Learn a lesson from this: the people that smile all the time…

NY- They were so over-the-top, so strange and abusive, that Diane Bosshard used to gather her staff into her office just so they could hear the rants for themselves. Isiah Thomas would be on the other end of the conference calls, threatening and screaming at the general managers of the Continental Basketball Association.

“I wasn’t supposed to let them listen, but I just had to have someone hear this,” she says.

Thomas, who bought the league in 1999 and said he was going to turn it into a “Microsoft for basketball,” would curse and threaten to “kick asses” if the teams from Sioux Falls, La Crosse, Boise and other small cities didn’t see things his way.

“He ruled with intimidation,” says Bosshard, who owned the La Crosse (Wis.) Bobcats with her husband Bill before selling to Thomas. “It was just like, ‘If I swear enough or if I act like I’m tough enough you’re going to back down.'”

In her brief time with Thomas, Bosshard says she never saw anything similar to the sexual harassment allegations made in former Knicks executive Anucha Browne Sanders’ recently filed lawsuit. But the part about Thomas’ temper and choice of words? That hit home, she says.

“When you hear (allegedly) this was said and this was done, I had a lot of compassion for her,” Bosshard says of Browne Sanders. “The tone of what was said, the words that were used… it was very familiar.”

In the lawsuit, Sanders says, “Contrary to Thomas’ carefully cultivated public persona, he is capable of ‘abhorrent behavior in private,'” and several former CBA officials say they saw such behavior during Thomas’ 18 months in charge of the league.

“Just the rudest person that I have ever run into in my entire life,” says Rich Coffey, the former GM of the Fort Wayne (Ind.) Fury and now the owner of the Fort Wayne Freedom in the Arena Football League. “He’s a very poor business person. He doesn’t listen to people. He’s always right. He makes poor decisions, and I’m talking about the CBA in particular.

“Who he listens to are people who tell him what he wants to hear. The fact that he’s still in basketball and running the Knicks just astounds me.”

In his short tenure as the owner of the CBA, Thomas had hoped to build it into a massive enterprise that might serve as an official minor league to the NBA. Instead, he lost between $5 and $7 million, made very few friends and ran a 55-year-old league into bankruptcy just as he left to become the head coach of the Indiana Pacers. Most of the old owners and a few new ones bought the league out of Chapter 7and revived it.

“The (CBA) owners got their money back, but then there are the employees, the players and the fans who are season ticket holders who got nothing. I worked three or four months without pay after I had worked (with the Fury) for 10 years,” says Coffey, a father of four. “You had the Sioux Falls, Boise and Fort Wayne franchises subsidizing the other (six) teams. They had to put up about $700,000. When I bought the Freedom four years ago, the first thing I said at a press conference with fans was, ‘Isiah Thomas is not involved.'”

There were cheers from the crowd.

That Thomas now runs the show at the world’s most famous arena is mind-boggling to the people he crossed paths with during the CBA debacle.

“I shook my head when I saw (that the Knicks had hired Thomas as their president). I thought, ‘Geez. Maybe he can coach. We certainly know he can play – he’s got a good basketball mind. But why would somebody not check into his business references?'” says Bill Ilett, the owner of the Idaho Stampede.

Bill Bosshard had the same reaction.

“Ownership egos are unbelievable. They want to rub bellies with sports guys, Isiah and these guys. They don’t bother to check a guy’s background. They look at the foreground, and the foreground’s a guy’s name and a smile,” he says. “It’s amazing how enthralled these guys can be – whether here or in Indiana or in New York, it’s all the same.”

Brendan Suhr, brought in by Thomas as the current Knicks’ director of player personnel, was the CBA’s director of basketball operations during Thomas’s ownership tenure and has a different take. He says he doesn’t understand why people like Ilett and Coffey are critical of Thomas.

“He’s a piece of cake to deal with,” Suhr says of Thomas. “We ran a very good business. And the New York Knicks are one of the great franchises in professional sports.

“I think the way we’re running the business – we’re not proud of our won/loss record – but I’ll tell you what, our business record is very strong. What leaders do, they define reality every day and then they create hope and optimism for the people that work for them.

“That’s what (Isiah) did (with the CBA).”

When Thomas first approached the nine CBA clubs about selling, several readily agreed and thought his name and contacts could make the league a gold mine. Under his proposal they would sell control but retain some ownership, with the promise of big paydays in the future. A few held out, however, saying they didn’t think Thomas had a sufficient plan to run the league.

