John Rigas, founder of the former cable television giant Adelphia Communications Corp. and former owner of the Buffalo Sabres who went to prison in a federal fraud case after the collapse of Adelphia, died Thursday in Coudersport.
He was 96.
His death was confirmed by Thomas E. Fickinger Funeral Home Inc.
Rigas, who built Adelphia from the ground up, was granted compassionate release from a federal prison sentence in 2016 due to declining health, as he had bladder cancer that had spread to his lungs. At the time, attorneys said Rigas had approximately 6 months to live.
Rigas and his son, Timothy, were both indicted for bank, wire and securities fraud in 2002, convicted in 2004, and sentenced to 15 years in federal prison in 2005. After an appeal was rejected in 2007, Rigas and his son were ordered to report to prison, and a year later, their final appeal was struck down in federal court.
The family has maintained that the Rigases are innocent.
Rigas founded Adelphia in Coudersport. It was once the nation’s fifth-largest cable company, with more than 5 million customers in 31 states and Puerto Rico.
It was a business that he built from nothing, explained Donald Gilliland, contributing editor of The Hill and former managing editor of the Potter Leader Enterprise newspaper in Coudersport. Gilliland spent six months in New York City covering the Rigas trial for The Era and other area newspapers. Currently, he is a journalism professor at St. Bonaventure University.
“First, the past is the past. What happened, happened. I don’t think it serves anyone’s interest to relitigate the trial,” Gilliland said. Instead, he talked about his experience in getting to know John Rigas during the months spent in the courtroom.
There weren’t a lot of people who sat through the months-long trial, mostly just members of the Rigas family and a few members of the media.
“Very often there was an older, white-haired man who would sit all the way in the back,” Gilliland explained. “Oftentimes during breaks, John would go back and sit down next to this guy and they would chat and laugh. It was clear they were old friends.”
Curious, Gilliland approached the man. “He was an old cable guy. He had known John from the old days. He thought it might be nice for John to see a familiar face.”
Gilliland explained that when the Adelphia scandal hit, it was the company’s 50th anniversary. This man told Gilliland about Rigas’ hard work building the cable company from the ground up, and about the tremendous amount of work that had gone into it.
He described Rigas driving his own vehicle to other states and places to try to build a customer base, and “literally go knocking door-to-door to get customers. It’s easy to forget that.”
“It was a hell of a lot of work and John did it,” Gilliland said. “He literally built a cable company from scratch. By 2002 it was the fifth-largest cable company in the United States.
“John started out with ambition and entrepreneurial spirit and built something that hadn’t existed before, and he worked his tail off to do it.
“Whatever happened at the end, I don’t think that should overshadow it.”
Gilliland shared another observation from his months in the courtroom — Rigas was a kind and pleasant man.
“I got to know John at one of the lowest points of his life,” Gilliland said. “Courtrooms are not known for being particularly great places to strike up friendships. Yet as soon as there was a break, John would stand up and walk straight over to the reporters to chat.”
So much so, in fact, that the judge admonished the reporters for talking to the defendant, despite Rigas being the one to initiate conversation.
Gilliland said he keeps in touch with reporters from the trial, and “the reminiscences of John are always pleasant. He was friendly and chatty. He had a personality that was difficult not to like.
“The bottom line was he was a charming guy.”
Adelphia filed for bankruptcy after a seemingly off-hand admission by an executive, in March of 2002, that the company had more than $2 billion in off-book loans, not included in its annual Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The viability and net worth of the company were seen in an entirely different light in the wake of that disclosure.
Rigas was ousted from the board of directors. Adelphia spiraled down, and cable companies it owned were acquired by competitors.
Adelphia prosecutors had accused Rigas and others of using complicated cash-management systems to spread money around to various family-owned entities and as a cover for stealing about $100 million for themselves by using the company’s financial ledger like a personal piggy bank.
The Rigases involved were ordered to give up a major portion of their assets, but a bankruptcy judge later allowed some of them to retain several local companies “to make a living.” They formed Zito Media Communications, and have expanded repeatedly, now holding numerous cable franchises and providing internet services, digital phone and other communications services to corporate, municipal and school district customers.
Adelphia was sold to Time Warner and Comcast in April 2005 for $17.6 billion. In February of 2007, the former Time Warner call center in Coudersport closed, putting 500 people out of work. All told, losing the company meant the loss of 1,500 jobs in Coudersport.
Gilliland said one of Rigas’ legacies is that Coudersport is one of the most highly wired towns in the United States.
“What John was trying to do in terms of locating a major business in a rural area, I think, was forward-looking, to some extent ahead of its time,” he said. “Unfortunately, I don’t know that anyone in Potter County government has leveraged the infrastructure they have as much as they could have.”
There’s fiber optics in place all over the community. With working remotely so much more prevalent after the pandemic, Rigas literally laid the groundwork to make Coudersport a thriving community, Gilliland said.
“Because there’s fiber all over Coudersport, there’s all kinds of business that could operate out of that town if the (government) had the wherewithal to recruit them,” he said.
John Rigas was born in Wellsville, N.Y., in 1924, to Greek immigrants, James and Eleni Rigas.
Known as an entrepreneur from early on, Rigas began as a shoe-shine man in Wellsville before introducing Texas hots — chili-topped hotdogs — to the community in 1921.
After serving in the U.S. Army in World War II, he returned to Wellsville and enrolled at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., studying engineering. He took a job with Sylvania in Emporium.
In 1952, he started his first business venture, buying a movie theater in Coudersport. The Rigas cable television enterprise first started in Coudersport when the family purchased the town’s TV cable franchise. Always looking to grow his company, Rigas had teamed with his brother Gus to start Adelphia after buying out his partners.
They borrowed heavily to buy more and more suburban cable companies and avoided city franchises. Eventually, Adelphia became the largest cable provider outside Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and South Florida and had systems reaching more than 30 states and more than 5.6 million customers.
Adelphia also launched product lines such as high-speed cable Internet service and long-distance telephone service.
Rigas had owned the Buffalo Sabres franchise of the National Hockey League. Following his arrest, the NHL stripped him of his authority over the Sabres. After more than a year as a ward of the league, the franchise was purchased by Tom Golisano.
