Photograph by John Griggs
Colin Flaherty wrote prolifically in the old Evening Tribune and San Diego Union, the SD Business Journal, San Diego Magazine, L.A. Times, and in the early 90s, even the San Diego Reader.
Three years ago in these pages, I eulogized Mr. San Diego: civic leader George Mitrovich, the man who famously knew everyone. Now Im back to pay tribute to his fellow flack and Kensingtonian, Colin Flaherty, who died last January in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, and who was an unmissable fixture of the San Diego scene for over 25 years. There was at least one obvious reason for that: he was big. Colin admitted to being 65, but I often suspected he was an inch or two taller. But size aside, he bestrode the local PR and journalism world like a colossus.
In the Copley papers, he wrote a weekly column that appeared under the byline of his father-in-law, ex-congressman Lionel Van Deerlin. He ghosted for others as well, and wrote prolifically under his own name: in the old Evening Tribune and San Diego Union, the SD Business Journal, San Diego Magazine, L.A. Times, and in the early 90s, even the San Diego Reader. (He turned up in the Wall Street Journal and dozen other venues, but were sticking with local color for now.) Every year, it seemed, Colin would walk away with one prize or another at the San Diego Press Club Awards.
His PR clients included a raft of politicians, and such enterprises as Qualcomm, Fidelity Investments, and Barratt American homes. Friends included editor/columnist Tom Blair; sometime-mayor and broadcast personality Roger Hedgecock (for whom Colin occasionally substituted on-air); and famous malpractice attorney Dan Broderick (at least until Dans ex-wife Betty shot both him and Wife #2 in 1989).
On a level of slighter acquaintance, maybe I could mention Karen Wilkening, 1991s Rolodex Madam, who sticks in memory because I first met her and Colin at some mutual friends backyard party. (No, they werent dating; Karen was a surprise guest though Colin was delighted.) But one person who was not Colins friend was George Mitrovich. As I was friends with both, I could never figure out what the deal was. Maybe they were too much alike: a couple of movers and shakers who both happened to have a history with Joe Biden. (George hosted Biden as a speaker at his City Club some twenty times; the teenaged Colin arranged meet-and-greets for the future President when he was just a 29-year-old Senate candidate back in Wilmington.) But whatever the reason, Colins splenetic outbursts against George were always hilarious. That no-talent sycophant did not deserve such a graceful remembrance, Colin wrote me after I sent him the Mitrovich article. Preening, pompous, all-around pretender...
The road wanderer
Colin wasnt a pretender, at least not when it came to ideas. He followed the truth as he saw it, even when it took him far afield of his former worldview. He was a wanderer, in both the physical and philosophical sense. I say wanderer, not traveler: there were two peculiarities about Colin that I spotted way back in 1991, and the first was that he seldom, if ever, drove a car. (Going car-free happens to be the preference of many writers, or so I was once told by Mr. Never-Had-a-License Ray Bradbury, a lifelong resident of Los Angeles.) Colin rode motorcycles, so it wasnt a question of not having a license. In fact, it may not have been much of a choice at all. Years after I knew him, I stumbled across this little column from the 1985 Evening Tribune, in which Colin proudly announces that he hasnt got a car, proclaiming I take the bus. Then he drops the punchline in the biographical note at the bottom: Flaherty is a political consultant who lives in Hillcrest. His wife is getting their car in a divorce settlement. He intends to buy another, but not until he can afford to get a nice one.
The other thing I noticed about Colin is that he didnt drink alcoholic beverages, of any kind even 3.2 beer, if they still make that. He had a cover story to explain it: many years ago in Colorado, he had gotten ticketed for a DUI. That was one of the first things he told me about himself. I had a mental image of him going through Colorado Springs on a big Triumph cycle, but Im pretty sure you dont want to be blotto on a motorcycle. Maybe it was a car? Maybe the story was just a white lie, something you tell your hosts when the drinks table arrives. At any rate, sober and carless are also good excuses to go hitchhiking. Then when someone gives you a lift, you can say you dont drink, and tell the tragic story of why. And hitchhiking, which is sort of the apotheosis of wandering literally getting taken for a ride was something Colin was good at.
Colin Flaherty Illustration by Meg Burns
For a long time Colins main commercial client was a busy and prosperous home builder in Riverside and San Diego Counties. At one point, Colin moved to a big new house in a little place called Winchester, and set about perfecting his golf game. This was a useful skill when his client took him on trips to England and then Scotland, where they played the links at St. Andrews. (Im no aficionado I hit a few buckets with him once many years ago but from what Im told, he was an excellent golfer and could have turned pro if hed focused as much on the game when he was young as he did in middle age.) When the client went into bankruptcy protection during the economic cratering of 15 years ago (the company has since emerged, safe and sound, I hear), Colin lit out for the territory. He went on a hitchhiking trip, venturing almost at random and writing of his adventures along the way. Eventually he packaged it as Redwood to Deadwood: A 53-Year-Old Dude Hitchhikes Across America (2011).
