The Deal from Hell

The news didn’t come as a shock to me. A few days before, Davan Maharaj, the paper’s business editor, had cryptically told me, “There are people who are supposed to be watching your back who are not watching your back.” And several others had appeared in my office in recent days with similar reports, indicating that Hiller was also asking people what they thought of Russ Stanton, the editor I had placed in charge of the newsroom’s Internet efforts and a favorite of both Hiller and FitzSimons. I knew Hiller and I knew how he operated; he’d often asked me about people in the same fashion. I knew that he and FitzSimons liked Stanton because he wasn’t, well, like me.

I sat down and fired off an e-mail to Hiller letting him know that the reports had gotten back to me and that he was undermining me, feeding newsroom speculation that he was looking for an excuse to depose me. If that’s what he wanted, he, of course, had every right to replace me. But I preferred to deal with him head-on. Hiller denied he had any such intentions. But I knew by now that the penguin initiatives championed by FitzSimons drove his almost frantic pleas for change for change’s sake.

After I had failed to show up for his Chicago meeting, FitzSimons came to the Los Angeles Times for a party hosted for KTLA’s anniversary. The Zell team had made it increasingly clear that FitzSimons would not be the CEO once the deal closed. Frantz, the managing editor appointed by Baquet, had decided to step down, and I had appointed two new managing editors, John Arthur and John Montorio. I set up a lunch for them to meet FitzSimons. The night before the four of us would sit down, FitzSimons sent me an odd journalism review article regarding how journalists laid off at Belo papers in Dallas had found new, rewarding paths in life. When one editor heard FitzSimons was coming to Los Angeles again, he quipped: “I guess he wants to piss on the fireplug one more time.”

The next day FitzSimons and I both arrived early, and we had a “frank exchange of views.” He recited his litany—he wasn’t too impressed with me, thought that I’d betrayed Hiller, and I should have kept silent about bonuses. I’d heard this all before. But this time FitzSimons extended another jab, voicing his dismay at my tolerance for a newsroom that had videotaped my introductory speech and put it online before clearing it with me. “If someone had done that to me, I would’ve fired him,” FitzSimons said. Given that almost everything I said in the newsroom was simultaneously published in LA Observed, the incident hadn’t bothered me. Besides, I thought firing someone on my first day as editor for covering a story in my own newsroom wasn’t a good idea. And then, of course, he attacked Wolinsky.

I told FitzSimons that my initial views about the Times had changed once I got to know the paper and the people better, particularly Wolinsky. “When I first got here,” I told him, “I thought he would be someone that would be a problem for me, but he actually turned out to be a help.” FitzSimons retorted that no one else shared my view of Wolinsky, an assertion that was patently untrue.“What is this with you and Leo?” I demanded. “He’s a one of my deputies. Why are you, the CEO of this company, so obsessed with him? I’d think you’d have better things to do.”

FitzSimons came right back, letting me know he thought my refusal to fire Wolinsky revealed my reluctance to make an unpopular decision and my ultimate desire to “play to the staff.” “We go back a ways,” FitzSimons said, “and I just wanted to come here and talk to you honestly.” When at last Montorio showed up, things returned to civil ground, and we made our way through lunch. In the end, I think FitzSimons felt he owed me a thumb in the eye. Just before he left, I asked him if there was a hidden message in the journalism review article he’d sent me. He laughed and said, “No. I just wanted you to see that all of the news about layoffs isn’t bad.”

I knew FitzSimons had little affection for journalists like me, and, unquestionably, he had a tough job at a tough time. But I found his conduct over the next few months bizarre. Anyone could see FitzSimons wasn’t Zell’s choice to lead the company once the deal closed. Pate and Larsen had made it pretty clear that the Zell organization felt new leadership was needed. Yet FitzSimons plowed ahead with his penguin initiatives like a man possessed, and a dual narrative began rippling through Tribune ranks.

Hiller, Smith, FitzSimons, and Bob Gremillion, a FitzSimons minion selected to be the czar of transformative change, started laying the groundwork for a future that resembled the past—steep budget cuts and austerity, that debtor’s two-step that would hit newsrooms hard. Frankly I don’t think they had a clue about how to grow revenues, other than “think local” and nebulous projections about a better life on the Internet. Over drinks in the Intercontinental Hotel on one of my visits to Chicago, Lipinski and I discussed the fate of our papers. She told me that we were both targets of much hostility during a large, transformative change meeting because of our opposition to front-page ads.

