Network's Former Chairman Is Missing
By DAVID LOMBINO - Staff Reporter of the Sun
August 26, 2005
nysun.com
The former chairman of Air America Radio, Evan Montvel Cohen - who former colleagues said engineered transfers of more than $800,000 to the liberal radio network from a boys and girls club in the Bronx - is missing, according to a lawyer who is trying to have him served with legal papers.
At least two people have said Mr. Cohen is in Hawaii. He has not responded to a series of e-mail messages in recent weeks from The New York Sun asking him about his role.
Mr. Cohen, 39, helped lead the launch of Air America in March 2004. Less than two months later, Piquant LLC acquired the radio network from Mr. Cohen's Progress Media. Piquant LLC has agreed to pay $875,000 to Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club, without interest, in installments over the next two years.
Mr. Cohen's long, mysterious absence cost him his seat on the board of directors of the National Cancer Center, a nonprofit group based on Long Island that has an annual budget of about $3.5 million and gives grants to cancer research projects.
The executive director of that organization, Regina English, said Mr. Cohen was dropped from the board because he did not attend regularly scheduled board meetings and failed to deliver on his promises to raise funds for the organization. Mr. Cohen - who had told colleagues, including Air America's star host, Al Franken, that he suffered from brain cancer - was notified via e-mail, because the cancer charity had no other effective way of contacting him, she said.
"He came on full of vim and vigor. He said he was going to produce hundreds of thousands of dollars," Ms. English said. "He threw no fund-raisers, made no personal contributions, and never sent letters to friends."
Ms. English said Mr. Cohen had attended only one or two board meetings since the beginning of 2004.
Board members of the Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club in the Bronx, where Mr. Cohen was employed as development director at the time he helped launch Air America, have said Mr. Cohen earned their trust through a very successful fund-raising event that he staged in Manhattan for the nonprofit club.
According to Ms. English and the vice president of the board of the cancer center, Franklin Reyner, Mr. Cohen did not transfer any money to Air America or to Gloria Wise from the cancer center.
Ms. English said Mr. Cohen was introduced to the board at the recommendation of an attorney, Seth Perlman, of the New York firm of Perlman & Perlman, which specializes in nonprofit regulation.
"I just knew that he had had cancer and that he had an interest in nonprofit organizations," Mr. Perlman said.
Mr. Perlman said Mr. Cohen had asked him to get involved with Gloria Wise but he did not do so.
Mr. Perlman said he knew Mr. Cohen through Mr. Cohen's brother, Thomas Montvel Cohen. All three men attended Beloit College in Wisconsin.
Despite claims to friends and coworkers that he had graduated from Beloit, however, Evan Cohen never fulfilled his graduation requirements nor did he receive a degree from the school, according to Beloit's registrar, Sherry Sandee.
Ms. Sandee said Mr. Cohen attended Beloit intermittently from 1984 to 1989, missing several semesters. She said he tried to make up the missing credits just before he started the Air America venture in 2003. For those credits, Mr. Cohen, a government major, submitted a project entitled "Examining the role of government in economic development."
It was at Beloit that Mr. Cohen befriended a future White House aide, David Goodfriend.
After serving as deputy staff secretary to President Clinton, Mr. Goodfriend became a leading figure in conceptualizing and launching Air America. It was he who introduced Mr. Cohen to investors.
Mr. Cohen was the first person named in a recent lawsuit filed by an owner of radio stations that is seeking more than $1.5 million it says it is owed by Air America.
But process servers - companies hired by lawyers to find witnesses or parties to lawsuits so they can be served with legal papers - have been unable to serve Mr. Cohen with the lawsuit, according to an attorney, Randy Mastro.
"We are still trying to locate him," Mr. Mastro, a deputy mayor in the Giuliani administration who is representing MultiCultural Radio Broadcasting in its suit against Air America, said yesterday.
A marketing consultant in Brookline, Mass., Abbe Cohen, was mistakenly served a subpoena for his son Evan Michael Cohen, who shares first and last names and middle initial with the former Air America official. According to his father, Evan Michael Cohen is in Europe, studying for a master's in business administration.
After reading the court document and consulting with his son by telephone, Abbe Cohen called the courts and returned the subpoena.
The law firm Stillman & Friedman was initially representing Evan Montvel Cohen but no longer is, according to Mr. Mastro, who is with the firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Julian Friedman, of that firm, did not return phone messages yesterday. |