This was not his first long-distance hitchhiking adventure. At, 17 he thumbed it to South Florida to join the crowds protesting the GOP convention. He memorialized this tale, and many other tasty autobiographical nuggets, in Redwood to Deadwood. Ill condense the story here, but try not to chop it up too much:
The first big hitchhiking trip I ever took was the 1500 miles down to Miami Beach for the Republican National Convention in 1972. I was one of those people convinced that Republicans in general and Nixon in particular were the source of all evil in the history of the planet if not the universe. So down I went, and ended up spending two days in jail with Allen Ginsberg for my troubles. I was in a bookstore recently when a college student came and sat next to me. She was carrying a volume of great American poets, and there was good old Allen glaring at me from the cover
I was going to try and impress her that Mr. Ginsberg and I were old cellmates, and how between meals of Dade County baloney sandwiches and Kool Aid he led me and the other miscreants in chanting OOOMMMMMMM.
Or was it OMMMMMMMMMM. Whatever.
But I decided to forgo this excursion into the literary life with this eager academe. Nothing worse than trying to impress a coed with meeting a famous poet in jail and have her either not believe you, or worse, not care.
Come to think of it, there are millions of things worse.
After two days, the Dade County authorities dropped charges and let us all go. Soon after, I called my folks and they asked me how I was doing Anything happen to you?
I just got out of jail.
I think my dad laughed. Though he did not really think it was that funny when a month later a picture of me getting arrested ended up as the cover picture for Hunter Thompsons story in Rolling Stone magazine on the Republican National Convention.
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail: Seventeen-year-old Colin Flaherty getting booked in Miami Beach, August 1972. From the September 28, 1972 issue of Rolling Stone. Photo credit: Mark Diamond.
Flaherty Family Collection
Actually it was a near-full-page photo, and the reporter was one Tim Findley. However, Hunter S. Thompson did reproduce a small version of the picture in his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72. And Thompson is who Colin wanted to write about here apparently, he was not a fan. He continues:
Thirty-seven years later, I wrote an article for Aspen.com (where Hunter lived) about his life and death. It was not an appreciation. I was actually going to convert the first few sentences of that Aspen.com article into a poem for the finals of theSteamboat [Springs] Poetry Slam.
Hunter Thompson is dead.
He killed himself 40 years ago when he figured out it was a lot easier being a circus clown with a typewriter, a bottle of bourbon and a fistful of drugs instead of being a writer.
It just took a while.
Redwood to Deadwood is very much a collage of autobiographical vignettes like that, told against a background of real-time travels on the road, circa 2009. So in bits and pieces you learn that he grew up in Delaware, went to Salesianum (a private Catholic boys day school in Wilmington), had a bit of college at University of Delaware, dropped out, joined a carnival, worked as a cook in Key West, toured Mexico on a motorcycle...and finally hitchhiked from Wilmington to San Diego...where he promptly won a Regents Scholarship to UCSD. After which he married the daughter of Congressman Van Deerlin, had two kids, got divorced, wrote lots of newspaper columns, news stories, press releases and political flackery...and this is pretty much where we came in.
In 1991, Colin wrote an inside feature story for the Reader that resulted in the freeing of a young black man, Kelvin Wiley, sentenced to four years in Soledad Prison for beating his white girlfriend, Toni Di Giovanni. In reality, the woman had staged her beating and persuaded her young son to lie to the police.
The grey areas around Black and White
It might be surprising to hear that the guy who used to work for Biden and who hated Nixon enough to do jail time went so sour on a guy like Thompson. But as I said, Colin followed his lights. Case in point: in 1991, he wrote an inside feature story for the Reader that resulted in the freeing of a young black man, Kelvin Wiley, sentenced to four years in Soledad Prison for beating his white girlfriend, Toni Di Giovanni. In reality, the woman had staged her beating and persuaded her young son to lie to the police. This is stillpointed to as a landmark case of exoneration, as well as a sterling example of investigative legwork.
Colins story begins with quotations from a couple who took a trip with Kelvin and Toni, and recalled her doing meth and calling him a stupid n----r, after which he broke up with her. Two weeks later, she accused him of beating her savagely and attempting to strangle her with his belt. What followed, writes Colin, was a strange series of inept investigations, contradictory and recanted testimony, and evidence not admitted that...might at least have placed Tonis story of the attack in considerable doubt. He begins by interviewing neighbors, who heard and saw nothing from the normally loud condo, then notes that nobody from law enforcement ever did the same. He notes that she had told a similar and false story about a previous boyfriend, but that the judge would not allow this to be presented in court. He interviews Kelvins neighbors, who recall seeing his car parked at home on the day of the alleged assault. He tallies up changes in Tonis story notably, she said she was beaten with a box wrench, but when no corresponding wounds were found, she changed the weapon to a belt. He talks to jurors, he investigates testimony, and he combs documents for gems like this from the judge: [Di Giovanni] possesses certain mermaid qualities where she can lure various men up to be thrashed on the rocks right in front of her, and she helps do the thrashing. When the Union-Tribune wrote up the exoneration years later, they noted Colins reporting.
