Parenting magazine success story turns into a bitter standoff
It started as a noble enterprise.
Thirty-five years ago -- a time when disabled children were often excluded from public schools and two decades before Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act -- three Boston psychologists had a simple idea to help parents of children with disabilities. They wanted to start a magazine called ''Exceptional Parent."
The three turned out to be better psychologists than businessmen. The magazine, published every other month, struggled from the beginning. It had no advertising, and it suspended publication a year after it began. Then in early 1973 syndicated columnist Ann Landers recommended it in her column, and 10,000 letters poured in, saving the magazine.
The magazine has grown and prospered over the last three decades, thanks in large part to a former Playboy magazine executive, Joseph M. Valenzano Jr., brought in a decade ago to run the organization. Today ''Exceptional Parent" publishes an annual resource guide that is the bible of the disability field, operates a trade show, and helps run disability awareness nights at every Major League Baseball park in the country. Over the years it has won a long list of awards and supporters like famed pediatrician Dr. T. Berry Brazelton and Fred Rogers, the late host of ''Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" on PBS.
But what began as a noble enterprise has devolved into a bitter standoff. While the magazine features inspiring cover stories of families who have triumphed over adversity and advice on everything from newborn screening to how to pick a guardian for your disabled child, the principals who built the magazine have been engaged in a take-no-prisoners war in the courts that has gone on for years, out of sight of its readers.
At the heart of the conflict are two different men from different worlds, one from science, the other from business, who very quickly came to despise each other. Stanley D. Klein, a cofounder and long-time editor-in-chief, was fired by Valenzano, the publisher and largest owner.
Klein's deputy, who is deaf, quit and filed a discrimination complaint, later dismissed, charging she was harassed by Valenzano, who she says could not deal with her disability.
Valenzano has sued both for defamation and says Klein and his deputy tried to take over the company, going so far as to attempt to link him with the Mob. It is a story that includes a celebrity gangster, a prominent Boston lawyer who was severely sanctioned for his hardball tactics, and a cast of supporting characters such as ''the mysterious Mr. Gordon."
'Mob-connected'
In May 1997 a gangster named Daniel Provenzano and his hired muscle walked into Valenzano's New Jersey office and started slapping him around.
Provenzano was the nephew of Anthony ''Tony Pro" Provenzano, a legendary member of the Genovese crime family and long regarded as the chief suspect in the disappearance of Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa. Danny Provenzano ran a printing brokerage firm called Advice Inc., and Valenzano says the gangster had some advice for him that day: Turn over your interest in ''Exceptional Parent" or else.
''He thought he was going to be able to intimidate me," Valenzano says. ''This guy is a maniac."
Valenzano says he was a victim. To Klein, who was then in a tense power struggle with Valenzano over the operation of the magazine, Provenzano's appearance on the scene suggested something much darker. According to a lawsuit later filed by Valenzano, Klein starting telling ''Exceptional Parent" board members, but ''only those without Italian surnames," that Valenzano was ''Mob-connected" and had recruited ''Mafia-connected investors" to the magazine."
Klein acknowledges he sent board members newspaper articles about Provenzano's history. The two partners were headed for a messy split.
Klein, 68, and Valenzano, 59, could not be more different. Klein is a licensed clinical psychologist who started working with disabled children as a camp counselor in college. Valenzano has spent his career in publishing, including a two-year stint as chief financial officer of Playboy magazine in the early 1980s and later Physicians' Desk Reference. Klein has written or edited hundreds of articles and several books on the disabled. Valenzano is a former minor league second baseman who developed a batting machine with the late Charlie Lau, the famed hitting guru. Klein is a Jew from Brookline; Valenzano is an Italian from New Jersey.
They had been brought together by Thomas H. Lee, Boston's leveraged buyout king who years before as a young loan officer at
It didn't take long for Klein and Valenzano to decide they didn't like each other. Klein, the long-time editor, says Valenzano, the publisher, was turning the magazine into an advertiser-friendly commercial venture and compromising its editorial integrity.
