“This may escape Jay, but it’s the question of dignity,” says Cooke.
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Cooke doesn’t want to get into the details, but he notes that Mariotti, in his 17-year career at the Sun-Times, threatened to quit many times before. The paper always found a way to change his mind, and Cooke supposes it might have been able to find a way once again. “He gave us an opportunity to pull the trigger, which we’ve never done in the past,” says Cooke. “This time we pulled the trigger.”
So when Cooke received Mariotti’s memo that afternoon that said “I quit,” he had every reason to think, well, that’s convenient. With more on his mind than Mariotti, Cook wrote and emailed the following staff memo:
Mariotti’s salary is between him and the paper, but it undoubtedly represents a huge chunk of that $580,000. And so it was that Mariotti, instead of hearing back from Cooke, heard instead from a Sun-Times lawyer that his resignation had been accepted.