All of which makes it remarkable that years later, Colin wrote two books about what he described as a media conspiracy to conceal black-on-white hate crimes. Beginning in 2012, there was White Girl Bleed a Lot, subtitled The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore It. Two years later, he came out with Dont Make the Black Kids Angry: The hoax of black victimization and those who enable it [sic]. Incendiary stuff, to be sure. But canny Colin made sure to adorn the book covers with glowing endorsements from such esteemed black conservatives as Allen West and Thomas Sowell. After all, the story here was not the existence of black crime (the focus was often on young flash mobs), but rather, the news medias determination to minimize coverage of it. Reviewing the first one in National Review, Sowell wrote: Reading Colin Flahertys book made painfully clear to me that the magnitude of this problem is even greater than I had discovered from my own research. He documents both the race riots and the media and political evasions in dozens of cities across America. Veteran talk-radio hosts Barry Farber and Neal Boortz also praised the books as brave and brilliant.
Colin Flaherty, who died last January in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, was an unmissable fixture of the San Diego scene for over 25 years.
Photograph by John Griggs
Friends included editor/columnist Tom Blair; sometime-mayor and broadcast personality Roger Hedgecock; and famous malpractice attorney Dan Broderick.
Photograph by John Griggs
Colin sold the books mainly through Amazon, and they rocketed to the top of whichever category Amazon was placing them in. Once when he was in New York for a Newsmax segment in 2015, I had lunch with him and saw him compulsively checking his iPhone every few minutes to see how sales were going. Sold another ten copies! Another fifteen copies! But the wheels came off around 2016, when Colin got caught up in the cancel-culture frenzy that accompanied that years presidential campaign. Many conservative authors and imprints were suddenly banned by Amazon, and soon enough, Colin had to look for other venues. YouTube pulled his channel, a major source of income. He moved on to Bitchute and other video and podcast platforms, selling more books in new editions.
Colin was not part of any racialist organization or any other eldritch movement. He generally shunned such outfits (he called one group that approached him creepy). He flew solo all his life, a successful freelancer and entrepreneur. But you could see the Left attempting to tar him with that creepy brush, at least by 2015. Trying to put a dark spin on the burgeoning enthusiasm for Donald Trumps presidential bid, The New Yorkers Evan Osnos called Colin a white nationalist who had written a self-published book. (Hows that for a sneer? By that point, Colin had actually produced three or four.) But Colin had spent years in the politico-journo trenches, and wasnt going to cry in his alcohol-free beer just because a Leftie hack slapped a label on him. There in Wilmington, he kept working: as an occasional radio host (WDEL), as a podcaster, and as guest commentator on the cable news channel Newsmax. He even tried his hand at writing spy thrillers, winning first prize for a chapter in the Washington Posts Summer Spy Serial contest, July 2011. A sample:
Even if the mysterious stranger was legit and there was no chance of that there was just no way they were going to tap Al-Zawahiri on the shoulder and ask him to come along nicely. Alex continued:
Listen Mister Whatever Your Name Is, I do not know how you got the idea we are some kind of super spies. But if you are so intent on catching this terrorist, I suggest you call him on the phone, tell him he just won a 52-inch flat-screen TV, and he can collect it at the American embassy. When he shows up, it should be easy enough for you to win your $25 million sweepstakes. That works all the time on TV. Which I think you watch too much of. Now if you will excuse us, my wife and I would like to get back to our dinner.
Alex got up to leave the room. The visitor did not move...
The laughable lottery lien
When Colin died, I knew hed been ill for a couple of years (cancer). After he passed, I suddenly became curious about a long-ago matter that had entangled the two of us. About 25 years back I was living in Seattle and occasionally doing freelance design and web work for Colin and his PR clients. (His big corporate fish at that time was Qualcomm.) Once, he FedExed me a paycheck with a few hundred dollars extra. Colin suggested that my friend and I use some of this bonus to contribute to a political campaign he was managing in the desert hamlet of Perris, California. So my assistant and I each wrote out a personal check to Riverside County Business & Property Owners Coalition, mailed them off, and never thought about it again.
