Gondo's gonzo coverage is on a roll
With the Gondo on an election roll to promote city council candidate Emilio Carlesimo as a spoiler for uncredited CQGer John Osmulski (if either candidate wins, it's a CQG win), election coverage is just getting weirder and weirder. Greg Giles' latest in-depth analysis of Carlesimo ended up being a long-form advert for Carlesimo with no analysis whatsoever of some of his latest outlandish claims.

This comes after both council candidate Kit McKeon and myself accused the Gondo of deliberately misquoting both of us in separate articles. The Gondo initially refused to make corrections. After a lot of screaming by me, the Gondo finally printed a correction on my quotes about attorney Jeff Boone and his accusation of computer hacking that had been aimed at me. That correction was printed in the Gondo on page 3A in yesterday's print edition, no correction was issued for the online misquote. McKeon's misquotes still stand as misquotes.

This, in turn, follows on the embarrassing news that Gondo correspondent Gerald Rogovin plagiarized a New York Times article recently. Staffers at the Herald-Trib, which is owned by the NYT, are so angered about that incident that at least two have forwarded the plagiarization to the NYT's legal department.

Now comes a long-form advert for Emilio Carlesimo disguised as a front-page, below-the-fold campaign analysis.

One problem, and it's a biggie: there is no analysis. As a result, a number of Carlesimo's fictional claims come off sounding like common sense truths that anyone should agree with, provided that the reader has a total lack of knowledge of local history.

Cross-eyed and clueless is no way to go through a political campaign, son
Let's go to the text of Giles' in-depth study.

Council candidate Emilio Carlesimo is a quick study. When he began his candidacy a few months back he was new to the political scene, with lots of questions and few answers. After knocking on the doors of more than 1,000 Venice homes, however, all that has changed.
-- The Education of Emilio Carlesimo, Venice Gondolier Sun, 10/08/08 (all other quoted text below is from the same article)

At a Venice Taxpayers League meeting a month ago, Carlesimo stated that he had never been to a city council meeting, in spite of the fact that he has lived here for over 20 years. He replicated that statement to me in a one-on-one interview a couple of weeks later. At the VTL meeting , he made one other incredible statement: that he had never stepped foot on airport land and that he would be taking his first tour of the airport later that day. Again, a few weeks later I asked him if that was true and he stated yes.

So, within a one-month period, Carlesimo has became a self-professed expert on all things airport and the Gondo was praising him for being such a quick study. That fish that you are smelling? It's herring. Carlesimo will be pulling it out just a bit later on in this article.

And now we come to our first lie, and it's a whopper

Although he says he's no airport "booster" and has no ties to the airport or its businesses, his enthusiasm for Venice Municipal Airport is what distinguishes Carlesimo from his opponents.

No ties to the airport or its businesses? That is just flat out not true. Carlesimo's biggest supporter to date is the Wasserman family, builders of the Venice Jet Center and hopeful operators of an airport-based hotel and restaurant combo to be located just a block north of the airport and just barely off airport land. Preliminary plans submitted to city hall last year for the Wasserman project included a skylit rooftop revolving restaurant.

Additionally, Carlesimo has been getting a lot of campaign advice from Venice Airport Business Association. Ex-Airport Advisory Board member Nick Carlucci has become one of Carlesimo's closest advisors. Carlucci, now of VABA, is one of several ex-politicos accused of destroying public records by deleting Airport Advisory Board-related emails.

In fact, to the trained eye it would almost appear that Carlesimo has replaced Chuck Schmieler as lead spokesman for VABA. Schmieler, by the way, is in the process of finding out that the Sarasota County Tax Assessor's office says that he owes them money for not declaring his rented building, located on Venice Airport land, to the tax assessor's office. As a result, the building never entered the tax rolls and appeared to be non-existent. There's a whole bigger story here, obviously, but according to phone conversations I have had with the assessor's office, the county is going after Schmieler for three years worth of back property taxes for his stealthed building at the airport. Three years is the max that the county can go after.

And Carlesimo is sticking up for these guys. Because they need to make money and it'll be good for Venice.

OK.... Moving right along........

Corporate welfare for a few of Dan Boone's crony friends is part of the local beauty that is Venice's ambiance (here's your fish)

"The airport is part of Venice's ambiance," he said. "Everybody I talk to says they want it to stay here. They don't want the airport any bigger, but they want it revitalized. Most people view it as a gem in the rough. It needs to be polished, not choked off, in its current configuration. We need aviation support facilities to make it shine and become a destination."

Oh where have I heard that last sentence before? Wait, don't tell me -- oh yeah, from Dan Boone, attorney for most of the leaseholders at the airport, and the man most responsible for seeing to it that land rents at the airport have been grossly undervalued to the point of being the biggest source of corporate welfare to a select few from municipal coffers.

As for needing to make Venice into an aviation destination, look again at Carlesimo's biggest backer -- the Wasserman family and the proposed hotel. If the Wasserman hotel is to make a go of it, flights into the airport will have to be escalated drastically. I don't fault Wasserman here, but when Carlesimo makes the statement that Venice needs to be made into a destination and his biggest backer needs that very goal, it is obvious that Carlesimo is not being truthful at all in his motivations.

He considers the controversy over the airport's C-II designation a red herring.

