Officials from General Growth Properties, the nation’s second-largest mall-owner and the bankrupt and debt-ridden company behind 10 Baltimore-region shopping centers, won’t give the time of day to its most persistent suitor, Simon Properties Group. Turns out that’s because GGP has been creepin’ behind Simon’s back — with Canadian investment firm Brookfield Asset Management Inc.

GGP sent out a statement this afternoon saying it had reached an agreement “in principle” to sell Brookfield a $2.625 billion equity stake in the company and pay off the interest GGP owes to its unsecured creditors, an extremely important part of GGP’s plan to emerge from the Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection it filed in April.

The plan, which GGP is calling a “recapitalization,” is somewhat convoluted — GGP’s shares will be valued at $15, but each one will be split into two separate offerings, one a $10 share of GGP common stock, and the other a $5 share of “General Growth Opportunity” stock. Full details of the deal are here.

What will this mean for White Marsh Mall, Harborplace & The Gallery, and the eight other GGP retail properties that dot Maryland? Probably a less-sure thing than if Simon had bought the company outright. Simon is the nation’s largest mall-owner, a well-trusted operator, and has long-standing relationships with hundreds of retail tenants. Brookfield holds about $26 billion in real estate assets, so they’re definitely a titan in the commercial real estate game, but their name has hardly the cache in retail circles that SPG does. And yes, Simon could still get in on this deal, pick up another piece of GGP, and lend another steady hand to the company as it navigates its way out of bankruptcy. But the real winners here are GGP’s shareholders, who are getting a much better deal than they would have under Simon’s initial offer.

But what surprises me most is how quick GGP was to accept the Brookfield agreement, rather than making Brookfield’s offer public and seeing if Simon or another company might be willing to match it with better terms or beat it.

This new arrangement is the corporate equivalent of an open relationship. For the last week, Simon has been positioning itself as a cheapskate sugardaddy: offering a $10 billion total buyout of GGP that would compensate shareholders at $9 per share (far less than GGP’s board thought the company was worth) and paying off all of GGP’s bad debts (its unsecured creditors), in return for the consummation of a marriage that would have produced a kind of super-company that would have a stake in every retail market in America. Instead, GGP has chosen to keep its independence and simply let itself be a kept corporation, living on its own in an apartment where Brookfield pays the rent, so to speak. To that I say, Throw your hands up at me, GGP. But girl, just make sure you know what you’re doing.

Photo is of Towson Commons, one of GGP’s 10 Baltimore-area malls.

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Simon Property Group LP’s courtship of bankrupt retail giant General Growth Properties, which owns 10 of Baltimore’s biggest malls, is playing out, a la Abelard and Heloise, in a series of deftly written letters. With each exchange, the proposed, $10 billion takeover, which would create a mega-company that would own somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of all malls in America, becomes more and more tawdry.

It all started with an unsolicited purchase offer from Simon, made public in a letter to GGP’s board this week, after a week of negotiations drew no “substantive response,” according to SPG CEO David Simon. The Wall Street Journal called this type of merger offer — technically a hostile bid — a “bear hug”, or an offer made public with the specific intention of pressuring the acquisition target to accept a deal even though the terms are unfavorable to the company.

The way it works is, Simon shows its plumage by saying, “Our offer is the best offer out there, and your creditors will come out unscathed, but only under our deal.” Simon then hopes that by making the letter public, GGP’s creditors will be impressed, or at least anxious enough to urge GGP to accept the deal. To us, it sort of sounds like classic dating politics. A girl is not responding to your romantic overtures, so you tell all her friends that you’re interested. Maybe you even buy them drinks, so that word might get around that hey, this guy’s not so bad after all!

But Alexander D. Goldfarb, an analyst with Sandler O’Neill, told us that GGP is no pushover, and that the company will likely play hard-to-get. “I would still accept them to play a pretty good game,” he said in a Tuesday Daily Record article.

He was right. Late Tuesday, GGP fired back with a letter of its own: We don’t like your style. We think we could do better. We’re just not that into you. Take some time, GGP said, get to know us, our interests, things to make us smile, what numbers to dial… The letter read:

We believe the information we would provide to you as part of this process will enable you to better understand the Company, get to a higher valuation, and provide a fully documented offer.

