by Craig Carton
After several meetings, it looked like I had a real chance to be one of the guys who was going to be the guy to replace Howard Stern. My last meeting was going to be with Joel Hollander, the president of CBS Radio. I went to my company one last time and described the progress. I said that before I take the Hollander meeting, I want to make sure that this is all kosher. If it’s not, you have to let me save face now and not meet with Joel. Andy told me that it was all good, and that they would never stand in the way of that kind of career progress.
I met with Joel. It went great. I thought I was going to get the job. Joel was so nice, he even promised to find me an agent to represent me and make the guy cut his commission in half. I thought I was going to replace Stern. It might actually happen. Holy shit.
Sadly, though, it didn’t. While I was in with Joel, the operations director of the parent company that owned NJ 101.5 sent a fax to Joel demanding a shit load of dollars to let me out of my contract.
Stabbed in the back.
I got the call from CBS on my way home from the meeting that I thought had changed my life forever. The executives wanted to know, and rightfully so, what was going on. I asked them if they would extend me a twenty-four-hour courtesy to find out and fix it, which they did. I called for a meeting with Santoro and Jim Donahoe, the douchebag who sent the fax. They didn’t apologize. They also were not going to let me out of my contract.
I offered to pay the full value of my deal to get out of it. They stonewalled me, and I had no way to get out of it. They didn’t care that they had robbed me of potentially replacing Howard Stern. I called both of them every bad word you could think of, and then five more. They said I was too valuable to let go. They even offered me a one-year extension for a boatload of money and equity in the company. I said no to all of it, and told them to fuck off. I would work out the contract and then plan on leaving, or worst case, hold them up for much more if I stayed.
Now I had no boss at all. I refused to speak with management ever again. Eric Johnson was soft, and anytime he tried to get involved in the show, I shut him down. He would then apologize with a bottle of wine. Not having a boss was a two-sided coin for me. Creatively it was great. I did whatever I wanted. I knew that no matter how bad the GM’s reaction, Andy would always have my back. I was also producing nearly 65 percent of all the revenue for the station.
I was a rogue broadcaster. I had uncovered a planned ticket blitz of the public by state troopers, in retribution for negative media coverage of the trooper who crashed Governor Jon Corzine’s car going 91 miles per hour. I had also organized more than a hundred strippers who showed up at the New Jersey State House to agitate for the repeal of the ban on smoking in bars—I called it “The 100 Stripper Rally”—and thousands of people showed up for it. But I was also number one by far, and untouchable, ratings- and revenue-wise. I was unfireable, and the only host before or after me to transcend what the station was about: traffic, weather, and nothing else. The shows were lazy and boring, and there was little pride in preparing and delivering a great show every day. It was easy to stand out. When Governor James McGreevey announced that he was a gay American and stepped down as governor, it changed the landscape of New Jersey politics and my show. I liked McGreevey a lot and always respected him. He was a lousy governor. Too many power brokers in the state knew he was gay, and always held him over a barrel because of it. McGreevey knew that I knew about his sexuality. He also knew that he needed to come on my show when there was a big statewide issue that he wanted to talk about to the most people possible. The week before he announced he was gay, he came on my show, knowing I was a “crazy out-of-control shock jock,” and that I knew his secret and I could ask him anytime.
I knew because I had a dear friend who worked with Jim, and this friend told me stories about half-dressed young men in the governor’s mansion at all times of the day and night, and one particular get-together at a Nets game in the governor’s suite. These stories were all reported publicly well after I first heard of them and kept mum about them. McGreevey showed up and drank beer with me for an hour, and did one of the best radio spots I had ever done with a politician on the show. I felt terrible for him that he was forced into his admission, and even worse about the effect it had on him and his children.
When he stepped down, Dick Codey became acting governor. Codey, a longtime politician and crafty blue-collar, streetwise guy, seized on the opportunity to run the state. He loved being governor; the power, the game, everything. The problem for Codey was that nobody outside of the county he lived in knew him. A Quinnipiac poll had his name recognition at less than 30 percent the day he was sworn in. Codey was smart, though. He knew he needed some way to get his name out there and in a positive way. So he chose me to do it for him.
The first Wednesday of every month, our station hosted an Ask the Governor show. The news director hosted it, and the governor would come in to the station for it. The show aired after mine, and the governors arrived about thirty minutes prior, so they could hear my show before going on. I figured it was a perfect idea to do an Ask the Governor pregame show, and let callers and myself take the governor to task and make fun of him while he was trapped as a listener.
Codey came to the station one day with a plan to get attention for himself. The day before, I had done a story on how now that the Codeys were in office, they had a new platform. His wife’s platform was postpartum depression. She told an emotional story about how she suffered from it after the births of their two sons. She had tried to drown them once, and contemplated putting one of her boys in the microwave once, only to be stopped by a nanny. These stories offended me as a parent. I couldn’t fathom ever doing harm to my child, or to any child. It seemed to me that she was being cavalier about expressing her postpartum desire to hurt her own kids. I respect the fact that thousands of women deal with PPD, and that it is a very real issue. But my brain couldn’t wrap itself around the idea that the mental demons could be so strong that a new mother would ever come close to—let alone do—the things she was describing. When I heard her comments, I vividly remember going home and looking at my two kids at the time, and being really angry that she was so comfortable talking about the idea of doing something like that. This happened on the same day that Governor Codey was blathering on about why he would never legalize medical marijuana.
