Gus Russo is the author of The Outfit: The Role of Chicago's Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America and Live by the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK. He is an investigative reporter who has worked for various major television networks, including PBS, where he was a lead reporter for the award-winning Frontline series.

As with any book of this scope, Supermob owes its existence in no small degree to the work of predecessors, in this case a dedicated group of gadfly journalists who for decades strove to call attention to the vaporous world of Sid Korshak and company. Among those deserving special kudos for their exceptional reportage are: Lester Velie, Jack Anderson, Ovid Demaris, Ed Reid, Art White, Robert Goe, Jack Tobin, Sandy Smith, W. Scott Malone, Dan “The Bat” Moldea, Dick Brenneman, Dennis McDougal, Ira Silverman, Sy Hersh, Jeff Gerth, Denny Walsh, Dave Robb, Alan Block, and Constance Weaver, every survivor of which helped guide me through the quagmire, often digging out long-stored-away files for my use. In this regard, special thanks go to Moldea, McDougal, and Robb, who unselfishly loaned me their voluminous files.

Additional colleagues who made meaningful contributions include Jim Grady, Bill Thomas, David Ashenfelter, Don Barlett, Tony and Robbyn Summers, Connie Bruck, Carol Felsenthal, and Julie Payne. A very busy Garry Trudeau made time to dig out his old Korshak file and send it to me, and the iconic network investigative producer Ira Silverman took me into his confidence during numerous lunches at D.C.'s Woodside Deli.

Once again, I was fortunate to benefit from the graphic expertise of a great friend, Steve Parke of What?design. Regrettably, the reader will never know the extent of Steve's brilliant and subtle touch in rescuing many damaged photographs.

Invaluable institutional help came from many quarters: At the Library of Congress's Legislative Archives, Matt Fulghum and Bill Davis always responded promptly to my many requests; likewise, Steve Tilley, Martha Wagner Murphy, Marty McGann, and Fred Romanski opened many new files at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland; Jeanette Callaway and Lee Lyons gathered reams of documents (and trusted me with the keys to the legendary storage basement) at the Chicago Crime Commission, a national treasure of organized crime history; Joe Eagan, Doug Adolphsen, and the staff of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Library were, as always, cheerfully helpful; at the Spertus Institute in the Chicago Jewish Archives, reference librarian Dan Sharon and director Joy Kingsolver made countless great research suggestions; Doug Moe, columnist for the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, provided details of Korshak's undergraduate years, as did David Null of the University of Wisconsin Alumni Association; Norman Schwartz of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society contributed files and interview suggestions; Chris Driggs of the Nevada state archives conducted file searches on key Las Vegas players; and Gloria Ralph McKissic of the FBI's Freedom of Information section helped deliver on my numerous requests for file openings.

We gypsy journalists are often at the mercy of friends made on the road, kindred spirits who open local doors for us, introduce us around, feed us, and sometimes offer their guest rooms. In Vegas, Ed Becker, Hal Rothman, Eve and Ted Quillin, and John Neeland were among the most gracious. In Chicago, I was welcomed by informed friends such as Jim Agnew, Andy Kolis, Bob McDonnell and Antoinette Giancana, Roy Suzuki, Joe Marchetti, Julius Draznin, Jim Johnsen, Michael Glass and Marie Beckman, and Rich and Judy Lynn Samuels. As always, great friend Jack Clarke made time to give countless suggestions, even while dealing with serious health issues.

In Los Angeles, the friendship and encouragement of Jeff Silberman, Steve Molton and Pamela Galvin, Bob Harris, John Leekley, and Lynn Hendee made the City of Angels feel like it actually deserves its nickname. In Pioneertown, Pappy & Harriett's provided a great space to kick up my heels, tie up my horse (right), while staring at desert stars and pondering the cosmic relationship between Sid Korshak and Gram Parsons.

Other pals hither and yon who were always available included Laurence Learner, Captain Alberto Miller, Dan Smith, Steve and Janet Nugent, Kevin Perkins, John and Ellen Bollinger, and the late Mike Corbitt. The Russo extended and nuclear families are a constant source of love, support, and lasagna.

Freelancers such as myself, accustomed to occasional periods of professional inactivity (aka poverty), have a habit of never turning down work, often taking on multiple projects in anticipation of future periods of drought. As fate would have it, when this daunting project began in early 2003, I simultaneously found myself pulled in six directions at once: writing this book, reporting and/or cowriting two ninety-minute investigative news documentaries, cowriting a book with goodfella Henry Hill, developing a complex motion picture script, and writing a book proposal for actor Vin Diesel. Each of these projects was so appealing that I decided to do them all—obviously I would need some help. Thus, for the first time, I reached out to the local schools to see if anyone wanted to help with the smothering workload. It was a delegating move that initially frightened me, but it turned out to have been something I should have done years ago.

Before the first intern came aboard, I was already receiving documents and guidance from Beverly Hills native Sara Stanfill. Sara's insider knowledge of the social connections of the Hollywood power elite was crucial to starting this book research with the proper mind-set. The first student intern to come to my rescue was Towson University's Justin Smulison, whose energy, wit, and intelligence were priceless. Justin brought aboard three of his journalism classmates, Rachel Kneppar, Jason DuPont, and Chris Blackmon, to help transcribe over 150 interviews. Their work was meticulous and timely.

From the University of Maryland came the invaluable assistance of Claire Patterson, Jason Rivlin, and Frank “Nitti” Butcher. Claire took on the thankless task of reading and creating database summaries of the thousands of records and news articles I was obtaining (some twenty crates of material). After Claire's graduation, Jason completed the databasing chores (and some house- and dog-sitting), before Nitti showed up to make frequent trips to the Library of Congress, where he surveyed ancient newspaper microfilm and photo holdings. When time came to archive the material, Jonathan Scott Fuqua, a local friend and writing colleague of renown, introduced me to Emily Moy and Zack Wilson, two of his standout creative writing students at Baltimore's Carver School, a magnet high school for the city's best students. Emily and Zack went file by file to create an Excel spreadsheet that was critical to sourcing. To all of these volunteer assistants, I give a huge thanks. This book, and the other projects completed during this hectic period, would have been impossible without them. I hope I can open some doors for you in the future.

No investigative book could exist without the cooperation of knowledgeable people who agree to give interviews, even those who speak only on background. I appreciate my interviewees' faith that I would not take their quotes out of context, or, in some cases, betray their anonymity. I hope they are happy with the final result.

Thanks again to Noah Lukeman, who worked hard to find a home for Supermob, and, as a literary agent who truly cares about his authors, negotiated a sterling contract. At Bloomsbury, I am beholden to publisher Karen Rinaldi for showing continued faith in my work; managing editor Greg Villepique; copy editor Steven Boldt; indexer Judith Hancock; Panio Gianopoulos, who contributed an informed and brilliant line edit; as well as Amanda Katz and Yelena Gitlin, both of whom I want to thank in advance for turning Supermob into a best-selling, prize-winning epic with the global impact of The Da Vinci Code and the Bible combined.

Supplying the all-important background music this time around were Brian Wilson, Count Basie, Richie Furay, Kate Bush, Django Reinhardt, Mark O'Connor's Hot Swing Trio, Donald Fagen, Stevie Wonder, Dan Hicks, Shirley Horn, Matt Bianco, and Dean Martin.

Deepest thanks of all go to Scout and Mrs. Teasdale, steadfast companions I was honored to know.

Finally, a very special thanks goes to anyone I've forgotten. I hope you'll understand—I'm really exhausted.

FADE IN
Beverly Hills. Present day.
INT STARBUCKS on BEVERLY DRIVE
At separate tables, a gaggle of aspiring screenwriters sip on their Frappuccinos as they ponder the next line to tap into their Mac iBooks. They all have a friend who has a friend whose sister works at Universal, or DreamWorks. They've all heard who is looking for new product and they aim to deliver. So here they sit, day after day, until they type the words FADE OUT on page 120 of the third draft of the mother of all screenplays. With any luck, they might soon actually live in Beverly Hills.

OVER THE LAST DECADE, a supposedly new type of office has emerged, wherein young entrepreneurs park themselves in a public coffee shop or restaurant for the better part of the day, as they work their cell phones and iBooks. With their Wi-Fi Internet connections, these “Laptopias” offer up-and-comers, whom the Baltimore Sun recently labeled the New Professionals, a more pleasant, and relatively low-cost, headquarters from which to launch their careers.¹ Little do they realize, the restaurant/office is nothing new—it was perfected, if not invented, by a shadowy man who plied his trade just two blocks from the Beverly Hills Starbucks, in The Bistro on Canon Drive. But this trailblazer never wrote a movie, and he never had to worry about someone's sister who used to work for a studio. He was on a first-name basis with the moguls themselves and could start up or kill movie productions with a quick call from one of two phones installed at his personal table at the restaurant.

In Hollywood, he was known as The Myth; his birth name was Sidney Roy Korshak, and his incredible reach said as much about his heritage as it did about the man, for Sid Korshak merely had to call one of a dozen men with whom he'd grown up on Chicago's West Side (and whose parents all hailed from a small parcel in the Russian West). In their lives, they accomplished the impossible, overcoming fierce anti-Semitism, making complex alliances with notorious underworld bosses, and emerging victorious, reinvented, and relatively unscathed in America's Garden of Eden, Beverly Hills, California.

Their common story began in Russia.

In 1791, Russian empress Catherine the Great established the Pale of Settlement. Meant as a territory for Russian Jews to live in impoverished sequestration from the rest of their countrymen, the encampment comprised the territories of present-day Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Poland. Jews living in the villages, or shtetls, of the Pale paid double taxes and were forbidden to lease land or receive higher education. After a brief period of liberalization in the 1860s, the restrictions were revisited with an even more vulgar ferocity, introducing a vile new word into the lexicon: pogrom.

The 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II by radicals gave the Russian government, and the anti-Semitic factions within it, the excuse to crack down. The Encyclopaedia Judaica defines pogrom thus: “A Russian word designating an attack, accompanied by destruction, the looting of property, murder, and rape.” After the assassination, and instigated by the government's resultant “May Laws,” the Russian military carried out a wave of such pogroms, spreading throughout the southwestern regions. Two hundred state-sanctioned terror attacks took place in 1881 alone. In Kiev, home of the Korshak family, dozens of Jewish men were murdered, their houses looted, daughters raped, and almost a thousand families ruined financially. It is not surprising that such villainy left a powerful imprint in the collective memory of all who survived it. It would manifest itself in the West as a hunger for real estate, financial success, and higher education. The emphasis was on mind over muscle. Indeed, no other people valued education more than the Russian Ashkenazic Jews. To learn was a religious duty, and nothing was lower than ignorance, a belief that inspired a popular ghetto slogan: “Better injustice than folly.” As Rabbi Edgar F. Magnin, founder of L.A.'s predominantly Jewish Hillcrest Country Club, was quoted: “We are Jews. We are a minority and a lot of people don't like us. We don't have to kowtow to anybody. We don't have to be weak … but we must use our heads. We are a very, very tiny minority in a tremendous majority.”²

* * *

In the years 1882-93, Tevye and Bella Korshak, whose surname meant “kite,” began sending their six sons to the western land of opportunity known as the United States, where they joined the wave of immigrants that hit American shores within months of the pogroms. After the requisite first landing at Ellis Island in New York, many proceeded farther westward, establishing their second settlement in America's Second City, Chicago. These arrivals were overwhelmingly young, but included a larger percentage of family groups, urban dwellers, people of skills and education, and permanent settlers than any other European group.

The first Jew, of the German sect, had actually arrived in Chicago five decades earlier. In 1838, a merchant named J. Gottlieb settled there briefly, then prophetically moved on to California in search of gold, unwittingly initiating a paradigm for Korshak and company. Before the immigration surge of the 1880s, the total Jewish population in Chicago was 10,000 out of 500,000. By 1920 that number had swelled to over 225,000, and by 1950 Chicago would have the second-largest Jewish count in America, numbering some 350,000.

The newest Americans quickly learned that German Jews like J. Gottlieb had arrived in Chicago at a more opportune time. On first arrival, the Russian Jews were met with a prejudice emanating, surprisingly, from their own religious kin, the origins of which were in internecine rivalries between Eastern and Western European Jews, and exacerbated by competition between new arrivals and settled, assimilated German Jews. These competing cliques even had their own discrete cemeteries. Perhaps worst of all, the Russian Jews were perceived as being unrelated to the original twelve tribes of the Torah.

The attitude of both the German Jews and the Spanish (Sephardic) Jews toward the Russian and Polish Jews was one of superiority and pity. German Jews thought themselves more intellectual and aristocratic. Many were professional businessmen, while the more orthodox, Yiddish-speaking, nomadic Russians were seen as only good enough to employ in the Germans’ sweatshops. German Jews, hinting at their own Jewish self-hatred, regarded the Russians as inferior and illiterate, referring to them as schnorrers (beggars, or bums).

A manuscript entitled Autobiography of an Immigrant, written by an anonymous Ashkenazi, paints a dour picture: “When I first put my feet on the soil of Chicago, I was so disgusted that I wished I had stayed at home in Russia. I left the Old Country because you couldn't be a Jew over there and still live, but I would rather be dead than be the kind of German Jew that brings the Jewish name into disgrace by being a goy. That's what hurts: They parade around as Jews, and deep down in their hearts they are worse than goyim.”³

The Germans’ upper hand was temporary as they became outnumbered, within a brief but tumultuous ten years, by the Eastern European Jews (fifty thousand to twenty thousand), a change that forever altered the character of the Chicago Jewish community. On a macro level, Chicago's population grew from four thousand in 1840 to 1.7 million in 1900.

Invariably, the wanderers found Maxwell Street on the west side of the city.