But Lipinski and I got different messages from Zell, Pate, and Larsen, who continued to emphasize the need for enhanced revenues and parroted the line that only fools would rely solely on budget cuts to meet the challenges ahead. They had discussed selective cuts but also some investment to enhance our ability to generate revenues. At times, it seemed like the right hand wasn’t talking to the left, and I began to wonder if the Zell team knew existing publishers were building budgets with fairly steep cuts baked into projected expenses. I could tell that Pate and Larsen had steeped themselves in the company’s financial operations. At one point, Pate remarked to me that a mismatch between total ad inches and ad revenues suggested that “a lot of discounting is going on out here.”

What neither of us knew was that both narratives were being driven by the increasingly tense behind-the-scenes skirmishes between the company and its lenders. In August, the lead banks—JPMorgan Chase, Citicorp, Merrill Lynch, and Bank of America—had sent the company a five-page due diligence letter seeking detailed information about Tribune’s strategy, markets, and business lines, including the rationale for everything from its assumption about publishing revenues and expenses to adjustment to its projections since April, when the company had made forecasts for phase one of the deal.

The company responded about a month later with a five-year financial model that included some pessimistic projections, those “sky is falling” scenarios that Tribune managers included in the model but didn’t endorse. The response triggered more back and forth between the company and the banks regarding the terms of the loans, the feasibility of revenue and cash flow assumptions, and testy questions about the Tribune’s ability to impose the deep cuts that would be needed to repay the debt.

At one point, the banks tried to restructure the loans to make them a better deal for themselves, a tactic that would also make them more appealing to investors in the secondary syndication markets. But the Tribune board rejected the proposal without offering any alternatives. “We are clearly dealing with an organization at all levels unable to come to a decision,” said a frustrated Michael Costa, the Tribune adviser at Merrill Lynch, who questioned whether the bank should deal directly with the board. “We should also seek direct dialogue with the board since management seems incapable of driving a decision.”

Subsequently, the banks issued yet another detailed list of questions framed by the solvency expert their lawyers had hired to analyze the adequacy of the Tribune Company’s solvency expert, Valuation Research Corp. (VRC). By having their lawyers hire the expert, the banks draped a cloak of lawyer-client secrecy over their communications, suggesting they anticipated court action. But the tactic backfired. The tenor of the questions made Tribune general counsel Kenney fear the banks were trying to “spook” VRC. Soon a lawyer from another Tribune law firm joined the discussions—one retained by Tribune to litigate in case the banks tried to abandon their commitments.

Tribune Company even disagreed with its own experts. VRC did an analysis of Tribune Company’s financial projections for October 2007 and concluded that many should be adjusted downward to reflect the deteriorating market conditions. But Tribune CFO Don Grenesko and Chandler Bigelow, a vice president in the financial department, countered with reports that argued management’s more optimistic assumptions were reasonable.

As the competing arguments began filtering down into the ranks, a dual narrative evolved and the stakes for closing the deal grew, creating an almost electric tension in the Tower. Tribune Company finally agreed to some changes in the terms for the phase-two loans, but the banks balked at extending the credit since the loans would translate into immediate red ink, despite the huge fees they stood to make. Tribune managers, who would rake in big bonuses if the deal closed, factored into their projections the kind of budget cuts that made Lipinski and me nervous. Zell and his team continued to argue that Tribune couldn’t cut its way to success and needed additional revenue so he could make the millions he saw in the deal. At one point, the banks sounded each other out and learned that a couple were leaning against funding the loans because they felt they could make the case that the loans would render Tribune Company insolvent.

As I watched from afar, I knew nothing about the behind-the-scenes skirmishes. But my gut told me that this deal offered me salvation and doom in one fell swoop. I owned Tribune stock and, like everyone else, I wanted to see the deal close. Employees of my rank had to own twice their salary in Tribune stock. I had a lot of my life savings tied up in the shares. But I also knew that a debt-laden company would force me to make some hard, personal decisions. I agreed with Zell, Pate, and Larsen; Tribune could not simply cut its way to the future. Over the past five years, I’d trimmed fat out of many newsroom budgets and had lived with tight financial controls imposed by the accountants. I’d become an adept budgetary surgeon. But my patient never got any better.