Valenzano says Klein didn't understand anything about the business side of the magazine and says Klein constantly missed deadlines, costing the magazine money. When Valenzano moved to close the editorial office in Brookline and consolidate the operation in New Jersey, where he lived, Klein's associate editor, Kimberly Schive, who is deaf, quit and filed a discrimination complaint against Valenzano.
In this poisonous environment, a character like Provenzano was a time bombing waiting to go off. On one thing there is no disagreement: Provenzano could be a very persuasive man.
In late 1995, for instance, his printing brokerage company, Advice Inc., was working for ''Exceptional Parent," at the same time that Valenzano was negotiating to buy another publication, ''Mothering" magazine. Peggy O'Mara, the publisher of ''Mothering," says Valenzano urged her to hire Provenzano to print her magazine, and she did. When Provenzano's bills came in far above his bids, she disputed them and asked for some time to pay them off.
Eventually her merger talks with Valenzano fell apart, and that is when the phone calls started, O'Mara said in a letter at the time. Provenzano started calling daily, at home and at work, demanding she pay the bill, she wrote. Provenzano, she wrote, threatened to shut down her company and ''threatened on more than one occasion to physically hurt or kill me."
''Today Dan Provenzano called the office six times and threatened to 'rip my . . . heart out,' " O'Mara wrote in a letter memorializing the alleged threats that day. Eventually Valenzano says he advanced Provenzano $120,000 to cover the cost of the ''Mothering" bill, according to a lawsuit Valenzano filed against Provenzano. Valenzano says he didn't know anything about the threats at the time.
Despite such strong-arm tactics, Valenzano says, he rejected Provenzano's demand to turn over his company the day he showed up at his office in 1997 and instead says he reported the assault to the authorities. Two years later Provenzano and others were charged with conducting a ''reign of terror" against a number of businesses, including threatening one executive with a baseball bat and hiring a man to smash the thumb of an employee with a hammer. Valenzano's case wasn't included in the indictment.
The entrepreneurial Provenzano subsequently turned his life experience into a gangster movie, called ''This Thing of Ours," which he wrote, directed, and acted in alongside James Caan of ''Godfather" and Vincent Pastore of ''The Sopranos." Provenzano is currently serving a 10-year prison term for racketeering and failure to file a state income tax return. His former lawyer, Vincent J. Nuzzi, said Provenzano could not comment from prison.
''Danny Provenzano is where he belongs," Valenzano says today. ''He is not a mobster. He is a wannabee. He is an outrageous punk."
Mobster or punk, he was red meat in the bitter feud between Valenzano and Klein.
Provenzano's name turned up on an ''Exceptional Parent' shareholder list in 1997, which Klein says he got from the company. Klein also says he got a stock certificate signed by Valenzano that lists Provenzano as owning 410 shares. Lee, the buyout king, exited at the first sign of trouble in the company, says an executive familiar with his investment.
''The association with the mob was sufficient for my rich friend to pull out altogether for fear of the risk to his reputation and his many companies," Klein said in an e-mail at the time. Lee declined to comment.
Valenzano says the stock certificate is ''phony or was issued in error."
He says Provenzano ''may at one time have held stock" in the company through another corporate entity, but that the stock was ''long ago disposed of."
''Mr. Klein launched a smear campaign to defame Mr. Valenzano in order that Mr. Klein might ultimately take control of EParent," Valenzano says in his lawsuit filed in Middlesex Superior Court. ''Mr. Klein ultimately enlisted the help of a former associate editor of EParent, Kimberly Schive."
Valenzano fired Klein in August 1997. Klein countered with a proxy fight and a website -- ''SaveEP" -- but lost. A few months later, however, the two men settled, with Klein agreeing to leave in exchange for $265,755 to be paid for his interest in the magazine over time.
The peace did not last for long. Klein had previously signed an affidavit supporting Valenzano against Schive's charges of discrimination. But unbeknownst to Valenzano, Klein had given a second affidavit -- a clarification, Klein called it -- calling Valenzano's behavior toward Schive ''highly inappropriate," according to a court filing. Schive, through her lawyer, declined to comment.