Bereft of education, money, and property, these Russian Ashkenazic Jews packed into the poorest parts of Chicago to the west of the Chicago River—symbolic of the rift between themselves and the East Side-dwelling German Jews. In short time, they coalesced in an area that stretched from south of Taylor Street to the railroad tracks at about Sixteenth Street, and from Canal Street westward to Damen Avenue. This community, only minimally refurbished after the great Chicago fire of 1871, was centered around the intersection of Halsted and Maxwell streets, where the population was 90 percent Jewish. Over the next twenty years, an estimated fifty-five thousand Eastern European Jewish immigrants crowded into this tiny locus. So dense had this ghetto become that one social scientist determined that if the rest of the city were similarly clotted, Chicago would boast, instead of two million residents, over thirty-two million people, half the population of the entire country.⁴

Here, Yiddish was the language of the streets and homes, used for shopping, labor anthems, lullabies, and political debates. Although Maxwell Street included all the trappings of a shtetl—the open market bazaar being most popular—it was not yet a complete escape from the violence of the homeland. Maxwell Street was in fact known as Bloody Maxwell. In 1906, the Chicago Tribune published a description of the street:

Murderers, robbers and thieves of the worst kind are here born, reared and grow to maturity in numbers that far exceed the record of any similar district anywhere on the face of the globe. Reveling in the freedom which comes from inadequate police control, inspired by the traditions of the criminals that have gone before in the district, living in many instances more like beasts than any human beings, hundreds and thousands of boys and men follow day after day year after year in the bloody ways of crime … From Maxwell come some of the worst murderers, if not actually the worst, that Chicago has ever seen. From Maxwell come the smoothest of robbers, burglars, and thieves of all kinds, from Maxwell come the worst “tough-gangs.” In general, it may be safely said that no police district in the world turns out such skilled and successful criminals.⁵

The atmosphere began to improve somewhat in 1899, after a Jewish peddler was killed, precipitating a protest meeting at Porges Hall at Jefferson and Maxwell streets. Attended by nearly five hundred, this mobilization led to the formation of the Hebrew-American Protective Association of Chicago. Subsequently, life within Maxwell Street was safer and familiar.

Turn-of-the-century immigrants to Chicago found a town that was a model of civic corruption. The city was divided into political wards, and power flowed up from the saloon-owning ward bosses directly to City Hall in an overt scheme involving payoffs and job patronage. Bosses like Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna and John “Bathhouse” Coughlin were given exclusive rights to hire thousands of city workers, who, out of self-preservation, voted Kenna-Coughlin and their anointed mayors into office ad infinitum. It was a brilliant self-perpetuating corruption machine that had yet to assimilate the Jewish wave.

As Chicago's Russian Jews started to prosper at the turn of the century, they began moving out of the run-down Maxwell Street area, following Roosevelt Road west toward Ashland Street, then leapfrogging over the Damen Avenue rail yards, finally ending up four miles from the Lake Michigan shoreline in a community called Lawndale. They were barely two miles removed from the dregs of Bloody Maxwell Street, but their new home of Lawndale nonetheless seemed an eternity away. Now, instead of the crowded firetrap homes around Maxwell Street, the quiet streets of Lawndale featured brick homes with porches and backyards. So attractive was the locale to the Russian immigrants that by 1930 Russian Jews comprised 45 percent of Lawndale's population.

Called a “monument” to Jews who had successfully fled Maxwell Street, Lawndale was organized in 1857 and annexed to Chicago in 1869. The Chicago fire of 1871 sent the first wave of city Jews to Lawndale, followed by the Polish and Irish. When the Sears, Roebuck world headquarters, employing ten thousand workers, and the McCormick Reaper Company (International Harvester) were constructed in South Lawndale, many new inhabitants, especially the Russian Jews of Maxwell Street, took jobs there and found housing in eastern North Lawndale. Like Maxwell Street before it, Lawndale swelled from a population of 46,000 in 1910 to 93,750 in 1920, and 112,000 by 1930—50 percent of whom were Russian Jews. By the early forties, as the Jewish population of Chicago was approaching about 9 percent, about 110,000 of the 300,000 city Jews were living in the greater Lawndale area, the largest and most developed Jewish community that ever existed in Chicago.⁶

In truth, the name Lawndale was a misnomer—the apartment buildings and duplex homes were so tightly aligned that little room was left for lawns. (At its peak, Lawndale held the dubious distinction of having the highest population density in Chicago, earning it the moniker the Kosher Calcutta. By 1930, Lawndale's population density reached unprecedented totals at fifty-one thousand people per square mile.) Nonetheless, the locale was alive with outdoor activity, and the physical surroundings were a pleasant change from the chaos of Maxwell Street. What greenery existed was largely relegated to the large median on Douglas Boulevard and the bucolic expanses of Douglas Park. The boulevard was Lawndale's main thoroughfare, and the Jewish cultural center of the settlement, measuring 250 feet wide with a seventeen-foot-wide grass median. In a relative eye blink, some seventy synagogues and countless Jewish educational, medical, and convalescent facilities sprang up in this confined area, many of these facilities clustered around Douglas Boulevard.

Beneath the orthodox surface, subtle changes were mutating the culture of the Ashkenazim: They adopted an uncommon (for Jews) desire to assimilate, perhaps because they came to the collective conclusion that it was the only way to prosper in America. They started to affect German ways (so much so that this area of second settlement was often referred to as Deutschland), becoming increasingly less orthodox, or kosher. Lawndale Jews, as they were called, became lax about synagogue and began to frequent the Near North and the Loop for entertainment. The rabbi had been the most important person in their lives in the Pale and on Maxwell Street, but now, increasingly, the most important person was the precinct captain, who lorded over the vital patronage job allocations. The Jews even started producing athletes—Sidney Korshak was a school basketball and boxing star. But above all, they worked and studied tirelessly in an effort to ascend the social and economic ladder. In the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wendell Rawls, “The Jews were called names, but they were smarter than the others. They knew math and percentages. They were the Asians of their day.”⁷

Since Jews were not allowed to rent, they bought Lawndale—block by block—and they were thrilled to be able, for the first time, to do so. Their focus on acquiring real estate bordered on the obsessive and would play a major role in the success of the Supermob. The intense drive for improvement created a potent primordial soup that saw an extraordinary number of Maxwell Street/Lawndale youths achieve greatness: there were entertainers such as Benny Goodman, whose father had taken him to the free band concerts in Douglas Park on Sunday afternoons; actors Wallace Beery, Tom Mix, Gloria Swanson, and Paul Muni; President Kennedy's secretary of labor, Arthur Goldberg; World War II military hero Admiral Hyman George Rickover; champion lightweight boxer Barney Ross; corporate moguls William S. Paley (founder of CBS) and Barney Balaban (founder of Paramount Pictures); Harry Hart, of Hart, Schaffner & Marx men's clothing; Julius Rosenwald, founder of Sears, Roebuck; Charles Lubin, of the Kitchens of Sara Lee; the Goldblatt brothers, founders of the fifty-store chain of Goldblatt's Department Stores; the Bensinger family of Brunswick Bowling; Abe Pritzker, founder of Hyatt Hotels and the massive conglomerate the Marmon Group; Henry Crown of General Dynamics and an owner of the Empire State Building; writer L. Frank Baum (The Wizard of Oz); and even the occasional infamous ne'er-do-well like Lee Harvey Oswald's killer, Jack Ruby, and a key member of Al Capone's brain trust, Jake Guzik.⁸ Then there were the not-so-famous successes …

David Korshak, arsonist (Rich Samuels)

One year after the 1881 pogroms in Kiev, brothers Mendel and David Korshak, then young adults, set sail from Hamburg, Germany, on the SS Suevia and arrived in New York in 1882. They proceeded on to Chicago, followed over by Max, Abraham, Reuben, and, finally in February 1889, thirteen-year-old Harry, the youngest by almost a generation. It is believed that all the Korshaks in America today descended from these siblings. David Korshak, a saloonkeeper and a real estate investor, achieved ignominy when he became part of an arson-for-hire ring, and the first Korshak to be exposed in the New York Times (July 13, 1913). One of David's partners was an insurance adjuster named Joseph Fish, whose wife was heiress to the Brunswick bowling ball and billiards empire. That an old-line German Jew would have engaged in an arson conspiracy with an immigrant Russian Askenazi contradicted the conventional wisdom, but for a time, the partnership flourished. David, who was dubbed King of the Firebugs by the Chicago Daily Journal, even hooked up with an Italian for the schemes. With Fish's insurance ken and Korshak's talent with kerosene, the arson trust set up operations in Chicago, New York, and other large cities, defrauding numerous insurance companies out of tens of thousands of dollars. As friends and a family photo album attest, David Korshak appeared to have a special closeness with Harry's middle child, Sidney.⁹

Also of interest was brother Max, the first of many Korshak lawyers. According to Korshak family historian Rich Samuels (husband of Judy Korshak), Max became one of the two protégés of Judge Harry Fisher. The other was a fellow young Ashkenazi named Jacob Arvey, about whom much more will be seen. According to Samuels, Max wanted to become the ward boss and kingmaker that Arvey eventually became, but only reached as high as the master of chancery in circuit court.*

Brother Abraham was found guilty, along with his son Jimmy, of beating a woman named Sophie White into unconsciousness on June 10, 1933, and a federal grand jury had earlier indicted Jimmy and a brother for violation of the Volstead Act (the federal law that outlawed the sale of alcohol from 1920 to 1933). Jimmy was not convicted, but his brother was.¹⁰ Alluding to the less savory aspects of the family's history many years later, Harry's son Morris (later “Marshall”) told the attendees at the second family reunion, “You know, in the old country we were horse thieves. In this country we became car thieves.” When he noticed a journalist in the crowd, he suddenly changed the topic. Descendant Judy Korshak's husband, Rich Samuels, said, “I sometimes think my wife thinks she's still in the marketplace in Kiev. There's a certain toughness there. My wife says, ‘Don't ever fuck with a Korshak.’”¹¹

Harry's Atlantic crossing was followed in 1890 by that of his future wife, then seven-year-old Rebecca Beatrice Lashkovitz from Odessa. Young Rebecca barely survived a pogrom; her parents’ landlord was a kindly gentile who allowed her family to hide in his barn when the Cossacks searched the house. Harry and Rebecca married in Chicago in 1902, and Harry took work as a two-dollar-per-week laborer, before hiring on as a carpenter contractor, then starting his own company. When Harry's small construction enterprise began to flourish, the family, which quickly came to include five children, joined the Maxwell Street exodus to Lawndale, where Harry presided over a kosher home—son Marshall would continue the tradition, never having bacon or ham in his own home. Harry now operated his business out of his family's new Douglas Boulevard home (which he built), just down the street from Douglas Park, where Jake Arvey, too short to play basketball with the towering Korshaks, played tennis.¹² Named after Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Douglas Park was a large and beautiful landscaped refuge that saw the occasional nighttime turf war between Polish gangs and the new Lawndale Jews.

David & Sidney Sidney David with nephew Sidney at a 1927 Korshak family picnic (Rich Samuels)

Tony “Joe Batters” Accardo mug shot (Chuck Schauer)

On June 6, 1907, Rebecca gave birth to Sidney Roy Korshak, the middle child among five: Theodore (1903), Minnie (1905), Sidney Roy (1907), Morris Jerome (1910), and Bernard (1913).¹³ Morris, who went by the name Marshall, described his six-foot-two-inch father as a “cream puff,” whereas his mother was “the strong one, an introvert like Sidney.” Sidney may have been an introvert, but by all accounts he was a tough one. One schoolmate told the New York Times in 1976, “He was handsome and had a lot of ego and a lot of guts. He didn't let anybody push him around. Sid was a tough guy.”¹⁴ The famously outgoing Marshall noted, “Sidney and I are completely different.”

Sidney's elder siblings were family tragedies. Theodore, known as Ted, fell into the throes of drug addiction and, using numerous aliases, amassed quite a rap sheet with the local police, often charged with narcotics violations and confidence schemes. For a time he ran a bookie joint at 217 North Clark Street for Tony “Joe Batters” Accardo, boss of the Chicago Outfit, and his underboss, Charles “Cherry Nose” Gioe. (Sidney's cousin Pete Posner handled bookmaking for the Outfit in the Hyde Park section for Curly Humphreys's underlings Ralph Pierce and Hy Godfrey.)¹⁵

Minnie Korshak's tragedy was of a different kind. Shortly after her marriage to Harry Wexler, she died of an unknown cause on January 12, 1928, at just twenty-two years of age. Exactly one year later, the Korshaks paid tribute to her, placing a short poem in the Chicago Tribune's death notices:

Thoughts return to days long past,
Time rolls on, memory lasts.
Your life is a beautiful memory.
Your absence a great, great sorrow to us.

Like many of the Lawndale Jewish youth, Sidney attended Herzl Grammar School, then Marshall High School, where he was an A student and a standout basketball player, his skills no doubt honed in Douglas Park, little more than a long jump-shot from his front yard. His academic success mirrored the business fortunes of his father, Harry, who was on his way to becoming one of the most successful contractors in Lawndale. “My father was a Jewish millionaire,” recalled Marshall. “He was worth about two hundred thousand dollars, a fortune in the twenties.”¹⁷ From 1925 to 1927, Sidney went to the University of Wisconsin, enrolled in the College of Letters and Sciences. At UW, the Phi Sigma Delta pledge held an 82 average, but with a 98 in Phys Ed, not surprising given that he won the 158-pound title in the 1927 All University Boxing Championships.

Basketball team School portrait Graduation photo Phi Sigma Delta Sidney Korshak (front row, far left), the Marshall High School basketball team's star center (Francelia Herron) Sidney Korshak's 1925 Marshall High School portrait (Francelia Herron) Sidney Korshak's law school graduation photo (DePaul University Alumni Relations) Frat boy Sidney Roy Korshak (top row, fourth from left), 1928 (David Null, Univ. of Wisconsin Alumni Association)

The school paper reported on the curious nature of Sidney's pugilistic success: “Korshak was awarded a verdict over Schuck at 158 pounds in an overtime period. Korshak, tall and with a long reach, was unable to withstand the heavy punching of Schuck, who hit him at a rate of six blows to one. However, an overtime period was required, and again Schuck sent Korshak reeling with a flock of stomach blows and kidney punches. Consequently when the judges awarded the fight to Korshak, there was a great deal of surprise in the crowd.”

