I knew former Red Sox great Curt Schilling had blown his considerable baseball earnings on an ill-fated gaming venture. What I didn’t know was the state of Rhode Island was his major investor:
Ideas that seem plausible in our darkest moments often seem plainly flawed in hindsight, and you can probably see where all this is going. A little more than two years after Mr. Carcieri first talked to Mr. Schilling about 38 Studios — so named for his baseball uniform number — the company went bankrupt, blowing a sizable hole in the state’s already strained finances. And now Mr. Schilling’s headquarters on Empire Street, the brick building just a few blocks from the Capitol that was supposed to prompt a high-tech urban renaissance, sits locked and abandoned, like some ugly monument to political folly.
…“It just felt really good, when this all started, to have the sexy sports celebrity from Boston who seemed to like Rhode Island and showed up in Rhode Island, and who built this exotic new business, even though no one knew what it was,” says the historian Ted Widmer, who grew up in Providence and works at Brown. “It seemed like the digital economy, or biotech, or whatever. But then it turned out that it wasn’t the new digital economy. It was some 13-year-old’s medieval fantasy.”
Yet another cautionary tale for politicians everywhere. Whether or not they take note is altogether another matter.