Robert Page seems to have made a mess of things since he left Chicago. The Sun-Times’s former publisher is being sued by his old partners here and his new partners in California. Maybe Page’s big character flaw is his failure to ever choose the right partners.
The charges of cronyism and financial recklessness could not have startled anyone who knew Page at the Sun-Times. In 1986 he fronted a syndicate that swung a $145 million leveraged buy-out of the Sun-Times from Rupert Murdoch, and he became president of the company formed to run it. After a career spent working for others, Page finally tasted ownership. Two years later, a friend of his would observe that Page’s “free-spending habits make Louis XIV look like a street person.”
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However much Page’s style suited his pals on the payroll and the big shots around town he schmoozed with, the Sun-Times happened to be a strapped, indebted newspaper operating on precarious margins. By mid-1988, Leonard Shaykin had stepped in and taken control. Shaykin was the New York investment banker who had put together the ’86 deal and chaired the Sun-Times Company board. He rewarded Page for going quietly by making him a man of means: the terms of departure Page agreed to would enrich him by two and a half million dollars.
Fueled with $16 million from Commonwealth Capital, Page Group Publishing was launched and began to buy. Stein and Page picked up the Orange Coast Daily Pilot and the Glendale News-Press, some weekly papers, and a couple of idiosyncratic magazines in west Los Angeles. These properties weren’t necessarily money-makers yet–but that’s where Bob Page, financial wizard, was supposed to come in.
After three months Lobkowicz says, he called the Page Group’s attorney, Mark Eissman, “and said, this isn’t going to work out. Why don’t you buy us out? So he said, OK, fine, I think you’re correct, we’ll get back to you in a few days. The next day when we went to the office we had been locked out.”
When the Page Group sued, its lawyers approached the Sun-Times Company and asked if the financial documents that Page had been showing around were genuine. Yes, the company replied, and headed to court to get them back.
Now the Page Group suit accuses Eissman of conspiracy to defraud. Page is alleged to have hired Eissman at $10,000 a month with a long-term contract that was back-dated to fool the board of directors. Eissman is also accused of breaching his fiduciary duty. Allegedly Eissman, with Page’s consent, persuaded a woman employee last month to file a sex discrimination suit against the new general manager of the Daily Pilot, someone brought in by Stein over Page’s objections to put the paper on its feet.
