Jeff Vanderbeek is a Wall Street millionaire and a pro sports franchise owner. It's hard to come up with a combination that could make somebody an easier target for scorn and ridicule.



Telemarketer and IRS agent?



Traffic cop and sidewalk mime?



Used-car salesman and Kardashian sister?



So while it took considerable courage to rush into a burning building to save a neighbor, Cory Booker didn't need much bravery to attack Vanderbeek. Booker called the Devils owner names belonging in a bad 1940s movie — honestly, who uses "huckster" in 2012? — and prattled on about broken commitments and a missing community center the city gave up without a fight years ago.

The mayor is hoping that his constituents, the ones in Newark now and maybe beyond in the future, see him as a tough guy. He better hope they don’t stop to ask the obvious question masked by the rhetoric here:

Where would this city be without the Prudential Center? Because, even more damning to the mayor, the natural follow-up is this: Where would the city be without the man who helped build it?

RELATED OP-EDS:

• Jeff Vanderbeek: Setting the record straight on Cory Booker's attacks

• Mayor Cory Booker: Devils owner let Newark down

Vanderbeek said last week that he regrets coming to Newark, that he should have listened to the cynics who told him to stay away. Some of that is posturing, too, because he didn’t exactly have a long list of alternatives. Nobody was rolling out the green carpet to get the Devils to Hoboken, for example.

But the city certainly shouldn’t have the same regrets. Vanderbeek, in spearheading the effort to build a world-class arena in downtown, has done more to help the infrastructure and image of Newark than nearly anybody in the past three decades.

Did he get a sweetheart deal? You bet. The $210 million from the Port Authority made this arena possible. But it’s hardly unique — right or wrong — for a city to make a public investment in an arena, and Vanderbeek wasn’t building his on Seventh and 33rd in Manhattan. He was taking a considerable risk, both for his hockey team and for his personal fortune.

That risk, after nearly five years, looks like it’s paid off more for the city than the man who took it. Newark has benefited from hundreds of jobs and, according to the Devils, more than $200 million pumped into the economy. But numbers can’t explain the impact of the building.

This is about the image. This is about millions of people coming into Newark and, for the many of them, leaving with a strikingly different opinion of the city than when they arrived.

I remember standing on Broad Street during the East Regional last March and watching them, fans from Ohio State and Kentucky and North Carolina, wandering around in their team colors. If they had one complaint, it was the weather. If they brought horror stories home, it was because their teams failed to reach the Final Four, not because of the city.

Booker knows this. "The big thing for us is the continued thawing of a reputation that's frozen in time," he told me then. "We are a city with exciting things going on, and these things are often overlooked because people think Newark is a place that just does not exist anymore."

So why attack the man who made it possible? Politics, probably, although Booker denies it. Hard feelings over losing in arbitration — a process the city initiated, by the way — although he denies that, too.

Booker’s beefs were mostly bogus. He’s right that Vanderbeek withheld payments for youth programs and job training programs, but the city was withholding money, too, from parking.

The mayor railed about Vanderbeek wiggling out of an agreement to build a community center, a provision that was taken out of the deal in July 2007. Three months later, the Prudential Center opened, and Booker declared Vanderbeek “a lifelong friend of mine, and more importantly … a lifelong friend of the city of Newark.”

His opinion is entitled to change, but if Booker is labeling Vanderbeek “one of the most despicable owners” in the NHL, we’ll just assume he’s too busy tweeting to keep up with the league. One team (Atlanta) moved last season (to Winnipeg), another (Nashville) is constantly threatening to do the same and yet another (Phoenix) doesn’t even have an owner. The NHL is running the team.

That doesn’t even list teams that are inept on the ice, like Edmonton, Toronto and the Islanders. The threat of bankruptcy still hangs over Vanderbeek — he has until July 1 to work out the team’s debt crisis — so his legacy could change in a hurry. Until then, Vanderbeek has presided over a successful and stable franchise.

But this isn’t about hockey. This is about the building that sits between Mulberry and Broad in downtown, and what it means to the city. No one has trumpeted that impact louder than the mayor.

Vanderbeek is a Wall Street millionaire who owns a pro sports team, and that makes him an easy target. His arena also has helped change the image of this city for the better. Not bad for a huckster.

Steve Politi: spoliti@starledger.com; twitter.com/StevePoliti