Korshak left UW for DePaul University, where he graduated in June 1930 with a law degree.¹⁸ His grades had slipped to a C+ average, and, curiously, the only As he received in two years were in Partnership, Trust, and Property Law—subjects well suited to his future successes. After Sidney's death many years later, a collegetown scribe wrote ominously, “He left DePaul for the shadows, where he spent the next sixty years.”¹⁹

Sidney Korshak was licensed to practice law on October 16, 1930,** and his younger brother Marshall followed Sidney to Herzl, Marshall High, Wisconsin, and DePaul. “I aped Sidney,” Marshall remembered. At Wisconsin, Marshall was a privileged student, receiving $125 a week from his father. However, when Harry was hard hit by the Depression, Marshall's University of Wisconsin days were over. “My brother Sidney called and said, ‘You'd better come home and tell Dad you don't want to stay,’” Marshall recalled years later. “He was telling me the old man was broke.”²⁰ Marshall came home and sold programs at Soldier Field, putting himself though night school at the Kent School of Law ($175 per semester), where he earned his law degree. Their father, Harry, would die soon thereafter, on January 29, 1931, at age fifty-five, likely due to the combined effects of the Great Depression and his young daughter's death. Marshall would go on to build one of the greatest political careers in Chicago history, all the while keeping his thriving law practice going.***

Whereas Marshall's career remained squeaky-clean, Sidney would prove to have few qualms about subscribing to the maxim “The ends justify the means.” Tom Zander (pseudonym), a former organized crime investigator with the Chicago office of the U.S. Department of Labor, said of the brothers’ formative years, “I saw Sidney when he was moving up the ladder. I knew his brother Marshall very well. He was a great fifth Ward committeeman. I think Marshall was against the mob, but was very careful never to say it. In Chicago it wasn't uncommon for one brother to go straight while the other went with the boys.”²¹

These two most enterprising of Harry's sons, Sidney and Marshall, were astute enough to deduce that the shortest road out of Deutschland was to ally with Uncle Max's fellow protégé of Judge Fisher's, and their neighbor of some six blocks away, the rising Twenty-fourth Ward star Jake Arvey. The Korshaks had been friends with the Arveys for as long as anyone could remember, and that kinship would come to benefit not only Sidney and Marshall, but also the majority of America's future Supermob. For in Lawndale's solar system, there was but one star for the up-and-comers to orbit, Jake Arvey.

A man ain't going nowhere without he has his Chinaman.

Jacob Meyer Arvey was born in Chicago in 1895, the son of Russian immigrants Israel and Bertha Arvey. Like so many other Russian Ashkenazim, Israel worked in the Maxwell Street marketplace. A hardworking street peddler and milkman, Israel inculcated his son with the need for self-improvement. Arvey described the times: “Where [my parents] came from in Russia, they were poor not only in money but poor in liberty and opportunity … They could not participate in who would govern them. And they were always in fear of the raids and assaults of hooligans and Cossacks … They were denied things. They had to grease the palms of authorities. Pay tribute in the shtetls. And the story of Maxwell Street is like the story of the Jews all over the world for centuries. They are raised amid violence, muscle, corruption, [and] distortion … Well, I was understanding that things could be better for the Jew. The opportunity was there. We needed the power.”²²

After his father's death when Jacob was just thirteen, Arvey located the power quickly: it was concentrated at the Roosevelt Road headquarters of the corrupt Twenty-fourth Ward Democratic organization, a model of miscreant efficiency, with sixty Jewish neighborhood precinct captains each responsible for a small section of the ward, where they knew everyone and almost everything. They befriended the voters, often bringing food, clothing, and coal to the needy, helped immigrants secure citizenship papers, and assisted people who had run afoul of the law or merely needed traffic tickets fixed.

This hands-on, in-person style of ward politics had been the brainchild of brothers Michael and Moe Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs, also sons of Russian immigrants, started out as junk dealers, but after forming an alliance with the notorious utilities baron Samuel “the Emperor” Insull, they prospered, becoming among the first Maxwell Street habitues to make the exodus to Lawndale.²³ Insull, a former private secretary to inventor Thomas Edison, and himself a genius in business, inherited Edison's General Electric power company and, thanks to massive political corruption, built it and his other holdings into a $2 billion empire. The Rosenbergs, in exchange for uncontested junk-hauling contracts from Insull, corrupted countless pols who happily allowed Insull to use monopolistic and predatory practices in exchange for “investment opportunities” in the power company—in other words, insider stock priced far below the market quotes. Ovid Demaris, the seminal historian of Chicago crime, described the unsavory climate thus: “[Insull] built his paper colossus on the hot coals of corruption. Corrupt politicians and predatory law firms kept it precariously fireproof for forty years in a continuing conspiracy that provided low taxes, and favorable legislation, plus safe judges, reasonable mayors, pliable aldermen, patronage officeholders, and anybody else who could serve Insull's undivided interest.”²⁴

Everyone got rich together, and when the stock market crashed in 1929, Insull merely sold overvalued stock to the public, costing investors over $2 billion in losses. So hated did Insull become that he hired Capone's musclemen to protect him from his countless enemies. Eventually, Insull's paper profits evaporated and he was charged with stock fraud and, separately, with embezzlement—he escaped conviction in both.*²⁵ Years later Moe Rosenberg would serve a prison term for receiving stolen goods and was also indicted for tax evasion. In an effort to lessen his sentence, Rosenberg gave a full confession in 1933 regarding the massive political-corruption schemes he had entered into with Insull. However, Rosenberg died before the trial started, and a year later his sealed confession was made public.²⁶

Although his father's death forced Arvey to wrork evenings after high school, and days while at night school at John Marshall Law School, he made time to grease the Rosenberg corruption machine. The Rosenbergs became Jake's “Chinamen,” or sponsors. Arvey's was a year-round job, but he was especially visible among his neighbors before each election, when every home was visited more than once to convince and plead with voters to vote for the endorsed candidates. It wasn't uncommon to see Arvey escort semiliterate Jewish immigrants, ignorant of the complexities of white-collar gangsterism, into the voting booth, instructing them, “Vote this way.” One of Arvey's successful protégés, Judge Abraham Marovitz, recalled in 1997, “They would give them matzos at Passover, and feed and clothe them, and, come election time, Arvey said, ‘You vote for so-and-so,’ and, ‘You vote for so-and-so.’”²⁷

The often-beholden voters turned out landslide majorities for the party machine, which sometimes garnered as much as 97 percent of the vote. Most Chicago Jews had voted Republican until the late 1920s, when they started voting Democratic.²⁸ Jake Arvey once said of the Twenty-fourth Ward, “The only ones who voted Republican were the Republican precinct captains, election judges, and their families.” Arvey's political prowess would soon garner him a national reputation. “In the election of 1936,” Arvey later wrote, “President Roosevelt called our ward the best Democratic ward in the country.”²⁹

While too young to vote, a teenaged Jake Arvey nonetheless became a precinct captain for the Rosenbergs. The lifelong Democrat rang doorbells, developed personal relationships with voters, and learned about patronage, Ashkenazic style. Implicit in everything Arvey accomplished in his career was the attendant loyalty to all Jewish causes—a trait he would inculcate in his own protégés. He also insisted that his workers balance their lives with regular giving to the less fortunate. “I'm an intense Jew,” Arvey later wrote. “I demanded that any man who was a precinct captain of mine had to belong to a church—Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish … I made them charity-minded, civic-minded, culture-minded, and sensitive to the needs of other people.”³⁰ This charitable sensibility—tzedaka is the Hebrew word for giving back to the community—would become a paradoxical leitmotif in the coming decades for even Arvey's most corrupt students.

Arvey was admitted to the bar in 1916, at just twenty-one years of age, and then became the personal attorney for the Rosenbergs’ junk business and Moe's Cook County Trust Company. Here, Arvey learned the beauty of the “receivership” game, the obtaining of foreclosed properties at fire-sale prices. Again, Demaris: “The fantastic earnings of receivers in six years in Chicago totally eclipsed the illicit profits of gangsters. One Congressional Committee investigating real estate foreclosures for a six-year period reported in 1936 that ‘there appears in the State courts serving Chicago and its adjacent territory approximately 100,000 foreclosure cases filed since January 1930, representing approximately $2,000,000,000 in face value.’”³¹

Demaris concluded that local attorneys had accrued some $100 million in fees during the period. While working at the Trust Company, Arvey utilized the Rosenberg-controlled judges to obtain 272 receiverships. He and his emissaries, known as Arvey's Army, would revisit this scheme with a vengeance when Japanese Americans saw their California land confiscated during World War II.

When Mike Rosenberg died in 1928, Arvey was chosen to fill his spot as Ward committeeman. As such, Arvey ushered in a new era in Chicago politics, that of the politician/lawyer. It was now his turn to be the Chinaman. Previously, political power rested in the hands of saloonkeepers and bookies. Lawyering formed the bedrock of this new political sophistication, and years later Arvey would mentor and advise a young Richard Daley as to the wisdom of earning a law degree. Daley had admired Arvey, who guaranteed him great success in politics if he passed the bar. Daley followed Arvey's advice and attained staggering power both in Illinois and the nation. His biographers dubbed Daley the American Pharaoh.

Korshak pals Jake Arvey (right) and Arthur Elrod (center) with unidentified associate (Chicago Historical Society)

With the help of Syndicate legend Al Capone, Arvey and Moe Rosenberg elected Anton “Ten Percent” Cermak mayor of Chicago in 1931. In his quest to “beat the Irish,” Cermak focused on gaining the approval of the working classes, and using Rosenberg's and Arvey's army of precinct captains, he unabashedly used patronage to gain the mayor's office. With Capone thugs providing security, Arvey's Army stood in the polling places and reminded the families of what they did for them, often accompanying the voter right into the polling booth. “Let me put it to you in a crude way,” Arvey advised his young charges. “Put people under obligation to you.”³² By putting people under obligation, especially those prone to legendary ashmah, or “Jewish guilt,” a self-perpetuating political machine was born. Patronage was king, and Arvey's Army elevated the practice into an art form.

When Cermak was assassinated in 1933 in Florida by a lone shooter (who some believe was actually aiming at the nearby President Roosevelt), Arvey set about building his own legacy, solidifying his anointing as “The Kingmaker.” With some seventy-five Arvey's Army precinct captains at his command—many of whom went on to local and national success—Arvey relished behind-the-scenes power. One of his precinct captains, Marshall Korshak, remembered putting Arvey's style to work. “When I was a precinct captain, I knew every one of the voters by their first name,” Korshak said. “I knew their wives. I knew their children. I knew their family.”³³ When Marshall set his sights on the Fifth Ward committeeman post years later, his brother Sidney spoke to Arvey about it. Arvey appointed Marshall committeeman, even though Arvey had to ask his own law partner, Barnet Hodes, to vacate the position for Marshall. Putting Arvey's patronage rule foremost, Committeeman Marshall Korshak obtained jobs for over five thousand constituents in one ten-year period, according to one estimate.³⁴

Arvey would spend twenty-eight years as ruler of the Twenty-fourth Ward before becoming Cook County Democratic chairman. His ward organization created absurd Democratic pluralities for Franklin Roosevelt—such as 29,000-700 (1936) and 29,533-2,204 (1944)—and his successor, Harry Truman. However, rumors of impropriety were never far beneath the surface. According to his obit, “Arvey's organization was at the top of the list in vote fraud charges, including ballot box stuffing, illegal voting and polling place violations.”³⁵ By his own admission, Arvey took thousands of parking tickets to the mayor's office for scuttling.³⁶ He also freely admitted the election frauds perpetrated by his precinct captains. “Some of them went to illegal means to do it,” he wrote. “I know it. I regret it very much, but they were inconsequential in relation to the ultimate result.”³⁷

With his expanding powers, Arvey extended the patronage system. It wasn't just the thousands of civil jobs that came under Arvey's thumb; applicants wishing to work at Lawndale's Sears, Roebuck headquarters knew better than to show up without a letter from Jake Arvey.³⁸ Other jobs were secured through Arvey's cousin George Eisenberg, a Maxwell Street Russian immigrant who made millions with his Northwest Side company, American Decal and Manufacturing.**

Not all of Arvey's triumphs were in the public arena, however. Congressional investigators learned that his law firm commanded a $24,000-per-year retainer from the infamous illegal national bookie service known as Continental Press,³⁹ itself the brainchild of fellow Russian Jewish emigre Moe Annenberg. Born in Prussia in 1878, Annenberg came to Chicago in 1885 and made his mark in the newspaper circulation wars of the 1920s that pitted William Randolph Hearst against Colonel Robert McCormick, not to mention the six other competing daily rags. Moe and his brother Max utilized the talents not only of well-connected Capone sluggers to gain the upper hand, but North Siders like Dion O'Banion. When Moe founded Continental, he again employed Capone's muscle to snuff out the competition. After Capone was sent to prison, Annenberg's alliance with the new Outfit was strengthened. In return, the Capone gang's bookies received the wire service free of charge. After his indictment for tax evasion on August I I, 1939, Moe Annenberg walked away from the wire business and the Capones took over. After the Capone takeover, Arvey began working for Continental.*** After an in-depth investigation, the 1951 Kefauver Committee concluded, “The Continental Press national horsetrack service is controlled by the Capone mob in Chicago.”

But there was an even more furtive association than that with the wire mogul. Early on, Arvey made a fortuitous alliance with a future powerful industrialist who would play a role in not only Arvey's financial success, but that of protégés such as the Korshaks. He was born Henry Krinsky, but was raised as Henry Crown.

