In Antony\u2019s mouth, the question was rhetorical. In Tallahassee and beyond, it has an answer, and everyone reading this knows what it is.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll get there. I promise.<\/p>\n But the town did love Jack once. And not without cause.<\/p>\n The sentiment I keep running into on social media, over and over, is that everybody has a Jack story.<\/p>\n It\u2019s true. And the stories are as wide as the Pinellas waterfront, from the deeply personal to deeply impactful public policy \u2014 which tells you something about the size of the man\u2019s footprint.<\/p>\n Jack Latvala was one of the ten or so most consequential figures in recent Florida political history. He built that standing without ever winning a statewide race, without ever becoming Governor, without ever claiming the Senate presidency he wanted so badly.<\/p>\n Think about how much harder it is to matter that much from where he sat.<\/p>\n Because none of us are obituary writers, we tend to frame someone else\u2019s death through our own perspective of them. I had hoped to avoid doing that here.<\/p>\n I can\u2019t.<\/p>\n On Wednesday afternoon, I called Jack out of the blue. It would be the first time we had spoken since Chris Latvala was hospitalized last year. I called to tell him he was a son of a bitch.<\/p>\n I meant it as a compliment. Mostly. Because everything I know about campaigning \u2014 almost every tool I am deploying right now to help my wife in her effort to elect Charlie Crist Mayor of St. Petersburg \u2014 I learned, in part, from Jack Latvala, some 25 years ago.<\/p>\n Hours later, he was gone.<\/p>\n That call, it turns out, was goodbye, full of gratitude.<\/p>\n Because there is no Florida Politics without Jack Latvala.<\/p>\n When this operation was still SaintPetersBlog, Jack was my very first campaign advertiser. Whatever you think of what I\u2019ve built, he\u2019s in the foundation.<\/p>\n I think back to my time at the Mallard Group, in 2002. By then I had taken over creating the firm\u2019s direct mail and ramped our output from 35 pieces in the 2000 cycle to more than 135.<\/p>\n This was a different printing era. A hundred and thirty-five mailers weren\u2019t oversized postcards you gang-ran in an afternoon; each one took a week to produce.<\/p>\n At the end of a long day right before the primary, my colleague Kathy Carroll looked at me and said, \u201cJesus Christ, you\u2019re just like Jack.\u201d<\/p>\n I assumed she meant our boss, Jack Hebert, who had worked for Latvala.<\/p>\n She didn\u2019t. She meant the Senator, hard-charging, tough, determined, not always easy to work with, but at the end of the day, someone who would fight for what he believed in and never be outworked by the competition.<\/p>\n I honestly don\u2019t know if I took it as a compliment, considering how tough Sen. Latvala was on me at that point in my life.<\/p>\n Jack was the first person to ever jam a pointed finger into my chest and demand I do something again, or better, which he did often, whenever the mail we designed for one of his clients fell short of his demanding standards.<\/p>\n And if I\u2019m being honest, Jack was almost always that way with me. He wasn\u2019t kind to me. I was never treated as well as others in his orbit, despite being one of his most public defenders and advocates.<\/p>\n And defend him I did.<\/p>\n I was such an ardent Latvala supporter during his war with Joe Negron for the Senate presidency that those in the rival camp offered to show me their tally of the secretive pledge cards<\/a> \u2014 documents so closely held the Senate refused to release them to the Tampa Bay Times \u2014 just to convince me my guy wasn\u2019t going to win.<\/p>\n For many, many months, I felt like I was the one running for Senate President.<\/p>\n That fight consumed the chamber for years, spilled into the 2015 redistricting mess, and ended with Jack conceding in exchange for the Appropriations gavel<\/a> \u2014 a perch, it should be said, from which he was arguably more powerful than the presidency would have made him.<\/p>\n Then came November 2017.<\/p>\n When POLITICO\u2019s Marc Caputo, Matt Dixon and Alexandra Glorioso reported that six women had accused Jack of groping and harassment<\/a>, I turned over editorial control of this outlet\u2019s coverage of the story to my colleagues.<\/p>\n I did it because, if I\u2019m being honest yet again, I was carrying water for Jack. I believed what he told me. I didn\u2019t want to believe what others were saying.<\/p>\n I remember embarking on a Disney cruise in December 2017. The last thing I did before the ship left the dock was talk to Sen. Latvala. He promised me it was his word against another person\u2019s, and that he would prevail.<\/p>\n Little did I know, a special master\u2019s report was about to detail a wave of stomach-churning allegations.<\/p>\n Retired Judge Ronald Swanson\u2018s 33-page report found probable cause<\/a> that Jack had repeatedly groped a Senate aide, and \u2014 through testimony and text messages \u2014 that he may have violated public corruption laws by trading legislative support for sex.<\/p>\n It was never his word against another person\u2019s. There were texts.<\/p>\n Soon thereafter, Jack resigned<\/a>, ending his Senate career and his campaign for Governor in the same stroke.<\/p>\n I can never forgive Jack for what he did.<\/p>\n Or for lying to me about it.