Simon’s response? Oh, snap. They did not just go there, telling us that they’re a more expensive date than we thought! So SPG rattled off another passive-aggressive love note late Wednesday. In that letter, which you can read in full here thanks to the good work of Jay Rickey over at CityBizList, Simon shifts to the aggressive courtship tactic that so many men fall back on, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad: telling the object of your desire that she’s not going to do any better than you, that you’re the best option she’ll see, and that she should really think twice about turning you down. Simon wrote to GGP’s CEO, Adam Metz:

…[Our offer] is far superior to any third-party proposal or stand-alone plan that would result from your “process.” … Given the clear risks of pursuing an alternative plan, the current state of the retail industry and your company’s past history of risky financial choices, your lack of urgency should deeply concern creditors and shareholders. Time is passing and General Growth is inappropriately speculating with creditors’ money – the company’s high leverage means not only that equity value could be destroyed by relatively small market movements, but that the value of the unsecured debt is also at risk.

Now if I were a late-night radio love doctor and not a business reporter, I would say that Simon really crossed the line here with that last remark. You can tell a girl she’s making a mistake by turning you down, but brother, where do you get off telling her how to live the rest of her life? The snipe about GGP “inappropriately speculating” with other people’s money is biting, and given, it’s meant for the eyes and ears of GGP creditors and investors, not GGP’s board itself, but the tone here has clearly taken a more hostile turn.

Waiting with baited breath to see if and when these two lovebirds will get together!

UPDATE:

It’s heating up again! At 3 p.m., General Growth CEO Adam Metz sent a curt, 4-sentence “Dear John” letter (or, technically, a “Dear David” letter) to Simon Property Group CEO David Simon. It reads as follows:

Dear David,

Reference is made to your letter dated February 17. As we have previously stated, our objective is to maximize value for the company and its stakeholders and we are engaging in a process that is intended to accomplish that result in an expeditious manner. Understandably, your objectives are not aligned with ours. We hope you will, nonetheless, participate in our process.

Sincerely,

Adam Metz
Chief Executive Officer
General Growth Properties, Inc.

What do you think, all you Don Juans and Femme Fatales out there in Heartbreak Land? Should Simon take this brush-off lying down, or is Metz just being a tease?

(Photo of General Growth’s Harborplace, clearly taken in more temperate times!)

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What is the city paying private contractors for snow removal? Eighty-five cents an hour, if they’re using a rowboat.

Earlier today we were over at the city’s “Snow Room” listening to Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, along with the heads of the city’s fire, police and transportation departments, brief the press about what’s going on with the Great Blizzard of 2010. Her main points were interesting:

- Total cleanup of the city will cost more than $1 million, which will come from the city’s general fund and 75 percent of which will hopefully be reimbursed by FEMA.

- Crime has been pretty muted by the snow — only two street robberies and one commercial burglary have been reported since the storm began late Friday, which Police Commissioner Fred Bealefeld called “like, incredible!”

- 120 trees were knocked over, and 20 power lines taken down by the snow.

- There were two major house fires during the storm, both of which were put out without serious injury or death. There have been 1,500 311 calls and 376 EMS calls.

- As of 9 a.m. today, city snow removal vehicles had logged 81,000 miles.

- There are 110 pieces of snow removal equipment in the field. Twenty-one private contractors have been enlisted to help, and 13 more are in line, being processed by the city’s procurement apparatus for more work.

The mayor’s verdict?

“Let’s be clear about one thing: This city was safe during this historic emergency,” she said, noting that the full cleanup will take at least a few more days.

But the BEST thing we learned today we learned from a list of fixed rates for services that the city is paying private contractors (see this document). The list, provided to us by the mayor’s spokesman, Ryan O’Doherty, goes line by line for every conceivable type of equipment and service, priced based on an hourly rate, which one could use to remove snow from roads.

Got a broom you’re willing to take to the pavement? The city will pay you $14 an hour if it’s 72-inches long. Got a 96-inch broom? The rate goes up to $23 per hour. If you are the proud owner of a “Bucket, Clamshell,” you’re due up to $13.50 an hour! A 625-horsepower bulldozer? An hourly rate of $240!

But our favorite, FAVORITE line item on this document was the simple, elegant, “Boat, Row,” which corresponded with the kingly hourly rate of 85 cents an hour from the city of Baltimore. The only equipment/service that pays less?

“Discharge Hose.”

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Any politician who thinks that the 50-some inches of snow that just got dumped on Baltimore is an “act of God” — we need to just stick it out, and it’ll eventually get cleaned up — would do well to revisit the story of Jane Byrne and Michael Bilandic.

