This was easily the weirdest local election I have EVER witnessed or covered.
There ain't no good guys. There were a lot of bad guys (apologies to Dave Mason, wherever you are).
For the record, I stated weeks ago that my prediction was that Emilio Carlesimo would win handily and that Jim Bennett would squeek by. I told Carlesimo as much at the VASI forum three or four weeks back. I've said it to numerous others as well. My numbers were a bit off, though. I stated Carlesimo would get approximately 70% of the vote (he ended up getting 61%), and I thought Bennett would win by a bigger margin than 139 votes -- that still astounds me.
I knew that Batshiat Crazy Harry Walia's mugshot would cause his campaign hopes to come to a screeching halt. As soon as I posted that picture, Walia should have stepped down -- he should have known that his campaign would end in flames and twisted wreckage. In spite of the close call this time, he stands zero chance of a comeback next year.
I didn't print my predictions for the same reason that I never have before: such prognostication in print within such a small electorate will invariably influence the result in unpredictable ways. It's the same in physics: mere observation and prediction alters the observed in measurable, but unpredictable, ways.
Bennett won, not because he ran a successful campaign -- he didn't. Both he and Ted Koszarski ran campaigns that could be best described as totally gay. Carlesimo and Walia exuded confidence, machismo, testosterone, a can-do approach. Both men knew how to work a crowd as intuitively as a carnival's best huckster knows how to talk the local schoolgirls out of their knickers, while Bennett and Koszarski came off as limp-wristed effeminites trying to host a drag tea dance.
The ONLY reason that Bennett won was because Walia was and is an incredibly duplicitous fiend and there was a wealth of paperwork to show it. Once the paperwork started slowly flowing from this web site to the public, it was too late for Walia -- there was no way to stop the fatal hemorrhaging, but he and his supporters tried to stop me anyway: I was involved in two altercations (one with a fellow journalist), received numerous threats of lawsuits, and one death threat. It's a personal best for a single election season.
Walia raised some $40,000 by October 29, a new record for a Venice council election, which means he spent $16.00 for each vote that he received. In contrast, Bennett raised almost $6,000, which means he spent around $2.40 for each vote that he received.
Last year, Emilio Carlesimo was thug extraordinaire. As the then-president of the MacArthur Beach and Racquet Club condominium association, he was involved in the ousting of 73-year-old Charlotte McGowan from her home because she did not trust the condo board or the condo management with a key to her unit. There's more to it than that -- the board wanted to rip out some of her internal walls so her upstairs neighbor could have a washer and dryer rather than use the community laundry two doors down. McGowan had just had her place remodeled. The fight was on.
While Carlesimo and MacArthur Beach management claimed they were playing fair, the legal record showed that they had played hide the paperwork by denying her access to condo board minutes and such, and that the hired help had been harrassing McGowan. Of course that was denied, but then the following post appeared on this web site on November 5, 2008 from someone posing as "realtor:"
"The papers did not pick up on those false stories from the 93 yr old lady because shes not telling the truth. The papers did their homework! You like talking to and listening to a ugly iside and out vindictive gas bag that lost in court. Nobody cares but a T.M.Z. wanna be like you. Your not man enough to keep this on here!!! DO your homework. [all errors sic]"
McGowan's attorney subpoened the ISP. It turned out that the above post came from the home internet account of a Tom Obermeier. He's not a realtor at all, but he was the property manager at MacArthur Beach at the time. McGowan described him as a resident terrorist who once tried to kick down her door. McGowan told me she was terrified of Obermeier. My nose and a whole lot of documented evidence had me leaning heavily towards believing McGowan. The later revelation that it was Obermeier that made that post on this site's message board confirmed to me that McGowan's assessment of Obermeier as a thug was spot on.
Obermeier later admitted to me that he had made the post and stated that he had Carlesimo's permission, as Obermeier had made the post on his own time from his home computer. Carlesimo didn't deny it when asked -- he shrugged and walked away.
When all of this started coming out on this web site (Obermeier's full involvement wasn't known yet), it ultimately cost Carlesimo the election to city council. Carlesimo lost handily to Kit McKeon in November of last year.
Meanwhile, this web site continued to broadcast McGowan's plight in an appeal to the MacArthur Beach board to show some sense of fairness. In spite of the obvious injustice, MacArthur Beach continued to treat McGowan like she was living in a banana republic.
Curiously, Obermeier still has his job.
Earlier this year, Carlesimo was ousted from the MacArthur Beach board, probably because of reports from this web site. It looked like Carlesimo was politically done and toasted. He plodded on, worked like a dogged madman, and campaigned hard to get onto Venice City Council.
Meanwhile McGowan was rapidly running out of money due to ongoing legal fees. She eventually lost her legal battle with MacArthur Beach due to economic attrition -- they outspent her, a guaranteed winning strategy. It didn't help that her attorney, Kerry Mack, turned the case over to Mack's attorney daughter, who reportedly struggled with coming up to speed on the case in the courtroom at McGowan's expense. The younger attorney took a near-guaranteed legal winner and plopped it into the toilet, and thus McGowan's life and home were flushed.
