The Eastern Stars - Mark Kurlansky [100]
In San Pedro, where Sosa’s wealth was well known and, no matter how rich you are, you are even richer in the minds of the poor, he was constantly criticized for not giving enough. This was partly because he talked so much, especially to the U.S. press, about how much he was giving. The reason he was questioned about his contribution to hurricane relief in 1999 was that he had made such a show of giving it, and yet people felt they weren’t seeing it. Mayor Cedeño claimed that Sosa had raised money in Japan to rebuild one thousand homes destroyed by Hurricane George but the money never turned up in San Pedro. Sosa said that the deal with the Japanese fell through over disputes about who would build the homes.
Sosa responded to Mayor Cedeño’s accusation, saying, “Never is it enough. I want the people in the United States to know I’ve done the best I can to help my people. I can only do so much. I can’t do everything.”
Sosa always did things with big displays and a lot of noise. In his 1998 “Up with People” tour, he went to San Pedro with a lot of press and handed out gifts on the street. In 1999, Sosa, the former shoe-shine boy, took two hundred shoe-shine boys in Santo Domingo to lunch, to which Macorisanos responded that he had failed to do anything for their shoeshine boys.
But it seemed that almost anything Sammy did turned to scandal. In 1998 he gave New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani the bat with which he had supposedly hit his sixty-sixth home run that season. Governor George Pataki got number fifty-nine. But the Baseball Hall of Fame revealed that they had both of those bats, and Sosa admitted to having gotten a little carried away with the moment. “The Mayor was so nice to me,” he explained. “I didn’t want to disappoint him.”
In 2000, Fortune magazine reported that Sosa’s Plaza 30/30 was assessed at $2.7 million and had been donated to his foundation for a tax savings of at least $1 million. Aside from a clinic, which was always packed with poor people and where, Sosa claimed, 150 children were inoculated a day and dental care was provided, the principal tenant was his sister, who operated a boutique, a beauty salon, and a disco but paid no rent. The magazine reported that Sosa was not putting money into the foundation and it was near bankruptcy even though his friend and onetime competitor Mark McGwire had contributed $100,000 to it. In 2001, Art Sandoval, the administrator of Sosa’s charitable foundation, claimed that the entire foundation, including Plaza 30/30 and its clinic, had been set up as a tax scheme that saved Sosa millions. While legal wrongdoings were never proven, even in an IRS investigation, the damage to Sosa’s image remained in the minds of many Macorisanos.
In 1999, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) planned to give Sosa their International Brotherhood Award but then complained that he had demanded a private jet to pick him up in Santo Domingo, fly him to the awards in New York, and then fly him to Las Vegas for a Mike Tyson fight. Also, according to CORE, Sosa wanted them to provide him with a luxury hotel suite and two other rooms for associates, buy him five ringside seats at the fight, set up a fund-raising dinner with CORE contributors, and guarantee at least $60,000 in contributions for Dominican hurricane relief. He also wanted to bring memorabilia to sell at the awards event. They could not come to terms and Sosa did not attend. CORE national chairman Roy Innis said that Sosa “has to learn how to deal with his fifteen minutes of fame.” And that was exactly the problem: baseball stars are famous and they do earn millions, but only