In December 1999, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination ruled there was probable cause to believe that Valenzano had discriminated against Schive, a decision it eventually reversed. Valenzano quickly sued both Klein and Schive, charging they had conducted a ''smear campaign" that had damaged him and his company. Valenzano cut off the payments to Klein for his share of the magazine. Klein and Schive countersued.
Playing hardball
In Edwin A. McCabe, Valenzano didn't hire just any attorney, but a Boston lawyer well known for courtroom hardball.
McCabe, 63, has been on the Boston legal scene for more than 35 years, and in that time has had more than his share of run-ins with judges. In the 1980s, when he was representing the billionaire Hunt brothers of Dallas, who had defaulted on billions of loans to their bankers, McCabe accused the judge of liberal bias and various conflicts of interest. The Hunts soon dumped him from the case. Four years ago he was fined $25,000 for making ''knowingly frivolous pleadings and at least one willful misrepresentation to the court in an effort to prolong and increase costs" of litigation.
If Valenzano was looking to play hardball, he wasn't disappointed. McCabe filed court papers on behalf of Valenzano that accused Klein of ''systematic destruction of evidence, deception, and fraud," and charged that Klein's attorney, George P. Field, had hired an imposter to steal and destroy evidence from the ''Exceptional Parent" office in Brookline. He also charged that Field, a former law partner of McCabe, had also prepared a perjured affidavit and secured another to be used by Schive in her discrimination complaint. Klein and Field denied all.
The imposter was a young lawyer named Joshua Gordon, and he appeared on the scene at a critical moment in the Valenzano-Klein split. It was Aug. 18, 1997, and Klein was at Field's office expecting to attend by telephone a showdown board meeting on his recent dismissal from the company. Instead, Valenzano and his wife showed up at the Brookline office of the magazine, where they taped a notice of Klein's dismissal on his computer screen. Klein's secretary called to alert him.
Klein says he dispatched Gordon to the office to rescue Klein's personal effects. Valenzano and McCabe say Gordon wiped Klein's computer clean of thousands of records and files, which led to their charges in court that Klein and Field had destroyed evidence.
Two judges, however, have come down squarely for Klein and Field and against Valenzano and McCabe. In a September decision, an appeals court judge affirmed a ruling by another judge ordering McCabe to pay $36,000 in legal fees for Klein and Field. The judge had ruled that McCabe had failed to prove any of his extreme charges. On top of that, the judge said McCabe was instead ''motivated by an intent to harass the opponent and drive up his costs."
''We conclude with a comment," the appeals court wrote. ''The tactics identified and sanctioned in this case are, sadly, not unique. Consideration of those forces in our culture in general, and in the legal profession in particular, that all too frequently transform the litigation process into a hateful, protracted, and unnecessarily expensive contest of endurance is beyond the scope of this opinion."
McCabe calls the sanctions outrageous. ''I play the game the way it is supposed to be played," he says. ''I have an ethical responsibility to provide zealous representation. That is what the canons require of me, and that is what I do." McCabe has since filed for bankruptcy protection, the result of a fee dispute in an unrelated case, he says.
Battle continues
Both sides fight on. Valenzano dug up information shedding light on ''the mysterious Mr. Gordon," as Valenzano calls him. In 1999, two years after the incident at Klein's office, Gordon was suspended from the Massachusetts bar. A year later he was disbarred. The reason: He was charged in sexual assaults on two underage girls and a cleaning woman in his law office. He is listed on the sex offender registry. Gordon could not be reached for comment.
Says Valenzano of Klein: ''He is bent on destroying our company, and attacking us with whatever means are at his disposal. I am not going to allow that to happen. . . .I frankly think the man is sick."
Klein, who says he is basically broke after his long fight with Valenzano, is cautious about his comments, but says: ''This entire sorry saga could be settled in less time than it takes to read this story. All it has done is drain my limited resources and make life difficult for me and my family."
It may be left to a jury to decide if Klein defamed Valenzano and if Valenzano owes Klein for his share of the magazine and legal fees. A trial is expected early this year.
Steve Bailey can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902.