Henry Crown, who spoke at a 1964 testimonial honoring Marshall Korshak,⁴⁰ had a long history with Jake Arvey. Henry was the third of seven children of Arie Crown (formerly Krinsky) and Ida Gordon. Crown's father, another Russian Jewish immigrant from the Pale, worked in the Maxwell Street market as a suspender maker, a foreman in a sweatshop, and a pushcart peddler. Like so many others, young Henry attended night school, where he took classes in bookkeeping. After persuading Chicago banks to extend him credit, he and his brother Sol formed the Material Service Corporation (MSC), a sand-and-gravel building-supply company—one of many conglomerates that would hire Sidney Korshak as its labor lawyer. Years later, Korshak told New Jersey gaming officials that, among his other successes, he'd intervened when Teamsters would not allow Crown's nonunion trucks to have access to his gravel pits in Indiana.⁴¹

As MSC prospered, Crown diversified into numerous raw-product and manufacturing entities, and real estate investing, which included the purchase of the Empire State Building in the 1950s.† With the political influence of his pal Arvey, Crown obtained lucrative city contracts in Chicago such as the award to furnish all the pencils and paper for the city's school system. He also supplied the coal for over four hundred schools, earning an additional $1 million per year.

After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Jake and Henry enlisted in the U.S. army. Arvey, aged forty-six, served four years as a judge advocate, including two years in the South Pacific, and when he came home in late 1945, he carried the rank of lieutenant colonel. However, during his military hitch, Arvey managed to become, with no small thanks to friends in the Roosevelt administration, the overseer of the countless international post exchange (PX) facilities on military bases. Soon, the military was supplying these PXes with commercial goods purchased from buddy Col. Crown's Material Service Corporation.

Captain Jake Arvey (Chicago Historical Society)

As for Crown, he was assigned to duty as a procurement officer for the Western Division, Corps of Engineers. Crown's service took him first to Los Angeles, where he directed the purchasing of military supplies. Eventually reassigned to the Great Lakes Division as chief of procurement, he was stationed near Chicago and promoted to full colonel. In that position, he supervised over $1 billion in military purchases. One month before his 1945 discharge, MSC was sued for more than $1 million by the Office of Price Administration for price-gouging a number of Chicago City and State of Illinois agencies.⁴² Four years later, a Mrs. Dora Griever Stern began a fourteen-year legal struggle to obtain her share of MSC. Incorporation papers filed in 1919 proved that she had invested her life savings ($4,250) for 170 shares (of 800) of the fledgling company. Her investment should have earned back approximately $100 million. She had received nothing. Ultimately the courts decided that she had waited too long to file.

MSC would go on to become one of the largest government contractors in history. By any measure, it was the forerunner of the present-day Halliburton and Bechtel conglomerates. In 1962, three years after Crown negotiated the merger of Material Service Corporation as an autonomous division with General Dynamics Corporation, it was awarded the largest governmental contract ($6.5 billion) in world history—that for the TFX fighter plane development. General Dynamics had been everyone's second choice (after Boeing) for the contract, and a four-month Senate investigation obtained testimony that political payoffs were made to ensure Crown's successful bid. This scandal-ridden project ended with the plane being one of the great design failures in history.

In 1949, Arvey used insider information about soon-to-be-condemned property to purchase land that the city would soon need to build the Congress Street thoroughfare. With a $1 million gift from Crown (a “loan” that was never repaid), Arvey purchased a square block of property including twenty-seven buildings for $900,000. A small portion of this property was sold back to the city in 1949 for $1,206,452.62 for the highway construction. Arvey's syndicate kept the remaining office buildings.⁴³

“Within the Jewish West Side political community, everybody knew everybody else,” said Korshak family historian Rich Samuels.⁴⁴ Without doubt, two of the closest Lawndale families were the Korshaks and the Arveys. It was Marshall Korshak whom the Chicago Sun-Times referred to as “the worthy successor to Jack Arvey.⁴⁵ Marshall later said about Jake/Jack Arvey, “He was the guy that impressed me the most. I learned from him. He understood the problems of our people.”⁴⁶ When Arvey was honored by the Israel Bond Organization years later, Marshall served as chairman of the event. Arvey was especially fond of Sidney. According to a retired Chicago attorney who was close to the Korshak brothers, “Jake just loved hanging with Sidney.”⁴⁷

Both Korshak brothers freely admitted their closeness with Arvey, Sidney to the FBI,⁴⁸ and Marshall to the local newsmen. And Jake Arvey returned the compliment, telling journalist Lester Velie in 1950, “Sidney Korshak is one of my best friends in the world.” The ward boss proceeded to prove that to Velie. When Velie interviewed Arvey, the writer tipped him that he had just left Korshak's law office, where he had noted the names of many of his “clients” who had phoned the barrister's switchboard. Returning to Korshak's the next day, Velie found that all the callers were now mysteriously using code names such as Mr. Black or Mr. White or Mr. Green.⁴⁹

The past is never dead. It's not even past.⁵⁰

Like every other college grad set loose in the world, twenty-four-year-old Sid Korshak had life choices to make. He had lived through family tragedies and was just one generation removed from officially sanctioned Russian violence perpetrated against his family and everyone they knew back in the Pale. It is safe to assume that Sid and his brother Marshall were determined that such privations would never visit them or their offspring again. They opted for the kind of power that would grant just such assurances, and if that choice meant walking an ethical or legal tightrope, so be it. As Jake Arvey put it, “You have to be unmindful of everything except the ultimate goal. This is what we must attain. If anybody stands in the way, out with them! … It's a rough, tough game.”⁵¹

In the post-Capone Chicago of the 1930s, the underworld heirs to Capone known as the Outfit, labor unions, and politicians were the ones with power, but they blurred together in murky alliances so as to increase their prosperity. All was for sale in Chicago as long as you had the muscle, brains, education, and economic and/or political power to take it. The Jews and the Italians who ran the Outfit were connected not only by their thirst for power, but by the value they placed in family. The only question was, how could the Outfit's power paradigm be altered to include these new Jewish up-and-comers? The answer was simple and elegant: the Jews would stay in the background. Throughout history, the Jews were never the public leaders; they were always the kingmakers and the power brokers. They knew from experience that a Jew would not get a top spot, however low the level, because of the existing anti-Semitism, even in America. They were always aware that their wealth and position in society could be noticed and another pogrom would ensue. Thus they worked surreptitiously, choosing to focus on the substrata of a business or event.

The Russians were fully confident that they possessed the drive and resilience to succeed in the shadows. They had only to look at recent history in Chicago for proof: German Jews hadn't allowed their Russian counterparts into The Standard Club, so the Russians had formed The Covenant Club; the Russians couldn't get on the board at Michael Reese Hospital, so they built Mount Sinai; unable to join the Illinois bar, they formed the Decalogue Society in 1935, the oldest and largest Jewish legal fraternity in America, today consisting of sixteen hundred Jewish lawyers.*⁵²

The fields they chose to conquer were, in hindsight, predictable. Historically excluded from many professions such as politics and civic functions, Jews naturally gravitated to becoming bankers and merchants—they were not prohibited by religion from dealing in money. And trade was an abstraction that didn't require social assimilation—enemies often trade. Also, due to their historical wanderings, the Jews were worldlier than their adversaries, and far less provincial. Their wide-ranging travels brought the additional benefit of language skills, which engendered international connections. The Jews’ historical Diaspora (dispersion) and relative lack of national roots helped them to identify and exploit more quickly the most lucrative emerging markets. Jewish merchants had operated in Venice, destined to become the first great epicenter of Europe's economic revival, long before it emerged into prominence in the thirteenth century.

Lastly, Jews were forced to toil in WASP sweatshops, ironically becoming the leaders of the labor union movement, the ascendancy of which brought about a tail-wagging-the-dog economy. It was a successful garment workers’ strike by Chicago's Russian Jews in 1910 that established collective bargaining in the clothing industry. Among the most notable accomplishment was the founding of the Federation of Jewish Trade Unions in 1930.

Unable to compete in the higher circles of industrial capitalism, the Jews fixed their attention on many of the emerging niches of the developing world economy, for which participation they are now best known, such as diamonds, communications, fashion, retailing, entertainment, and the medical-legal professions. But those who came to comprise the Supermob steered toward law, real estate, finance, and partnerships with the gangsters of lore.

You want diplomatic? … Greatest diplomats the world ever saw were the German Jews. Where did diplomacy get them. A ticket to Auschwitz.

WITH THEIR LAW DEGREES and chutzpah, Korshak, Arvey, Crown, and the others began to envision a world beyond Lawndale, itself a community that was always intended as a temporary way station on the road to bigger things. The young Turks of Lawndale, imbued with the “moving spirit,” were keenly aware of socioeconomic heights to be scaled. Thus, these entrepreneurs and dreamers alike left their childhood homes, as transitional neighborhoods changed complexion almost overnight. Irving Cutler wrote, “This acculturation happened among some of the more radical, irreligious immigrant Jews as well as many younger Jews, usually American-born … But the Jews left the area because … they were interested in areas with better amenities, schools, higher status, more space and single family homes … The exodus was facilitated by the automobile and the government loans that were readily available, especially to veterans … [Some went] to Albany Park and Rogers Park, but more to West Rogers Park (West Ridge).”*²

Although many of the Jewish institutions of greater Lawndale were reestablished on the North Side, they would never approach the previous scale. By 1950, Lawndale's population had declined significantly, as the young left in pursuit of their dreams—first stop, downtown Chicago. Rabbi Saul Silber intoned, “Our children are running away from us because we have nothing to hold them with, to make them worthy of their Jewish heritage.”³ In truth, the dispersing young Lawndale Jews did not entirely cast off their heritage. Imbued with centuries of tradition, they held on to beliefs such as those crystallized in the paintings of Russian artist Marc Chagall, whose depiction of the fiddler on the roof shows an oval-shaped violinist floating in space over the roof of a peasant village, playing traditional songs. “The Jews sit precariously as the fiddler on the roof” goes the expression, and that notion bound the Lawndale Jews to their traditions until their own passing. For the rest of their lives, the Supermob associates played major roles in Jewish causes of all manners. Interestingly, as a retiring adult in Beverly Hills decades later, Sid Korshak collected Chagall originals.

As seen, many Lawndale evacuees achieved successful (and legitimate) careers in a variety of fields. But, invariably, some coveted a quicker—and guaranteed—path to success. These members of the future Supermob concluded that there was no future without some accommodation and/or alliance with the post-Capone Outfit, which seemed to hold a vise grip over Chicago and a powerful influence in many cities to the west, all the way to Los Angeles. Soon, associations would also be forged with East Coast boss Lucky Luciano and his “shadow Jew,” Meyer Lansky. Noted New York Police organized crime expert Ralph Salerno wrote, “There is a happy marriage of convenience between Jewish and Italian gangsters. It represents the three M’s: Money, Moxie, and Muscle. The Jews supply the moxie. The Italians take care of the muscle. And they split the money between them.”⁴ According to Ira Silverman, NBC's longtime producer and organized crime specialist, “The Jewish lawyers were like ‘house counsel’ to the mob before the term was invented. They were on lifetime retainer.”⁵

Jewish lawyers of the period made no apologies for their cozy relationships with the hoods. Typical of their philosophy is the statement of one retired Chicago Jewish attorney who was close to both Korshak and the crime bosses. “In those days it was so much different than today,” said the attorney, who asked for anonymity. “In the early thirties, a Jewish kid right out of law school didn't have a lot of opportunities. All he could do was get into some kind of ‘collection’ practice, like a collection agency. Where else do you go? So he gets this opportunity to make the kind of money the WASP lawyers were pulling in and he took it. We all took it if it was offered to us. Sidney was just the best of the bunch.”⁶

Former Chicago FBI agents Fran Marracco and Pete Wacks experienced the mob-Supermob alliance firsthand. According to Marracco, “The Italians knew that if you wanted something done, you didn't get an Italian accountant or lawyer. You got Jews. On the wiretaps we'd hear the Italians and how they stereotypically described the Jews’ abilities with money. They respected their work ethic. They knew that the Jews came from this bad situation in Europe and they were hungry for success. They didn't want to be without. We used to call it the Kosher Nostra, the Jewish Mafia.”⁷ Wacks heard one hood remark, “If we didn't have the Jews, we'd still be hiding money under the mattress.”⁸

Lawndale's Supermob evacuees were likely cognizant of Jewish proverbs such as “God help a man against gentile hands and Jewish heads” and “Heaven protect us against Jewish moach [brains] and gentile koach [physical force].” The successful use of sechel (smarts) rather than mere brute force was the only option. More important, for the Supermob, organized crime—or an association with it—was not a moral choice, but a political and economic reality, which translated into power and a “seat at the table.” It was also pure Arvey, who later wrote, “I knew some men who were bookies in the old days who were well-respected—real estate operators, capitalists, and very acceptable in high society … They weren't degraded at all. They weren't demeaned by the fact that they were doing an illegal act … This was a different sense of morality.”⁹ In their Faustian bargain, the Supermob founders were making money and security for the family the fastest way they knew how, a rationale fueled by the insecurity of their position in America (or any other country throughout history).

Later in life, Sid Korshak bragged to friends about how, while still studying law at DePaul, he made his liaison with the Outfit by advising Al Capone. Bob Evans, a Korshak pal, protégé, and later production chief at Paramount, called Korshak Capone's consiglieri.¹⁰ Movie executive Berle Adams recently recalled, “I heard that Sidney was Capone's chauffeur. Everybody heard it.”¹¹ One of Korshak's closest friends in the Hollywood legal whirl, Greg Bautzer, informed editor Tom Pryor of Daily Variety that Sid told him he drove for Capone. Few in Chicago accept that proposition, given that a don's driver doubles as a bodyguard, the most trusted position in the crew, and is always an Italian. Often, the driver inherits the role of boss, as was the case with both Joe Batters Accardo and Sam Giancana. But there was, in fact, a Capone connection to Korshak's early work for the Outfit.

