News Archive
ARCHDIOCESE OF MIAMI IS LATEST OF MIAMI IS LATEST CLIENT TO LET WRAGG & CASAS HANDLE REPORTERS
Publication: The Miami Herald - Business Monday
Date: Monday, June 10, 2002
Author: Beatrice E. Garcia
When the going gets tough and the tough need help, Wragg & Casas is the public-relations firm in South Florida that often gets the call.
Its latest client is the Archdiocese of Miami, which is sorting through allegations of sexual abuse by priests in South Florida.
LARGE CASES: Leading Wragg & Casas are, from left, Otis Wragg, Ray Casas and Joanna Wragg, back row. The public relations firm has worked on the Florida Overland Express campaign and for the U.S. Sugar Corp.Its three name partners -- Otis and Joanna Wragg and Ray Casas -- have a knack for being in the thick of some of the most heated public-policy debates and most avidly followed news stories that have gripped this region in the 11 years since the firm was created:
- When Wayne Huizenga battled local governments and the Florida Legislature to win approvals for his mammoth Blockbuster Park development in the early 1990s, he brought in Wragg & Casas. The park never materialized.
- U.S. Sugar Corp., which has fought Everglades restoration legislation, is a long-time client.
- Sabretech, the now-defunct airplane-maintenance company linked to the 1996 ValuJet crash, tapped the PR firm when it faced criminal charges.
- Last year, Joanna Wragg represented Holy Cross Academy after a monk-in-training at the West Kendall school confessed to killing a nun and lobbed accusations of sexual abuse at the academy's founder.
- Florida's bullet train was axed by newly elected Gov. Jeb Bush in 1999. The four-company consortium that was bidding for the project wanted to draw some $70 million in annual state funding. So it hired Wragg & Casas to help reach legislators and transportation officials. In 2000, voters approved a constitutional amendment requiring the state to build a train linking the state's five largest metropolitan areas.
- When Gulliver Schools found itself thrust in the news after O.J. Simpson selected it for his two children, it turned to the PR firm to keep away the media crush.
All this played into the archdiocese's decision to hire Wragg & Casas two weeks ago. But there was also one more critical factor.
Wragg & Casas has helped with archdiocese outreach campaigns. It has also worked for other Roman Catholic organizations in South Florida, such as Mercy Hospital.
Plus, Casas has strong ties to the Catholic Church, both professionally and personally.
Casas, who was then working as executive vice president at the Hank Meyer public relations firm in Miami, helped coordinate the throng of media that descended on the region when Pope John Paul II came to visit in 1987.
He is also heavily involved in fundraising and educational activities for the archdiocese. In the past year, he served as chairman of the Archbishop's Charity and Development Drive, which brought in $8.6 million.
Says Otis Wragg: "I'm pleased to think that we're the most qualified firm in the city to understand the issues and help" the archdiocese.
"There's a comfortable level there," says Mary Ross Agosta, the spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Miami.
Agosta met Casas when he was coordinating the papal visit. The archdiocese hired the firm in 2000 to help develop an endowment drive.
The PR firm won't displace Agosta as the archdiocese's representative but rather will back up her, she says. They may also assist with the strategic planning and counseling.
"We're taking it one day at a time," Agosta says.
Some PR firms may not relish an assignment from any entity with ties to the Roman Catholic Church right now.
Wragg & Casas doesn't think that way.
"We like getting involved in complex and long-range issues," says Joanna Wragg.
Adds Casas: "We have an affinity for that type of work."
Wragg & Casas, which is the fourth-largest public relations firm in the state, turns down bids for celebrity PR. It shies away from the entertainment and tourism industries for the most part.
"When there's a complex issue and a law firm brings in a PR firm because it needs media advice, you don't want to bring in a firm whose last assignment was promoting a beer-drinking weekend on South Beach," says Otis Wragg.
One saving grace of such a strategy was that the firm wasn't caught up in the whole dot-com boom-and-bust cycle. While many other PR firms in town got stiffed as the cash began to fizzle out for the Internet wannabes, Wragg & Casas was spared because it didn't take on any of the tech clients.
In a way, the firm was born out of adversity.
Otis Wragg started his own PR firm in 1989 after he left General Development Corp., a Miami home builder embroiled in a federal investigation over its deceptive sales practices. Eventually, four top officials were convicted on fraud charges, which were later overturned by an appeals court. Wragg briefly served as a spokesman for the reorganized company.
When Ray Casas joined Wragg in 1991, the firm became Wragg & Casas.
Much of Wragg & Casas' business comes in by referrals -- from present and past clients, attorneys or community groups where they may have volunteered in the past.
"When we come to the table, we usually know someone at that table. We know the executives or the lawyers or both," Joanna Wragg says.
She says the firm's impartiality -- its ability to step away and view all of the opinions and issues surrounding a problem and listen to all the constituencies affected -- is one of its strong suits. Wragg adds that the firm's previous ties to the Archdiocese of Miami or Casas' work with the church shouldn't pose a problem.
"He's not a bishop. He's one of about a million lay Catholics in South Florida," says Joanna. "But he also happens to be more knowledgeable [about the archdiocese and these issues] than all of them."
"We've been hired to do a professional job. That's what we're going to do," adds Casas.
While the firm does do pro bono work for some nonprofit groups in town, the job for the archdiocese is not a freebie. Wragg & Casas is on retainer. Neither the firm nor the archdiocese would say what that fee is.
However, other PR professionals say that crisis management can be quite lucrative because of its all-consuming nature. The fees are usually 1 ½ to 2 times a firm's usual rate.
Roy Black, a Miami attorney who usually presents high-profile clients, often calls in Wragg & Casas to handle the media during a crisis. "They'll be over here in 20 minutes," he says. "They're good at making sure there's a response for reporters."
Black hired the firm to work with his client, Eller Media, which faced criminal charges of sloppy wiring after a 12-year-old boy was electrocuted on a rainy night in a bus shelter owned and maintained by the company. They came in quickly and developed a strategy for dealing with the media and the community, he recalls.
Some credit the firm's effectiveness in dealing with crises to the partners' deep ties in the South Florida community as well as their journalism training. All three have newspaper backgrounds.
"You can think like a reporter and you can preempt their questions," says Cori Zywotow Rice, a former journalist who runs Samcor, a Coral Gables PR agency recently purchased by Hill & Knowlton.
"It's a joke around here," says Joanna Wragg, that "we spend a lot of time teaching journalism" because very few executives have knowledge of how the media works.
"They demand fairness and accuracy for their clients," recalls Martha Musgrove, who as a former associate editor on the Herald's editorial board dealt with issues that affected Wragg & Casas' clients.
However, Joe Garcia, who served as a spokesman for Save Our Everglades -- the group on the other side of the Everglades restoration issue in 1996, recalls that Wragg & Casas "used a lot of tactics that I thought were unfair and mischaracterized" the facts in the battle to impose a penny-per-pound tax on Florida sugar.
The PR firm, which was representing U.S. Sugar Corp., took the line that the tax would be disastrous for the state's sugar industry.
Meanwhile, Wragg & Casas won't comment on precisely what strategy it will devise for its latest embattled client -- the Miami archdiocese -- or how many of its 20 staffers will be devoted to this project.
But outreach and openness are likely to be part of the plan.
"The general principle," says Joanna Wragg, is that "if you have to cut off a hand, it's better to do it all at one time than a finger at a time."