The Chicago Tribune has a nice little summary of the story here, but the gist of it is that in the stormy January of 1979, Byrne unseated Bilandic, the mayor who had fired her from city government two years earlier, and became the first female mayor of Chicago. She had been the head of consumer affairs for the city, a mid-level government position, but one that she enjoyed with the support of the Daley Democratic machine. So how did she beat, Bilandic, the incumbent acting mayor with a long history in city politics as both a lawyer and an alderman? The answer is four letters long: SNOW.

Two huge storms dumped 35 inches of snow on the city over the course of about two weeks, and the widely-held public opinion was that Bilandic was too inept at cleaning it up. “Streets were not plowed, garbage was not collected and mass transit was staggered. Chicago was the city that could not get to work. By Election Day, many voters who had been faithful to the machine were ready to dump Bilandic,” the Tribune writes.

Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has a year before she has to worry about any electoral primary challenge, but as anyone in this town knows, Baltimoreans have long memories. If the prevailing opinion of SR-B’s job cleaning up this frosty mess shifts negative, it could be a problem. Already Gov. Martin O’Malley has predicted a $40 million cleanup bill, and scolded Marylanders for their impatience with the cleanup. Meanwhile, Rawlings-Blake has been shown on TV in the city’s special Emergency Operations Center (known these days as the “Snow Room”) nearly around the clock. Yesterday the Baltimore Business Journal published a rather random selection of local businesspeople giving their opinions on the mayor’s cleanup effort, which ranged from vague statements about the “great job” SR-B is doing to carping about Thames Street being still unplowed. Twitter has been abuzz (here’s one feed that’s been particularly vocal) with plowing updates and griping. But by and large, the jury’s still out.

But pols beware: Don’t get Byrned by the snow!

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A week ago, I was going through my morning routine, which includes, most mornings, listening to WYPR, the local NPR affiliate, before I head to work. One of the station’s regular features is the “Morning Economic Report,” hosted by local economist Anirban Basu, who heads the local think-tank the Sage Policy Group Inc. In Basu’s minute-long segments, he tends to focus on one part of the economy — housing, banking, public finance — and provide very quick, but usually very expert analysis of data. It’s not quite investment advice, but it’s the kind of thing that a businessperson, an amateur investor or even just an informed citizen might listen to and get ideas about money, the state of the market, or how things are likely to change and develop in the future.

Last Tuesday, Basu’s segment was about being a rental landlord, and a recent report that showed rising vacancies in rental properties in 79 markets across the country. The point of it was, in the end, that renters have the upper hand in the current market, as far as demanding lower rents and better service, because there simply aren’t enough tenants to fill the space. Baltimore was not mentioned specifically, and the implication was that this is a problem of national scope. The transcript started like this:

Those looking for a new apartment should be aware that renters presently enjoy the negotiating upper hand vis-à-vis landlords. According to vacancy and rental rate data … apartment vacancies hit a 30-year high during last year’s fourth quarter and rents have been falling as landlords compete aggressively to retain existing tenants and attract new ones.  Rents declined 3 percent last year, led by declines in West Coast markets such as San Jose, Seattle and San Francisco; cities that were expanding briskly prior to the recession.  Analysts believe that rental market weakness will last at least through the first half of 2010 and probably beyond …

Here’s the issue: Anirban Basu is, in addition to being a highly respected economist, a rental landlord. He owns five rental properties in Baltimore, a house in Deep Creek and another house in Harrisburg, Pa. Why does this matter? Because he didn’t mention it on the air. He was presented merely as an expert and introduced only in his context as chairman and CEO of the Sage Policy Institute, but the fact is, Basu has a financial interest in the rental housing market, its fluctuations, and questions of business strategy surrounding rental housing investing.

And now’s the time where I disclose that Basu, in addition to all the other things he is, is also frequently quoted in The Daily Record, especially as an expert in our quarterly mergers and acquisitions stories. He also is the lead author on many of the research reports that guide city and state economic policy decisions. This, I admit, is just a fact of life that you have to deal with, being a business reporter in Smalltimore. There are only a handful of economists at local think tanks or academic institutions who cover the local and statewide markets. Richard Clinch of the University of Baltimore and Daraius Irani of Towson’s RESI institute come to mind. And yes, we quote them frequently too.

But WYPR’s lax disclosure rules are a bit troubling. If Basu has a financial interest in something, shouldn’t he mention it when providing expert opinions on the subject? And if the trends he’s reporting are negative, isn’t that all the more reason to ask, Why not? Why shouldn’t he mention it?