Teitelbaum & Capone Jake Guzik Abe Teitelbaum escorting Al Capone from court (Library of Congress) Jake Guzik, undated mug shot (Chicago Crime Commission)

According to a retired Chicago attorney who was close to Korshak, the original link surfaced many years later, when the attorney (who asked not to be identified) had a chance encounter with a retired Abe Teitelbaum, formerly Al Capone's personal lawyer. (Teitelbaum had often stated, “Alphonse Capone was one of the most honorable men I ever met.”¹²) When the source mentioned his friendship with Sid Korshak, Teitelbaum smiled and said, “I gave Sidney his first business clients. I was returning the favor because his uncle Max had started me in the law business.” It is not a stretch to assume that many of those clients were from Capone's Syndicate, later called the Outfit.

With his chosen clientele now arranged, Korshak formed an early partnership with a fellow DePaul alumnus, attorney Edward King, lawyer for Capone's heir Frank Nitti. However, King, who was also cocounsel with Marshall Korshak at Windy City Liquors, soon found greener pastures in New York, working for Mob Commission boss Meyer Lansky and his adviser Moses Polakoff. From that point, according to others like former Chicago reporter James Bacon and Chicago FBI man Bill Roemer, Jake Guzik became Sid's chief liaison to “the boys.” Guzik was born in Russia in 1887, making him an elder in the Capone organization. He had the dubious distinction of being part of a family that was entirely devoted to white slavery—his parents were imprisoned on that charge, and all six of their children were pimps. Breaking out of the world of whoring, Guzik was likely the first Ashkenazi to find his way into Capone's inner sanctum, becoming both his bookkeeper and political-payoff wizard. Guzik was imprisoned for tax evasion in 1931, the same year the IRS nailed Capone.

Korshak's recruitment origins aside, there was no argument about whom Sid Korshak ultimately served. Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz, another Arvey protégé, recalled just before his death in 2001, “Sidney and I were rivals in the thirties. He had silent partners in his law firm—he was with the hoodlums. He almost never took a case to trial—he was always making deals.”**¹³ Marovitz remarked that Arvey had played a role in getting him the seat on the federal bench years earlier.¹⁴ “Jake Arvey picked me up when I was nineteen and helped me every step of the way,” Marovitz would say at Arvey's funeral. “I owe him a lot.”¹⁵

Not quite a year after his graduation, Sidney Korshak made his first known appearance in a court of law—but not to use his law degree in defense of a client. In May of 1931, Sidney, apparently influenced by his older brother, Ted, was arrested with his senior sibling after an early-morning brawl at a Loop club called The Showboat. The arrest came about when Sidney tried to stop the arrest of Ted. “You can't arrest him, he's my brother,” warned Korshak. “Don't you know who I am?” The unimpressed cops promptly added Sidney to their paddy wagon. Although Sidney was held on $2,400 bail when he was discovered packing a pistol, the charges were eventually dropped.¹⁶

In October of 1931, Sidney finally appeared in court to exercise his legal muscle. It was an unimpressive debut. Hired to defend young toughs Joe Carbona (twenty-two) and Louis Cadulo (twenty-four) for grand theft auto, Korshak quickly lost the case and the two were sentenced to six months in the House of Corrections.

Korshak's next known appearance before the bench was no improvement. On May 2, 1933, Korshak was secured to defend one Jack Niedle for assault with a deadly weapon. Niedle was found guilty, sentenced to a year in jail, and hit with a $500 fine.¹⁷ In September, Korshak appeared with his associate Ed King in defense of Sam Battaglia, a notorious Capone racketeer. At the time, the chief of detectives was cracking down on known mobsters, often citing them with nuisance vagrancy citations. Korshak and King had failed to deliver their client for an earlier appearance, and on September 5, Judge Thomas A. Green lit into them. “You attorneys are in contempt of the court,” Judge Green bellowed. “The bailiffs will take you into custody.” One lawyer was held in an anteroom and the other in the jury box. Green then turned to the court reporter and dictated to her for the record: “Policemen, lawyers, and some judges seemed to be under gangster influences.” He ordered the $10,000 bond of Battaglia forfeited and set new bonds at $30,000. He then instructed the police chief that if other judges ever reduced bail, he should make a list of such judges and publish it. Then he directed the bailiffs to free attorneys King and Korshak.¹⁸

James Bacon, renowned Associated Press reporter in Chicago at the time (later in Hollywood), recently recalled the gangster-crackdown period. “That's when I first became aware of Korshak,” Bacon said. “They would arrest these guys for vagrancy. They might have twenty grand on them, but they were arrested for vagrancy. Sidney was always the lawyer down there defending them.”¹⁹ In Korshak's FBI file, the Bureau noted Korshak's “close contact with police officials and judges in the Police Courts in Chicago.” Simultaneously, the Bureau noted, “Sidney Korshak was one of the Chicago attorneys used most frequently by the Syndicate.”

Despite his courtroom failings, or perhaps because of them, Korshak's underworld bosses stuck with him. But it was apparent to all that his particular skills were of better use outside the bright lights of the city's courtrooms. The adjectives most often used to describe the young barrister—suave, slim, tall, and imperious—were the same attributes that made him the perfect corporate liaison for the most powerful underworld organization in the history of the nation. “Korshak was considered to be a fair-haired boy in the organization with the blessings of [Outfit boss] Tony Accardo,” said veteran Chicago columnist (and Korshak friend) Irv Kupcinet. The gang had just emerged from the financial high of the bootlegging era, anxious to exploit new treasures such as labor, casino gambling, and entertainment. Aware that it would take someone with much more refinement than that of its typical crew member to mix with legitimate society, the bosses began headhunting for the right man with a law degree to smooth the transition into the next evolution of their enterprise, and the short list of candidates was topped by Sidney Korshak.

Curly Humphreys (Don Llewellyn)

These were the years when Chicago's Outfit, under the direction of its “Einstein,” Murray “Curly” Humphreys, was perfecting the science of labor racketeering—the takeover of unions so as to cut sweetheart deals with industry. Among others, Humphreys worked closely with Korshak mentor Abe Teitelbaum, Jake Guzik, and Al Capone in the takeovers of Chicago's dry-cleaning establishments.²⁰ Teitelbaum, who first met Capone due to the friendship of his and Capone's mothers, was a labor-relations attorney, hired by the Chicago Bar and Restaurant Association in 1932. His labor counsel was therefore invaluable to the Capones. Years later, a congressional investigation concluded that the Chicago Restaurant Association engaged in “terrorism” and functioned “principally to defeat and destroy legitimate unionization and has callously and calculatedly used men with underworld connections to make collusive arrangements with dishonest union officials. There is additional undisputed testimony that gangsters and hoodlums were employed to handle the association's labor relations.” It added that Teitelbaum was nothing more than a mob front, funneling corporate money to the Outfit in exchange for labor peace and protection from arson.²¹

In the case of unions not directly under the mob's control, it was often just a simple matter of paying off the union bosses to persuade them to accept a substandard deal, a modus operandi adopted by Sid Korshak. “He made cash payoffs to business agents—five thousand dollars here, three thousand dollars there,” said Leo Geffner, a Los Angeles attorney who negotiated with Korshak years later. “I know that. That's the way it was—to keep labor peace, you'd find a corrupt business agent and pay him off.”²² Of course, in doing so, the racketeer stabbed both the workers and their employers in the back. Ironically, this was the very abuse suffered by Korshak's grandparents in Kiev. The ever-vigilant Korshak gadfly, journalist Lester Velie, succinctly described how the treachery worked: “The deal may be to bring a ‘friendly’ union in, or to keep a union out, or to accept substandard wages … In the deals that the go-between arranges, the union's function is perverted. Instead of serving as an instrument to win better wages and working conditions, it becomes a tool for keeping the worker in line. Thus, it performs the same function as the unions do in Communist Russia.”²³

Thus, by the early 1930s, it was decided that Korshak would be groomed to oversee labor matters when the Outfit expanded outside Humphreys's Chicago home base. Korshak later admitted to the FBI that he met Humphreys in 1929. As overheard by FBI “bugs” planted years later, it was Curly Humphreys who indeed approved Korshak's recruitment.

A retired detective from Chicago's Police Intelligence Division, who wished to remain anonymous, witnessed something of the Korshak-Humphreys relationship: “There used to be this joint on Rush Street many decades ago. It was a lavish seminightclub. A guy I knew was sitting at the bar with Sidney. I don't think Sidney drank, but he was sitting at the bar. Out of the back room of this joint came a man shouting all sorts of four-letter words at Sidney, demanding that Sidney come into his office in the back. And Sidney got up and went back. The significance of the story is that the man sitting at the bar said that the man doing the yelling and demanding was Murray ‘the Camel’ Humphreys.”²⁴

Gus “Slim” Alex, Korshak's pal and Outfit liaison (Kefauver Committee Evidence File, Library of Congress Legislative Archives) Jake Arvey with Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz (Chicago Jewish Archives, Spertus Institute)

Humphreys scholar Royston Webb concluded, “Obviously Humphreys considered Korshak several rungs below, and I think he used Gus Alex as an intermediary for a while. He'd bloody well tell Korshak to remember on which side his bread was buttered or words to that effect.”²⁵

His niche now established, Korshak occasionally turned back to his original benefactor, Abe Teitelbaum, whenever a labor problem proved especially vexing. “Whenever the going got tough, Sidney called Abe in,” said a close family friend of the Teitelbaums.²⁶ (This counsel would continue for decades.) Soon, Korshak and King were working out of the office of attorney Philip R. Davis at 188 W. Randolph Street, a notorious point of convergence for Syndicate members, their lawyers, and paid-for officials. The building had an interior connection to the equally notorious Bismarck Hotel, where mob boss Frank Nitti and his next-in-command, Paul “the Waiter” Ricca, maintained their headquarters. Thirty years later, 188 W. Randolph was still an unmolested underworld crossroads. Jim Agnew, an elevator operator in the building in the 1960s, saw teamster head Jimmy Hoffa, Outfit boss Tony Accardo, and underbosses Gussie Alex, Eddie Vogel, Phil Alderisio, and Marshall Caifano, all making the trek up to the mobsters’ top-floor dominion. Mob-friendly judge, and Arvey protégé, Abe Marovitz also attended powwows on the upper floors. “They used the back entrance and took the freight elevator up to Postl's Health Club on the twenty-seventh floor,” Agnew recently recalled. “They had meetings in the steam room, which they didn't know was bugged illegally by FBI.”²⁷

The Chicago Crime Commission's legendary director, Virgil Peterson, wrote:

Korshak's connections were known ever since he could run from the barbershop two doors west of Henrici's where Fischetti and Gioe were kept waiting while Sid would hold a conference with “Tubbo” Gilbert [of the State's Attorney's Office]. This brazen messenger would commute from the barbershop to Gilbert's Sherman Hotel room four or five times a week. This was twelve years ago [1938]. But what about the supposed owner of St. Hubert's Grill on Federal Street? Where almost every goon of consequence would meet every Thursday evening, where, during the lunch hour, a number of federal judges including Igoe would relax, not with the real owner, Jake Guzik, but with the “front” who has a “place,” Tommy Kelly … Fischetti and wives would meet Campagna's wife and Gioe's wife, who were escorted by Sid Korshak.²⁸

Peterson was referring to the investigator from the State's Attorney's Office's police labor detail, Dan “Tubbo” Gilbert, directed by the corrupt head of the office, Tom Courtney. Gilbert had amassed an astounding $300,000 nest egg, much of it by betting with Outfit-controlled bookies, and running his own handbook on the side. In later years, when his congressional executive-session testimony was leaked to the press, the local papers dubbed Gilbert “the world's richest cop.” Under intense questioning before a congressional tribunal, Gilbert admitted that he had in fact earned big winnings by gambling on baseball, football, prizefights, and even elections. He also conceded that he placed his bets with the Outfit-connected bookie John McDonald.

During the Courtney-Gilbert reign, thousands of felony charges lodged against Outfit bosses and crew members were reduced to misdemeanors. But more importantly, Gilbert was in charge of the police labor detail, a position of critical importance to the efficient running of the city. The bottom line was that the city's business community depended on Courtney and Gilbert working closely with the Outfit as Murray “Curly” Humphreys took over one union after another. Frank Loesch, then president of the Chicago Crime Commission, said, “Few labor crimes have been solved in Chicago because of the close association between labor gangsters and law enforcing agencies.” Many years later, mob-fighting federal judge John P. Barnes described the arrangement between the Outfit and a compliant State's Attorney's Office: “The [Capone] Syndicate could not operate without the approval of the [State's Attorney's] office … The relationship between the State's Attorney's Office, under [Tom] Courtney and [Dan] Gilbert, and the Capone Syndicate, was such that during the entire period that Courtney was in office [1932-44], no Syndicate man was ever convicted of a major crime in Cook County.”

The entire scheme was facilitated by Courtney-Gilbert's alliance with none other than the gang's young labor lawyer, Sidney Korshak. An associate of Gilbert's recently said, “Gilbert worked both sides—labor and business—and he took to Sidney. Sidney learned at his knee.” With Korshak representing the Humphreys-controlled unions, Gilbert became a powerful voice in Chicago's power structure. The troika represented a sort of parallel-universe version of City Hall. One Gilbert acquaintance recently recalled, “Dan Gilbert was the only guy in town who could stop a strike with a phone call.” A call to Sidney Korshak, to be exact.

With such important consorts, Korshak not only controlled the city's Outfit-unionized workforce, but also was able to negotiate practically all gang criminal citations down to misdemeanors. Before long, Korshak had no need of the courts at all, since his clients had their cases resolved with a phone call. The all-solving telephone would become a leitmotif of Korshak's “practice.” As one of his fellow lawyers said, “Sid Korshak is a lawyer who tries few cases—but he has one of the most important law practices in town.”

