Word: councilman
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...acres of wetlands where Howard Hughes once assembled his lumbering wooden "Spruce Goose" plane. DreamWorks wasn't leaving the area--it needs the specialized talent that lives there--yet Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan didn't want the project to go to neighboring Burbank or Universal City. Complains councilman Nate Holden, a Democrat who represents part of inner-city Los Angeles and was the lone dissenter when the council voted on the project: "We're being asked to help the rich. This is a bunch of fat cats getting together and giving to one another...
...story begins on the banks of Lake Erie, in Willowick, Ohio (pop. 15,469). It is the last Monday night in January, about 9 o'clock. City councilman Frank Suponcic is home with his wife Linda when the phone rings. Linda answers. "Hi, this is Mike," says the man at the other end, politely enough. Linda chats with Mike, figuring he must be a constituent. (As Willowick's longest-serving ward councilman, Suponcic has lots of voters calling him at home.) After a while, Mike asks for Annette. Linda tells him he has the wrong number. Mike apologizes and hangs...
That night, when the next wrong number came in, Suponcic interrogated the caller and learned that the councilman's phone number was printed at the bottom of some pictures of naked women that had been posted to a Usenet newsgroup called alt.binaries.pictures.erotica, which, naturally, Suponcic had never heard of. But he had a friend in Cleveland who was something of a computer buff. So the next day the two of them jacked into Usenet and spent three hours sifting through about 7,400 files on alt. binaries.etc...
Over the next week, Suponcic received more than 75 calls a day from lusty Netizens. "You just could not make phone calls," says the exasperated councilman. "And when you went to bed, you had to take your phone off the hook...
...identity of the poster was, and is, unknown, though Suponcic has his suspicions. "It's my personal belief that the root of this is political," says the councilman, who had to get an unlisted telephone number and whose wife now wants to move...