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Press Lord 2.0

But these are the exceptions. Mostly, Tierney has been a hired gun. His words, his opinions, have always been for sale, even when he was ostensibly speaking for himself. For years he was a panelist on the Channel 6 public-affairs show Inside Story, and when you watch the tapes, what’s amazing is how unseriously his fellow panelists take him. He spews Limbaugh-isms about “overly sympathetic liberal bleeding hearts” and “irresponsible environmentalists” and how Hillary Clinton has no credibility because “SHE WAS SELLING PIG-BELLY FUTURES!!!” Those were heady days for Clinton-haters, and Tierney could Clinton-hate with the best. Once he even compared Bill to Saddam Hussein, saying that Bill’s relationship with special prosecutor Ken Starr was like Saddam’s relationship with weapons inspectors: “You know, what the President has done is in many ways what Saddam Hussein has done, which is to hide and obfuscate for so long that people will get fatigued and not want to keep looking.” On one show, Tierney protested to his fellow panelists, “I’m a noble person.” Then smiled ironically. Then they all burst into laughter.

Sometimes Tierney was such a deft spinner, he talked about his clients without disclosing the relationship. In 2001, when Sixers officials Ed Snider and Pat Croce battled for control of the team, Tierney took Snider’s side, slagging Croce with what Croce says were “pure lies.” (Tierney says he never lied about Croce.) Croce was so furious that he declared, “If I saw him on the street, I would rip off his head and spit down his neck.” A few years later, Croce confronted Tierney about it. Says Croce, “He said, ‘Pat, Ed paid me!’” Croce was disarmed by Tierney’s “pure candor and honesty,” eventually going into business with him on the proposed Donald Trump casino. The two men literally hugged it out. Tierney is such a pitchman that he will keep selling himself to someone he’s been paid to smear; it doesn’t compute with Tierney that anyone might actually dislike him. Four years ago, PR consultant Alison Grove told Tierney that she’d love to work for him because she respected his willingness to ruffle feathers: “I know a lot of people think you’re an asshole.” She meant it as a compliment. Tierney didn’t take it that way. He demanded to know which people. “It derailed our relationship for weeks,” says Grove. “For a guy who has all this vim and vigor, and who, frankly, gets paid to offend people, he’s very sensitive.”

Or maybe Tierney was just starting to realize he couldn’t keep shitting in the pool — not if he wanted respect as a civic leader. One of Tierney’s old employees, Hugh Braithwaite, remembers a stunt Tierney pulled that was like Dale Carnegie by way of Ayn Rand: When Tierney was in his 30s, he invited the likes of Ed Rendell, David Girard-diCarlo and Shanin Specter to a private dinner at his home. The night of the dinner, a snowstorm hit, blanketing the roads. Tierney chartered limos and SUVs with snow tires and chains to pick up the guests. “I think he wanted to be a peer of them, even before it would normally be allowed,” says Braithwaite.

Tierney never wanted to be a mere hireling for the CEO class, so he started looking for ways to brand himself as a co-equal, having given up on running for office himself. ("I always thought he wanted to be governor,” says former Inside Story host Marc Howard.) After the 2003 Katz campaign, he left the big firm he’d founded to launch a start-up called T2; the idea was to serve fewer clients more intimately. In 2004, T2 was bought by one of those clients, Advanta. Tierney’s friends thought that Advanta’s leader, the imperious tennis fan Dennis Alter, might be grooming Tierney as his successor, but it wasn’t to be. According to the Daily News, Tierney ticked off Alter by asking “why tennis great [Billie Jean] King was being paid $300,000 a year as a consultant for mostly just playing tennis with Alter.” Tierney lasted just nine months at Advanta; he won’t talk about what happened but denies saying anything like that.

He took some time off. He went to Hawaii. He spent some time down the Shore, where at one point he’d owned a dozen or so condos: “Built, tore down things, redeveloped, built something new, did the back-and-forth.” Semi-retirement didn’t take, and pretty soon he’d started an Internet cigar company and invested in an Internet fitness company, among other ventures. None of it was “what you would call a Brian Tierney thing,” says Alison Grove, who worked for him then. “There seemed to be a quest for that big thing.”

He thought he’d found it in 2005, when the owners of Fast Company and Inc. magazines put them up for sale. Tierney immediately reached out to his friend and fellow board member at Episcopal Academy, real estate developer Brian O’Neill. “Typical Brian Tierney,” says O’Neill. “Phone call on a Friday afternoon: ‘How’d you like to go into the magazine business?’ Just like that.” Says Grove, “We all learned the magazine business in two weeks.”