Now suitably connected, the dashing Korshak joined the Lawndale exodus and made the move to the big city. Still in his midtwenties, Korshak was nonetheless wise to the power of networking. He therefore chose as his first out-of-the-nest home the most highly charged, vibrant abode in Chicago's upscale Near North district, the Seneca Hotel, a sixteen-story, four-hundred-room edifice on 200 E. Chestnut Street, just two blocks from Michigan Avenue to the west and one bock from Lake Michigan to the east.

At the time, Jews leaving Lawndale preferred to live in residential hotels, with the North Shore becoming known as Jewish Hotel Row. Author Louis Wirth wrote, “The middle-class businessmen among the Jews moved into these hotels originally, not merely because their wives wanted to be free of household duties, nor merely because they had reached a station in life where they could afford the luxuries of hotel life, but rather because they wished to be taken for successful businessmen or professional men—not merely successful Jews. The hotels offered anonymity.”²⁹

When one hotel manager was found to have joined the Ku Klux Klan, the Jews banded together, bought the hotel, and hired a new manager. They continued to buy hotels, one being the Seneca, new home to Sidney Korshak, and arguably the nation's most dynamic underworld networking site.

To tourists, the Seneca was known for its amenities and legendary marathon poker games played by the city's upper class. But to knowledgeable Chicagoans, the hotel represented a critical intersection for Syndicate members anxious to invest the mob's lucre in legitimate or semilegitimate operations. And it wasn't just the tenants who raised local eyebrows; the very ownership represented a who's who of the local underworld. In hindsight, the financial cross-pollination that occurred at the hotel resulted in a cascade of immense business transactions that spawned numerous Fortune 500 companies, many of which were tainted by mob money, and not coincidentally represented by former criminal lawyer, now “labor consultant,” Sid Korshak.

The Seneca (author photo) Charlie Gioe after his 1944 arrest in the Hollywood Extortion Case (author collection)

As one might expect, Jake Arvey's presence was felt at the Seneca: his son Buddy kept his ex-wife and son there, as well as his current flame, actress Lila Leeds. The hotel was also known to be home to a dozen racketeers and hit men, including Hymie “Loud Mouth” Levin.³⁰ And although it was rumored that Korshak was seduced into the mob's circle with stock in the Seneca, this was never followed up or proven.³¹ But the partners of record were interesting enough to local law enforcement officials. One co-owner and tenant of the Seneca was Charlie “Cherry Nose” Gioe (also spelled Joye), a Capone underboss and client of Korshak's. Gioe admitted under oath that he owned $12,000 of stock in the Seneca, which, in a pattern that would prove typical for underworld investments, was placed in his wife's name.³²

Gioe testified that he had grown up and gone to school with top Chicago mob boss Tony Accardo. In that same testimony he added that he met Korshak soon after he came out of law school, “through some fellows on the West Side when he just opened his office.” Gioe further testified that he had frequent meetings with Korshak at the Seneca, as well as with bookie Hymie Levin, who lived across the street. According to a source of the Chicago Crime Commission's, Gioe enlisted Korshak's advice when immigrant Outfit boss Paul Ricca applied for (and received) his naturalization using a false identity.³³ Korshak later told the FBI that he was the attorney for Gioe's Don the Beachcomber restaurant in 1939 and represented him in his divorce from his first wife.³⁴ Simultaneously, one of Gioe's bookie joints, at 217 North Clark, was run by Korshak's brother Bernie for Gioe and “Joe Batters” Accardo, boss of the Chicago Outfit.

Like so many others involved with the Seneca, Gioe's tentacles reached far and wide. With the Calimia brothers, notorious hoodlums from Nebraska, Gioe was heavily invested in the Reddi-Whip Corp., based in Los Angeles—the Calimias became president and VP of the company. The company was the parent of over ten subsidiaries that within a decade counted over $1.5 million in assets.*

Gioe also partnered with Supermob member Alfred S. Hart, a Hungarian Jewish immigrant (born Alfred Harskovitz in 1904) who started out as a beer runner for Capone, then managed Gold Seal Liquors for Gioe and his partner Joe Fusco. Hart was among the earliest of the group to make the move to California, where in the 1920s he prospered by first forming Glencoe Distilleries and the Pacific Brewing Company. He was arrested two times in 1928, four times in 1929, and twice in 1931, all in connection with his running of an illegal punchboard operation out of an L.A. cigar store.** In the thirties, Hart owned Central Liquor Distributors, the San Angelo Wine and Spirit Corporation, and the Alfred Hart Distilleries, using their profits to purchase the Del Mar Race Track, where he struck up a lifelong friendship with racing fan—and FBI director—J. Edgar Hoover, this despite the fact that Hart's FBI file notes, “Hart has a reputation of associating with known hoodlums.”

Del Mar president (and former Capone bootlegger) Al Hart presenting jockey Willie Shoemaker with a trophy for his 300th win, September 1, 1953 (Corbis/Bettmann)

In 1949, a San Bernardino grand jury was convened to investigate two of Hart's partners in Alfred Hart Distilleries, Edward Seeman, the slot-machine king of San Bernardino, and State Senator Ralph E. Swing, for soliciting a bribe from a citizen who wanted to obtain an auto racing concession.³⁵ However, the grand jury returned no indictment.

There was more. According to the LAPD, Hart became first an investor, then a majority owner, in the Maier Brewing Company. In that endeavor, he partnered with one Paul Kalmanovitz, who was in turn part of mobster Mickey Cohen's local syndicate. Kalmanovitz operated bars, such as Keith's Café in downtown L.A., that were key meeting places for the Cohen organization. In 1945, Hart sold Maier to his old Capone partner Joe Fusco.³⁶

In 1948, Hart invested $75,000 in the infamous Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, run by legendary hoodlum Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel for a consortium of Chicago and New York gangsters. At the time of the partnership with Hart, Siegel maintained a booth at Hart's Del Mar Turf Club, which he shared with Virginia Hill. Hart was also known to have loaned money—$7,000 on one occasion—to L.A. mob kingpin Meyer “Mickey” Cohen. Hart would go on to dabble in real estate speculation in San Bernardino (which landed him in stir for fraud), become a director at Columbia Pictures, and finally create the City National Bank of Beverly Hills, currently the largest independent bank in Los Angeles and the bank of choice for movie moguls, celebrities, and the Supermob (pals like Sid Korshak were among the original stockholders).³⁷

Another co-owner (25 percent) of the Seneca was Jake Arvey's brother-in-law, Benjamin Cohen, who also owned the DuSable Hotel, which featured a grill that was called “a common whorehouse” by the Chicago PD. He also owned ten buildings, including the Pershing Hotel, in the heart of Chicago's “Bronze Belt,” a province handed down by Al Capone to the “white syndicate” for the express purpose of preying on the city's black population. According to an FBI source, Cohen, who died in Los Angeles in 1943, “had been an integral part of the Capone investment machinery.”³⁸

But the importance of Gioe's and Cohen's Seneca ownership pales in comparison to that of the majority owner, and one of the most important architects of the Supermob, Alex Louis Greenberg. It was Greenberg's financial partnerships that would taint the reputations of numerous political, corporate, and judicial icons, not only in Chicago, but also in Chicago's soon-to-be outpost, Southern California.

Chicago gossip writer, and Korshak pal, Irv Kupcinet called him The Comptometer, and “one of the most interesting characters I ever met.”³⁹ According to “Kup,” for Alex Louis Greenberg, “like almost everyone who became rich through racketeering, respectability was what he sought most.”⁴⁰ His son-in-law, a scientist named Nathan Sugarman, was accustomed to seeing Greenberg studying books in Sugarman's vast library. “Imagine knowing all them words!” he once told a friend. In his quest for success, Greenberg would become key to the Supermob's massive, hidden investments in, and control over, the Golden State.

Born in Russia on December 10,1891, Greenberg was an emigre from the 1905 pogroms, journeying first to New York, then to Chicago in 1908. Greenberg liked to boast of how he journeyed from Russia alone at age fourteen with just “sixteen cents in my pocket.”⁴¹ Sensitive about his lack of formal education, Greenberg was driven to succeed, and in wide-open Chicago he worked his way up from a mugger of drunks to expert jewelry thief, with Big Al Capone's right hand, Frank Nitti, acting as his fence. He admitted under oath to being friends with Capone since about 1920. “He used to be my barber,” Greenberg sarcastically testified. He said he had met Nitti the same way. “We all get acquainted with good barbers,” Greenberg told the Kefauver Committee in 1951.⁴² At only twenty years old, he opened his first saloon, which provided him with a steady stream of suitable drunks/victims. Greenberg relocated to Lawndale (4013 W. Roosevelt, at Pulaski) within walking distance of pals Jake Arvey, Moe Rosenberg (2051 S. Hoyne), and the Korshaks.

Alex Louis Greenberg testifying before the Kefauver Committee, January 19, 1951 (Corbis/Bettmann)

Greenberg was first arrested in May 1910 for theft of barrels of whiskey; he was one of ten defendants indicted by a grand jury for larceny and receipt of stolen goods. During Prohibition he operated a speakeasy at Lawndale and sixteenth and was arrested in a raid there in 1921, caught with forged whiskey permits.⁴³ In 1925, he was charged in what the IRS described as “the biggest booze plot since the advent of Prohibition.” The scam, which included a police captain, three bankers, and Prohibition personnel, involved hijackings, counterfeit medicinal-alcohol certificates, spurious Prohibition Department stationery, and phony withdrawal permits. The partners had grossed millions in the enterprise.⁴⁴

Greenberg's career really began to accelerate when he decided to enter the world of finance. Starting off small, he first loan-sharked his own mugging victims at 20 percent vig* per week. Those who were tardy in their payments were seen frequenting emergency rooms complaining of broken arms. Greenberg may have learned the ropes from his brother-in-law, Izzy Zevlin, another financial wiz, responsible for hiding millions of embezzled entertainment union funds. As personal secretary to George Browne, the president of the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE), Zevlin would soon figure in a massive extortion of Hollywood studios.

By this point, Greenberg had mastered the political payoff, greasing the palms of the notoriously corrupt Kenna-Coughlin regime in order to quash the few indictments that he received. He later testified that he made a point of bribing both Democrats and Republicans. “They both want money,” he said. “You pay them for what you want. Then you get it.”⁴⁵ His money-lending scheme thrived and gave rise to Roosevelt Finance, which became, according to Greenberg's testimony, the third-largest company in Chicago.⁴⁶ The company obtained start-up funds (used to finance mortgages) by borrowing as much as $50,000 at a time from notorious bootlegger Dion O'Banion, the Arvey-Annenberg ally in the circulation and wire wars.⁴⁷ Greenberg had previously loaned O'Banion and Hymie Weiss money to start their bootlegging Manhattan Brewery (later Canadian Ace Brewery), where one of O'Banion's partners was Joe Adonis, underboss for New York Mafia chief Frank Costello.⁴⁸ For his distribution needs in the West, Greenberg was represented by mafioso Tony Gizzo in Kansas City, and Luigi Fratto in Des Moines.⁴⁹

After the Capone Gang killed O'Banion and Weiss, Greenberg took over the brewery with Nitti, helping Canadian Ace become the most popular beer in Chicago, grossing over $10 million a year by 1950. That success was not based merely on the brew's sudsy appeal. When the Outfit started to muscle in on the Bartenders Union, union official George McLane said that he was ordered by Nitti and Greenberg to have his men push sales of Manhattan/Canadian beer.⁵⁰ Such an order was not to be taken lightly, since Greenberg's Chicago distributor was Ralph Buglio, the gunman for Capone's patriarch, Johnny Torrio.

Greenberg diversified again when he opened Realty Management, which managed, among other properties, Capone's Cicero headquarters, The Towne Hotel. With Capone's backing, Greenberg opened a cigar store in the lobby of another Capone installation, the Lexington. The store was merely a front for an off-track betting parlor, started with $110,000 fronted by Nitti. Under the Realty banner, Greenberg bought stock in the Seneca, the shares actually purchased from the wife of Charlie Gioe. At the time of his death decades later, Greenberg owned, by his own testimony, $579,632 of stock in the Seneca, for which he also served as president.⁵¹

Another of Greenberg's significant real estate partners was Fred Evans, regarded by the Chicago Crime Commission as “the financial brains of the Capone gang.” Evans worked closely with Frank Nitti, Paul Ricca, and Louis Campagna, but his staunchest Capone partner was the legendary Murray Humphreys, the labor and legal strategist for the Capone Syndicate, and occasional Public Enemy Number One. The two were so close that Evans named his only son, Robert Murray Evans, in tribute to Humphreys. Evans and Greenberg were coinvestors in a number of commercial properties, such as buildings at 5100 Cornell Avenue, the Monterey Hotel, and Ruby Cleaners.These⁵² investments were but a warm-up to the massive land grabs that Greenberg, Evans, and the rest of the Supermob would institute in California and elsewhere. (For a biography of Evans, see chapter 4.)

