Downtown Mafia To Rely On Jimmy "The Pill Popper" Irsay For 2018 Super Bowl Push, Wants Two New Publicly-Subsidized Luxury Hotels

The downtown mafia today rolled out its big plans for pushing the billionaire NFL team owners to select Indianapolis as the site of the 2018 Super Bowl, an event that could well cost Indianapolis taxpayers more than the $50 million hit they took from hosting the 2012 Super Bowl event. At the top of today's news is an announcement by these shameless self-dealers to drag Colts' owner Jimmy "The Pill Popper" Irsay out of his self-imposed exile to an out-of-state rehab clinic following his arrest in March for driving while intoxicated and felony drug charges for possessing controlled substances to aid them in their pitch to the owners.

If that isn't bad enough, they have plans for two new luxury hotels at the site of the former Pan Am Plaza owned by the politically-connected developer, Kite Realty, and another downtown property recently acquired by Ersal Ozdemir, the Turkish businessman who has been buying off all the local politicians in plain sight for years now with his generous campaign contributions to be built, of course, with tens of millions of dollars in public subsidies to further entice the NFL owners to choose Indianapolis. And this all comes at a time when Indianapolis city leaders are trying to ram a new $29 million a year income tax increase down your throats to pay for more police officers they say the City is too broke to hire. The IBJ shares a few of their plans to dazzle NFL team owners when the greedy bastards meet later this month:

In a 900-page bid for the 2018 Super Bowl, Indianapolis officials list the possibility of two new upscale hotels opening downtown by the time the game is played.

Indianapolis Super Bowl Bid Committee Chairwoman Allison Melangton said at a press conference Wednesday morning that a new hotel on the Pan Am Plaza site and another where the Illinois Building stands at Illinois and Market streets are both possible by February 2018.

The Pan Am site is owned by Indianapolis-based Kite Realty Group and the Illinois building is owned by a subsidiary of locally based Keystone Realty Group.

In addition Wednesday, Indianapolis Colts Chief Operations Officer Pete Ward announced that team owner Jim Irsay would attend the May 19-21 NFL owners meeting and would lobby for the city’s bid.

Irsay was arrested March 16 for allegedly driving under the influence and possession of a controlled substance. He was admitted into an out-of-state rehabilitation clinic in mid-March.

Ward said Irsay is doing “really well,” but declined further comment.

You will recall that following the 2012 Super Bowl Irsay complained about the billionaire NFL team owners' disappointment of the lack of luxury hotels to accommodate their fine tastes during the Super Bowl. So guess what? You get to subsidize the construction of two new luxury hotels for the benefit of these hucksters. I've told you all along that the so-called public safety tax increase that is being pushed by Mayor Ballard and members of both political parties on the Indianapolis City-County Council has absolutely nothing to do with hiring more police officers. It's all about getting their hands on more of your tax dollars to ensure the pot is full to start doling out tax dollars solely for the benefit of the downtown mafia who runs this city for its own benefit like an iron fist.

 

The downtown mafia apparently decided that making its multi-million dollar money laundering operation contrived through another one of its supposed nonprofit organizations a permanent fixture in Indianapolis to wield political clout, provide six-figure make-work jobs for insiders and dole out favors to other favored businesses and individuals and to feed our hungry, corrupt local politicians who always seem to have their hands out is an essential part of its future. That's why their number one priority is making sure that Indianapolis becomes a permanent rotating city to host the Super Bowl, which contrary to popular myth is a drain, not a boon to the local economy due to all the tax breaks, public giveaways, added policing costs and foregone opportunities that occasion meeting the demands of the nation's top extortionist racket known as the NFL.

Since its inception, the local Super Bowl committee has burned through nearly $30 million from undisclosed corporate donors with a payroll that has reached as high as nearly $1.3 million as recently as 2011 and which paid its top person, Allison Melangton, a salary of more than $220,000 a year during a multi-year period. The nonprofit's chairman, Mark Miles, used his clout-heavy position to land a new job as Hulman & Company's top executive, whereupon he fast-talked state lawmakers last year into donating $100 million in state taxpayer dollars for improvements to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway owned by the Hulman-George family. By no coincidence, Tony George sits on the Super Bowl committee's board. Ironically, the nonprofit's largest contracts were virtually all paid out to out-of-state vendors, providing no benefit at all to the local community other than a few elitist members of its board of directors who were provided VIP entrée to Super Bowl-related events and all the free entertainment and accommodations their hearts desired.

The local Super Bowl committee has so much money floating in and out of its bank accounts that it is impossible to detect potential fraudulent and illicit influence-peddling uses of the nonprofit's money, most of which comes from local publicly-traded corporations and public utilities whose rank-and-file shareholders and ratepayers would never approve of such wasteful expenditures.  The public simply cannot compete against these corrupt interests when they can funnel such large sums of money cloaked in secrecy into so-called civic ventures where the money trail is next to impossible to trace. Don't expect anyone in the local news media to investigate how the local nonprofit spends its money. They all have a vested self-interest in seeing the Super Bowl return to Indianapolis year after year and endless spending on sporting-related and other efforts aimed at turning downtown Indianapolis into nothing more than a permanent, exclusive playground for the rich and well-connected.