It’s rare for a big-time publication to concede that the premise of a solicitous cover story was way, way off target.
But Feb. 28 Forbes admits that a 1986 profile of highly leveraged businessman Ralph Ingersoll II, a onetime client of junk-bond king Michael Milken whom “we dubbed the next great media mogul,” was less than prescient.
That cover story, titled “Success Is the Best Revenge,” came at a time when Ingersoll, the son of a once-famous big-time former newspaper and magazine editor who was a pillar of the Eastern Establishment, was seemingly riding high: He owned 32 daily newspapers and 100 weeklies and was getting bigger and bigger.
Indeed, three years after the Forbes profile, he was up to 40 dailies, employing 11,000 people at nearly 200 newspaper properties, and was making his biggest splash, unveiling a new daily newspaper in St. Louis, the St. Louis Sun.
It was an intrepid move, since no metropolitan daily has started and succeeded against an existing one in decades in the United States (the Washington Times survives versus the Post because of huge subsidies from the Unification Church).
Despite lots of publicity, the Sun failed. And now, it seems, so has Ingersoll.
He was one of the victims of the early 1990s decline of the junk bond market. He lost control of his U.S. properties and, by last year, had only a 50 percent interest in three dailies in Ireland, Forbes says. “Now that, too, seems lost.”
An Irish judge has ordered him to fork over that stake to his Irish partner, in part because the partner inherited the papers. The stake originally cost Ingersoll $16 million, and it’s unclear how much the judge will decree he’ll come away with.
Regardless, the empire never made it.
Quickly: While contending that “the determinants of crime and law-abidingness are, of course, complex matters which are not fully understood,” Northwestern University law professor Daniel Polsby argues provocatively, if not always convincingly, in March Atlantic Monthly that gun-control laws have the effect of increasing crime and violence rates. Partly focusing on the impact of curbs on firearm sales in Chicago, his is a bad-guys-will-always-get-guns-from-somewhere thesis. . . . The premier issue of Escape, a travel quarterly, is generally informative and breezy as it takes forays to little-known areas of India, Australia and Ecuador but suffers from an emphasis on first-person accounts by writers who fail to interest one in their travails ($3.95, 2108 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 1060, Santa Monica, Calif., 90403). . . . The winter Wilson Quarterly offers a superb overview on the rise and fall of America’s once path-breaking passenger railroads and how a variety of government policies and actions, perhaps more than the advent of the airplane and the automobile, are to blame both for undermining the speed, cost and efficiency of the railroads and for putting us way behind other countries in high-speed rail service. . . . Feb. 21 National Review scoffs at companies turning toward “diversity management,” or seeking a greater cultural mix, as they rely on consultants (generally minorities or women) who may charge around $225,000 for supposedly long-term, systemwide makeovers. . . . Since a kid from Alaska named Moe (or was it Larry or Curly?) won the Olympic men’s downhill race, those who want to similarly risk their limbs might check out March-April Snow Country for its heralding Alaska’s Chugach Range, a 45-mile-long mountain chain rising 7,000 feet out of Prince William Sound, as a nifty, affordable place to ski. The best times are March and April, when daylight can strech past 10 p.m. . . . And Feb. 21 New Yorker, which replaces its annual Eustace Tilley cover with an R. Crumb illustration of what resembles a Tilley grandson on PCP, includes a dandy profile of $400-an-hour New York mob attorney Gerald Shargel, 49, a nice Jewish kid unabashedly turned on in the presence of the likes of client John Gotti (and given to accept cash payments in a paper bag). “I love the fact that when you represent someone you are automatically elevated to that person’s level,” says Shargel, who terms visits to the Manhattan hangout of now-imprisoned Gotti and gangster chums “cool because it’s like a movie.”
