Standing on the corner of Wylie Avenue and Elmore Street in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, Franco Harris looks across the street at the names of jazz legends etched on the Legacy senior building—Billy Eckstine, Erroll Garner, Earl “Fatha” Hines—and starts nodding his head.

UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT—Members of the group that bought the Crawford Grill in February include, from left: Robert Meeder, Greg Spencer, Jules Matthews, Victor Rogue, Dwight Mayo, Franco Harris and William Generett.

“This is a good corner,” the Hall-of-Famer said. “You stand here and your head just starts bopping up and down. This is such a historic site that the preservation and history of it has to live on. So the question is, how do we do that? Well, the first step is to buy this building—so we did.”

The building Harris is referring to is the Crawford Grill, a Hill mecca for jazz that closed in 2003. He is among a group of four private investors and three nonprofits that purchased the property in February. The others include Randall Industries founder Greg Spencer, Transportation Solutions owner Dwight Mayo, former Fisher Scientific CEO Bill Recker; Pittsburgh Gateways, The Keystone Innovation Zone and The Hill House Economic Development Corp.

Last week U.S. Magistrate Judge Lisa Pupo Lenihan ruled that a state law allowing for faster firings of management-level school employees was unconstitutional. Though this decision could have future implications, it came as a direct result of a lawsuit filed by Dwight Mosley, Ph.D., in November 2007.

DWIGHT MOSLEY

Mosley, a graduate of Westinghouse High School and the University of Dayton where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D., was fired from his position as the director of recruiting and staffing with the Pittsburgh Public School District Aug. 23, 2007. He filed a lawsuit against the district on the grounds he did not receive due process when he was terminated.

When hired, his title was slots manager, but that was only because the Rivers Casino hadn’t been approved for table games. That approval is expected shortly from the Gaming Control Board, meaning Corey Plummer is the Rivers’ new vice president of gaming, the highest ranking African-American in the company.

COREY PLUMMER

Plummer served as the vice president of slots at Red Hawk Casino in Shingle Springs, Calif., prior to joining Rivers Casino. He has broad management experience having worked for Aristocrat Technologies, Inc., opened Native American properties and managed gaming and casino marketing domestically and internationally. He also held executive positions with SKYCITY Casinos in Australia and New Zealand. Plummer began his career in the gaming industry with Harrah’s Entertainment.

Polls that show him trailing in his race to unseat U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter don’t matter to U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, nor do the polls saying he’d lose to Republican candidate Pat Toomey if he somehow managed to defeat Specter in the May primary election. What matters, he says, is integrity.

OPPORTUNITY OR OPPORTUNIST—That, says U.S. Senate candidate Joe Sestak, is the choice Democratic primary voters face between him and incumbent Sen. Arlen Specter.

“There is an absolute lack of trust in politicians by the public and Arlen Specter epitomizes that lack of trust,” Sestak told the New Pittsburgh Courier editorial board. “He’s shown time and again, he’ll do anything to keep his job. I think you should stand or fall on your convictions, which is why I’m not running to keep my congressional seat.”