Luis Cruz: Welcome to “San Diego News Fix: The Backstory,” where we tackle important questions about journalism ethics and give you a behind-the-scenes look at our industry and our newsroom.
The San Diego Union-Tribune recently published a multimedia series examining the rise and fall of San Diego’s largest Ponzi schemer, Gina Champion-Cain. Champion-Cain swindled close to $400 million from hundreds of people, including close longtime friends and major financial institutions. ing us today to talk about the scam and the mastermind behind it all are Union-Tribune tourism and hospitality industry reporter Lori Weisberg, criminal justice and legal affairs reporter Greg Moran, managing editor Lora Cicalo, and we begin with editor and publisher Jeff Light.
Jeff Light: Thank you, Luis, and congratulations to Lori and Greg on the excellent reporting of his story. A lot has been written about Gina Champion-Cain over the years, and quite recently, your piece and several other big treatments have come out. In looking at all of that, one of the things that struck me was the extent to which the nature of publicity – of PR – how important a role that played in establishing Champion-Cain’s reputation and her credibility, which, of course, enabled her criminal enterprise. And, as a part of the local ecosystem of publicity and prominence of local people, I thought maybe it held some lessons for us.
But let’s start with some details from her journey. Lori, you’ve reported how Champion-Cain very purposefully engineered a reputation – she hired a PR professional to help get her story promoted in the local press. Tell us a little bit about that and how that worked.
Lori Weisberg: She did, indeed, hire a local PR person who, himself, had been a little involved with downtown redevelopment, having been a partner in a restaurant that opened early in the Gaslamp years before it really had gentrified. And that was his job – to raise her profile. That was specifically what she asked him to do. And even though we know now that Gina Champion-Cain had very little to do with some of the big developments downtown during the ’90s and 2000s that she claimed to have participated in, you would not have known that had you seen some of the cover stories – San Diego Magazine, San Diego Metro, San Diego Woman – all with big splashy headlines. In one publication, there is a photo illustration – that we actually used for our series – showing her towering over the downtown skyline. So, it was a very effective PR campaign.
Ultimately, the city of San Diego named a day after her, she was on the boards of many powerful or well-recognized organizations, like the now-defunct Center City Development Corporation, the San Diego Downtown Partnership. She was seen as a real player, but again, what we know now from several lawsuits and interviews was that she did not have that outsized role in downtown redevelopment that she claimed to. But her PR campaign was quite successful.
Jeff Light: So, how does that work? You cover downtown development as part of your beat. How does a PR person end up getting stories placed or selling reporters on stories? In your series, you quote the PR professional about this campaign. How does all that work? How does a story end up in the U-T, for instance?
Lori Weisberg: PR people will and still do – like this PR person did – call you and pitch you. I don’t know how we got his pitch because I wasn’t a recipient of the pitches back then. But they’ll give you details about a person – what they’re doing, what they’ve done, that says they’re deserving of a story. And here she was, a woman in a male-dominated world of redevelopment at that time, and the pitch was look, she’s buying up property, she’s doing development. Obviously, you have to do your due diligence and see if she really was. One of her biggest projects she takes credit for is the House of Blues. And there was a period of time when she had a project moving through the downtown redevelopment agency; it never came to fruition. She also, in one of these cover stories, claimed she owned a very high-profile building. Well, if anybody had checked, it turned out, no, she didn’t own the building she claims she did. It was a lie, basically.
Obviously, as a reporter, it’s up to you to judge the pitch and then do a little research of your own to decide if that pitch is warranted by pursuing it further. I should add that once she pivoted later to the restaurant world and was opening one restaurant after another – she started getting into short-term rentals, she was doing a lot of other things, she was doing retail – I doing a big Q&A with her and it was actually during the Ponzi scheme, which, of course, I didn’t know anything about it. It was talking about how is she doing it all? How does she even have time to sleep, because she’s delving into all these projects. I mean, they were real projects at the time, but even I feel maybe a little chagrined now knowing that all these projects were eventually underwater. So, ultimately, yes, as a reporter, you have to do the due diligence before you accept a pitch as the truth.
