By Gregory Korte
The Cincinnati Enquirer

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The Cincinnati Bengals, bracing for a long court fight over Hamilton County's antitrust lawsuit alleging that the National Football League used its monopoly power to "extort" a new stadium from taxpayers, said Friday the team would countersue the county for millions.

"If you start pulling the string, I don't know where it stops," said Troy Blackburn, the Bengals' director of business development. "This is, realistically, a four-year litigation. It's going to get ugly. It's going to get expensive."

Blackburn and Bengals lawyer W. Stuart Dornette spoke to Cincinnati Enquirer editors Friday, two days after the county commission voted 2-0 to enter the year-old federal lawsuit. Republican Phil Heimlich joined with Democrat Todd Portune, a longtime critic of the stadium deal, to hire class-action lawyer Stan Chesley to represent the county.

Blackburn, in the team's first public statement since the county entered the $200 million lawsuit, acknowledged the Bengals hadn't taken the lawsuit seriously until Wednesday.

"Until this week, what were we supposed to do? Until this week, you had one voice at the county commission. Now it appears there are two. That's a majority. That's a sea change," he said.

"We have been too silent. We tried to work with the county, and not get into a political fight with Todd Portune - who the last time I looked was running for re-election in November."

The lawsuit claims that the Bengals and the NFL used high-pressure tactics - including well-publicized threats to move to Baltimore, Cleveland or Los Angeles - to get voters to approve a sales tax to pay for two new stadiums in 1996.

Blackburn said that if the county's suit moves forward, the Bengals would countersue to protect the team's interests. Among the team's possible claims: that the lease requires the county, not the Bengals, to pay $14 million in federal taxes on the sale of personal seat licenses. The team paid the taxes while the county fights with the Internal Revenue Serviceover the liability.

If the county loses the antitrust lawsuit, the lease agreement requires taxpayers to pay the Bengals' legal bills. And even if the lawsuit is successful, Hamilton County might accomplish nothing more than invalidating the 1997 lease.

"Do they really want to terminate the lease and start this whole thing over again? Is that where you want to be?" Blackburn said. "All the sudden this goes from being an ugly incident to a really ugly incident."

Portune said he would call the Bengals' bluff. "Nobody's going to buy that 'we're going to move to another town' stuff again," he said.

Portune first filed the lawsuit in 2002 as a taxpayer. When the Ohio Ethics Commission said the lawsuit conflicted with his job as a commissioner, he handed it off to Green Township activist Carrie Davis. U.S. District Judge S. Arthur Spiegel ruled last month that Davis had standing to bring the lawsuit and that the antitrust claims could proceed to trial.

That ruling could have national significance, allowing the county's lawyers to open up the books of the Bengals and the other 30 privately owned NFL teams. The league has long fought against any disclosure of a team's finances.

A 2001 Los Angeles Times story - which for the first time disclosed details of football's finances contained in a lawsuit between the Oakland Raiders and the NFL - is what kept Portune's lawsuit in the ballgame.

In his ruling last month, Spiegel said the plaintiffs could use the Times story to show that - contrary to the Bengals' assertions - free agency and profit-sharing had not cut into the team's profits.

More importantly, it was the 2001 story - and not the 1997 lease - that started the clock ticking on the four-year statute of limitations, Spiegel ruled.

Blackburn disagrees. He said the county - represented by the Chicago sports law firm of Rudnick & Wolfe - should have known about possible antitrust implications in 1996. After all, he said, the St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission filed a similar lawsuit against the former Los Angeles Rams in 1995. That lawsuit ultimately failed.

"The only difference is that we stayed. The Rams moved. It's the same claim," Blackburn said.

Blackburn said the county was making the Bengals a scapegoat for the downturn in the economy. With the lion's share of the county's sales tax going to pay the bonds on the $459 million Paul Brown Stadium, there's been little left to complete the promise of the central riverfront development known as The Banks.

"We are the size of an automobile dealership in Cincinnati. We really are a small company," said Blackburn, the son-in-law of Bengals owner Mike Brown. "If we're asked to be a backstop for the sales tax decreases, that's not something we can do. If they want another $5 million from us, we already paid it to Chad Johnson. We paid it to Carson Palmer. We paid it to our players, because our resources are going to win football games."

Blackburn blamed political leadership for the lack of riverfront development.

"We do such a good job of beating the snot out of ourselves in this town," Blackburn said. "If you want to build something on The Banks, and you see that the county is suing one of its major tenants, how would you deal with that?"

Indeed, the Bengals accused county commissioners of using the lawsuit as much to draw political attention as to recover damages the team allegedly owes.

E-mail gkorte@enquirer.com