Still another diversification was the founding of Lawndale Enterprises, which saw Greenberg fronting for Nitti in a partnership with Jake Arvey and Moe Rosenberg.⁵³ Another partner in the business, which operated theaters and exhibitions, was Joseph G. Engert, a co-owner with future Outfit boss Joey “Doves” Aiuppa, owner of Capone's Towne Hotel.⁵⁴ Not surprisingly, Lawndale Enterprises had its downtown Chicago office at 188 W. Randolph.⁵⁵

As though he needed any more underworld connections, the driven Greenberg helped finance the San Carlo Italian Village at the 1933 World's Fair, held on Chicago's lakefront. The village was run entirely by members of the Chicago Outfit, including Fred Evans, Paul Ricca, Joe Fusco, Ralph Capone, Murray Humphreys, James Mondi, and Charlie Fischetti.⁵⁶

When interviewed by congressional staffers, Greenberg admitted that he and Nitti had loaned each other tens of thousands of dollars over the years.⁵⁷ On the occasion of Nitti's suicide on March 19, 1943, Greenberg had to pay back the money to Nitti's estate. During the probate hearings after Greenberg's subsequent death, it was disclosed that Nitti had loaned Greenberg over $2 million in mob money for investment purposes. Nitti's widow, Annette, told the court that Greenberg had been investing Nitti's money for over twenty-five years. Some of the stocks purchased included American Air Lines, the Chicago Daily News, Marshall Field & Co., United Air Lines, Standard Oil, and US Steel.⁵⁸ Greenberg appeared to share the investment-adviser role with Sid Korshak. As the FBI later noted, “Korshak advised top racketeers in Chicago concerning their investments in legitimate enterprises and was in close contact with [Murray] Humphreys and handled many matters for Humphreys and his Chicago hoodlum associates.”⁵⁹ According to James Ragen, president of the Continental Wire Service prior to the Outfit's takeover, Greenberg also peddled Continental's “blue sheet” racing form. Ragen added, “Louis [Greenberg] is Capone to some extent. He is probably Capone to a larger extent than he wants to be. He would like to break away and he is having a hell of a time doing it.”⁶⁰ (Six weeks after making these and other disclosures to the U.S. attorney in Chicago, Ragen was shot to death in his car on June 24, 1946.)

As a final side endeavor, Greenberg managed many of the Capone-run unions. One such guild, the waiters’ union, had Greenberg reach accommodation with the owner of the Folies-Bergère, a topless dance revue that was the hit of the 1933 World's Fair. That proprietor, Jules Stein, like so many other Greenberg contacts, would play a large role in the future success of Sid Korshak and the Supermob. Through his founding of the entertainment power agency Music Corporation of America (MCA) on May 24, 1924, Stein would give his Chicago brethren entree—once they moved to the next settlement in Los Angeles—into the highest echelons of twentieth-century entertainment. With his enabling pal, James Petrillo, supplying the talent, Stein turned MCA into the most powerful entertainment conglomerate in American history.

Jules Stein (Marc Wanamaker/Bison Archives)

Julius Caesar Stein was born in 1896, another son of Jewish immigrants from the Pale (Lithuania). Growing up in Indiana, he studied violin for a time, but soon gravitated to saxophone. In 1913, at age seventeen, Stein moved to Chicago, where he played in, and organized, dance bands to pay for his schooling. Stein's diminutive, 140-pound frame was no barrier to attracting the ladies—his wit more than made up the difference. He entered Chicago's Rush Medical School on a scholarship, but when Prohibition became law in 1920, Stein was seduced by the money that flowed not only to the speakeasies, but also to the bands that were enlisted therein. Like Arvey, Greenberg, Korshak, and so many of his friends, Stein soon struck up a friendship with Big Al Capone, with whom he was also a bit player as an illegal-whiskey supplier.

“Mr. Stein was friends with Al Capone,” recalled Charles Harris, Stein's butler and confidant for over four decades.⁶¹ Actor Robert Mitchum said, “Everyone knew that Stein worked for Al Capone in Chicago. That's how MCA got into the band business.”⁶²

In return for the supply of whiskey, Stein obtained Capone's muscle to force holdout clubs to book his bands. It is also known to insiders, such as columnist Irv Kupcinet, that Stein gave Capone a piece of MCA, which regularly took as much as 50 percent of the client's earnings.⁶³ Stein fine-tuned Capone's bookkeeping model, maintaining murky ledgers in order to render accurate royalty statements impossible. MCA entertainers such as Bing Crosby, needing relief from freelance Black Hand extortionists, turned to Stein, who would use his connection with Capone to call off the dogs.* When the Outfit started placing its newly invented coin-operated jukeboxes in clubs, Stein came up with the top-forty list of most-often-played songs. Of course, the accounting was far from accurate and jukes were rigged, so soon entertainers became beholden to the Outfit and Stein's MCA for the career push afforded by the machines.**⁶⁴

Stein's hardball modus operandi included the use of an Indiana labor union racketeer named Fred “Bugs” Blacker to “take care of” nightclubs that refused to hire MCA bands. Under Stein's orders, Blacker hurled stink bombs into the holdout clubs, along with his trademark bag of roaches—hence the nickname Bugs. Stein's dirty tricks came to an abrupt end on November 26, 1937, when Blacker and his wife stepped out of Chicago's Argo Theater and were killed by three masked gunmen.⁶⁵ MCA had grown so notorious that a series of federal investigations into MCA (over a dozen) were begun in 1938 and would continue periodically for the next five decades, albeit with minimal success. Stein was also close to entertainment union honchos Willie Bioff and George Browne, who would soon figure in a headline-grabbing extortion of Hollywood studios.

Stein was also known to be an owner of the 650-seat mob hangout the Chez Paree Club, which opened in 1932. “I know Jules had an interest [in Chez Paree] because I represented [co-owner] Mike Fritzel,” said Chicago's legendary Judge Abe Marovitz. “Jules made deals with Fritzel and [Joey] Jacobson to provide the entertainment, and then he demanded a piece. Jules was very powerful.”⁶⁶ However, it was common knowledge that the Chicago Outfit was the silent partner behind not only Stein, but also the owners of record, Fritzel and Jacobson. It was also understood that the Outfit handed the club over to the Fischetti brothers to run it.

The new club instantly became a “meeting place for the Outfit,” according to columnist Irv Kupcinet. It was at the Chez that Arvey protégé and Harry Truman pal Arthur X. Elrod apparently sanctioned a murder. Elrod, who overlooked the gang's bookie operations in exchange for a $700-per-month payoff from boss Louis “Little New York” Campagna, was witnessed meeting with Outfit members who were at war with a bookie competitor named Willie Tarsch. At the sit-down, Elrod told the boys to “take care of it your own way.” A few days later Tarsch's bullet-ridden corpse was found on W. Roosevelt Road.⁶⁷

Of course, up-and-comers like Sid Korshak were regulars at Outfit-frequented clubs like Stein's Chez Paree. “Korshak and Stein met each other in the band-booking business,” a former FBI agent remembered. “They were introduced by Joe Glaser, a mutual friend who ran his own talent agency [Associated Booking]. Stein knew that Korshak was connected [to the Outfit], and he went to him when he wanted to get a message to someone or wanted something done.”⁶⁸ Club singer Tony Martin began his career at the Chez, where he met his lifelong friend Sid in the midthirties.⁶⁹

The cross-pollination that occurred at connected clubs like the Chez was well-known, and much of it would figure in the Supermob's future hold over Southern California real estate, politics, and the entertainment industry that made its home there. Illinois-born actor and future California governor and U.S. president Ronald Reagan was one of Stein's early and lifelong MCA clients, booked into the Outfit-controlled Club Belvedere in Iowa. Joe Glaser got his start managing Capone's interests in the Sunset Café and a small prostitution ring, before obtaining a $100,000 loan from Stein to create Associated Booking, which specialized in black musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, both Capone favorites. Jazz authority Burton Peretti points out that unscrupulous club owners maximized their profit by muscling their names as coauthors onto Ellington compositions, and patenting a trumpet mute that was actually created by their black acts. When Associated moved to L.A., it developed a strong roster of both white and black talent, funneling many to Las Vegas showrooms. Of course, by that time, Sid Korshak had taken over the company.⁷⁰

The through-line of the Supermob continued from Jules Caesar Stein and his Chez Paree to the man who contracted the local musicians that played there. While Stein concentrated on band bookings, his childhood pal James Caesar Petrillo, who was also a friend of Sid Korshak's, lorded over Chicago's individual musicians. His rise to the top was littered with stories of clubs that were firebombed and stink-bombed for using musicians not represented by Petrillo. Born in Chicago's Little Italy section in 1892, Petrillo's first job was that of union muscleman. An amateur musician, Petrillo soon gravitated to the musicians’ union, where he found a career. With the mob's backing, the man who was known as Little Caesar and the Mussolini of Music became and remained president of the Chicago Federation of Musicians for over forty years, and the president of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM.), with its 250,000 members, for another eighteen. Petrillo regularly gave Stein exclusive sweetheart deals, including waivers that allowed MCA alone to book its acts on radio shows it produced. These favors, in contravention of AFM bylaws, were a boon when MCA ran into problems with Petrillo's union rule forbidding out-of-town bands from performing for money on local radio stations. This unique treatment given to MCA by the AFM greatly accelerated MCA's rise to predominance.

“Both Stein and Petrillo made their deals with the major mob guys in this town,” a veteran Chicago investigator advised.⁷¹ Not only was it impossible to run a business without some mob accommodations, such alliances tended to minimize the ongoing kidnapping epidemic. At the time, local bootlegging powers supplemented their income with the occasional grabbing of a thriving businessman. There were also fake kidnappings. Petrillo was said to have been kidnapped in 1933, although some musicians believed it a con devised in order to allow Petrillo to keep the $100,000 ransom paid by his union. Stein also received threats, but both he and Petrillo always pointed the finger at Capone's North Side rival, Roger Touhy.

But the truth may have been even more convoluted: not only were there fake kidnappings, but also false accusations—railroading someone for a kidnapping that never occurred was a convenient method for having a rival put away. “I was pretty sure the Touhy gang was behind it,” Stein had said of one threat against him.⁷² But informed Chicagoans were, like Petrillo's union rank and file, skeptical. “Touhy was nothing next to Capone and his boys, and that's where Stein and Petrillo's connections were,” the Chicago investigator adds. “All the rest of that stuff about kidnappings was nothing more than high drama, well contrived and acted out.” Touhy was soon to learn the worst consequence of a false kidnap accusation.

Sid Korshak's friendship with Petrillo came to a crashing halt in 1933, when Petrillo, for reasons unknown, made a weak attempt to distance himself from the Outfit. In December 1933, Korshak represented two union musicians in a suit against Petrillo, alleging that he stole the ransom money from his “kidnapping” earlier that year.

Petrillo's AFM weathered three congressional investigations and two federal prosecutions, both of which came up empty. Petrillo died in Chicago in 1984, at age ninety-two.⁷³

Like the rest, Stein would move his operation to California, but not before he brought a worthy heir into the MCA fold. On December 16, 1936, Stein hired the publicist for Cleveland's Mayfair Theatre and Casino, Lew Wasserman. Louis, as he was originally named, was the son of Isaac and Minnie Weiserman, Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim who had arrived in Cleveland from Russia in 1907.⁷⁴ His family name changed to Wasserman, young Lew, as he was now called, entered the workforce as a theater usher, eventually rising to the level of publicist for Cleveland's Mayfair Casino. The Mayfair was nominally run by Lew's mentor, Harry Propper, but the man who sold it to him in 1933, Herman Pirchner, knew the truth. “He was the front man,” Pirchner admitted. “The casino was owned by the Syndicate—four Jewish gentlemen.” Those men were Moe Dalitz, Lou Rothkopf, Morris Kleinman, and Sam Tucker, all members of Cleveland's notorious Mayfield Road Gang, which had the local monopoly on vice, gambling, and bootlegging. These men would all work in league with Korshak in the coming years in Las Vegas. According to a congressional committee, the Mayfair had still more silent partners, including the city's Mafia representatives, the Polizzi brothers.⁷⁵

Lew Wasserman (Cleveland Public Library) Early Ronald Reagan headshot (Irv Letofsky) Jake Factor after his alleged 1933 kidnapping (Library of Congress)

When the Mayfair went bankrupt in 1936, Wasserman moved to Chicago to work for Jules Stein's MCA. The move to Chicago would prove momentous, given that Wasserman began to socialize with Stein's friends, such as Sid Korshak and Ronald Reagan, the two men most key to his future success. The disparity in income between a green Wasserman and the flush Korshak didn't prevent them from becoming soul mates. “It didn't matter that Reagan was making two hundred dollars a week, and I was making three hundred dollars, and Sidney much more,” Wasserman recalled. “We didn't know just what Sidney was making, or what he was doing. He was a good lawyer, very accepted in the community. And he was a good friend of mine for fifty years.”⁷⁶

Los Angeles attorney Leo Geffner recalled that Sidney commented years later about Reagan, “Ronnie says he's so pure. He's really phony with this big moralistic platform—he and I used to be with hookers in the same bedroom!” Korshak told Geffner that they had maintained a strong friendship for many years, often mentioning recent phone chats with the future president.⁷⁷

Wasserman, who has been likened to a rarely smiling funeral director, would come to rule over the Hollywood production machine, all the while in daily contact with his close friend and adviser Sid Korshak; other chums, such as Ronald Reagan, were lodged in political positions high enough to ensure that the Supermob was untouchable. Henry Denker, who worked closely with Stein, Wasserman, and MCA producing television programs for CBS in the earliest days, recently recalled, “Wasserman was a guy in a gentleman's suit with a mob mentality. He was the shrewdest guy in all of show business. He used that shrewdness in many, many ways.” Denker added that Mrs. Doris Stein had her own calculating style: “All the antique furniture in Stein's offices was bought by Mrs. Stein in Europe and rented to MCA. She was getting a terrific paycheck every week. They didn't miss a trick.”⁷⁸

While Stein, Greenberg, Arvey, and Korshak for the most part kept their questionable associations in the background, one Supermob associate was so reckless that he barely made the coming gang exodus to California. John Jacob Factor was born lakow Factrowitz in the Polish sector of the Russian Pale in 1889, the tenth child of a Polish rabbi. In 1905, the family relocated to Chicago's Maxwell Street, where Factor's father joined many other breadwinners as a street peddler.

