Former TV reporter seeks seat on Council
Time was, if you were a crooked contractor, welfare cheat or slum landlord, one of the last people you wanted to see as you walked to your vehicle was Tom Sussi.
The former bulldog Columbus TV reporter made a career out of sting-style, gotcha, inyour-face confrontations that won his stations ratings and himself awards.
His prey never knew where Sussi might pop up — including once from a bathtub behind a shower curtain, hidden cameras in tow, lying in wait for an overpriced plumber to pull back the curtain only to find Sussi, mic in hand. Sussi wanted to know how a new tub
installation for a 68-year-old widow could possibly cost $6,600 when the contractor quoted others $1,100.
“And you’ll never know where I’ll be hiding next, trust me on this one,” Sussi warned at the end of the segment.
Now, Sussi, 62, wants voters to trust him with a seat on the Columbus City Council.
He’s the only one of four candidates on the November ballot who isn’t on the endorsed Democratic slate, which includes Council President Shannon Hardin and two newcomers, Lourdes Barroso de Padilla and Nick Bankston.
Sussi is running as an independent for one of the three open seats, the only resident taking on the endorsed Democrats.
The field fell three candidates short of forcing a spring primary.
“I’m in the middle, man. I’m not a political guy,” Sussi said following a fundraiser meet-and-greet recently attended by a couple dozen supporters at the Bogey Inn near Muirfield Country Club in Dublin.
While Sussi has been a registered voter most of the last decade, records show that he not only didn’t vote in any partisan primaries, but he also voted only once — in the November 2020 general election.
“I rarely vote because I think most politicians are full of s---,” he said.
Up against the establishment
Sussi acknowledged that he faces long odds. But he insisted that his bid is real and not designed to bolster his new online business, “The Sussi Report,” which he hopes to grow into his own daily news report.
“It’s not a publicity stunt,” he said. “The thing that got to me was last year, those riots. I started to see what the police were going through, and what the community was facing, and statues being moved. And the core of the problem was never addressed.”
While anyone has the right to protest, Sussi said, “they don’t have the right to destroy property, loot businesses and assault police and citizens, and Columbus officials allowed this to go on week after week,” he said. “They lost control of their city and can’t seem to regain control.”
Aside from the protests and riots, Sussi said the “huge issue” facing Columbus is what he says is a lack of transparency at City Hall.
“This one-party town, there’s no accountability, there’s no transparency,” he said. “You don’t know what they’re up to.”
On the Ma’khia Bryant shooting, Sussi said he believes the Columbus police officer who shot the 16-year-old did so to protect the female Bryant was threatening to stab. City leaders turned it into a racial issue, he said, creating more distrust between the police and the Black community.
Despite Sussi’s independent status, some of his rhetoric aligns with today’s GOP. He acknowledged that he has the ear of some local Republicans who have unofficially offered him campaign advice.
Attending his recent Bogey Inn gathering was Shawn Parker, who heads both the Dublin Republican Club and the statewide Council of Republican Clubs. Sussi’s campaign treasurer is Bill Curlis, secretary of the Franklin County Republican Central Committee.
“I am helping Tom out as a friend, not as party secretary,” Curlis said.
Sussi has raised about $10,000 toward his campaign as of last month, Curlis said. Sussi believes he needs 20 times that amount to be competitive.
The Franklin County Democratic Party did not return a telephone call Friday seeking comment about Sussi’s bid for council.
From Flint to TV tough guy
Sussi says he has more in common with Columbus’ struggling, low-income residents than many current and former city Democratic officials.
He grew up poor in Flint, Michigan, the oldest of four kids raised largely by his single mom after his dad, with whom he has no relationship, left when Sussi was in grade school, he said. The family survived on welfare checks, foodstamps, school lunch tokens and his mom’s part-time jobs, Sussi said.
“We didn’t have a car, never went on vacation,” he said.
Sussi went to the local Mott Community College in Flint hoping to become a police officer, “but I took one elective class — journalism — and it got me hooked,” he said. He began working at the college newspaper.
After sitting out a year to raise money for a four-year college degree by clerking for his local Flint newspaper’s sports department, he finished his television journalism degree by transferring to Michigan State University, intent on becoming a sportscaster. He was the first member on either side of his family to finish college, he said.
Upon graduation, he got a part-time morning sportscasting job at an AM radio station in Flint, he said. Then he joined the Flint Journal, his hometown newspaper, as a reporter. Around age 30, he decided he would get into TV broadcasting as a news reporter.
Flint was a mid-sized tough blue-collar town in decline, with gang executions and lots of crime, “a small version of Detroit,” said Jim Kiertzner, now an investigative reporter for WXYZ, the ABC affiliate in Detroit, who competed against Sussi in the Flint television market in the 1990s.
After people were convicted of murder, Sussi would stand in the hallway as deputies led them away and “put a mic in their face and say, ‘How does it feel to go to prison for the rest of your life?’” Kiertzner said. “That became his trademark.”
Some two decades later, TV news would bring him to Columbus in 2010, where his assignments often dealt with consumer problems.
“These weren’t Watergate stories,” Sussi said of his “gotcha” stories. “I made a living in this town chasing down bad contractors. I mean, let’s be honest, this wasn’t heavy-duty journalism, man, this was gotcha TV. Because I realized early on ... I had to have a schtick.”
But in May 2017, he was fired from his employer, WSYX (Channel 6), because he was “having a rough time with corporate lawyers” Sussi said.
The business was changing in Columbus against confrontational TV news, a transformation that Sussi said began after a colleague, Steve Levine, was run over by a car on the South Side in 2013 while attempting to interview the female driver about packages stolen from the porches of houses. Stations wanted less of it, for fear of liability, he said.
Being Sussi went to Sussi’s head
Sussi said he now regrets playing hardball with his station over his many grievances and not rolling with the punches, saying his ego might have gotten the better of him.
“I went in there and thought I was bigger than the game. You’re never bigger than the game,” Sussi said.
Channel 6 General Manager Tony D’angelo said he doesn’t comment on personnel matters.
After a stint at WCMH (Channel 4), Sussi said he quit, wanting to get out of television news and ending a TV career that included major markets including Detroit, Pittsburgh and Orlando, Florida.
After working as a private eye and a “pet detective,” he set up his local news website, which he uses to further his longstanding bad professional relationship with Mayor Andrew J. Ginther.
“If I didn’t have a wife with a good job, I wouldn’t be out here doing this,” Sussi said of his spouse of more than three decades, Julie, who works as a hospital administrator in Columbus.
They have no children and live near Downtown.
Even if Sussi wins the election, he acknowledged that it won’t change much — there would still be six Democrats to his single vote on the city council. Instead, the public would get a reporter inside City Hall, he said.
“I’m going to demand accountability and transparency,” Sussi said. “I’m not going to be part of the team.”
If he loses, he promises to go quietly into the political sunset.
“I can tell you with certainty if I don’t win in November, I will never run again for anything,” Sussi said. “This is a oneshot deal for me.” wbush@gannett.com @Reporterbush