Jeff Light: So, a skillful PR person will probably trade a little bit on their access and credibility: “Hey, Reporter, you know me. We’ve worked together before on stories that didn’t go wrong on you. I’ve got credibility because I, myself, have been involved in downtown development. And let me frame this story about Gina Champion-Cain in a particular way and then connect you to friendly people who will be glad to talk to you,” sort of steering you away from asking hard questions. And it really looks like that’s what happened here.
Greg Moran, you are an experienced reporter and have dealt with many, many difficult stories, as well as many PR people, and we were talking a little bit before we got on the air and I thought you had an insightful way of talking about the role of publicity in this whole scam.
Greg Moran: I mean, in many ways, the kind of contemporary publicity that she got – not sort of the old-fashioned PR, but this kind of new genus of it – was really central, I think, to the fraud. We talked to a lot of people who said that they gave her money, clearly believing that it was a legitimate business proposition, but largely doing so based on her reputation. Now, you can always fault people: If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is; you should always check under the hood. But, at some point, the power of the publicity, particularly in this case, it kind of creates its own weather system and people just kind of assume that it’s correct.
I we talked to one guy, it wasn’t included in the story, but she had come to him – he kind of ran a hard-money lending business – where she needed a short-term loan, I think it was for one of her restaurant things, and she came to him and she backed out at the last minute, which was a pattern for a lot of her business dealings. He ended up suing her. But I was interviewing him and I said, “Well, you know, did you do any research on her?” “Oh, yeah, we googled her. She had all these articles and all of these things on there. She seemed to be very legitimate. We didn’t do a deep background on her, but, you know, everybody was saying she was legitimate.” And I think that kind of confluence of her promotional image, which really began before the fraud began – the fraud begins about 2011. She was building herself up through Berkman (the PR guy) and other people through the 2000s. But I think it was a real critical component to how she was able to separate people from their money is that at some point, people believed this artifice that had been constructed.
I also don’t think – it’s kind of a side angle – but there’s no accident that this kind of happened at the period where we have this big shift in the media landscape, right? Where you didn’t have three TV stations and one newspaper, but you had this enormous number of different outlets that PR people can go to, which you know, just have this demand for this heaving maw of content that now is the media landscape. People need something to put on their website, to fill the publication or whatever. And different publications have different standards, so it’s easier to sort of get a nice piece out there. You know, once it’s on the internet, it’s available to everybody, rather than having to try to work through the one or two or three kind of gatekeeper reporters that was the situation many years ago. Now, I’m not saying that PR people didn’t get a lot of bunk through the old-fashioned thing, but it’s somewhat easier now to do it, and I think that was, unintentionally, a way that she was able to exploit that and attract people to her scheme.
Jeff Light: Yes, an incredible cautionary tale, I think for all of us. And by full disclosure, we had Gina Champion-Cain as one of our Econometer ists – sort of late in her career – where we look for academics and business leaders to talk about economic trends. And Gina Champion-Cain was one of those people we selected, I think, based on reputation.
Greg Moran: Very much. Yes, that came up with several people we talked to. They said, “She was in the Union-Tribune every Sunday.” Not great.
Jeff Light: Let’s talk about publicity in the aftermath, You two have told a very powerful story: This false narrative that enabled this large crime, and now that she has been convicted and jailed, the publicity has sort of taken a new turn. I guess a question would be, for Lori, what were we trying to accomplish in writing the story? And then we could talk a little bit about some of the national media that’s out there and other efforts that attempt to really commercialize this story.
Lori Weisberg: I think as a media organization that covers the San Diego metropolitan area – and all of the county – we wanted to explain to our readers how this colossal fraud could have happened. But what Greg and I were also interested in, though, is was she always like this, because she seemed like this pretty important person. So, that was our goal: The rise, obviously, and then the fall of Gina Champion-Cain. But again, as we’ve talked about, when we looked back, we discovered it wasn’t really a rise at all. She was kind of on the sidelines of things happening; she wasn’t the main mover and shaker like many of the people that helped shape our downtown core today. I really wanted to explain – as did Greg – how this could have happened. She was this supposedly very respected businesswoman and helped shape some of the decisions that happened. How could she have turned so badly and fallen so far?