McGowan lost, with Judge Bennett curiously ruling that state condo laws obligate McGowan to turn over a copy of her house key to Tom Obermeier, in spite of the fact that no such state law actually exists. No such rule was in the condo association's docs, either, but without the ability to appeal, Bennett's ruling became law.
Bennett also awarded legal fees to MacArthur Beach, meaning McGowan would have to reimburse the condo association. In a sad irony, McGowan stated to me that MacArthur Beach was earning such a bad PR reputation in the real estate market that, coupled with the downturn in real estate, it was impossible for McGowan to sell her place. Well, who would want to move in once they had read about the board and the management there?
So now, according to what Carlesimo told me on this year's campaign trail, MacArthur Beach is readying to slap a lien on McGowan's condo in the first move to foreclose and take ownership, only they can't find her.
A few months back, McGowan called me up. She knew that she was going to end up homeless, so she was packing up to move out to Yosemite National Park, where she had had many happy experiences earlier in life.
McGowan sounded totally crushed. Nobody locally has heard from her since. Calls made by me to Yosemite have turned up nothing.
Carlesimo always insisted that McGowan was a crazy old woman. I met McGowan a few times. I found her to be sane, highly intelligent, but a bit goofy, and definitely cantankerous.
From MacArthur Beach's and Carlesimo's point of view, they have done a good thing: they have driven a dangerous crazy woman from their posh community.
My take is that MacArthur Beach is apparently a good place to move out of and not a good place to move into. Be careful, those who still live there -- if your mind slips a few notches, these predators will take you down and eviscerate you like a pride of lions on a lame gazelle. They kept this manager after all.
Still, in this year's campaign, Carlesimo proved himself to be predatory and competent, two things that Ted Koszarski, his opponent, could not successfully claim to be. If there was ever a more incompetent campaign run in local politics here, I can't remember one. Helen Jean Wilson's campaign from quite a few years back comes close.
Competent and predatory won out. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe, just maybe, Carlesimo will turn out to be a decent councilman. If he does, we all win. If he turns out to be evil, it can only make Martin, Lang & Co. look good. So either way, Carlesimo can't hurt the town.
However -- if Ted Koszarski had a disastrous first year while working the learning curve, Martin, Lang & Co. would pay the price, as Ed Martin, Sue Lang, and Ernie Zavodnyik are all up for re-election next November.
So, with apologies to Koszarski, his campaign was a campaign full of fail right from the start. One could blame the print media and not be entirely wrong. The Gondolier was living way out in the land of biased fiction to give praise to Carlesimo, while the Herald-Tribune did not cover the race with any greater degree of accuracy. Neither paper has ever printed the name "Charlotte McGowan" which means many of you never saw that side of Carlesimo unless you read my back articles from last year.
The Gondolier endorsed Carlesimo but refused to make any endorsement in the Jim Bennett / Harry Walia race. The Herald-Tribune didn't endorse anyone in either race -- instead they took pot shots at Bennett and Koszarski while refusing to even look at the background records of any of the four candidates until I started slamming their foreheads into a pile of legal papers.
A few days before the election, Kim Hackett finally decided to take a closer look at what I was writing about Walia, probably in an attempt to slam me down. She finally admitted, after looking closely, that I had been right all along: Walia really is a total nutjob who needed elongated sleeves, large quantities of Thorazine in his bloodstream, and some quality time in a rubber room.
By then it was almost too late: both papers had been solidly praising Walia. Giles at the Gondo alternately lied in print about the nature of Walia's legal problems while accusing both the existing court records and myself of lying about Walia. Eric Ernst at the Herald-Trib wrote that it was racist to point out that Walia had been using two names when Walia was falsely claiming to have used only one all along.
Meanwhile, Venice Florida! dot com took the exact opposite approach as the Gondo: this site tacitly supported Bennett by showing up Walia as the slimey amoral horrorshow that he turned out to be, this in spite of outright fabrications pushed by print media about what a great maverick businessman he was supposed to be. At the same time, this site made no implicit endorsement or journalistic inroad into the Carlesimo / Koszarski race because, when it came down to it, neither candidate was endorsable.
This election better give Martin, Lang & Co. pause for reflection. Their campaign needs to begin today, which I told Lang, only she doesn't seem to believe it. Koszarski was creamed, a statement against Martin, Lang, & Co. that they need to pay strong attention to: this was a violent attack on their existence as much as on Koszarski.
The fact that a pathologic and psychotic lunatic lost by only 139 votes says something else: Bennett has no mandate and half of Venice voters found a clone of Idi Amin to be preferable to another egghead drone from the Ed Martin College of Political Diplomacy.
On the record, I asked Ed Martin, Sue Lang, and Ernie Zavodnyik last night if each of them were running for re-election in 2010. Lang said yes, Martin and Zavodnyik both said maybe, with Martin spitting out some gobbledegook political phrasing about a need to "take the pulse of the people." Apparently, he needs a stethoscope to read this year's election numbers.
Ed, Sue, Ernie: You guys have one year from today to figure out all that you have done wrong, somehow correct it, and figure out a way to bypass the newspapers in getting your message out. Otherwise you are doomed and you will take us all down with you.
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