Reached by phone last week, Basu said he didn’t see any conflict of interest in the “Morning Economic Report” spots, because they’re very short, and entirely data-based.

“I’m reporting what the data say. I’m working against my own interest, because I’m suggesting that the rental market is weak, and that people can afford to be selective,” he said. “Those are 65-second spots. There is not a lot of opportunity to disclose … I report on the economics of banking, and I sit on the board of First Mariner Bank. I don’t disclose that.”

Well, why the heck not?

We put the question to WYPR’s vice president and program manager, Andy Bienstock, pointing out that Don Fry, who also provides regular commentary for WYPR, always discloses that he is president and CEO of the Greater Baltimore Committee, a business booster group, when he speaks on-air. Bienstock responded that in last Tuesday’s report, he agreed that that there was no conflict of interest, that “putting [Basu] into Jim Cramer territory is an enormous stretch,” referring to the CNBC host who was the subject of a scandal related to disclosure issues last year. But he also said that in mentioning the First Mariner issue, we had “buried the lede.”

“I did not know the full extent of his involvement with First Mariner and, if he is speaking directly about the bank we will ask him to disclose, on-air, his role there,” Bienstock wrote in an email. “We are, co-incidentally, working up internal disclosure forms for all our contributors – both commentators and news stringers. With journalists needing to keep there hands in a lot of pots – just to eat, since full time work is so scarce – we need to do a better job of catching any conflicts of interest before they happen. That way we can either disclose on air, or not air the piece to begin with.”

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Everyone knows that the easiest way to rile a true Baltimoron is to insinuate that Charm City is just a suburb of Washington. Yeah, a lot of people around here work for the federal government, and a lot of investment money comes from our rich, fat-cat cousins down in the “Corridor.” But as the decade comes to a close, the Baltimore faithful can point to two things we’ve got on Washingtonians: the Ravens (who’ve got a Super Bowl victory, a bunch of playoff appearances, and no shame like the shame of a Redskins fan, especially this season, JEEZ), and now — the Health of our Housing Market!

Housingwatch.com posted an analysis a few days before Christmas that ranked the top ten healthiest housing markets of the decade, based on percentage change in median home sale price, and guess what? Baltimore-Towson came in at a whopping #2, behind only Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton, Pa.-N.J.

According to data from the National Association of Realtors, median home prices in the Mobtown metro area rose 9.81 percent, from $131,800 to $261,100, from 2000 through the third quarter of 2009. That left the sprawling, all-inclusive DC metro area, referred to by most multiple-listing services as “Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, D.C.-Va.-Md.-W.Va.,” eating our dust in 9th place. Median prices there rose from $178,800 to $324,700 over the last decade, or a change of 8.16 percent.

So what does this mean? Well, DC real estate is still more expensive, but generally, your typical investment house inside or around I-695 was a better investment, by 1 percentage point, than the average DC-area investment home. And for that, folks, I think we can all be thankful to Santa.

And as for New Years resolutions? Let’s beat ‘em again! Here’s to the new decade!

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I found this video while trying to confirm the details of a story I wrote the other day about Baltimore developer Pat Turner. Turner turned out to be the highest-profile witness called by the prosecution in the trial of Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon. Turner, the state said, gave Dixon gift cards meant for the needy, and Dixon used them for her own personal uses. Earlier this week, the prosecution described a close relationship between the mayor and Turner’s wife, Jeanine, who first met at a real estate conference in Las Vegas. Then on Thursday, during closing arguments, the prosecution described Turner as a “matter-of-fact man” who tells the truth and keeps meticulous financial records. As it turns out, Turner’s photographer wife Jeanine, is also fairly matter-of-fact.

The above video was posted as a teaser to a photography exhibit Jeanine had at SubBasement Gallery in Baltimore. Taking us through her artwork, she starts by saying flatly,

“Hi, I’m Jeanine Turner, and I’m an artist”

She goes on to describe how she became an artist, starting with a little pocket digital camera that her husband bought her, and upgrading to better and better cameras, which she used to photograph Silo Point, her husband’s luxe condo project in Locust Point:

About six years ago, my husband bought me a camera. A little digital camera, something you can stick in your  purse. And I loved it. I took pictures of everything, but mostly my drunk girlfriends. And anyway, so from that, he, the next year for Christmas he brought me another camera, and then the next year he bought me then another camera, and another one and another one, I mean, he just every year I got a better camera, and I was very excited. So then he bought this amazing building. It is a grain silo, and it is in Baltimore, and I started taking pictures of it.