And I think one of the things we learned in going back and looking at her career is how much she wanted to be the center of attention, how much she wanted to be known as a player in a male-dominated world of business and development, and then it kept driving. As the Ponzi scheme grew larger and larger, it was mostly to fuel and finance her businesses that weren’t doing so well. This idea that, “Oh my God, if I just get a little more money from these investors, I can pay everything back and I can make everything good again.” I think it was important to tell our readership and the community what fueled the Ponzi scheme of this enormity. And, as you pointed out, Jeff, now it’s being taken on by national media and they have a different angle in mind.
Jeff Light: Yes, I think locally, a cautionary tale with real people and real events that we can look back on and say, “If we, collectively, as journalists had asked harder questions, the outcome could have been different.” Certainly, if investors and business partners had asked harder questions, the outcome would have been different — like, “Are there any liquor license loans?” “Is this list of applicants really a customer list?” “Is any of this true?” It turned out none of that was true. So, it’s important to be able to see how easily we all can be taken in. Now, as you mentioned, there’s other journalistic work, or maybe it’s entertainment work – around this story. You mentioned to me, Lori, that there’s a TV show in the offing and also, you’ve reported that Gina Champion-Cain, herself, is interested in somehow telling her story through some sort of dramatization. What’s all that about?
Lori Weisberg: One of her friends – who became friends with her more during and after the Ponzi scheme – shared with us letters of correspondence she had gotten from Gina, and in those letters, Gina makes very clear her excitement about the prospect for, possibly, a streaming series on Netflix. We’ve seen recently other female fraudsters on Netflix and Hulu being profiled, and I think she has the same idea, that maybe her story is worth a dramatization. So, we know that, and then there’s a national series that looks at fraudsters in general. They’ve been on the air for many years, and they’re planning a profile, a look at this scheme in the fall that’s going to air nationally. But it’s a curiosity to them.
Jeff Light: She also has an “as told to” book – the story, according to her. Very interesting.
Let’s close with a question for Lora Cicalo, who is the managing editor. As you look at all of this, I can imagine the kinds of thoughts that go through your mind about the perils of what we do, and who we center, and the kind of implicit endorsement that’s involved in writing about somebody at all. How do we handle that responsibly? What is the lesson for us as gatekeepers, as Greg called us?
Lora Cicalo: I think there are a lot of lessons for us and, as all of you have said, it is a cautionary tale, not only for our community, but for our organization and for journalists. One of the issues is the way that reputation kind of builds on itself – to Greg’s point of potential investors who ended up being victims googling her to see, “OK, what is out there about her?” In a lot of cases, I think San Diegans would look and see, “Oh, she is in the Union-Tribune.” She does have this stature that we have granted her by quoting her in stories as a business leader or an authority on certain aspects and including her in our Econometer that lends legitimacy to her in the eyes of the public. And, in many ways, it speaks to the importance of us being skeptical, making sure that we are doing our due diligence, even with people who seem as though they’re known quantities.
She, in many ways, s the pantheon of people at the center of fraud schemes in San Diego who were perceived as business leaders – C. Arnholt Smith, J. David Dominelli, there is a long list. These are people that, within the community at one time, were viewed as leaders and important parts of the business community, and when you looked behind the curtain, it was very different. Our job is to look behind the curtain and to make sure that people are aware, and sometimes we come to that a little bit late and maybe haven’t been as skeptical or dug as deeply as we should have along the way.
Jeff Light: Yes, it’s a fascinating story. And congratulations again to Lori and Greg. Really terrific reporting. And with that, we’ll send it send it back to you, Luis.
Luis Cruz: Thank you very much, Jeff. You can read Lori and Greg’s series of reports on Gina Champion-Cain, watch a video that explains the Ponzi scheme, and hear more about Lori and Greg’s reporting on this story on our website, sandiegouniontribune.com.
