Cable Offerings Can’t Match Rigas Scandal
The Rigas family had homes in all the best banlieues of Mexico, the Rocky Mountains and Manhattan, and three private jets to take them there, or on an African safari, or to the south of France--much of that bankrolled, so the federal court documents say, by the duped stockholders of Adelphia Communications.
But a letter to “Dear Valued Customer” (they must have run out of the “Dear Sucker” form) informs me that my monthly cable fee is going up--excuse me, adjusting--by $2.37 a month.
While they ran Adelphia, the Rigases--again according to court papers--lavished almost $13 million of company money on their own private golf course; evidently that $700,000 country club membership wasn’t enough for one of the Rigas boys to chip away at his handicap.
But Los Angeles City Councilwoman Wendy Greuel couldn’t for the longest time get a working cable box to replace her broken one, because Adelphia hasn’t got the dough to keep its system in repair.
John Rigas, the company founder, the son of immigrants who grew up above the family hot dog joint, couldn’t scrape by on a $1.9-million annual salary, and started sucking so much money out of the company that his own son had to put him on an unreported $1 million-a-month limit.
But the good employees of Adelphia, about 3,000 of them in Southern California--like the stalwart Bill Rosendahl and the staff of his invaluable public affairs show--saw the value of their nest-egg stocks drop by 99%, and wonder how long they’ll still have paychecks.
So let’s sum up: I am one of a million-point-two Adelphia customers in Southern California--about a fifth of Adelphia’s total nationwide. In my neighborhood, as in others, it’s the only cable service I can get.
In the years that the Rigases have allegedly treated themselves to more than two billion bucks in “off-balance-sheet” loans (down at the Burrito King they’d call that dipping into the till, and they’d call the cops), my cable service has shriveled as my cable rates have risen from about $24 a month to--hang on, let me look at my checkbook here--to about $400 a month.
Okay, I’m exaggerating that part. But give it another year, and I may be right.
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I love Angelenos. We swan through quake and riot and no pro football with hardly a peep. But mess with our cable, and the phones and computer lines overflow like the Danube.
A man called the city attorney’s office from his car after getting his “adjustment” letter. “I’m furious,” he complained, “about Adelphia and I’m on my way to court to file my own lawsuit, but I need their proper corporate name.”
A Tarzana e-mail to Councilman Dennis Zine read, and very politely, considering, “Please consider non-renewal of the Adelphia cable contract.... Adelphia has the lowest level of high-speed Internet access, charges the highest fees for the least amount of programs/services....”
Hundreds of callers--hundreds of voters--want to know: Why are we dealing with Adelphia, especially after it filed for bankruptcy protection? Will my monthly check go for a Dream Team defense of the Greed Family? Should I stop paying my bill in protest? Where can I buy a set of rabbit ears? (That’s my question; it may come to that.)
Zine met the senior Rigas last year at a big lunch here. “I thought, ‘What a wonderful man.’ You hear his story.... Then you see how he looks in handcuffs.”
Zine, who just got redistricted into Adelphia territory, is joined by the others on the information technology committee, Councilmen Mark Ridley-Thomas and Jack Weiss, to find out what kind of wiggle room the city has in this, being as handcuffed by federal cable regulations as the Rigases were by federal agents. They can’t even find out with one phone call how much Adelphia rates have gone up compared to other L.A. cable companies. (If it helps, gentlemen, I’ll dig out my canceled checks.)
How did cable get this high and mighty? I wanted to hunt for clues on the city’s ethics Web site--a repository of records on lobbyists, contributions and connections--but it was down. It’s probably powered by Adelphia Internet.
The Rigases, like Charles Keating and his campaign against naughty words and pictures, primly congratulated themselves for being too moral to profit by airing a soft-porn cable channel. Then, like Keating, they may have gone on to commit the greater obscenity of ripping off the unworldly and unwary.
If the Rigases ever go to prison, you just know it’ll be one of those honor farms with a low-carb menu and cable. So let’s really punish them: for starters, no golf channel. And since they’re such cable geniuses, let them become their own programming. Train a cell-cam on each of them, 24 hours a day. Their lives, their loves--all Rigases, all the time.
That, I’d pay premium for.
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Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes .com.