The rest of it is just as good. As we await the jury’s verdict, I encourage you to enjoy this.

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Last week, President Obama signed into law an extension of the $8,000 first-time homebuyers’ tax credit, and expanded it to include a $6,500 credit for relatively-new homeowners and widened the income parameters for elligible participants in the program. This morning, Maryland home sales numbers came out, and the Real Estate Wonk, over at our friendly competipaper, The Sun, has the dirt:

Home sales last month increased a dizzying 36 percent over last year in the Baltimore metro area, according to numbers released Tuesday morning.

The unusually large pickup in activity represents deals that closed in October but in most cases were agreed to in the summer, as first-time buyers were staring down a Nov. 30 deadline to get in the door if they wanted an $8,000 federal tax credit. Last week, the tax credit was extended into next year and joined by a $6,500 credit for certain repeat buyers.

The connection between the credit and the sales figures is not attributed to any statistics, but the link/headline on the Sun’s website is catchy: “Homebuyer tax credit boosts area home sales 36% in Oct.”

Not so fast, says the Wall Street Journal. On Tuesday, the same day the Maryland sales numbers came out, housing reporter Nick Timiraos wrote this, which basically says that a recent Deutsche Bank study of the impact of the credit proves that the impact of the credit is all psychological, because in markets battered by foreclosures, no amount of tax incentives can induce people to buy, and because of disparities in home prices across the country. The report even goes after language (“dizzying”) used by reporters such as The Wonk:

The report notes that while the tax credit hasn’t created the boost for home sales that “some euphoric headlines would imply,” analysts “can’t dispute that it has been meaningful in bolstering consumer psychology and general housing market sentiment.”

The report concludes: “While the actual impact on sales numbers may be relatively light, the impact on consumer psychology, and that second-order impact on the housing market, could be meaningful, and should serve to take a worst-case scenario off the table, at least over the next several months.”

The impact of the credit is also likely to have uneven results geographically: an $8,000 credit in Cleveland, for example, offers buyers around 9.8% off of the median home price, while the same credit only goes for around 1.7% of the price in Honolulu.

In other markets, a glut of bank-owned property may offset any demand stimulated by the credit, including Miami and Fort Myers, Fla., where more than one-third of homes are in some stage of foreclosure: “Because this particularly policy tool is a blunt instrument, its application will be uneven when applied to different markets that have very different home price levels and degrees of economic stress.”

I think the way to settle this point would probably be to pull numbers on how many Maryland homeowners applied for the credit in October. So I called Jim Dupree, an IRS spokesman in Baltimore who tends to know about these things, but he wasn’t immediately available.

But actually, knowing how many homebuyers applied for the credit in October wouldn’t even really provide much of a definitive answer on this question, because the credit can be applied retroactively. They have to apply before the end of the year to get it on their 2009 tax returns, obviously, but homeowners who bought in June can still apply for the credit today.

Honestly, on a month-to-month basis, I don’t really think there’s any way you can establish that it was the homebuyers’ credit stimulating home sales. Year over year, if you compare total home sales with total credit applications, that might yield something, and perhaps anecdotally one might find that Realtors are having a lot of conversations with buyers about the credit, but as far as we know, it’s still an open question, and frankly, I think it’s a tad risky to credit the lawmakers who conceived and passed the bills with a housing turnaround just yet. What do you think?

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No movies tonight
The drama is in the streets
See yinz on Monday
–Manny Thiener, Pittsburgh, PA

Today, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page soft feature article about a Haiku contest held by the organizers of the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, which starts next weekend in my hometown. Entrants submitted predictable banal lines of verse, in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables each. Stuff like this, from presumed Pittsburgher Kelly Lynskey:

Neighbors of the world
Welcome to our three waters
Share with us your peace

As a fan of the World-Champion Pittsburgh Steelers, I am, like one or two other members of this newsroom, acutely aware of how high emotions run between these two cities, so I sent out a mass email to the newsroom asking for Haikus from our staff about Pittsburgh, or about the G-20, or about anything they felt moved to write after reading the WSJ story. Predictably, even though I didn’t mention football, most of the poems I got were Steelers/Ravens-related. here is a sampling.

From copy editor Wayne Countryman:

Roethlisberger won’t
End inequality or
Win the Super Bowl

From sports business reporter Liz Farmer:

Pittsburgh’s on a roll
G-20 and the Super Bowl
Luck always runs out.

