Page 3 of 5
"We threw ourselves a softball," Singer admits. "We knew journalists would ask if they taunted the animals. And we'd say 'We don't know, but we have enough information that we believe it was a possibility.'"
Then the stories about booze and pot and hooliganism managed, somehow, to find their way into the press. "And that gave credibility to our signage," Singer says. The narrative had shifted: The cinematic terror of a zoo's catastrophic failure gave way to queries about the character of the men nearly done in by the escaped tiger — and what they surely must have done to bring this misfortune upon themselves.
The Dhaliwal brothers were kindling for Singer's incendiary tactics. Both had a litany of run-ins with the law prior to their confrontation with Tatiana the tiger — and this continued afterward as well. When they retained high-profile attorney Mark Geragos, Singer lampooned him as the man who said, "Michael Jackson was a perfectly normal human being and Scott Peterson was an innocent man." The Dhaliwals' subsequent lawsuit personally accused Singer of libel and slander. "That," Singer says now, "was so much fun for me."
His focus on the alleged culpability of the mauled brothers certainly kept the focus off things his client would rather not see come up.
In the end, the zoo settled with the Dhaliwals for a purported $900,000. Terms of its settlement with Sousa's survivors were not made public — but, SF Weekly is told, the total payout in both cases is on par to what Chevron doled out for torching Richmond. Asked for a valediction, Singer whooped to a reporter, "Don't get high on weed, drunk on liquor, and don't fuck with man-eating animals."
Well, those are the facts as Singer's client sees them.
And, in this case, says Singer, society at large seemed to make the "right" choice. In the court of public opinion, the Dhaliwal brothers were the guilty parties in the tragedy that left them at the mercy of an inexplicably free zoo creature. Anyway, San Franciscans seemed to be more put out over the shooting of a rare and beautiful animal than the Dhaliwals' plight or the death of their companion.
Of course, few now recall that the brothers never copped to taunting Tatiana, which was the cornerstone of Singer's narrative. The tiger enclosure, since reinforced, was 4 feet shorter than the recommended height for such a pen. But, Singer stresses, these aren't "rules"; they're "guidelines." A source close to the matter tells SF Weekly that, in fact, generations of city workers maintaining the FDR-era grottoes "solved" persistent drainage problems by simply slapping down layer after layer of concrete, thereby effectively raising the floor.
When asked if a taller enclosure might have kept Tatiana away from the Dhaliwals, Singer replies, "I never speculate about what I don't know."
Maybe, he then speculates, they would have fallen in.
These are, to put it mildly, mitigating factors. But the narrative that took hold was the one spoken the loudest — even if, given a modicum of thought and divorced from the emotional heft of the moment, it makes little sense. "It would have been a regular day at the zoo if two men who were high on liquor and dope hadn't taunted a tiger," Singer sums up. "Bad deeds led to the death of a young man and a rare tiger."
But being inebriated and — purportedly — razzing a zoo creature shouldn't trigger a potential death sentence. For you or the innocent kid tagging along with you. No amount of uncouth human behavior ought to exculpate the zoo when an animal escapes its pen and kills people. But that's how Singer reframed the story.
And a brilliant one it is, even now. You don't have to believe it for it to be believable. Or at least convenient: A city official nodded in agreement when all of the above points were recounted. Then he grinned: "They were fucking with the tiger. And that's why they got eaten."
The Financial District office of Sam Singer's 14-year-old solo venture, Singer Associates, somewhat resembles an elegant, oversize set closet for the film Jumanji. Employees hunch over keyboards while bookended by massive wooden spears and shields and African masks. Tribal art is around every corner, socked into every office and every cubicle.
Amassing tribal art, Singer says, "keeps me balanced and sane." He frequents Paris galleries every September to add to his burgeoning collection. With tribal art, "you don't need a lotta words," he says. This artwork, he continues, "tells a story."
Telling stories is all Sam Singer has ever wanted to do.
Singer's parents were both UC Berkeley professors. His father, 94-year-old physicist Jerome Singer, is still working five days a week on "4-D technology," per his son. Like his late wife, Jerome is a Nobel Prize nominee.
Their son barely made it into college.
At 18, Singer was an honest-to-goodness copy boy for the Richmond Independent in the chain-smoking, Underwood-pecking, bourbon-drinking era of journalism. For the next eight years, he worked single-mindedly toward becoming a newspaper publisher. He achieved this goal, taking the reins of the Berkeley Daily Gazette — two weeks before the paper folded in 1984.
So, that lifelong dream died at the moment of realization. But, personally and professionally, Singer is malleable. He doesn't allow a disaster to linger past one news cycle. He soon leaped into political consulting — where speed and aggression are de rigueur — and in 1990 shifted into PR, where he could still tell stories. "You get to be your own newspaper!" he gushes, defining his current raison d'être. "You are making and shaping the news to someone's betterment and providing a service to the media, public, and elected leaders."
Showing 1-4 of 4
Comments are closed.