Hiller agreed with me philosophically. He took one look at the debt we faced and concluded that the Los Angeles Times would be better off being sold to a local investor like Eli Broad or David Geffen. On a practical level, though, Hiller was in a difficult position to effect change. FitzSimons and Wall Street wanted cuts at Tribune’s biggest newspapers, and Zell had told Hiller that he—and he alone—would have profit-and-loss responsibility for the Times once the deal closed, a break from the past when financial control was centered in Tribune Tower. Hiller was under the gun, and, as we began fashioning a financial blueprint for 2008, I feared the newsroom was heading in one direction—down.

The same thing was happening at newspapers across the county. Everyone was trying to figure out if the changes in print advertising markets were cyclical, a result of hard times triggered by a softening economy, or structural, more fundamental changes spawned by alterations in American advertising and consumption patterns. No one really knew the answer, although I figured it was probably a combination of both and would affect all newspapers and journalists like me.

I wasn’t too worried about my immediate fate. I had the ear of the Zell group. Pate and Larsen made it clear that they wanted me to remain in Los Angeles, and I had met in Chicago with Randy Michaels, a pudgy, smiling man who asked me a lot of questions and didn’t volunteer much, other than to tell me: “You are in for one hell of a ride.” But as someone who was trained to look beyond impressions for facts, I began to wonder whether I would be able to live up to the pledges I’d made when I had joined the staff of the Los Angeles Times the year before.

When I had agreed to become editor of the paper, I had said that I wouldn’t take the job unless I felt that I could make things better. I knew at the time that I would have to make some budget cuts and probably lay off some journalists. But I vowed to myself and to the community of concerned readers that I would not preside over the destruction of one of America’s greatest newspapers. At all costs, I had to protect the integrity of the institution I ran and, by extension, the news and pass on to my successor a better paper than the one I had inherited. If the credibility of the newspaper and the respect with which it was held in the community diminished on my watch, I failed my community, my craft, my staff, my newspaper, and its owner, even if the owner failed to appreciate the distinction.

Soon I began wrestling with two options. Some friends advised me that resisting cuts was foolhardy and naïve. If you don’t cut the budget, someone else will, the logic went, so why should I be hoisted by my own petard? One day, Stanton walked into my office and told me, “Don’t quit.” Although he didn’t know it at the time, I knew they had already talked to him about my job. The other option was to resist—draw that proverbial line in the sand and flush out the facts to see where everyone really stood.

One day I would take a morning walk on the beach and say to myself, “All right, the gutsy thing to do is make the cuts, figure out how to minimize their impact, and preserve as much of the paper as you can. That would be hard, but I could do it. It’s easy to walk out, but what do you accomplish?” But the next day, I would wonder if I were just fooling myself to keep a nice salary, a home on the beach, and the heady perks that come as editor of a famous newspaper—a soiree at Helen Mirren’s house, a seat at the Academy Awards, or an introduction at a dinner at which Angelina Jolie was also present. The right thing to do, I would tell myself, is fight back, hard, even if it meant getting fired—a daunting prospect since I was of an age that it would probably mean the end of my career as a working journalist. I had reassured the readers of the Los Angeles Times I was no short-timer and that I would stay as long as it took to resolve problems at the paper. I wasn’t done.

I plumbed the depths of my psyche searching for the right answer. I consulted friends, took long walks, thought through my dilemma on bike rides the length of Malibu, the wind my only companion. One day, walking along the surf near my apartment, I decided that the answer didn’t cower in the recesses of my mind, waiting for a moment of insight. The answer was in my gut. I needed to rely on the instincts that I had honed during every chapter of my life. Where I’d been, what I had learned, and what I’d become told me what to do. You cut a budget to save a “job.” But you stand firm to honor a calling. If the editor of a newspaper didn’t stand up for readers, who would? I had to resist, consequences be damned. The values I had learned at the Des Moines Register prevailed: Journalism first, profits second.