When the Bosshards finally sold, Diane stayed on as general manager, the only owner to do so. Former Celtic Dennis Johnson was then the team’s coach, and Bosshard says he warned her and her husband that Thomas was “not the person you want to go into business with.”

Johnson, now coaching the NBA’s developmental league team in Austin, Tex., didn’t directly answer when asked whether he recalled saying that. “Inside their dealings (with Isiah), I don’t know,” he told the Daily News. “All my business dealings with him have been court-wise.”

Diane Bosshard says she was charmed by the Thomas she first met.

“There’s an Isiah in front of cameras, and another behind closed doors. It really blew me away,” she says. “Very handsome, well-spoken, three-piece suit, the smile, the (Thomas) that says ‘everything’s great because if I’m going to put my name on it there’s no problem whatsoever, trust me and we’re in this together.’

“We went from the very well-spoken Isiah to the Chicago Isiah that kind of got the lingo going and every other word was a swear word, and ‘This is how it’s going to be.’ I thought, ‘Oh my god…’ I don’t think we have as many f-words and swear words here.”

Bosshard spoke to an issue that several CBA executives mentioned, a culture clash between an African-American celebrity raised on the rough streets of Chicago and the white, small-town residents he encountered.

But the real problem, Diane Bosshard says, was that Thomas never had a business plan to speak of, which made his business style untenable.

“(The owners) wanted to see a business plan. He was so mad about them not trusting him. He was going on and on about how this is all built on trust, cursing every other word,” she says. “It wasn’t like we were going to say, ‘Okay, you win because you swore more than everybody else.'”

Ilett says Thomas did give them a plan, but there wasn’t much to it.

“Did I look at an 80-page business plan? No. Did I look at an executive outline the way it was going to go? Yes,” he says. “(Thomas’) original thought was not to change very much, but to expand it tremendously.”

Almost as soon as the changes were made, the league ran into trouble. Thomas hired marketing experts at $30,000 a month and paid Gallup $400,000 to do a survey on the CBA’s management practices. League executives were astonished.

Coffey says he asked how Thomas could afford to expand the league’s budget by $2.3 million and was told he would make it up from national sales (which never materialized).

“A few of us said, ‘Hey, this isn’t going to work.’ To which his answer was, ‘It is going to work and if you don’t like it, quit.’ Or ‘I’ll fire you,'” Coffey says.

Ilett says he and Thomas might have gotten off to a bad start because Ilett was one of the owners not eager to sell, but whatever the cause he soon found out Thomas was not all smiles.

“He tends to do business just like he played basketball,” he says. “He’s very clever and cunning and friendly until the rubber hits the road. And then he can really bow his back up and get pretty ornery and hard to get along with when he doesn’t get his way. It would go from us being best friends to him calling me a little bit ethnic-related names.”

Several CBA owners say they saw a competitive streak in Thomas that was relentless, making it impossible for him to compromise or listen to other opinions.

“He came to Boise when we were turning the ownership over to him. We did it at a Boys and Girls Club, which he is a former member of,” Ilett says. “After the press conference, he met with some children. He was giving the old owl-eye smile that Isiah is good at when answering questions, and one little girl in the back of the room put up her hand and said, ‘Isiah, why didn’t you bring Michael Jordan with you?’ Immediately, I could see his whole personality change and he actually went cold shoulder to the whole situation and finished it up and wandered out of there.”

Current and former owners still can’t believe Thomas turned down an offer to sell the league to the NBA for reportedly $2 million more than he paid.

“He bought (CBA) for like, $10 or $11 million. He then went to a Wall Street firm and decided he wanted to do an IPO and told (David) Stern he could buy it back, but it would be $30 million,” Coffey recalls. “Stern said, ‘Hell, I’ll start my own league.'”

When the national sponsorships failed to materialize and the league ran out of revenue, Thomas accepted the job with the Pacers, put the league in a blind trust, sent a fax to the clubs that the league had ceased operations, and was gone, leaving more than $4 million in debts.

And as hard as it was to see their league fold, Diane Bosshard says, “You almost took some pride in the whole thing failing because you really didn’t want to see it succeed with what was going on in the background.”

The worst part, she says, was dealing with business owners and season-ticket holders in La Crosse who felt abandoned.

Adds her husband Bill, “And then he reappears at the Garden. It was amazing to me. And the world goes ’round.”