SO, WHO GETS THE JINGLE?
Sour note in Cellino & Barnes split
Seventeen years ago, a Buffalobased advertising composer was paid a paltry $5,000 for a song that became truly remarkable — but only because of how annoyingly catchy it was.
“It came to me right after I got the down payment,” Ken Kaufman — composer of the “Cellino & Barnes’’ law-firm jingle — told The Post on Thursday.
The 67-year-old Kaufman’s sticky little jingle, with its cheerful stutter of “eight-eight-eights” phone number, has played on radio and TV ads ever since, with countless New Yorkers singing along, often unwillingly.
Which makes the following news very sad and a little unsettling: The personal-injury law firm of Ross Cellino Jr. and Stephen Barnes is splitting up, with one, in fact, suing the other, leaving the fate of the jingle in peril.
So will one or the other party in this legal smashup get custody?
“I have no idea,” the firm’s founder, Ross Cellino Sr., 83, said when asked what he thinks his son and soon-to-be-ex-partner will do with the jingle once Cellino & Barnes loses its ampersand for good. “I imagine they’ll flip a coin for it.”
Cellino Jr. was not talking to the press Thursday, a day after word broke of his and his longtime partner’s split.
But Barnes, known to television-commercial audiences as “the bald one,” issued a statement — on Cellino & Barnes letterhead — saying that he will “aggressively oppose the dissolution papers filed by Mr. Cellino.”
Erie County Supreme Court records confirm that Cellino is suing Barnes in an attempt to dissolve the firm, which began in Buffalo. In filing suit, though, Cellino asked that the paperwork be sealed.
Perplexingly, Justice Deborah A. Chimes agreed, claiming that “Cellino & Barnes is a law firm with assets uniquely different than a typical corporation.”
News of the firm’s breakup was surprising to the jingle’s composer.
He still remembers getting a call — he thinks it was from Barnes — laying out very specific details for the lyrics.
The song, he was told, had no slogan besides “the injury attorneys,” emphasis on “the.”
“I want to find out what their plans are for it,” Kaufman said when told of the impending split by a Post reporter.
“Because if either of them are inheriting it from the other, I’d like to be the guy who does the re-sing.”
Meanwhile, the lawyers’ breakup is all the talk in New York personal-injury circles, especially in Buffalo, where Cellino Sr. started the firm back in the 1950s with then-partner Michael Likoudis.
“It’s big news all over Buffalo,” Likoudis, 85, told The Post of the current firm’s breakup.
Likoudis knows what it feels like to be dumped by a Cellino.
He says the elder Cellino kicked him out of the firm when the younger one finished law school.
By the mid-1990s, the elder Cellino retired, and Junior and Barnes modernized the advertising campaign for the fourlawyer firm.
It paid off — Cellino & Barnes now has nearly 80 lawyers working personal-injury cases in New York and California.
The firm boasts of winning $2 billion in settlements, and generally has the reputation of being aggressive but fair.
But “I don’t like it at all,” Likoudis complained of the jingle with the firm’s number (800) 888-8888. “It’s on all the time.”
Cellino’s mother, Jeanette, 84, thinks otherwise.
“It was a catchy little thing,’’ the mom of nine remembered of first hearing Kaufman’s jingle.
“All I can remember is all of the little kids singing it.’’
Cellino’s father insisted Thursday that his son’s firm is ditching its ampersand “amicably.”
Barnes wants to focus on the California end of the business, Cellino wants the East Coast, and the partners simply want a judge to referee the complicated split, he said.
But the scuttlebutt around the Buffalo personal-injury and defense pubs is that Cellino Jr. — a minority partner in the firm’s San Francisco and Los Angeles offices — is feuding over money with Barnes, who has already moved to the West Coast.
“If it were amicable, it would just be a negotiation,” noted one Buffalo insurance lawyer who asked not to be named.
“It’s not amicable if it’s a lawsuit.”