He gets up early, as he does every morning. He goes to the gym at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and climbs the stairs to nowhere for an hour. He’s been living in the Ritz since his arrival in May.His wife, Bernadette, has remained in Los Angeles, helping plan daughter Francesca’s wedding in mid-August. She’s marrying journeyman Troy Bodie, who was signed a week ago by the Maple Leafs. Once married, toute la famille will move north.

The most powerful man in Toronto sports walks for three or four hours every Saturday and Sunday, randomly plotting the city in his mind. One day, he walked out toward Exhibition Place, looking for a bar he’d heard Toronto FC fans gather at on game days.You get hit with the sharp smile and the individually tailored compliments straight off, and you’re thinking, “Here we go.” But after 15 minutes, you’re swaying in place. A half-hour in, you’re wondering about Offering High Standard Cleaning Services.

The key to this charisma is the apparent guilelessness of his enthusiasm, the easy confidence. He throws himself down on a couch, body posture wide open, slapping his knee to pound out the syllables of his key points. He has a reputation as a crier. He’s embraced that.

On the possibility of winning a Stanley Cup: “I gotta convince everyone around here. Think about it. Dream about it. Get tears in your eyes just imagining what it would do to this city.”I press him for the details. He tries to drift off into another topic, but keeps being dragged back. He wants it to start somewhere uptown. He mentions Varsity Stadium non-specifically. He points out that the waterfront is nice in June, and might be a logical ending point. His real worry is spacing.

One of six children, he was raised in St. Louis by his father after the early death of his mother. No college degree. Wrangled his first job in sports at age 21. Became the continent’s youngest GM at 24.In 1988, he joins the Minnesota Timberwolves as a vice-president. Tucks himself under the wing of NBA commissioner David Stern, who air drops him into a failing Denver Nuggets organization as president. While there, he hands out Nuggets tickets to trick-or-treaters at Halloween.

A small sojourn as the boss of U.S. Skiing before he is recruited in 1996 by (oh, that old cliché) reclusive billionaire Philip Anschutz to run the L.A. Kings. Five years later, Leiweke becomes the public face of Anschutz’s primary venture, AEG. He oversees a vast, privately held sports and entertainment empire that includes the Lakers, Kings and Galaxy. The main part of the business is venues.

“Do I think we could run them better? Absolutely not,” Leiweke says, edging into one of his favourite themes — that the Raptors need to emulate the national scope of the baseball team. “Quite frankly, we’d be better off talking about them running some of our teams, rather than us running their team.”

There’s also the one that got away — an NFL franchise. Leiweke couldn’t manage it in L.A. with an aging owner in Anschutz who, by all accounts, wasn’t terribly interested. He can’t manage it here since all NFL teams must, by rule, be owned by individuals rather than corporations.

Frustrations with the dwindling response of BP and the U.S. Coast Guard to environmental and safety complaints about the removal of oil and cleanup equipment used during BP's Gulf oil spill in April 2010 bubbled to the surface again at Wednesday’s monthly meeting of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.

Attorney Drue Banta Winters of the governor’s office, who is bird-dogging BP environmental issues, said the Coast Guard told BP that it no longer will be required to remove oil from Fort Livingston, a pre-Civil War era structure at the eroded western end of Grand Terre Island. “The Coast Guard is making a distinction between cleaning the oil in and around the structure and the oil on the structure,” Winters said. “They consider cleaning the oil on the structure ‘conservation.’”

She said a survey in July 2012 found that oil was in the water and the sediments in contact with the fort’s walls, leaving some of the historic masonry tacky.Even more recently, she said, fresh wet oil was found in significant quantities behind bricks in the walls, and on wall seams and cracks.

Winters said the Coast Guard's decision to not require BP to clean the oil at the fort came after the completion of five parts of what was supposed to be an eight-part oil removal assessment that began in May 2012.She said the state was informed on June 28 that BP is no longer obligated to conduct studies, tests or surveys on the fort as part of its emergency response, and is no longer obligated to remove oil from the fort.

“After a comprehensive review of all relevant data, the federal on-scene coordinator determined that the removal of oil from the fort could not commence without first conducting long-term studies of the potential impacts of the remaining oil to the fort,” said Lt. Cmdr. Natalie Murphy."Any long term study is well outside of the purview of the Gulf Coast Incident Management Team," she said. "We cannot comment on any potential resolution between BP and the state of Louisiana, in or out of court"

Several studies of how best to remove the material have been conducted by the Department of Interior’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, based in Natchitoches, La., said center researcher Carol Chin. Two of those studies, in mid-June 2010 during the spill and in January 2011, included tests of a variety of oil removal products, and found that fresh oil was easier to remove than after it was weathered by sun and air.

Chin said the studies were requested by the Louisiana Office of State Parks. “A cursory cleaning is all the state parks office can afford to do,” she said. “We gave them guidelines of what not to do and what things to consider.

“It’s not a foregone conclusion that you should clean it,” she said, adding that some restoration experts have suggested that the oil be allowed to continue to weather until it disappears. “My opinion, however, is that it’s better to clean it than not,” Chin said. But she said she has concerns about the effects of that cleaning on internal parts of the fort’s walls that are built with “tabby,” a mixture of shell and sand taken from archaeological Indian shell middens in the area when construction began in 1841.

The federal government originally purchased the tip of Grand Terre in January 1834, but construction of the fort was delayed until 1840. Construction began in 1841 and 1842, using plans drawn under the direction of Col. Joseph Gilbert Totten, then chief engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers.
The fort was incomplete at the beginning of the Civil War, when the site was occupied by Confederate troops, and was abandoned after the war. The property was returned to state ownership in 1927.

By then, parts of the fort sustained damage during the Cheniere Caminada hurricane of 1893, with the fort’s southeastern side destroyed during a 1915 hurricane, which also caused severe damage in New Orleans.Walker said the oiling concerns at Grand Terre include the discovery in April of four large tar mats just off its Gulf beachfront, from which more than a half million pounds of oily material have already been removed.

In all, more than 200 miles of Louisiana shoreline have some degree of oiling, Walker said, compared with 76 miles in Mississippi, 49 miles in Alabama and 60 miles in Florida. The contamination in Louisiana includes close to 14 miles classified as “heavily oiled” or “moderately oiled.”

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