Columnist Jon Ralston: Fall of the Goodman empire

Saturday, April 3, 2004 | 6:56 a.m.

Jon Ralston hosts the news discussion program Face to Face on Las Vegas ONE and publishes the Ralston Report. He can be reached at (702) 870-7997 or at ralston@vegas.com.

THE VEGAS Caesar bestrides the political world like a Colossus, but thanks to the state Ethics Commission, he is about to find himself a dishonorable grave.

What form that entombment takes -- for cowards die many times before their deaths -- remains unclear. But after all the fulminating and intimidating subsides, three days short of the Ides of May, Mayor Oscar Goodman finally will have to account for his transgressions.

Despite all his thundering and maundering, his defiance and his arrogance, not to mention his utter lack of repentance, Goodman will face a full-blown state Ethics Commission hearing on his efforts to help his son's business and his appropriating city property to do so. His Honor's use of his office to lure municipal officials at the U.S. Conference of Mayors to a sales pitch for iPolitix, a company formed by Ross Goodman and Councilman Michael Mack, along with the mayor's appearance through city-owned tapes on a promotional CD, has been widely seen as one of the most egregious and obvious ethical breaches in years.

On May 12 the full Ethics Commission also will consider Goodman's pattern of behavior as the members are scheduled to hear testimony on whether Goodman should have accepted a gin deal with Bombay Sapphire that funneled $50,000 to his wife's school, whether he should have taken a Cadillac from a company he regulates and whether he should have engaged in an unseemly magazine deal where he endorsed a Web site and offered to name a street for a contest winner.

So now, thanks to a two-member panel of the Ethics Commission that met Friday, let it begin.

Goodman will employ all the artifices he used for his clients, arguing the law because the facts are so awful, crying government persecution because his guilt is manifest. You can take the man away from the thugs, but you can't take the thug out of the man.

The combination of his emperor-sized ego and his previous suffusion in mob culture will now become all too apparent. Goodman is the most solipsistic of elected officials, believing his popularity is a prophylactic against multiple crossings of ethical lines. And when caught, he reacts by railing against the messengers and passing the buck to underlings.

But the fault, my dear mayor, is not in the aggressive media or your sycophants that you must defend yourself against allegations -- charges that you used your position not to benefit the city but to benefit your family and to satisfy your lust for publicity.

Just imagine how the ethics commissioners reacted as they looked at the weight of the evidence on the iPolitix case. Surely, they wondered, "Upon what meat doth this Vegas Caesar feed that he doth grow so great."

In her recommendation, Ethics Commission Executive Director Stacy Jennings cuts to the heart of the iPolitix matter, shredding Goodman's defense that he had no power over those who attended the D.C. reception. "Rather, the allegation focuses on the use of Mayor Goodman's official position to provide an unwarranted privilege or advantage to his son, Ross, in whatever form that occurred (e.g. serving as host for the party, allowing his name to be used on the invitation, personally handing out invitations, allowing his visage and video footage to be used on the demo CD ...)."

Couldn't have said it better myself -- actually I have said as much. But I come not to bury Goodman -- he has done that to himself, with his own words and deeds. Nor do I need to praise him -- that, too, he does quite well by himself.

But there are those who have enabled and/or covered for the mayor, including City Attorney Brad Jerbic and City Manager Doug Selby, who will have to explain their actions to the panel. But that will not be a problem, for they are honorable men. They are all honorable men at City Hall.

Shakespeare would have had a field day with this plot line: Mob lawyer looks for redemption by becoming populist mayor, but tragically can't escape his true nature and is brought down.

But Oscar is no Julius; he is more like Little Caesar, ambitious and ruthless, but paranoid and vicious. Like Edward G. Robinson, Goodman is a masterful actor, managing to conceal his true nature behind a mask of disarming humor and faux candor.

Now, though, he faces a different and more serious and discerning audience. Not juries who can be swayed by emotion and diversion. Not shoppers at Costco or imbibers at Fellinis who get a kick out of the mayoral shtick. And not a superficial and too-often compliant media.

This has been coming for some time, an aggregation of events that began years ago, a slow progression of the ill-advised (trying to change the law so he could invest in areas he regulates) to the brazen (making a deal with Bombay Sapphire that helps The Meadows School) to the outrageous (using his position to promote his son's business).

Much of it has gone unnoticed by a public that has thrilled to the Dorian Gray-like picture Goodman has presented -- the happy mayor hawking his beloved downtown with an unabashed enthusiasm. But the ugliness of his conduct and his all-about-me mentality has been evident to anyone who wanted to look.

In one important way, the Vegas Caesar is different than his Roman counterpart. In this story, there is no Brutus or Cassius; there is no murder. What we are witnessing is the slow, public suicide of a leader whose succession of self-inflicted wounds have done him in.

That, for Oscar Goodman, must be the unkindest cut of all.