If You Build It, They Will Come... Part 6

When we left, Christmas 2002 was approaching. It had been three years since Massillon's 6,500 seat arena was announced. The Arctic Express had fled to Canton, MG/Dove spent one million tax dollars, and all we had to show was an empty construction trailer, and empty lot, a rusting pile of steel, and the enduring faith of Massillon's Mayor for Life who still believed in the dream of Hockeytown, USA.

MG/Dove never received the bank financing it needed to build Massillon's 6,500 seat arena. MG/Dove now needed to borrow 24 MILLION DOLLARS to build a hockey arena in Massillon, Ohio, where the anchor tenant was now going to be a junior hockey team, as The Arctic Express had packed up and moved to Canton. A 6,500 seat arena so teenagers could play hockey. A bank would be foolish to not loan them the money. It makes such great business sense.

In 2002, MG/Dove started to negotiate with a company who was going to loan them the 24 MILLION DOLLARS, a company that believed in the dream, a company which saw the tremendous business opportunity linked to teenagers playing hockey. The company that was going to provide MG/Dove the loan for this endeavor? Global Arbitrage. Not Local Arbitrage. Not State Arbitrage. Not even National Arbitrage. Global Arbitrage. If a company has the name "Global" in its corporate moniker, it must be HUGE, not some scam operation run out of some guy's basement... oops... We will get back to that thought later.

Massillon City Council gave MG/Dove a deadline of December 31, 2002, to close on the loan, or else. The or else part ended up being that Massillon City Council would give them yet another deadline well into the future. On December 31, 2002, The Repository reported that Mayor Cicchinelli believed the loan would come through by the end of the day. It didn't.

In January, 2003, Steven A. Waldman from Global Arbitrage told then Massillon Law Director John Ferrero that funding was on the way, although the loan had not actually been closed. "We're going to get there," Cicchinelli said, "Everybody just has to be patient" (The Repository, January 7, 2003).

And patient we were. And then in May 2003, the construction trailer disappeared from the arena site, and the steel that had been rusting away at the construction site was now gone. MG/Dove probably sold the steel for scrap. All that was left at the former Agathon Park were several signs, declaring the site as the future home of the arena. "Cicchinelli still wasn't concerned because construction trailers and equipment have been removed from the site. He remains optimistic The Arena will be built." (The Repository, May 14, 2003).

Wow. A man with vision. No common sense, but plenty of vision.

In July, 2003, even Cicchinelli's most reliable rubber stamps on City Council thought it might be time to possibly, maybe, take down the signs declaring the site as the future home of The Arena.
"Those signs won't come down until we know the project is over," the Mayor said, "and we don't know that" (The Repository, July 3, 2003).

And what of the million dollar state grant that Massillon's Mayor for Life gave to MG/Dove for "site preparation?" Would the state want its money back? Was MG/Dove on the hook for it? Or was the taxpayers' money lost, and unrecoverable?

Stay tuned...