By late October, as the banks continued their struggle to weasel out of their loan obligations, a furious forest fire erupted in the mountains of Santa Barbara. Back in the newsroom, coverage of the story started normally: Print reporters swung into action, the online folks were slow on the uptake since they rarely worked weekends. But a day into the fires, things changed. Thanks to my online newsroom initiatives, the print and online staffs started working in tandem, providing jaw-dropping coverage. I was proud. I didn’t have to do a thing; my editors took over. This was the kind of awesome, multimedia journalism the future demanded—videos; photos from professionals and readers alike; great writing; smart editing; crisp, active headlines; taped interviews of people fleeing their homes. A few weeks later, I had lunch with Phil Bennett, the managing editor of the Washington Post, who told me he had watched our fire coverage from afar and felt that we had crossed some kind of a line.

After weeks of headlines and dramatic coverage, Maharaj came into my office and suggested we have a newsroom celebration. “We’ve had so many going-away parties for people who leave,” said Maharaj. “You’ve hired a lot of people. Why don’t you have a party for the people who came here. It would be great for morale.” I thought it a terrific idea and was quite surprised when Susan Denley, the newsroom human relations liaison, told me more than seventy journalists new to the Times had been hired since I had become editor. Even though the total newsroom staff, including the Internet, had settled at about 920, I had filled numerous openings and vacancies and had created some new slots for Image.

At the same time, Richard Boudreaux, the Times Middle East bureau chief, had scheduled a home leave for December, and foreign editor Marjorie Miller suggested I set up a lunch with Zell, since he had strong interests in the Middle East. I e-mailed Zell and he invited Marjorie, Boudreaux, and me to join him and his wife, Helen, to have lunch at Geoffrey’s, a posh restaurant that overlooks the water just south of Malibu. We met on a delightfully warm Friday, ate fresh salads, and downed a couple bottles of white wine. Zell charmed us with his ambitious plans and witty stories, although he didn’t tell us any specific plans for the paper. But he did allow that he couldn’t wait to get the deal closed. “You will be surprised at what we can do,” Zell told me. “You may end up with more people.”

Encouraged by the lunch, I arrived back at the Times building just in time for the newcomers’ party, told Hiller about my conversation with Zell, and prepared to make some remarks. As usual, he asked if he could talk to the staff after me, to which I agreed. When Hiller faced the assembled audience, he commented on the more casual look I had adopted for my lunch with Zell and said, cryptically, “I sure hope you didn’t stab me in the back.” When someone later asked me what Hiller’s comment had been about, I admitted I didn’t know. “I think he meant it as a joke,” I said. But in my gut, I suspected otherwise.

During the fire coverage, I learned of an intriguing Times project in which two reporters had been scrutinizing how government officials fought fires. They discovered that the fire-retardant chemicals that airplanes dumped from above might do more harm than good. It was just the kind of story I loved, and I told the reporters to forge ahead and see if we could get something in the paper about it before the year’s end. I wanted to personally edit the story to demonstrate I was first and foremost an editor. A year after I left the paper, the project won a Pulitzer Prize.

The California fires soon tapered off, but the sparks continued to fly on Wall Street as the calendar slipped into mid-December and the banks zeroed in on the adequacy of Tribune’s solvency expert’s work. A roadblock had developed when VRC, under pressure from the banks, asked if another $4 billion in phase-two loans would give the company a major problem in 2014, when some Tribune debt would have to be refinanced. How could a company so encumbered with loans get a bank to refinance its debt, particularly if the economy didn’t improve? By that time, VRC’s own analysts had cast doubt on the financial projections supplied by Grenesko and Bigelow, and had asked them if they could get Morgan Stanley, the Special Committee’s financial adviser, to affirm that Tribune could get the loans refinanced in 2014, an opinion that no investment bank would ever deliver.

After much to and fro, Grenesko and Bigelow, who would be promoted to Tribune CFO once the deal went through, gave VRC an answer. Although Morgan Stanley wouldn’t issue any kind of formal opinion, they said, the bank would supply Tribune with data about the ability of companies with similar debt ratios to refinance loans. The data gave VRC justification to agree that refinancing was a reasonable assumption.

But on December 19, lead banker JPMorgan Chase, where one officer ranked Tribune management as “B at best,” broke the logjam by once again hauling out its big guns. Jimmy Lee, the company’s savvy vice president who’d played key roles in almost every media deal over the past decade, spoke to Zell that morning and later reported back to colleagues:

Just had a long talk with Sam. He could not have been any clearer and more confident that the company is solvent. No financial issues in year one, more cushion than maybe we realized in deal. His commitment [is] to help us sell the paper [or loans] with more yield or whatever when the time is right, his reputation being totally on the line. I also spoke with him on the core issues of governance. He becomes CEO tomorrow. Dennis gone tomorrow. Bring in long-time Zell lieutenants to run each major business line. Osborn and [Betsy] Holden stay on board. Everybody else goes. It was the kind of call we needed to proceed given our concerns, all critical issues getting settled to our satisfaction, of course. I told him we were totally counting on him to make this work. He said “I don’t make commitments I can’t keep.”