At least not till 2003...when someone from Sacramento tracked me down (Id moved 3000 miles away) and rang me up. Somebody named Dennis Pellon, from something called the Fair Political Practices Commission. Basically, I was being interrogated about a suspicious 1997 contribution to that Riverside County campaign fund. FPPC was trying to frame it as money laundering. I angrily stonewalled, pointing out that my income from Colin had far exceeded whatever trifling amount I may have given, and that if I chose to contribute to a political campaign, that was entirely my business. (At the time, I remembered my donation as de minimis, maybe $50. But I recently found diary notes that tell me my friend and I each wrote a personal check for $250. Oopsie! Enough to get me on FPPCs radar, anyhow.)
Book signing for White Girl Bleed a Lot, subtitled The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore It.
Flaherty Family Collection
Puzzled, I phoned and e-mailed Colin. Just ignore it, he said. Years later, I discovered the FPPC had fined Colin $76,000 for a wide variety of alleged infractions, some of them utterly absurd. Supposedly, he had broken campaign finance rules thirty-eight times, with a $2000 fine for each. One of these purportedly illegal donations was $4000 for a birthday cake and balloons for Governor Pete Wilson.
Did Colin ever pay that whopping fine? No he did not. Nor did the FPPC boondogglers ever make any serious effort to collect it. I know this because after Colin died, I contacted the FPPC and asked about the status of the case. They sent me a copy of a recent letter (October 29, 2021), in which they limply threaten to have the Franchise Tax Board garnish that $76,000 if Colin ever wins the California Lottery! Bwah-hah-hah! Colin loved black humor, and would have enjoyed this immensely.
Just ignore it, Colin had told me. He knew FPPC wouldnt make any serious effort to collect their fine because that would trigger a legal response, and then the claim might well be vacated by the court. It wasnt a legal judgment, it was a demand by a public ethics quango that claimed to be non-partisan. Like everyone in Sacramento, I guess. The FPPC didnt care for Colins political work, and also frowned on Pete Wilsons birthday cake and balloons.
The biographical note at the bottom of a 1985 Evening Tribune column: Flaherty is a political consultant who lives in Hillcrest. His wife is getting their car in a divorce settlement. He intends to buy another, but not until he can afford to get a nice one.
Flaherty Family Collection
The money laundering allegations described what were evidently routine campaign procedures in local politics at least in that time and place. Rather than make it look as though candidates or initiatives are being funded mostly by one well-heeled interest (say, a big developer), you gift money to others and suggest that they donate of their own volition. A little sneaky, you think? Thats politics, and both sides were doing it. Small-town micro-campaigns are seldom grass-roots in origin. In early 2005, I recall, Colin was managing a campaign to shoot down a no-growth initiative (Proposition X) in Santee. The three biggest contributors in favor of the proposition lived in La Jolla, Tucson, and Jackson Hole or so Colin assured me.
A nun in Lebanon
Colin grew up Catholic, but he seems to have given all that up in late adolescence. Still, he did ask for a Catholic funeral, or memorial service, in the little city of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, where his mothers family had lived. Lebanon is about 25 miles west of Reading, and historically largely German. What the town is known for, so far as I can tell, is a couple of foodstuffs: theres a pre-Lenten pastry called a Fastnacht (because you eat it the day before Ash Wednesday), and Lebanon bologna which is not a vile pink luncheon meat, but a dry beef sausage rather like a giant salami, a delicacy theyve been making there since the 1700s. I give you all this so youll realize what an out-the-way place it was for most of the 60-odd people who showed up some from as far away as Temecula for the memorial service and the reception.
The FPPC sent me a copy of a recent letter (October 29, 2021), in which they limply threaten to have the Franchise Tax Board garnish that $76,000 if Colin ever wins the California Lottery! Bwah-hah-hah! Colin loved black humor, and would have enjoyed this immensely.
Flaherty Family Collection
Colin wanted the service in Lebanon so that his favorite cousin, a Franciscan nun named Sister Margaret Bender, could sing at it. For her part, Sister Margaret, an enthusiastic musico, looked forward to fulfilling Colins last wish. And so Colins far-flung family, friends, and fans descended upon the tidy Gothic stone church in the middle of town. Along with the regulars attending Saturday evening mass, we pretty much filled up the place. But the service didnt quite go according to plan. Sister Margaret was not able to sing at her nephews memorial service because there was no music! The priest explained, apologetically, that he didnt think many people would show up, so he hadnt bothered engaging the organist or other music-makers. (Cue up a sad trombone.) I think the likelier reason is that the pastor simply forgot about making the arrangements until he emerged from sacristy and noticed the big crowd and the Franciscan nun. Fortunately, he didnt waste much time on sermonizing, and as there were no hymns or music, things proceeded very quickly: in and out in 25 minutes flat.
After that disappointment, many of us were in need of a drink. So we gathered back at the hotel, where we had a fine reception that lasted well into the night. And after a couple of hours, Colins cousin finally did get to sing sans accompaniment. A happy ending, and a good time was had by all.
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Colin Flaherty gets sent off with a song | San Diego Reader