Yeah, well, he'd have to after taking some of the stances that he's taken. You know who else thinks that the C-II problem is a herring? Dan Boone, Nick Carlucci, City Councilman John Simmonds, and VABA. Probably Wasserman as well. They'd all like to run away from that politically lethal fish.

Meanwhile, City Council, the FAA, and area citizen groups don't think that issue is a fish of that species and color at all -- it's probably more like an octopus. They all still view it as a serious, unresolved, and entirely slippery issue.

The tiff over whether the airport directly or indirectly brings into the local economy as little as $4 million or as much as $20 million is another red herring issue for Carlesimo. "We can double and triple that amount, have more local jobs and maintain a healthy airport -- if we let the federal government funds flow and bring it up to safe standards, and maintain a good working relationship with our congressmen." He said Venice airport's Florida Flight Training Center enrolls 60 students that bring about $20,000 each into the area.

It is at this point that I would ask Carlesimo to submit voluntarily for drug testing. How much money the airport brings in to the local economy is exactly the point, and we don't just mean into the Boone law firm's bank accounts or the flight schools' coffers, the latter owned by out-of-state interests. The flight school money goes nowhere locally, but it does bring in an interesting cast of multi-national characters, some of whom made international news in September of 2001. You might even have heard about that.

Carlesimo forgets that his new friends' greed led to lack of federal funding, and these bastards just won't let go easily

Carlesimo says the current council is falling down on the job when it comes to courting Congress and capturing state and federal funds. He promises to give more attention at the regional, state and federal level. "Ten million dollars was passed up -- twice," Carlesimo said, referring to Federal Aviation Administration and Florida Department of Transportation funds for future projects that council axed earlier this year in an effort to keep the airport small.

Hell, we lost more than that and for a much longer time, due mainly to Carlesimo's new friends, but Carlesimo and the Gondo do not want to remind you of that.

There was an eight-year gap where Venice Airport was totally blackballed for funds from the Feds and the FAA due to the outlandish leases that literally gave land away nearly for free to leaseholders, most of whom were represented by and had their leases written by the Boone law firm. That dry period ended after the FAA conducted an open investigation into the Venice Airport in a formal legal process that concluded that Venice Airport was guilty of diverting revenue to local businesses, namely the Lake Venice Golf Course.

That eight-year dry spell was immediately followed by the two-year period that Carlesimo has just learned about. That two-year funding denial was directly caused by secret deals and negotiations aimed at sneaking a Marriott On The Beach onto airport lands, this as part of the airport vision of former City Manager Marty Black and airport consultants MEA.

Killing that sneaky deal due to public outcry caused a ripple effect in airport planning. After the smoke cleared, the previous city council agreed to get back on track last year, but warned citizens that this would screw up the next two funding cycles. That was followed by last November's elections, when three new council members were elected and were thrown into the already created mess. Both Mayor Ed Martin and Councilwoman Sue Lang warned citizens early on that all of the past shenanigans by airport economic rapists could not be undone in time for the next federal funding cycle but that we should be on track again by 2009. So far, that funding time cycle is still very viable, in spite of the recent flurry of legal activity surrounding council and the airport board.

You can't educate the uneducable
I sent a link of all of the paperwork on the federal investigation into the illegal diversion of revenue from the airport to the golf course to Carlesimo. Silly me -- I thought that since he obviously didn't know about any of it, it might be some good knowledge to have.

He emailed me back saying that he would refuse to read it: "I make it a practice not to go to your web site." Instead, he wrote that he was learning everything he needed to know from the airport businesses and from going door-to-door: "Among the ways I have been getting my opinions and information is from walking the neighborhoods, knocking on doors, and listening. Very effective!"

Well, at least now I know how Carlesimo became an expert on herring.

Venice never gets any grant money because we don't ask for it? What planet is this guy from?

"I learned from Rep. Doug Holder's office that not one person from the city has lobbied for any funds for the city of Venice." [this in a discussion of overall funding, not just airport]

Well Emilio, both you and Doug Holder are apparently full of shit, and I'm left wondering if Holder actually said something that stupid.

Just yesterday, the city announced it was receiving grant money for stormwater management. See Pam Johnson's latest press release, dated yesterday. That's not even close to being the only funding that the city has received over the past couple of years in state and federal grants.

Emilio as a law and order kind of guy
While not in the article, Carlesimo makes a big deal about the Sunshine Laws and how he would never be involved in such lawlessness. This becomes laughable when it is coming from a guy who can't even run a barbecue political rally legally.

I was at that barbecue. I was sitting on a picnic table talking with Councilwoman Vicki Noren when Carlesimo popped over to talk to us. He was handing out literature on the Sunshine Law from a reprinted Herald-Trib article and he was in full self-righteous rage about the whole mess. I stopped him and pointed to a sign on Tampa Avenue, a sign in our field of vision that said "Elect Emilio Carlesimo." The sign was in the city right-of-way and it legally shouldn't have been.  I asked Carlesimo about that sign and local election laws.

His response? "I didn't put that sign there." He walked away.

But he left the sign.

For someone touting a law and order campaign, that's not a good sign at all.

John Patten is the head of Web Operations for Creative Pages, and has worked in broadcasting for over 12 years. He can also be incredibly rude at times.