Iowa sports radio pioneer Marty Tirrell emerges as alleged scam artist with multiple victims
Mark Emmert 1 day ago
© Provided by USA Today Sports Media Group LLC Marty Tirrell
In his days of living large, Marty Tirrell made no effort to conceal what money could buy an audacious New England transplant in an unassuming place like Des Moines.
Tirrell, who was drawing a six-figure sponsorship from Toyota of Des Moines for his weekday sports talk radio show, traveled in high style from 2009-12. He would stay only in hotel suites as he hopped from one major sporting event to another. He outfitted himself exclusively with clothing purchased from a tiny Iowa department store. His cars were always new. His gambling was extravagant.
“Everything he did was in excess,” said John McDermott, Tirrell’s friend and radio partner for those four years. “You’d look in his car and there’d be four shirts from Von Maur, with the price tags still on. Two pairs of shoes. He’d have $4,000 worth of stuff in his car that he’d never worn yet.”
The money bankrolling that lavish lifestyle? It didn’t always belong to Tirrell, according to numerous court judgments against him. Ultimately, similar accusations landed him in a substance abuse treatment facility awaiting trial on six charges that he defrauded eight people out of $1.5 million. By the time the law caught up with Tirrell this winter, he was living in his car.
TIMELINE: Marty Tirrell's time in Des Moines — and the court system
The Register contacted 36 people involved in Tirrell's court cases dating to 1998, and spoke to 16 of them for this story. In central Iowa alone, civil judgments against Tirrell total about $2 million, most of which has not been recovered. That doesn't count his bankruptcy attempts or matters settled out of court.
Now, for the first time, the self-proclaimed "Mouth of the Midwest" is facing criminal charges.
Tirrell’s trial is scheduled to begin Sept. 9 after his court-appointed lawyer, B. John Burns III, got a five-month delay to prepare. Tirrell, 59, faces up to 30 years in prison.
The Register's attempts to contact Tirrell for this story were unsuccessful. His last known phone number rings to a recorded message noting he is "not available." Nor did he respond to messages left on social media. The public defender's office, which is representing Tirrell in his upcoming trial, declined to comment on the pending case and refused to make him available for an interview.
Tirrell arrives in Des Moines market: 'There was a niche audience that just ate it up'
Tirrell grew up in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and told friends like McDermott that he knew he wanted to talk about sports on the radio from the time he was a toddler. It showed.
Tirrell brought his shrill style to Des Moines in October 1995 as the station manager at a low-watt country music station in Indianola. Tirrell rebranded 1490 AM "The Jock" and labeled himself “The Mouth of the Midwest,” even though he had just arrived in the region.
There was no arguing “The Mouth” part, though.
On June 24, 1996, Tirrell teamed with Ken Miller to launch central Iowa's first sports talk radio show. Tirrell, never drawing on a script, would opine on any sports matter that came up, showing a deep knowledge of the most arcane facts while also acting as a contrarian at all times.
"When the mic was on, he could flip a switch and he could do his whole act,” said veteran broadcaster Geoff Conn, who once worked with Tirrell. “There was a niche audience that just ate it up and loved it. He was good on the air.” McDermott came to think of Tirrell's on-air persona as a staged attempt to appear more exuberant and charismatic than he actually was.
Off the air, McDermott encountered a different Tirrell.
"He could be so charming, but it was weird because if you listened to him in a weak moment, he was always filled with anxiety, depression," McDermott said. Tirrell’s radio programs, and there were many over the years, required him to find advertisers. This was another talent of his. He would go door-to-door to local businesses asking for money in exchange for touting their services on the air.
But Tirrell also quickly showed he was not always going to stop with advertising. He would occasionally become a customer of a business, and then fail to pay his bill, court documents reveal.
In 1998, for example, he bought a plane ticket from Odyssey Travel and Convention Services in Altoona, which had been advertising on his show. The check he paid with bounced. The company had to take Tirrell to court to recover the $1,119. That ended the relationship.
“I was just scared I was going to lose all my money,” Odyssey Travel owner Norma Bettis said, easily recalling the details of her run-in with Tirrell 20 years later.
It was one of many lawsuits Tirrell became involved in — and the dollar amount wasn’t always so small.
CIT Charters Inc. in Ames won a $4,559 judgment against Tirrell in 2014. He walked into the doors of that company looking for a bus to take listeners of his show to two Green Bay Packers games.
“We totally, as an organization, got starstruck,” CIT Charters owner John Grzywacz said. “Because he’s throwing out his connection to ESPN and, of course, he said he’d mention our name on the radio every once in a while."
Tirrell never paid for the buses. Grzywacz sued, knowing he’d be unlikely to recover the money.
“When this stuff happens, you’ve got to get it out there so the next guy that’s like me doesn’t get hurt,” Grzywacz said.
Grzywacz feels sorriest for one of his bus drivers. On one of the trips, Tirrell took the group into the gift shop at Lambeau Field and suggested that he would buy everyone souvenirs. When it came time to pay, Grzywacz said, Tirrell pulled the ultimate cheapskate move: He claimed he had left his wallet on the bus. He talked the driver into paying, and never reimbursed him.
“I get it. You scam a business, we should have been smarter. We had protocol procedures in place that we didn’t follow,” Grzywacz said. “But to scam a guy that’s trying to serve you and your group and create a memorable experience? That’s low.”
Poster Comment:
When the money system is based on debt, it is sometimes easy to scam people out of their hard earned dollars.