Lee’s boss, Dimon, later characterized the conversation as an entreaty from Lee to Zell to improve Tribune’s deteriorating financial performance. “This is just saying, ‘Hey partner, we’ve got this far, we need to give it everything you got.’” Zell said he knew the bank would fund his deal after the phone call: “I never heard the word solvency with him, I’ve never had any conversations about this whole solvency issue other than in the board meetings. This is Jimmy, and he truly believes, as I do, that banking is personal. He wanted to make sure that I was still there, and I was.”

On December 20, 2007, at 12:02 p.m., the deal, at long last, closed. The FCC, thanks to lobbying by Zell, had approved of it. VRC ignored every pessimistic projection of its own analysts and accepted the financial rationale of the Tribune managers, who had fat bonuses riding on the deal. Grenesko and Bigelow based their broadcasting revenue projections on an election year, when income from political ads inflated the ad revenue outlook, a step that would push the company over the solvency line, but later come back to haunt it. The banks wire-transferred funds to Tribune, which disbursed about $4 billion to Computershare Trust Co., to buy back the remaining Tribune stock at $34 per share. The company terminated its registration at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and requested its common stock be delisted at the New York Stock Exchange. As a public company, Tribune was no more. Zell now controlled its fate, along with his “partners” in the ESOP.

A lot was written at the time about how Zell shafted the Tribune employees. That’s not completely true. Many existing Tribune employees had investments in Tribune stock through 401(k) plans. They still had jobs and got $34 a share for their stock, not what it once fetched but still far more than they would have garnered had the grave dancer not waltzed along. The company had ended its defined-benefits pension plan and had set aside enough money so that it actually was overfunded and carried benefits backed by the federal government. The big question was the future. In doing the deal, Zell had cut things so close to the wire that the Tribune ESOP, which now owned most of the company, had an extremely narrow band for success: If the company’s performance was off just 2 percent from its plan, the ESOP would have no value for five years. Nonetheless, employees at Tribune newspapers were thrilled on December 20, 2007. FitzSimons’ departure made Wolinsky smile; he’d survived him to fight another day. But FitzSimons had reason to be even happier. His salary, bonus, and the price of stock he’d acquired over the years totaled $41 million, not a staggering amount compared to some of the golden parachutes other CEOs corralled, but still a tidy sum. Many of his friends in the company did well, too, particularly in corporate headquarters and on the broadcasting side. John Reardon, president of Tribune Broadcasting, walked away with about $10 million in salary, bonus, and benefits. Some thirty-two managers and other key employees involved in the strategic review process leading up to the deal got $6.5 million in benefits under a bonus and phantom stock plan. Don Grenesko, the senior vice president and CFO who played a key role in engineering the deal, got $13.8 million in salary, bonus, and stock proceeds after the deal closed.

On Wall Street, the banks and their advisers collected another $122 million in fees and expenses, bringing their total take to around $283 million. “Ka-ching” was no longer in the air, though, for they had to quickly mark down the debt to its trading value and simply collect interest from Tribune, which paid just under 8 percent on the loans, until—and unless—they could peddle the debt to other institutional investors, which would probably generate a loss. Zell later said the banks had to mark down the debt on their books by $400 million.

Nevertheless, Zell was happy. He had gained control of some nice assets for relatively little money. Overall, he put $315 million into the deal, which would represent about 5.25 percent of his reported net worth of $6 billion at the time. That’s like a $5,250 investment for someone worth $100,000. For his money, Zell acquired control of a company that owned the best collection of daily newspapers in America, thirteen titles, including a presence in the nation’s three largest cities; twenty-six television stations; a one-third interest in the Food Network; the Chicago Cubs baseball team; and a range of other properties, including a near-monopoly of the media market in Chicago. He probably laid off some of his investment on others he brought into the deal, but he had a potential bonanza on his hands if he could make the deal work. The imputed rate of return that he had figured on the deal ranged from 25 percent to 35 percent, depending on how long the grave dancer hung on to his new toy.

