If You Build It, They Will Come... The Finale

As we left our last installment, it was the middle of 2003, three and a half years after our Mayor for Life promised us a 6,500 seat hockey arena. The project had turned into a scam. MG/Dove had spent the million dollar state grant Mayor Cicchinelli gave them, there was no construction, no possibility of construction, and no financing in place to build the arena.

Bob Russ, then Repository Suburban Editor, compared Frank Cicchinelli's blind faith in the arena being built to Linus, of Peanuts fame, waiting for the Great Pumpkin. In the animated cartoon special, Linus convinces Charlie Brown's sister, Sally, to give up trick-or-treating to sit in a pumpkin patch and wait for the Great Pumpkin. The Great Pumpkin never arrives. Russ compares then city council members Paul Lambert and Mike Loudiana to Sally.

On June 3, 2003, the Independent write a strong editorial urging the mayor to give up on the arena, that "City officials need to face reality and move on."

Does Massillon's Mayor for Life face reality? Absolutely not. Because he had a dream...

"Cicchinelli said he remembers talking about a downtown civic center in Massillon while he was still a student at Kent State University Stark Campus. That was two years before Cicchinelli won a seat on City Council and 16 years before he became mayor" (The Repository, November 9, 2003).

And what of the taxpayers' million dollars? Will the City of Massillon have to pay the grant back to the State of Ohio? "This isn't a problem, Cicchinelli insists, because the $1 million came in the form of a grant, it doesn't have to be repaid" (The Repository, July 27, 2003).

This isn't a problem? We were swindled for an arena that wasn't built, and this isn't a problem? MG/Dove claimed it spent about $700,000 of the million dollar grant and they were sitting on the rest of the money. We bet they were.

They were sitting on our money as they tried to work out financing through Steven Waldman, of Florida based Global Arbitrage. Let's see how that worked out.

Not so good. According to a September 30, 2003, article in The Independent, Steven Waldman was a fraud. Waldman had promised about 75 project developers, including MG/Dove and Massillon's arena, project funding. No group ever got any funding, but Waldman collected various up-front fees from businesses wanting money. Shocking. Waldman was arrested in Florida in October, 2004, for scamming fees from developers without funding a single project, including Massillon's 6,500 seat hockey arena.

"In a letter MG/Dove provided to Massillon officials in January 2003, Waldman claimed he had more than $750 million through multiple financial organizations. But in the letter, Waldman misspelled the name of Banco de Brasil" (The Repository, October 23, 2004). What a shrewd operator. He must have been one smart cookie to fool our Mayor for Life, correct spelling or not. Who wouldn't believe a story about hundreds of millions of dollars and a bank in Brazil?

In the end, over four years after the project was announced, even our Mayor for Life started to have some doubts. We suspect when the financier was arrested for fraud, even Frank Cicchinelli started to maybe suspect that the arena was not going to be built.

It was a sad ending, really. 6,500 Massillonians denied the opportunity during hockey season to see teenagers playing Junior League hockey. The dream of Hockeytown, USA, was over.

How did the citizens of Massillon react to this scam? How did they react to their mayor being hoodwinked for over four years? They re-elected Mayor Frank Cicchinelli to a fifth term in 2003, and a six term in 2007. If he runs for a 7th term in 2011, we suspect the people of Massillon will elect him to that as well.