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How did the Kerry cookies crumble?<font size=3>
By Sam Dealey
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To hear Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) tell it, his brief foray into the cookie business in the late 1970s gives him a leg up on the concerns of small-business owners. Earlier this month, the Democratic presidential candidate introduced his small-business program with vignettes from his own cookie-making experience.
Yet all that experience kind of, well, crumbles, in the mind of David Liederman, another cookie entrepreneur. Liederman, the founder of the David’s Cookies chain, claims Kerry ripped off the idea from him.
“The bottom line is he just stole it from me,” said Liederman, now a restaurateur and real estate developer in the New York City suburbs.<font size=3>
The Kerry campaign sharply dismissed Liederman’s charge.
file photo
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.)
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“Clearly, the guy who started David’s Cookies didn’t invent cookies,” said spokesman David DiMartino. “John Kerry absolutely denies this charge.”
Kerry’s former venture serves as the backdrop for a number of campaign publicity measures designed to woo voters. In a Vogue magazine profile last year featuring the presidential candidate in surfing wear, Kerry discussed the cookie business at some length.
After dinner one night in Boston, Kerry said, he and a friend had a hankering for cookies. Their search took them to Faneuil Hall. There was no cookie store to be found, but there was an empty retail space. An idea was born, and a store soon followed. The pair named their shop, Kilvert & Forbes Ltd., after their mother’s maiden names, and eventually sold their interest when Kerry’s political career intervened.
“It was a late-night inspiration,” Kerry told Vogue. “I had always had this entrepreneurial piece of me, and I saw it as a great business opportunity.” And this experience, Kerry continued, “stood me in great stead on the [Senate] Small Business Committee.”
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However, Liederman recalls a different version of how Kerry’s cookie venture crumbled.
“Some guy who called me up was John Kerry, in ’79 or ’80,” Liederman recalled. “He said he wanted to come down and talk to me about franchising. He came to the office and said he had an incredible space in Boston, which was Faneuil Hall. He said he needed some plans and some layouts and all sorts of things to get the approval of the landlord.”
“So I gave him the layout, the package, and he went back and I didn’t hear from him for six or seven months.”
Then one day Liederman got a call from someone who said they’d seen one of his stores in Faneuil Hall. Not having a store in Boston, Liederman decided to have a look for himself.
“It was a direct, 100-percent knock off of David’s Cookies,” said Liederman, from the appliances to the shop’s design to the cookies themselves. “If you had walked into a David’s Cookie’s store in Manhattan at the same time he opened ‘John’s Cookies’ in Boston, you couldn’t tell the difference.”
In his 1989 autobiography “Running Through Walls,” where the charge first appeared, Liederman wrote that he challenged Kerry on the origin of his business. “I told him he had stolen my idea, and he replied: ‘You’re absolutely right. I am a politician; I shouldn’t be in the cookie business, so let me sell you my store,’” Liederman wrote.
Liederman never bought the store, he said, because Kerry was operating it in violation of his lease. “He was supposed to be selling jams and jellies, not cookies,” he wrote.
DiMartino denied the exchange took place. “John Kerry does not recall having the conversation Mr. Liederman discusses in his book,” he said. “The facts included in Mr. Liederman’s complaint don’t match reality.”
Still, if he wants it, Kerry hasn’t quite lost Liederman’s vote.
“I’d support anybody that wasn’t Bush,” he said. “If Kerry got the nomination, I’d absolutely support him — although Bush never stole David’s Cookies from me.”
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