I put the two together and suggested that maybe if he would legalize marijuana, women like his wife would go for a bag of Doritos as opposed to trying to microwave their kids. I added that I wouldn’t be surprised if she had an underlying mental issue, which was exacerbated by the hormonal changes from having a baby. Perhaps she was crazy before she had the kids. The governor never heard the show. He heard about it thirdhand.
Codey invited along a female reporter who was right out of college and had never covered the governor or anything, for that matter. She was at the Star-Ledger, a paper that took shots at me every chance they could. He promised her a show and told her to make sure she documented everything that happened. As I walked out of the studio, Codey came right at me nose-to-nose with two state troopers—both armed, of course—and the young reporter flanking him. He said loud enough for all to hear, “If I was not governor, I would take you out!”
I was shocked, but I didn’t back down. Still nose-to-nose, I said aloud, “What, are you kidding me? You’re threatening me?”
“I would take you out,” he said.
“How dare you say that? You’re the governor of New Jersey!” I looked around, but nobody seemed to think his behavior was strange. He went on frothing at the mouth about how dare I say the things I said about his wife. I asked him if he had heard the show. “No, but people told me about it,” he said.
“How dare you?” I moved closer, and noticed that both troopers now had their hands on their weapons. Members of his staff and the radio station separated us, and he was ushered into the studio.
If he had wanted to take me on for what I said, he was in the building early
enough that he could have come on my show and attacked me. But he didn’t. What he did was premeditated, and he made sure he had a reporter in his back pocket to document it for the next day’s paper. He decided to start the Ask the Governor show by making a statement condemning me and what I had said, despite not having heard it firsthand.
The next day, a story appeared about how Governor Codey defended his wife’s honor against the shock jock. He was an overnight sensation. I was the scourge of the earth, an out-of-control heathen who attacked a mentally unstable woman. Governor Codey was the hero on a white horse. I was the subject of TV shows, columns, and countless newspaper articles. On Mother’s Day, I was the lead story above the fold for the Star-Ledger.
Codey wasn’t done yet. Quinnipiac took a poll the day after the front-page story, and Governor Dick Codey had an approval rating of nearly 80 percent. In two weeks, he went from unknown to the most popular governor in the history of the state, thanks to me and his choreographed confrontation with me.
The state legislature then got involved. Led by Wilfredo Caraballo, they had an emergency session to vote on whether or not to censure me. About a dozen politicians met in a public forum, which I attended. At the meeting, the public could attend and ask questions. I sat in the front row to be seen, and could not believe it when a member of the public asked the politicians how many of them had heard my show that day. Not a single one said that they had heard it. Twenty minutes later, they voted to censure me. I was the first-ever private citizen to be censured by the state of New Jersey.
I was on a roll.
Codey and I had more in common than anyone thought. We were both big sports fans, and both big basketball fans. About six months later, after the incident had died down and he was running New Jersey, word got to me though a close friend that Codey wanted to make a surprise appearance on my show to bury the hatchet. Why not? He was the most popular governor. I wasn’t going anywhere, or so I thought.
Bob Ingle, the talented Gannett news chief for New Jersey, was a friend. He came on my show every Friday to dispense State House gossip. Codey went to him to set it up. The plan was that they would show up at six and spend the last hour with me on the air. I knew about it but didn’t tell anyone at the station, not even Ray Rossi. The only issue was, the day that the governor was set to surprise us, I had three former terrorists in the studio talking about their time under bin Laden. As a result of their being there, four undercover FBI, CIA, and state police officers were acting as “producers,” just in case. Because of this, the governor’s security detail would not let him in the building until the terrorists left. Governor Codey sat outside our building for nearly forty-five minutes waiting for them to leave. When he came in, he was all smiles, and buried the hatchet with me on the air. He winked and smiled when I told him I thought that he had set the whole thing up.
Codey and I became friends that afternoon, and have supported each other’s charitable causes ever since. He was one of my first callers when I got to The FAN, and I believe that if he had run for governor as opposed to Jon Corzine, he would have won in a landslide. The added result of this dustup was that I was considered the ninth most powerful person in New Jersey state politics, according to a major political poll.
“Nappy-headed hos”: those three objectionable words changed my life. When Don Imus used that term to refer to the Rutgers women’s basketball team, it shocked the entire radio universe and the country as a whole. I paid close attention, as I was interested in seeing how CBS would handle what he said. I, too, had said objectionable things over my career. Most successful talk radio guys have.
I was surprised when word came down that Imus was being fired for good. I never thought that I would get a call from CBS, based on how things had gone a year earlier during the Howard Stern fiasco. But my phone rang and it was CBS, and I was in the game. After several weeks of conversation and many cleared hurdles, I met with Mark Chernoff at Harold’s Deli in Edison, New Jersey, to discuss the opening. Harold’s was my spot. I had all of my big meetings there: huge sandwiches, great hospitality, and a memorable lunch.
