Karma

When you meet someone new, one of the most important steps in the mating ritual is learning the new person’s stories. With my wife and me, the exchange of stories was especially crucial, since we had so much in common. We were attending the same creative-writing program, we were both Midwesterners who had graduated from journalism schools in adjacent states, and we were both coming out of relationships that had taught us exactly what we didn’t want from future partners.

The foundation stories are about family, of course. The next tier of stories is about past relationships. But because of our similar backgrounds, the work-related stories were some of the most important in establishing how we’d gotten to the place where we met.

She was impressed by fact that I was the bad guy in one of my own stories, about how I got fired from my part-time sportswriting job at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

I was covering high school sports, and I just wasn’t any good at it. I discovered the hard way that there’s a world of difference between being someone who’s a sports buff and former participant, and someone who can go into the locker room and interview coaches and athletes after a game and write a story that captures the action and emotion of the contest without making the losers of that contest look like … well, losers.

It was a story that didn’t make me look good in any way, except for the fact that I came out it understanding I was ill-suited for that type of reporting. She found my lack of victimhood refreshing.

Some of her work stories — by no means the most important, just ones she threw out there — were about her career as a reporter at the Los Angeles Daily News, which struck me as a comically dysfunctional place to work. A few of those stories included an editor named Doug Dowie, a pure nightmare of a boss. He was a former marine who just didn’t get that reporters don’t respond well to bullying and humiliation.

Here’s why I bring all that up:

Kimberly got a phone call yesterday from a former colleague who told her that Dowie had been sentenced to 42 months behind bars because of his role in defrauding the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power out of a half-million dollars in bogus billing fees.

The details aren’t particularly important, unless you live in L.A. and are sick of politicians and other con artists treating your city as an ATM. (And of course you get find the details by clicking on the link above or this one.)

The key piece of the backstory is that Dowie had become a public-relations executive and Big Swinging Dick in L.A. politics after he left the Daily News. That’s how he was in a position to defraud the city.

This is the part that Kimberly pointed out to me, with some sense of payback:

Feess [the judge who sentenced him] singled out Dowie for relentlessly pushing subordinates … until they committed crimes while he insulated himself by not looking at the bills they fraudulently inflated.

The judge said Dowie, a self-styled tough ex-Marine, used intimidation, ridicule and humiliation when he needed to satisfy corporate demands on the L.A. public-relations office.

“Mr. Dowie was going to use those techniques if that was what was needed to hit those numbers. He talks about battlefield honor … but loyalty is a two-way street from commander to grunt, and from grunt to commander,” said Feess, whose father was a Marine.

Feess said Dowie has failed to come to grips with his actions and has displayed a “degree of cynicism” that Feess has seldom encountered.

It’s also worth noting that this story appeared in Dowie’s former paper, and was written by one of his former employees.

Sometimes the worst people you encounter really do get their comeuppance.

Tags: Tags: society