As a disc jockey, Russ Oasis, CJ’73, got fired from nearly every job he had—for speaking his mind.

“I was very vocal about how radio stations should operate,” he says. “When I thought they were too sales-oriented, and not oriented enough toward programming, I would speak up.”

The strong opinions paid off. Oasis went on to own and operate several very successful radio stations in Miami and Fort Wayne, Indiana. “I buy and operate unsuccessful radio stations, build them up, then sell them,” he explains. “I’ve never owned a radio station that didn’t end up in the top three [in its market].”

“Russ knows radio in and out,” says Steve Avellone, national sales director for Cox Radio in Orlando and Oasis’s longtime friend and former business partner. “He’s been successful because he stands his ground. And most of the time, he’s right.”

“If you were to ask people I’ve worked with or competed against, they’d say I’m a radio guerilla-fighter,” Oasis says. “I take no hostages and will do anything necessary to win.”

He adds, “I will not take anything less than the very best.”

Oasis’s passion for radio began the day he arrived at Northeastern from his home in West Hartford, Connecticut. He’d signed up as a criminal justice major, figuring he’d become a criminal attorney or work for the Secret Service.

“But,” he says, “within an hour of my parents’ leaving me off at Hemenway Street, I walked over to the quad, where the student radio station [WNEU] was set up, and my whole idea of my life changed.”

In a few weeks, Oasis was on the air at ’NEU. “You would think that, going to Northeastern, criminal justice would be the cake, and the radio station would be the frosting,” he says. “But it turned out the radio was the cake.” As “Rusty Nale,” then “Rick Williams,” then under his own name, Oasis also worked DJ gigs in Keene, New Hampshire; Fitchburg, Massachusetts; New Haven; and Boston during his NU years.

After graduation, seeking a warm climate and a hot radio market, Oasis headed to Miami, where he hosted shows at various stations from 1973 through 1980.

But eventually Oasis got tired of getting fired all the time. With a colleague, he opened a radio advertising agency that became Miami’s third-largest all-around ad agency. By 1987, he’d earned enough to buy his first radio station, and in 1993 he sold the agency to devote himself full time to radio, concentrating on the Spanish-language market in South Florida.

How did a criminal justice major with no business background become so successful in radio? “It comes from knowing where the programming opportunities are in a market,” Oasis explains. “I saw that Spanish stations were being operated like the lame radio stations I had gotten fired from, and that if people were disciplined in their approach to broadcasting, they would win. And I won major.

“Being successful in radio is not about the music,” he adds. “People who go into radio because they love the music don’t make it. It’s about doing what makes your radio station get huge ratings.”

Luck stays on Oasis’s side, Avellone says. In 1992, after Hurricane Andrew knocked down the radio tower of Oasis’s first small station—located in Homestead, Florida, out of range of the lucrative Miami market—the FCC allowed him to move the tower to downtown Miami.

Before ten years were out, Oasis had made roughly ten times what he paid for the Homestead station, says Avellone, who, in partnership with Oasis, bought a Fort Wayne station that earned five times its original price in just two years. “Everything he touches turns to gold,” Avellone marvels. “That’s his life story.”

Oasis sold his two Miami stations to the Spanish Broadcasting System in 1997. Today, he owns one station, Fort Wayne’s WJFX-FM, devoted to hip-hop. He is a car aficionado—he owns about fifteen cars and races once a month in the Viper Racing League. And he stays on the lookout for new business opportunities.

“He’s a street-savvy businessperson with an in-your-face negotiating style,” says Avellone. “He’s like Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street, with that kind of ruthless business mind. He gets what he wants through sheer intimidation, if nothing else.”

“Russ is without question one of the most challenging people I’ve ever worked for,” says Tony Coles, regional vice president of programming for Clear Channel Communications in Oregon, who in 1991 was program director at WFWI, one of Oasis’s Fort Wayne stations. “That being said, there’s no way I would be [in my current position] had I not worked for him. He sets high standards for himself, and he expects those same standards from everyone who works with him. To me, the biggest mark of Russ’s success is not the amount of money he’s made or the power he’s gotten, but that those who have worked for his organizations tend to go on and have amazing careers.”

Oasis, adds Avellone, is actually “one of the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet. If you said that to a roomful of radio people, they’d say, ‘What? That guy’s one of the rudest people ever!’ But that’s just his business façade.

“Really, he has a wonderful heart.”

Ministry of Sound

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