<\/p>\n Rachel Perrin Rogers, who went public with her allegations in 2017 and later settled with the Senate for nearly $1 million<\/a>, posted something this week<\/a> that stopped me cold: \u201cJack Latvala did a great deal of good for his community and for the causes he believed in. This was a huge part of why myself and others stayed silent for so long about the bad acts. Reminder \u2014 two things can be true.\u201d<\/p>\n (An aside: it is incredibly magnanimous of Perrin Rogers to say that about the man. And in one of life\u2019s unbelievable twists \u2014 again underlining the strangeness of my role in all of this as the town crier \u2014 minutes after I hung up with Jack on Wednesday, Perrin Rogers sent me a beautiful note thanking me for my handling of her beloved son\u2019s passing. RPR\u2019s just incredible.)<\/p>\n Here is another confession. Part of me was relieved when Jack was taken off the public stage.<\/p>\n He was such a powerful political boss in this corner of Florida that it was difficult for the rest of us in local politics to maneuver around him. And his reach never really ended; his firm is working for Jim Large in the St. Petersburg mayoral race against Crist<\/a> at this very moment.<\/p>\n Had Jack not resigned, had he simply run for Governor and lost, he would have found his way onto the Pinellas County Commission, or otherwise remained enormously powerful.<\/p>\n Men like Jack don\u2019t retire. They get removed or exiled. Jack, somehow, managed both.<\/p>\n Understand, Jack and I were allies, but we were not friendly. I did not like the lecherous behavior. He did not care for the way I blur the lines between media and political operative.<\/p>\n When the Florida Phoenix debuted, he commented on Facebook about how happy he was to see real journalists working, no more having to deal with \u201cpay-to-play outlets.\u201d That was not a subtle dig, and it wasn\u2019t meant to be.<\/p>\n He would call and yell at me about my coverage of his post-scandal career, right down to the time I noted he was selling his house in Tallahassee. He didn\u2019t think that was news.<\/p>\n It was.<\/p>\n Scrolling through what has been written about Jack over the last decade, the coverage has not been kind. Deservedly so.<\/p>\n The comp that keeps coming to mind, believe it or not, is Pete Rose. The all-time hits leader, banned from the game he loved, dead before baseball got around to forgiving him<\/a>.<\/p>\n Jack did so much, in so many policy silos, and so much for Tampa Bay and Pinellas County in particular, that there should be buildings with his name on them, the way there are buildings all over this region named for Congressman C.W. \u201cBill\u201d Young.<\/p>\n Yet there never will be for Jack, just as Rose died waiting on a Hall of Fame that only reopened its doors once he couldn\u2019t walk through them.<\/p>\n And yet.<\/p>\n Because of the history Because of the battles we fought with and against each other, I am deeply saddened by Jack\u2019s passing.<\/p>\n Damnit, Jack and I had a weird relationship!\u00a0<\/p>\n The night I proposed to Michelle at Cassis, Jack showed up at the party. He was just out of surgery and could barely walk. I was so surprised to see him there. He told me he wouldn\u2019t have missed it for the world. The Tampa Bay Times even wrote it up<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n That was Jack. The same man who jammed a finger in my chest dragged himself out of a hospital bed to stand up at my engagement.<\/p>\n And I recognize that I have a particular responsibility, maybe a unique one, given what this publication owes him, to make sure this man\u2019s story is remembered as more than the scandal that knocked him down.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why I called him the Lion of the Senate. The moniker cuts two ways: there was the young lion, and then there was the old lion.<\/p>\n This was the Senator who spent decades defending state workers when his own party had stopped bothering, who fought prison privatization, who killed a pension overhaul<\/a> with the observation that state employees \u201chaven\u2019t had raises in six or seven years,\u201d and who, as Appropriations Chair, finally delivered those raises.<\/p>\n He\u2019s the Senator who sponsored the bill letting Florida\u2019s Dreamers, kids who grew up in our high schools<\/a>, pay in-state tuition, and dared his own party to stop him.<\/p>\n The Senator who built the state\u2019s dedicated beach renourishment program<\/a>. The Senator who fought for Florida Forever land-buying dollars.<\/p>\n He\u2019s the Senator who saved VISIT FLORIDA when the House wanted it gutted, dragging the fight into a Special Session<\/a> and walking out with $76 million for tourism marketing.<\/p>\n The Senator who cut taxes on manufacturing equipment because he wanted north Pinellas making things again, and who fought his own party\u2019s Public Service Commission appointee for being too cozy with the utilities and not cozy enough with ratepayers.<\/p>\n The Senator who quietly procured the money to build and outfit the Willa Carson Health and Wellness Center<\/a> in Clearwater\u2019s North Greenwood neighborhood, because his constituents there were forgoing healthcare entirely.<\/p>\n He\u2019s the Senator who steered millions to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium<\/a>, Winter the dolphin\u2019s home, including the $5 million that helped land the \u201cDolphin Tale\u201d sequel and everything it did for Clearwater tourism.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/2026-Hattaway-Web-Ads4.jpg\")
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