CORNUCOPIA… I have a little story for you this week but since it was hard to make contact with the people involved I will have to tell it carefully and to make certain that you know after reading this that I am just asking some questions here. I may be forming an opinion as well but whatever I may state here are mere allegations, not the gospel of truth. But I am curious to know what that might be in this situation, no matter what it turns out to be.

A few years back the teams founding father, Bob Naegele, sold the Minnesota Wild to Craig Leipold and an individual from the Iron Range by the name of Phil Falcone. From what I could find out it is estimated that Falcone’s share is about 40 percent of the club. Falcone grew up in Chisholm, played HS hockey there and went on to play at Harvard. Falcone wasn’t a strong candidate for the NHL but went to Sweden to play for a year, got injured and came home and called it a career.

Falcone then took his Harvard education to Wall Street and engaged in a variety of business ventures before founding Harbinger Capital in 2001. Harbinger has dealt in “Hedge Funds” which are basically a financial vehicle whereby a person or fund will bet against the success of a business, actually betting that it will fail, and when said business does, make a huge windfall profit for doing nothing that creates anything of value. Yes, you can tell by my tone here that I am not a fan of these investments. This is speculation on my behalf here, but I have contemplated that with huge sums of money at stake that some of these people may actually do some maneuvering to help the business in question get into failure status so they can cash in their chips.

It is estimated that Falcone may be worth as much as $1.2bil at this time, most of it coming from Hedge Fund activity. Please note that I can’t tell you how he personally manages those activities. In the recent past Falcone has run into problems with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He was accused of illegally using fund assets to pay some personal tax liabilities, also of conducting an illegal “short squeeze” to fraudulently manipulate bond pricing amongst other illegalities. He was caught and after negotiating with the SEC over possible penalty, agreed to admit guilt, pay an $18mil fine and be barred from thae securities industry for a period of five years. OK, fine.

So, when this story appeared in a major Twin Cities publication that happens to allow readers to comment online about it’s news stories, I commented. This is something I do on a frequent basis, mostly regarding sports stories, sometimes about politics or other matters. This was a business article that just happened to involve a person that owns part of one of our local pro sports franchises. And regarding this article, I was the first reader to post a comment.
My comment was reviewed for “inclusion” and after a brief amount of time was posted on the publications website. What I said basically was that the amount of the fine was a joke, that it was on par with me giving up my lunch money for the next day and that it almost always seems that the well moneyed elite never have to go to jail for their transgressions, or even answer many questions about same, and that I could feel better about being a supporter of the Minnesota Wild if an individual such as Falcone was no longer involved with the club.

I let a day go by and checked back on the article to see if anyone had responded to my opinion. To my surprise the article was no longer on the immediate website where it could be clicked on and read. I then used the publications search mechanism and the article was available using that method, however, if you never saw the article the day it was published you would have never known about it. Then, and much to my surprise, when I clicked on the “comments”, my comment had been removed! I thought what in the heck is this?

So, the comment was reviewed, deemed fit to allow and then a day later, not only is the article no longer viewable on the site itself, my comment had been deleted. I was quite surprised by this. My first thought was to wonder if the club employed a “media watcher” who constantly monitors media outlets for content about the team, and then depending on how they might feel about it, move to challenge it and have it removed or pushed into it’s archives a bit quicker then normal.

Most content will stay on the site for 2 to 3 days before being “moved out” by other newer content within the news cycle. Some articles stay much longer, like a story about Edina figure skaters battling with the hockey program over primetime ice time. That has been on the site going on 2 months now. At any rate my interest was now piqued and I was starting to contemplate going about getting an answer.

When this first occurred I had no intention of writing about it. And even now, I’m not looking to launch a full scale investigation, but I am slowly drawing my own conclusions about this matter. A couple of days went by and I was more strongly leaning toward believing that someone saw this story and my comment and made a couple of calls to the right person and had my comment removed and the story pushed into the archives a little quicker then normally would be the case. But that is speculation on my part. So I reached out…. CONCLUSION NEXT WEEK!

THE MINNESOTA TWINS have traded 4 time All Star and former AL MVP Justin Morneau to the Pittsburgh Pirates. Morny is nearing the end of his contract with the Twins and the Bucs are trying to bolster their lineup for a run at their Division title and a trip to the National League playoff. I thought that he and the team might try and get together on a new, lesser type of contract once the season ended, but Morneau sent a letter to the Metroplex media thanking the fans and the club for a great run here. That gave me the feeling that his run here is probably over. Thanks for everything JM! Class act! PEACE