Tierney is a master of the bluff. Sometimes it’s a small bluff, specific to a crisis situation — for instance, in late February, when I called Tierney to confirm a tip I’d heard that the Inky’s next opinion columnist would be Rick Santorum, Tierney objected vehemently. No, he said, giving Santorum a column was just a stray, “blue-sky” idea. Tierney would be more likely to give a column to Dan Rather. ("Seriously.") He left me with the impression that my tip was bunk. I found out later that the talks were actually pretty far along. Tierney and editorial-page editor Chris Satullo had met with Santorum in person. Tierney lied to back me off a story he wanted to announce on his own terms.

For Tierney, bluffing isn’t a mere tactical weapon. It’s a more basic way of operating, close to a life method. He believes there’s nothing he can’t do, even if he’s never done it before. He commits to the impossible thing in the belief he can figure it out on the fly — which usually works, because the people he’s bluffing either lack the right defense mechanisms for unearned confidence of that magnitude, or choose to find it charming. Brian O’Neill tells a story about how, three years ago, Tierney called him on a Friday and asked for a $500,000 check. It was for a deposit on a huge piece of land that cost $31 million: a new campus for Episcopal Academy. O’Neill cut the deposit check. Then, the next Monday, O’Neill asked Tierney when Episcopal would pony up the rest of the $31 million. “He says, ‘Oh, did I forget to tell ya? Episcopal has no money.’ With a big shit-eating grin on his face. So I’m lookin’ at him, and all I can do is say, ‘Okay, let’s go raise the money!’” Tierney disputes O’Neill’s account, saying, “That’s an ‘O’Neill Story.’ That’s not how it happened.”

Optimism only goes so far. Tierney got beat on the Fast Company deal. His bid wasn’t accepted. So a year later, when the Philly papers went on the block, Tierney jumped. “I used to have, in my other office, a quote by Ovid,” Tierney says. “‘Let your hook always be cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.’ It was just an opportunistic thing.”

Tierney started by hooking his investors. They were a wide-ranging and unexpected bunch — “If you were to lay out all the names,” says real estate investment banker Walt D’Alessio, “you’d say, what the hell? Where’s the common thread?” — but the big players shared some characteristics, especially Bruce Toll, Ed Coryell and Bill Graham, the three biggest. (Tierney was only in for around $10 million; Toll, one of the founders of Toll Brothers construction, was in for about $30 million; Graham, of the Graham Company insurance brokerage, was in for $31 million; Coryell, business manager of the carpenters union, invested about $45 million of his union’s pension.) These were all guys like Tierney — “One. Hundred. Percent. Self-made,” in the words of Brian O’Neill.

And, like Tierney, they didn’t care that they were clueless about the newspaper business. Bruce Toll, vice chairman of Toll Brothers, has embarked on a second career as a peripatetic investor, buying into a biotech start-up, a bagel chain, a chain of for-profit methadone clinics, a for-profit kidney dialysis company and a huge auto mall. When I asked him if the newspaper business was like any other he’d been in, he said, “No. This is the hardest business I’ve invested in. And there’s so much unknown. In methadone clinics, everyone who signs up keeps going for the rest of their life. Once you’re there, you’re there. Same with dialysis. ... But with newspapers, you’ve got to resell the newspaper every day, with advertising and such.” Toll is the chairman of Philadelphia Media Holdings. In Toll’s office, there’s a drawing, given to him by his kids, of Scrooge McDuck, the money-worshiping villain from the old DuckTales cartoons. (Toll is a notorious cost-cutter — he says his tactic is to look for costs that can be cut but don’t affect anyone, “like health care.")

Even Tierney’s own friends didn’t take the bid seriously at first. But Tierney wouldn’t let go. According to O’Neill, Tierney had “wanted to establish a publishing empire for some time,” and he saw Philly’s papers “as a platform for a greater enterprise, kind of like Comcast. And I think you’re gonna see him take that newspaper group and expand it into a massive international publishing empire.” (Responds Tierney, grinning, “From his lips to God’s ears.") Tierney says he was ready to pull out of the bidding if it rose much beyond $515 million, the final cash value of his team’s bid. But his friends aren’t so sure. O’Neill says that Tierney getting outbid on the Fast Company deal was “the best thing that ever happened to him, because he made up his mind that it wouldn’t happen on the Inquirer.”

Tierney was ready to do something meaningful. What he told his reporters, in early, casual chats, was this: “It’s legacy-building time.” It was a surprisingly bald admission, half insecure and half grandiose. Tierney was a middle-aged guy who was worried about how he’d be remembered. “I thought it was actually a sweet and vulnerable thing to say,” says one journalist. “And because it’s Brian, part of me thought, ‘Is this just what he’s selling today?’ The guy just sells all the time. He’s selling with every breath.”