Chernoff had approached me six months earlier about Free FM, which was CBS Radio’s attempt to do FM talk. But that idea fizzled as well, due to my small-minded management cock-blocking me. That CBS would call me again was awesome and surprising. Chernoff indicated he wasn’t sure if it would happen, but they had picked a guy with whom they thought I would work well, someone who would help sanitize my bad-boy image from New Jersey. He had done radio, but never on a daily basis where he was half the show.
His name was Boomer Esiason.
Chernoff gave me Boomer’s number and gave mine to Boomer. The first time we ever spoke, Boomer called me. I was on my way down the shore to host my annual Jersey Guys bikini contest. I told him where I was going and he said, “Please tell me we won’t be doing any of those if we get this job.” I laughed and told him, “If we get the job, we won’t do anything you don’t want to do.”
We made idle chitchat: surface stuff about family and a little bit about my life at 101.5, and that was it. We ended the call by saying that we looked forward to meeting in the near future. I went from my bikini show to a week of vacation with my family in Margate, New Jersey, a shore town next to Atlantic City. The first day of vacation, Chernoff called to ask if I was available to come into New York to do a demo show with Boomer. I said yes and planned on being in New York two days later. We would meet at Fifty-Sixth and Seventh outside the Brooklyn Diner, which was connected to the same building I worked out of when I hosted the ill-fated Sports Guys show nearly six years earlier. The irony didn’t escape me. I liked the fact that one of my lowest career moments might be related to the site of the biggest turning point of my career.
I sat outside the diner until Chernoff showed up with a few other CBS executives. Boomer arrived a minute or two later. We shook hands and joined the executives for the elevator ride up to the radio station. Boomer and I had never met before. We had only spoken that one time on the phone for five minutes. Chernoff told us that he and the corporate executives wanted us to do a radio show, off-air, in one of their production studios. They would throw out a topic and then Boomer and I would pretend to be doing a real show on that topic. I would drive the conversation, being the experienced radio guy, and hope that Boomer would follow along and mix it up with me.
Right before we started, Boomer told the radio executives that he wanted a minute alone with me, so he and I walked into another room. Boomer looked right at me and said, “Go for it. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Worst case, we both go back to our other jobs. Best case, we replace Don Imus on the legendary WFAN Radio, something that could change both our lives for the better.”
We walked back into the studio. Within thirty seconds, we bantered about one topic after the next, and gave each other a hard time as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Boomer didn’t flinch when I took little potshots at him, and he gave them right back. I went right at him when he would name-drop about playing with or knowing certain guys. I referred to him as a “booshie name-dropper,” and he gave it right back, describing me as an unathletic sports fan who was jealous that he wasn’t invited to the pro athlete dinners that he got to go to. Those dinners don’t exist—he invented them on the spot, much like I was riffing on my shots at him.
We just got each other from day one. If you had walked into that room, you never would have known that we had never met, let alone never done a radio show before. What we did that day duplicates the same rapport we have on the air today. We could see and hear the executives who were sitting on a couch in the studio watching us like we were zoo animals; they were laughing and nodding their heads. We did a full hour, and when we were done, Chernoff said, “Out of all the people that tried out or were considered for the gig, that was the best we heard. Who do we have to talk to for each of you to get a deal done?”
Two months later, on September 4, 2007, the Boomer & Carton show be
gan. The beginning was rough. All of the on-air hosts at the station except for Steve Somers turned their backs on us and went out of their way to discredit us and put us down. I knew we had a good show, and I thought it could be great. I also knew that as we evolved, we would sound so much younger, more vibrant, and more entertaining than all of the other shows. We just needed time and some attention.
Prior to going on the air for the first time, Boomer and I spent a few days reviewing what kind of show we would do. We met with sales and promotions and our immediate staff in preparation for September 4, 2007. We had met just about every person in the building except for one: Mike Francesa. Mike was one-half of the afternoon show Mike and the Mad Dog. Mike’s reputation was that he was tough to work with and considered himself the de facto boss of WFAN.
I didn’t like Mike. Mike didn’t like me. Years earlier when I was hosting the WNEW Sports Guys morning show, I made a point of attacking him whenever he made a mistake on the air or lied about something he had said.
He recently told his audience that he picked the Giants to beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl and beat them big. Two days later, a listener produced an audiotape of him predicting the exact opposite before the game. I attacked and attacked and attacked. He got wind of it and wanted it to stop. How dare a fellow CBS Radio broadcaster attack him? He thought he had the clout to make me disappear.
My boss at WNEW was Jeremy Coleman. Mark Chernoff was running WFAN back then, as he does today. Mark called Jeremy and implored him to make me stop. Jeremy didn’t give a shit that I was doing it, so he came to me and told me that he had been asked to make it go away. I told him that if Mike had some issue with me, he could call me himself. Jeremy relayed that info to Mark. I was told that Mike would be calling me in ten minutes at WNEW.