Nils Larsen called me later in the day to say how happy he was that the deal had finally closed. “Now what we have to do is go out and hire the best talent we can get,” Larsen said. And I soon sat down with Sean Reily, an editor with an eye for finance, and told him to start going through the paper, section by section, to determine if and how they contributed to our mission to be the voice of California and the West. Our goal was to see if we could redirect some of our energies into more opportunities like Image. My family joined me for Christmas in Manhattan Beach, where the sun was shining and it was 70 degrees. We had a marvelous Christmas. I liked California. I wanted to stay.

But after the holidays, things changed quickly. Reily came into my office for a session on the budget. Hiller had imposed a hiring freeze that would frustrate my plans, and Reily said his sources in finance predicted he would not back down on tight controls on the editorial department, including a mandate that spending in 2008 could not exceed the levels set in October 2007. This was the kind of Tribune top-down micromanagement that simply didn’t work. I wrote Hiller a memo outlining how his so-called flat spending blueprint actually represented a fairly large cut to the editorial department.

“I am not saying my budget can’t be cut,” I wrote, “and that we can’t save money.” I had always come in under budget and reminded him that I had given back $2.5 million the year before when asked. My real problem was that we were reverting to a system in which I had to seek approval to hire even a lower-level employee, a process I considered a waste of time. “If you can’t rely on me to make routine decisions, I question why I’m even here,” I wrote. I asked for some time for Reily and me to submit a spending plan that would hit his targets without hurting the paper and provide me with some flexibility. “Just give me a number to hit,” I said, “and let me—and not some accountant upstairs—figure out how to hit it.” But Hiller turned me down flat.

Any newsroom is a gossip mill, and soon rumors flew that our disagreements over the budget meant my days were numbered. Stanton dropped by. Klunder dropped by, too, and I asked him where he thought the situation was going. He doubted Hiller would do anything to get rid of me and risk having the newsroom hate him anymore than it already did. A few days later, we had a budget meeting in which Hiller and I disagreed. Afterward, he invited me to his office for a chat. It was time for the line in the sand.

I told him that an editorial budget with a hiring freeze and tight controls would not work. “Well, what do you think is going to happen?” he asked. “This paper has to keep getting smaller and smaller. You see what is going on around you. Do you think we can get bigger?” I replied no, but said this was not a discussion about the budget but one about a failed process. “I’m not saying we can’t cut,” I said, “but we need to reinvest those funds in journalism.” Hiller almost looked sick. I could see the anger rising. I had smoked out his true feelings. “The future.” he said, “is in cutting back.” I told him I totally disagreed. We talked about whether he needed another editor who saw the world his way. “This is nothing personal,” I told him. “I like you. But I simply don’t think the current course is the way to solve our problem. If you think you need another editor, you’re the publisher and that’s your choice.” “Let’s sleep on that over the weekend,” Hiller advised.

I was in my office on Monday writing a memo that Hiller had sought summarizing my accomplishments over the past year when he stuck his head in and asked if I wanted to “grab a bite.” I said I wanted to finish my memo first and send it to him, knowing full well what was about to happen at our lunch. We went to TRAXX, a restaurant in Union Station in downtown Los Angeles, and I thought this wouldn’t be a bad place to get fired—there were lots of others coming and going. Hiller made small talk about how much he loved old train stations as we picked our way through our lunches. Eventually, he got to the point.

“I’ve thought this over, and I want to make a transition,” he said. “Believe me, I’ve thought a lot about this. I just read your accomplishments memo, and you did a lot. I asked you to come out here, and we owe you a lot.” I told him that I agreed. But I also understood that the editor served at the publisher’s pleasure and that the two had to see eye to eye on things. We didn’t. Hiller seemed quite uncomfortable, even clumsy, dealing with the subject.

Then, to my astonishment, Hiller said he wanted to hold off on any changes until he checked with Zell to see if he was going to sell the paper. “We all know that David Geffen is still around, and he might want us to stay here until it is sold. Geffen may even want a new publisher. . . . Sam will probably say, ‘Hiller, you are nuts. I want to keep him [Jim O’Shea], not you. You have a pretty good relationship with Zell, don’t you?”