Randy’s night out: Stuck in the mud, spinning his wheels

Randy Michaels

One year ago this week, Randy Michaels was forced to resign as chief executive officer of Tribune Co. amid allegations that his personal behavior and the “frat house mentality” he fostered made him unfit to lead the Chicago-based media company.

“So long, Randy,” I wrote on October 22, 2010. “We hardly knew ye.”

The truth is we actually knew Randy quite well. Though his comeback last June as CEO of Merlin Media may have been unexpected, his latest return to national headlines was hardly surprising at all. It was just another sorry chapter in an embarrassing public career.

Shortly after 5am last Friday, Cincinnati talk show host Bill Cunningham showed up at the Middletown, Ohio, city jail and posted $615 bond for Benjamin Homel, a 59-year-old resident of Cincinnati’s Lawyer’s Pointe enclave about 40 miles south. Homel is Michaels’ legal name.

It was the least Cunningham could do for his old friend and former employer, considering that Michaels had arranged for him to get a nationally syndicated TV talk show produced by Tribune Broadcasting. Michaels also got Cunningham a “hefty raise” from his Cincinnati radio station by engineering a counter-offer for Cunningham at Tribune-owned WGN-AM (720) last year. (Cunningham also happens to be an attorney and former Ohio assistant attorney general. Cunningham’s wife, Penelope, is a judge on the Ohio Court of Appeals.)

A few hours earlier, around 2am, according to police reports, Michaels had been found in his car, which was stuck in mud and water up to its frame in a construction zone beneath an overpass that was closed to traffic. Michaels was observed behind the wheel, spinning his tires in a futile attempt to get out of the mud. “He was asked to stop doing that and he did not,” a Middletown police lieutenant told the Sun-Times. “He continued to spin tires and we had to call a wrecker to hook on to get him out of the mud.”

There at the intersection of Ohio Highway 122 and Interstate 75, an officer who approached the car reported that he smelled alcohol on Michaels’ breath, noticed that his eyes were bloodshot and described him as “unsteady” on his feet. When Michaels failed three field sobriety tests, according to the police report, he was arrested and taken to the city jail. After calling a lawyer, Michaels refused to take a Breathalyzer test and was charged with operating a vehicle impaired (the Ohio equivalent of DUI) and driving in a construction zone. He’s due in court Friday. A Cincinnati attorney, Steve Adams, subsequently entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.

Michaels and Merlin Media have not commented on the incident. Although his arrest was widely reported by Chicago media Friday, it apparently was not deemed newsworthy by Merlin’s all-news station here, WWWN-FM (101.1). And with a few notable exceptions, the broadcast trade press, which has long overlooked or covered for Michaels’ history of personal indiscretions, gave him a pass this time, too.

Among those who got it exactly right was Tom Taylor, the eminent executive news editor of Radio-Info.com, who wrote: “There are certainly people in radio (and at Tribune Company) who feel the arrest is payback for the pranks and layoffs (at Tribune) that Randy’s been responsible for. The arrest also fits the ‘frat boy’ narrative of last year’s New York Times article that sped his departure as Tribune CEO. Since then, Michaels has been carefully tending his reputation, finding a new backer (private equity firm GTCR) and launching Merlin Media. And now this.”

Regardless of the outcome of his court case, Michaels may be fortunate that Merlin Media is a privately held company — unlike previous employers Tribune Co. and Clear Channel Communications at the time he headed them. That means he has no one to answer to but his investors, who surely must have known the character and reputation of the man to whom they entrusted the company at the outset. What anyone else thinks of him matters little.

Michaels’ arrest came two days after he met with staffers in Chicago to explain why their FM News 101.1 format seemed to be like a car stuck in the mud and spinning its wheels . . .

Oh, never mind.