Franklin A. Cole, the savvy downtown executive, leaned forward expectantly as State Sen. Richard Newhouse (D., Chicago), the savvy South Side politician, bored in.
Instead of pushing a new stadium for the Chicago Bears, Newhouse demanded, why wasn`t the elite downtown businessmen`s group Cole represents concerned about the kids in the Robert Taylor Homes who couldn`t get jobs at McCormick Place or other downtown projects?
”The Central Area Committee is concerned with the entire city of Chicago as a philosophical matter,” answered Cole, his voice rising. ”But we can`t have a vibrant city without a vibrant core–a new agora, if you will.”
The reference to an ancient Greek marketplace was typical of Cole, who named his private company Croesus Corp. after the king of Lydia in 560 B.C. for whom the phrase ”rich as Croesus” was coined.
On the other hand, public controversy, such as last week`s hostile exchange with Newhouse at a hearing regarding the stadium, is uncharacteristic of Cole`s civic and private endeavors. The 60-year-old business leader would much rather operate behind the scenes.
But that`s not been happening lately. One of Chicago`s leading backroom operators has moved out front.
More Top Picks Best Cordless Hair Clippers
Michael McCaskey, president of the Bears, was reviled earlier this month for issuing a 60-day ”ultimatum” on a lakefront stadium decision. In fact, it was Cole, in a press release, who first voiced the controversial deadline, based on his understanding of the Bears` financial need for a new stadium by 1990 to counter stagnant television revenues and higher player salaries.
Cole certainly is less well known than the grandson of George Halas. Yet Cole is the principal reason why the Bears are still considering a stadium in downtown Chicago. His baptism in public controversy comes after years of playing a behind-the-scenes role in city affairs.
In 1984, Cole represented Chicago United, the consortium of major area companies and minority businesses that grew out of the social unrest of the 1960s, in mediating the City Hall dispute over control of city contracts. That dispute pitted Mayor Harold Washington`s insistence on greater minority contracting against a hostile majority in the City Council. The controversy, which held hostage a $300 million bond issue, threatened to delay the O`Hare International Airport expansion program.
In 1985, Cole lobbied both City Hall factions to create a more independent Economic Development Commission–with himself at its head. That effort foundered in a quiet dispute with leaders of what was then the City Council majority over expanded powers for the commission.
In 1986, Cole was one of a number of downtown business leaders who successfully lobbied for the repeal of the commercial lease tax.
The Bears` lakefront stadium controversy has put Cole in the unaccustomed position of out-front spokesman for an unpopular cause. In that role, Chicago has gotten its first view of the traits that have characterized Cole`s style in both the public and private arenas.
”I find him a devoted salesman and a very intense supporter of a point of view. Like any shrewd businessman, I suppose, he conceals his cards,” said Walter A. Netsch, Chicago Park District president.
Cole is a Wisconsin native who graduated from Chicago`s Senn High School, the University of Illinois and Northwestern University Law School.
From 1963 to 1984, he worked for his former law client, Walter E. Heller International Corp., a former $6.6 billion international banking and commercial finance company based in Chicago.
As Heller`s chairman and chief executive officer, Cole in 1983 and 1984 presided over the sale of the company`s divisions to the Fuji Bank of Japan and First Chicago Corp. for $700 million. He left those transactions, generally regarded as a bonanza for Heller`s shareholders, with a tidy personal stake.
Cole then formed Croesus Corp. with his stepson, 31-year-old Peter D. Straus, former head of marketing for one of Heller`s units. Their initial objective was to invest in financial service companies. But their first publicized effort–the $17 million acquisition of suburban La Grange Bank & Trust Co. and First Burlington Bank of Willowbrook–collapsed when the Federal Reserve Bank ruled the deal was too highly leveraged.
Cole`s application to the Fed revealed some of his substantial business connections.
