, I want to call out McMahon for the state of her industry today – and for her own actions, including obstruction of justice, that brought things to this state.

Irv Muchnick