Hm. Does this mean Liz is rooting for Pittsburgh’s misfortune in areas other than football? Economic development and international recognition, for example?

Associate Editor Paul Samuel was more of a civic-minded Balti-booster:

Why go to Pittsburgh
For G-20 summit?
Baltimore has much more charm

That one, however, I’m going to have to disqualify, because its syllabic scheme is 5-6-7, or so unorthodox that I’m not even sure it qualifies as a Haiku, if any poem not written in Japanese, can indeed qualify as a Haiku (energy and finance reporter Danielle Ulman, who did not submit a poem, insists that in order to qualify, a Haiku must have a reference to the seasons in it).

Richard Simon, our multimedia supporter, wins the prize for Haiku most heavily reliant on a patently false version of revisionist history, but his second line shows impressive lyrical promise, in my opinion:

Santonio Holmes
Big catch on the biggest stage
One foot in, one out

Business Editor Ed Waldman sent this in, and if anyone out there can figure out what it means (beyond the fact that Steelers rookie cornerback Keenan Lewis wears #20), they get a prize:

Steelers fans thinking
that ‘G-20′ is number
of Keenan Lewis

The last three Haikus that I’ll share are the ones that had the least to do with football. Because ultimately, the G-20 isn’t really about football. It’s about macroeconomic cooperation and public relations. Legal reporter Caryn Tamber took the high road:

I wish I could write
Pithy words about football
Sorry, no can do

Government reporter Andy Rosen, true to form, did his homework. His Haiku references the Allegheny County Department of Sanitation, Pittsburgh’s waste-disposal authority. He gets points for being both wonkish and disparaging in only 17 syllables:

Three Rivers are joined
But do not swim or sip them
It smells. ALCOSAN.

And finally, the winner of the Daily Record G-20 Haiku prize, comes from legal reporter Brendan Kearney, who got my email requesting submissions right before lunch, apparently, and we were planning on hitting up the Kooper’s Chowhound Burger Wagon for some burgers (they were delicious). He read the article, then called on all his powers of rhyme and composition to compose the following mellifluous lyrics:

Yes I am hungry
For a juicy slab of meat
And maybe bacon.

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While the O’s are still up in Beantown for a quick, two-game series, I figured it would be appropriate to share this timely piece of news. The Boston Herald is reporting that Janet Marie Smith, an employee of Baltimore development company Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse, has been replaced as head of the Fenway Park redevelopment effort by Red Sox owner John Henry. The position will apparently be filled by Linda Pizzuti, who Henry married in June.

The team’s management is keeping mum about the change, but Smith, who had been heading up the team’s effort to buy up properties around the baseball park to keep developers from building any unsightly condo towers that might block the view, has been working with the Red Sox for eight years. Reached on vacation, Struever spokesman Bob Rubenkonig said that as far as he knew, Smith was still a consultant working for the company, but a call to her Baltimore office was not answered, and a voicemail system did not appear to be set up. In classic Herald fashion, we’ve got this insightful commentary:

“Janet Marie was told to go because Linda’s taking over the whole damn place,” said one person familiar with Smith’s exit. Another source said, “Janet was thrown under the bus and everything is a mess as a result of the young bride. The Chinese symbol for conflict is two women under one roof.”

Two camps have been established, it seems. One credits Smith with saving Fenway from the wrecking ball and pursuing an effective, aggressive real estate strategy in its surrounding area. The other is described this way:

Some anti-Smith forces also accused her of a conflict of interest, noting that she also worked for Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse, a Baltimore-based development company that handled the team’s real estate transactions for a fee.

Others dismissed the charge, saying the real estate deals were transparent and everyone knew Smith split her time between the Sox and Struever.

“When Linda arrived, she woke John Henry up to the fact that Janet has a conflict of interest and that the team is not maximizing its value on properties it owns,” a source said. “So they ditched her and they’re trying to make it look like Janet’s departure was mutual, but it wasn’t.”

I remember about a year and a half ago, interviewing Bill Struever in his Tide Point office, and he had a scale-model of Fenway  on his coffee table. The next time I went back, about 6 or 7 months later, it wasn’t there anymore. I guess the bottom line, though, is that Baltimore no longer has a mole in the Red Sox organization who can secretly effect disastrous changes on the baseball game-going experience for all Bostonians. I guess we’ll just have to settle for ruining the view at our own baseball park.

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