Investors in that deal included longtime associate Benjamin B. Cohen, head of the Chicago mortgage banking firm Cohen Financial Corp.; James W. Walter, chairman of Jim Walter Corp., a Tampa-based home-builder on whose board Cole sits; K. Brooks Abernathy, retired chief executive of Brunswick Corp. and a co-director with Cole of the American National Bank & Trust Co.;
and several members of the multimillionaire Crown family. Cole calls Lester Crown, executive vice president of General Dynamics Corp., a ”good friend.” Last July, Croesus bought 57 percent of the publicly held Allied Farm Equipment Inc., an Ohio-based specialty farm equipment distributor, for $350,000 in a deal that included Cohen and Leonard H. Solomon, a former officer and director of Goldblatt Bros. and member by marriage of the famous retailing family.
Croesus has purchased at least two other private companies and ”is looking at a half-dozen others,” according to Cole. He`s cooled on bank acquisitions but has invested in a savings and loan association and may seek other S&L investments.
Croesus is officially described as ”a company established to examine and pursue investment opportunities, both as an organizer and investor.”
Cole flatly denies that a Bears stadium is one of those opportunities for himself or any other member of the Central Area Committee, which comprises many of Chicago`s top chief executive officers.
”None of us involved in this project is going to make a dime out of it,” he said. He said that if a corporation formed by the Central Area Committee to finance a stadium issues stock, ”I may buy some, just like you.”
Lakefront stadium boosters from the Central Area Committee insist that the financial scenario published by The Tribune last week was only a preliminary estimate. That report indicated the stadium could be an extremely lucrative investment for both the Bears and any private backers. Cole promised to unveil more detailed financial plans at a March 10 hearing of the city`s stadium review committee.
Cole, who says he`d rather be golfing in Ireland, estimates he spends 25 to 33 percent of his time on a variety of civic projects without pay. Besides pushing the downtown stadium for the Central Area Committee for two years, Cole, as chairman of the Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center board, last year headed a committee with Hanna H. Gray, president of the University of Chicago, that tried to engineer a merger of the two institutions` hospitals.
”He`s a man who looks at the long term and wants to get things done,”
Gray said. ”He`s not out there asking for attention.”
Cole also is leading a major fundraising drive for the national Local Initiative Support Corp. (LISC), which wants to raise $30 million by May 31 for a National Equity Fund to invest in low- and moderate-income housing. The program is modeled on the local LISC`s Chicago Equity Fund, on whose board Cole also sits.
”I`m amazed he`s been so out front on the stadium deal,” said Andrew Ditton, director of LISC`s national program. ”Everything else he`s done has been remarkably low key.”
J. Thomas Schanck, vice chairman of Illinois Tool Works Inc. and longtime associate of Cole, said: ”He`s a great salesman. He`d really push. When he commits himself in a direction, he is highly focused and energetic and forceful, and very intense about it.”
That intensity is somewhat out of place at the Chicago Central Area Committee, which historically issued grandiose plans for the downtown area and then did little about them. Cole, as chairman of the stadium task force that grew out of the committee`s 1983 Central Area Plan, first organized an elaborate proposal for two side-by-side stadiums covered by a movable roof and located in the West Loop.
More Top Picks Prior Written Notice Pwn When And How To Use It
Immediate opposition from numerous quarters, most notably the probable sports franchise tenants, who showed no interest in joint endeavors, and city officials who preferred a stadium site south of Roosevelt Road, quickly killed the plan.
Undaunted by that experience in political naivete, Cole and other Central Area Committee representatives last July began negotiating with the Bears, who at the time were flirting with various suburban locations, about a football-only stadium downtown.
Washington`s stadium negotiators, Al Johnson of Johnson Cadillac-Saab Inc. and Economic Development Commissioner Robert Mier, were included in the talks that eventually led to the current lakefront proposal.
The subsequent opposition from lakefront preservationists and mayoral challengers caused Washington to back away from his negotiators` stance. And it left Cole and the Central Area Committee appearing to be front men for a controversial stadium on the lakefront.
”We came to the lakefront because we had nowhere else to go,” Cole insisted in an interview last week. ”Nobody wants to despoil the lakefront.” Cole said the committee`s primary concern is to keep the Bears downtown in a privately constructed stadium. The Bears` primary concern, he said, is to be in a new stadium by 1990, or the football franchise will turn into a losing proposition. He denies that McCaskey is simply humoring downtown big shots whom he eventually will solicit for skyboxes in a suburban stadium.
”Mike McCaskey isn`t playing games with anybody,” he said.