Sarasota businessman Richard Garden still promotes his shows, and conflict still follows close behind.
Over the last two decades, Garden's businesses have been fined or barred from operating in at least six states. He faced criminal charges for a circus bleacher collapse that injured 70 people in New York, and his companies have been sued more than a dozen times in Sarasota County alone.
Now, ice skaters are accusing Garden and his son, Niles, of skipping out on an Ice Capades tour in Canada, leaving them in the lurch, and officials at Robarts Arena in Sarasota say the Gardens stopped payment on a check for a home show.
On Tuesday, a dozen Ice Capades performers from across the globe learned Garden Family Shows, Inc. abruptly canceled the rest of the North American tour and reportedly drove away before dawn without doling out paychecks or plane tickets home.
Media reports said the Gardens informed the skaters of the cancellation by slipping a letter under their doors at 4 a.m. The letter also told the performers to send in their bank information with account numbers so they could receive payment.
"They owe us money," performer Gabor Balint, who is from Hungary, told the Williams Lake Tribune.
The Williams Lake arena where the Ice Capades held two shows heard about the Garden Family Shows reputation from another arena manager, and required full payment before letting them on the ice.
"I owe one of my colleagues a case of beer for the heads up," said Geoff Paynton, who has heard from a several Garden Family creditors who hoped the arena still had the box office revenue from two shows.
The Rona Home Center in Williams Lake was not warned. It rented 150 sheets of plywood to the Ice Capades for $1,000. Niles Garden never paid, but did give the staff six complimentary tickets to the show, the manager there said.
Back in Sarasota, Robarts Arena manager Rory Martin said Niles Garden did not pay $5,100 rent for a lackluster home show in February that also left vendors fuming. They will not be invited back, and Martin said he gave the case to his legal staff to pursue.
"We got a check on Saturday," Martin said. "Then at 3:10 p.m. on Monday, I got a letter that they stopped payment on the check."
Neither Richard Garden, 66, nor son Niles, 35, returned phone calls for comment on Wednesday. An employee of Garden Family on the Ice Capades tour said that arrangements and payments are being sorted out, and that the poor economy was to blame for the show's collapse.
Garden Family Shows is the latest name for Richard Garden's business enterprises.
He promoted shows under the name Toby Tyler Circus, Kastle Entertainment, Piccadilly Circus, Circus Matrix and Sterling and Reid Bros. Every one of them has been named in a lawsuit.
Garden's troubles started in 1984 when Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, Michigan, Maine and other states started pursuing his companies for deceptive practices.
Authorities said the companies sold tickets on behalf of disabled children with no serious attempt to get the youngsters to the circus once the money was collected.
Garden pleaded guilty in 1987 to criminal counts in connection to one of three bleacher collapses at his circuses. Authorities said he ordered bleachers erected on muddy ground despite warnings from circus workers. About 70 people were injured. A tent collapsed onto a crowd of 1,100 in Green Bay, Wis., in 1987, injuring 41.
While many of those claims were settled, several states accused Garden of not living up to his end of the deal, resulting in a lawsuit in Wisconsin, judgments of more than $100,000 and seizures of his act's equipment in Maine.
In 2001, Sarasota businessman David Rodgers filed a lawsuit claiming Garden and others took $500,000 from him for a share of the Ice Capades business, but Garden never had the share to sell. That lawsuit was dropped in 2003.
Another round of trouble in 2004 included an injured circus employee who claimed Garden's company could not pay its debts or $45,000 in damages owed to him, and a bullwhip performer who claims he was owed $6,588 in back pay from Garden.
That bullwhip artist, Robert Dante, said he finally worked through all the business entities and hired a collection agency last month to try and collect.
"They tend to shift things back and forth to different company fronts," Dante said.
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It brought a tear to my eye, thinking that Sammy was able to make some sort of ammends for the internal guilt he carried. At what point does loyalty to co-workers outweigh the sense of right and wrong? When does a trying to be "with it and for it" become less important than the knot of guilt in your gut? Sammy had no aspirations of being the next circus sensation, so there was no sour grapes in his death bed confessions.
One can try to correct the past by living your life to a higher standard, but there is no way to completely remove the gnawing sense of shame one feels when your new enlightnment is in conflict with past actions.
This story is remarkable simply because of the rarity of people who turn their backs on their past deeds or compliance by way of silence. One would think that more of the tens of thousands of people who have worked in the perifery of the circus business (butchers, prop men, grooms, showgirls and electricians)and have had first hand seats to the elephant business would have emerged to tell their stories by now. It must be a part of human nature to shut the door and move on.
Although it is an overused comparrisson (and admittedly out of proportion), following WW2, there were thousands of German citizens who lived in towns surrounding the camps that swore they knew nothing of the activities inside. Even after the camps were fully revealed, many still publicly denied the truth, out of national pride and not wanting to taint themselves.
I believe an entire study could be done on what drives people, whether it is being complicit in political cover-ups or banking scandals or circus misdeeds.
It is undoubtedly a self serving motive. As you, yourself have said, Wade, your association with Hawthorn was a detriment to getting a good postion at a major zoo. Like Sammy used to say - he stopped telling people what he had done for a living, and I'm sure he was not alone.
Whatever anyone's opinion is on his actions before he died, Sammy did what, seemingly, is so difficult; he chose his concience over some vauge friendship with people who, if the truth be told, would never have chosen freindship with him over self preservation in the world of Ringling.
It may be true that no one likes a whistleblower, but what Sammy did should be an inspiration to every young trainer to develop greater ethics and less tolerance of wrong-doing. RIP, friend.
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