Art Held Hostage by John Anderson

Author:John Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Glanton was busy all that summer and fall. No small part of his time was being devoted to Niara Sudarkasa’s unfortunate problems with the IRS, which wanted to tax her on the value of her university-owned house, car (the ill-fated Lincoln Continental), her chauffeur, and her housekeeper—in addition to her $130,000 a year salary. Worse, the IRS wanted back taxes with penalties and interest: a total of more than $163,000.

Sudarkasa once again appealed to Richard Glanton to take on her tax problem himself. Years later, Sudarkasa’s lawyer Carl Singley would ask Glanton on the witness stand: “You think she came to you twice and didn’t trust you?” No, Glanton replied, Sudarkasa came to him because “I was competent.”

Sudarkasa “insisted” that Reed Smith take her case; again, Glanton demurred: “I said, ‘We can’t represent you.’” Eventually, though, he claims, the business affairs committee of the Lincoln University board of trustees authorized the action. “Was [there ever] a board resolution?” Singley wondered. No, Glanton replied, but “there was a scribbled sentence from Earle Bradford,” the committee chairman. “Where?” Singley asked.

“On a piece of paper sent to me by Gene Cliett.”

What is clear is that the business affairs committee approved an expenditure of $10,000 to help defray the president’s legal fees. On May 4, 1995, Sudarkasa conveyed her tax information to Richard Glanton at his Reed Smith offices. Glanton, in turn, referred the case to two tax law specialists at the firm, Wendi Kotzen and Ted Marascuilo. Kotzen recommended that Sudarkasa also hire the suburban Jenkintown-based Goldenberg Rosenthal accounting firm, where her father was a partner. Sudarkasa did, and eventually the Reed Smith team managed to reduce her IRS debt to $28,000. “I was very happy with the savings” and with the tax work done by Reed Smith, Sudarkasa would say years later. What she wasn’t happy with, Sudarkasa also testified, was the unwanted exposure of the details of her tax problems. For now, both Richard Glanton and the Goldenberg firm—we haven’t heard the last of them in this saga—were privy to the exact nature of Sudarkasa’s finances.

Bedeviled from the outside by the IRS, Sudarkasa was also having her troubles internally at Lincoln. Her physical plant director, husband John Clark, and her vice-president for fiscal affairs, Gene Cliett, couldn’t stand one another. Cliett’s own account of the matter is instructive—and not only for what it says about Sudarkasa and Clark: “I come from a pretty formal background. I’ve run organizations larger than that university, had staffs reporting to me [that were] head and shoulders above the v.p.s out at Lincoln. I would even have to say that I never even reported to a board [of trustees] that was so junior in their experience.”

Sudarkasa, says Cliett, “was difficult. She’d say, ‘You’re a problem, Gene. You’ve been running your own organizations for so long.’ I’d say, ‘Madame President, I give you the best advice I can give you.’” President Sudarkasa, claims Cliett, “was someone absolutist [and] autocratic.” Lincoln’s trustees, Cliett felt at the time, “wanted me to do their job.

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