After a teenage job as a barber, his nickname was secure; lakow Factrowitz had become Jake “the Barber” Factor. Not one to resist the allure of the quick buck, the Barber left a trail of lawlessness that even Capone could envy. Among his indictments: in 1919 for stock fraud in Illinois; in Florida twice for land fraud (one elderly Florida woman was relieved of her life savings of $280,000); twice for mail fraud; and for stock swindles in Canada and Rhodesia. Factor returned to Chicago and in 1923 convinced New York's most brilliant criminal mind, Arnold Rothstein, to front $50,000 toward what would be the largest stock swindle in European history. They started off small, selling worthless penny stocks, in London, then graduating up to bilking British investors out of $1.5 million.

Yet even these were mere preludes to the main event, in which Factor and Rothstein sold worthless African land, which they claimed was home to Vulcan Diamond Mines, to tens of thousands of investors, many of them elderly. The pair made off with $8 million, a staggering amount at the time. The U.S. Justice Department called Factor “absolutely ruthless.” Tried in absentia in England, Factor was sentenced to eight years at hard labor. But he had made his way to Chicago, where it is believed he cut Murray Humphreys in on the booty for the protection of the Capones. Factor managed to delay the extradition hearing for three years and, thanks to his deep pockets, had his high-powered legal team appeal the case up to the Supreme Court.

In 1933, cracks began to appear in the wall of protection built by the Outfit for Factor. That spring, federal authorities made it clear that Factor would have to appear in court in preparation for extradition to England. Since the lawyers had exhausted their legal bag of tricks, it was up to the hoods to show how to delay a court appearance, permanently. According to a source close to both Tom Courtney and Tubbo Gilbert, fair-haired boy Sid Korshak, with Curly Humphreys's approval, was instrumental in devising a strategy to keep Factor out of prison. Consequently, the first show-up was scuttled when Factor's son Jerome was “kidnapped,” only to be found healthy eight days later, with no “kidnappers” ever charged. When the feds reset the date to late June, Jake Factor himself disappeared after leaving an Outfit-controlled saloon in the northwest suburbs.

Jake Arvey, a close friend of both Korshak's and Factor's, was seen running in and out of Factor's elegant fortieth-floor suite at the Morrison Hotel, trying to arrange his ransom.⁷⁹ However, after twelve days, Factor surfaced, like his son, in excellent health. But this time, a kidnapper was named. In rapid succession, Tom Courtney's goons arrested the enemy of Stein, Petrillo, and Capone: Roger Touhy.* Courtney persuaded the Washington authorities to cancel Factor's extradition proceedings now that he was a material witness in a capital case. Touhy was tried twice in the Factor case, the first jury being unable to reach a decision. Although Factor identified Touhy, his admission was suspect given that he had earlier testified that he had been blindfolded the entire time. Two weeks later, the second trial produced a surprise witness, Isaac Costner, or Tennessee Ike, a man who when asked under oath to state his occupation replied, “Thief.” Ike stated that he was with Touhy during the kidnapping, but he was against the idea. Factor chimed in that he remembered Ike as the “good man” among the kidnappers. Touhy was found guilty this time around and sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. Meanwhile, Jake the Barber was allowed to stay in the country as “a friend of the court.” (Twenty years later, Ike filed a deposition in which he admitted that he was put up to the false testimony by U.S. assistant attorney general Joseph B. Keenan, who promised to cut Ike a break on a thirty-year sentence for mail robbery if he agreed to testify against Touhy. When Keenan reneged, Ike filed the damning deposition.)

Now free to resume his larceny, Jake the Barber continued scamming until his luck ran out in 1942, when he was found guilty of swindling three hundred individuals in Iowa out of almost $500,000. The scheme, which involved the sales of fraudulent whiskey receipts, finally sent Factor to prison for six years. After his release, he would first relocate to Vegas, where he managed, under Korshak's and Humphreys's close supervision, the Outfit's Stardust Hotel, then go on to self-reinvention in Los Angeles, joining the rest of the Supermob.

Meanwhile, Jake's brother, Max, single-handedly reinvented the look of Hollywood movies with his development of Pan-Cake makeup (pan because of its small, flat, panlike container, and cake because of the form in which it was made). Prior to this, stars were painted with vaudeville-style greasepaint, which tended to crack. Max Factor was also the originator of the pouty-lip look and is widely considered the father of the cosmetics industry. When his cake makeup was mass-produced, Factor revolutionized the way everyday women presented themselves (prior to this invention, women rarely used makeup). Max Factor, who was immortalized in the Johnny Mercer song “Hooray for Hollywood,” died in 1938.⁸⁰ His company is now owned by Procter and Gamble and continues to be one of the worldwide leaders in cosmetics.

As the Supermob continued to coalesce, the unanswerable question was which, if any, of its constituents viewed their association with the underworld as merely a means to an end, and which ones embraced the criminal life without reservation? Much as James Ragen had hinted that Greenberg was trapped by his alliance with the Outfit, there were those who would echo a similar sentiment about Korshak. Among the first to notice some misgivings (if only slight) on Korshak's part was Harry Busch, a fellow attorney who also worked out of 188 W. Randolph. Looking back, Busch commented recently, “However Sidney got his start, I think it was inadvertent. Something that was just too tempting, and then he couldn't get out.” It was a theory expounded by any number of Korshak's friends, of which there were many, over the years. But Busch actually heard Korshak voice it.

One day, Busch encountered Korshak at the Randolph entrance. They exchanged pleasantries, and Busch informed Korshak that, with court in recess, he was on his way to pick up his car.

“How I envy you,” Korshak said to his friend.

“Why? I know you're making far, far more money than I,” replied Busch, to which Korshak said, “I'd rather be making less money and be out of this.”

Busch didn't ask what “this” was because he knew. “The thing was,” Busch concluded, “by then, he couldn't get out.”⁸¹

It was a refrain Korshak would repeat thirty years later.

While Korshak was busy in Chicago learning the ropes as liaison between Courtney's office and the Outfit, events were unfolding in Hollywood that would test his abilities in the art of damage control. The gang Korshak so often represented was about to become embroiled in one of its few missteps, and a potentially fatal one at that.

In the early thirties, the Outfit began making inroads into the exploding movie business. It first became interested in the local variation, specifically in the thriving company founded by Barney Balaban. The oldest of seven sons of Maxwell Street Russian immigrants Goldie Manderbursky and Israel Balaban, Barney had partnered with his brother-in-law, Stan Katz, in 1917 when they opened the Central Park Theatre, Chicago's first picture palace. The pair revolutionized the film exhibition business by indulging in lavish buildings, combined with reasonable ticket prices, which made the movie experience accessible to middle-class filmgoers. In addition, they personally oversaw the design of massive air-conditioning systems that allowed theaters to stay open, for the first time, throughout the hot Midwest summers.

Soon the B&K theater chain was prospering. That's when the Chicago Outfit enlisted the business manager of the stagehands union, George E. Browne, and a Russian-born pimp named Willie Bioff, to extort B&K out of $20,000 or else have stink bombs tossed into their theaters. Pressure was also applied to John Smith, president of Local 110, the Motion Picture Operators Union. Smith later testified that Korshak showed up, for no fee, and asked if his union wanted protection. “I said no,” Smith said. “He thought I was going to hire him as an attorney, and since there is trouble here, I don't want no part of Korshak.”⁸²

Of course, Smith was unable to forestall the gang's momentum, and before long everybody was paying the boys for protection. When the local putsch proved successful, the mob began coveting the movie business itself, then the fourth-largest industry in America. Later testimony revealed that the plot was devised at a series of meetings at the mob's Colony Club. “I think we can expect a permanent yield of a million dollars a year,” Capone's heir Frank Nitti, who had to authorize the proposal, was heard to say. According to an unnamed source of the Chicago Crime Commission, Sidney Korshak was present at the Colony meetings every night.⁸³ In later testimony, George Browne confirmed Korshak's attendance.⁸⁴

The Outfit was hopeful of success in large part because it already had a good man in place: Johnny “the Hollywood Kid” Rosselli had been dispatched from Chicago by Capone's Syndicate in the twenties to oversee the Outfit's race wire, which, thanks to the massive gambling habits of the movie crowd and corrupted L.A. mayor Frank Shaw, was turning a big profit. Rosselli simultaneously become the personal bookie for studio honchos like Joe Schenck (United Artists), Harry Cohn (Columbia), and Joseph Kennedy (RKO and Film Booking Office).

Rosselli and friends were also engaged to break a few legs when the industry's labor unions made demands. Columbia's Harry Cohn became one of Rosselli's best employers and friends. In return, the Chicago gang was allowed to begin their infiltration of the business—first through silent partnerships in actors’ careers, and later in the various craft unions.*

The Hollywood Kid flew back to Chicago and explained how the studio bosses had him emasculate the leading trade union, the already corrupt International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE), making it ripe for a takeover by the mob. It shouldn't have surprised anyone. As director Orson Welles put it, “A group of industrialists finance a group of mobsters to break trade unionism, to check the threat of Socialism, the menace of Communism, or the possibility of democracy … When the gangsters succeed at what they were paid to do, they turn on the men who paid them … [The] puppet masters find their creatures taking on a terrible life of their own.”⁸⁵

Rosselli's wish and Welles's analysis came to fruition on June 24, 1934, at lATSE's annual convention in Louisville, Kentucky. With the mob's gunmen ringing the perimeter of the convention hall, George Browne ran for the IATSE presidency unopposed. Once Browne was installed, Alex Greenberg assigned his factotum Frank Korte to be vice president, and his brother-in-law, Izzy Zevlin, to manage the crooked books.⁸⁶ Then it was Bioff's turn. The convicted panderer and whore-beater went door-to-door in Hollywood, letting the studio heads know that unless they ponied up large quantities of untraceable cash, IATSE would shut down production. The moguls had no choice, and the “majors” (Fox, MGM, Warner, and Paramount) as well as the “minors” (RKO and Columbia) each began paying $50,000 a year to Bioff and the mob-run IATSE to keep the cameras rolling. Only Rosselli's pal Harry Cohn at Columbia was spared.

Of course, the studio heads were far from lily-white victims: they watched their profits soar when lATSE's mob bosses slashed worker salaries by up to 40 percent; the Schenck brothers utilized their new underworld partners to divert theater profits away from their stockholders; Fox had Bioff make insane union demands of rival independent theater owners to drive them out of business. Harry Warner admitted under oath that “it was just good business” to have a relationship with Bioff. Writer Stephen Fox concluded, “Bioff did not have to ‘corrupt’ Hollywood any more than he needed to corrupt the stagehands union. In both instances he merely folded smoothly into the environment.”⁸⁷

When Bioff made an attempt to go independent and seize the actors’ union for himself, he was promptly summoned back to Nitti's Bismarck Hotel headquarters, where he was informed that Charlie Gioe, Sid Korshak's pal from the Seneca, was now in charge of that union.**

In 1936, at the suggestion of adviser Joseph Kennedy, the presidency of Paramount (the Balaban & Katz parent company) was offered to Barney Balaban. He moved to New York City to take over the corporation and remained there for thirty years, while his brother John Balaban ran the studio in Hollywood and Stan Katz became a VP at MGM. In 1958, Balaban raised additional capital by selling the company's backlog of pre-1948 films to Jules Stein's Music Corporation of America for $50 million.⁸⁸ In 1966, Balaban was eased out as Paramount came under control of Gulf & Western.

Meanwhile, Sidney Korshak was engaged in his own private showbiz enchantments. In the midthirties, Korshak balanced his intense “mob lawyer” duties with the occasional representation of a helpless young babe, such as twenty-one-year-old model Dorothy Zink, who was immersed in a property dispute with her estranged husband.⁸⁹ This is one of the earliest examples of Korshak's mixing of business and pleasure—the young barrister was seen squiring Zink around the Windy City. A more lasting enchantment began when, during his association with attorney Phil Davis, Korshak was brought in to handle the nuisance lawsuit of Hollywood starlet Dorothy Appleby. A native of Portland, Maine, Appleby was a beauty queen (not to mention a drama queen), crowned Miss Maine in 1923 by matinee idol Rudolph Valentino. The brush with Hollywood royalty inspired Appleby to become an actress, so she packed her bags and hit the road as a greasepaint gypsy, appearing in stage plays around the country before landing work in Tinseltown. In a fit of retribution against a former lover, she hastily married a fellow actor in 1931, then one week later attempted suicide in New York's Central Park Lake. “He called me a lousy actress in front of my friends,” a distraught Appleby said of her husband to the divorce court not long after.

Dorothy Appleby circa 1929 (Corbis/Bettmann)

The brunette heartbreaker next fixed her sights on Chicago furniture-empire scion Sidney M. Spiegel Jr., formerly married to Fay Lamphier, Miss America 1925. When he broke off his 1935 engagement to Appleby at the last minute, she sued under a soon-to-expire “breach of promise” statute, and Korshak was hired to represent her in the specious $250,000 claim, unaware that he would soon join the long list of men to succumb to Appleby's charms. The suit was settled out of court (for $1,000 in expenses, according to Spiegel's attorney; $5,000, according to Korshak). One week later it was announced that twenty-eight-year-old Korshak and twenty-nine-year-old Appleby were engaged.

CHICAGO LAWYER TO WED ACTRESS DOROTHY APPLEBY ran the September 22, 1935, Chicago Tribune headline. The article noted that Sid had just taken the train back to Chicago from L.A., where he had spent two weeks. According to Korshak, the romance developed during this, his first visit to California. Plans were announced for a December wedding in Harrison, New York, but for reasons unknown the marriage was postponed and, after three more years of dating, canceled outright. “Something about Hollywood makes love fade away,” Appleby had once said.***⁹⁰

But the relationship gave Korshak the opportunity to experience his future West Coast home, and also likely to get to know one of Appleby's costars in Riffraff, white-hot actress Jean Harlow, the stepdaughter of Chicago mobster Marino Bello, and lover of New Jersey gangster Abner “Longy” Zwillman. Two decades later, Korshak would provide counsel to Mrs. Zwillman after Longy's passing. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wendell Rawls, who researched Jules Stein for years, recently opined, “Korshak was like Zwillman. The entertainment world is very appealing to guys who grew up poor. There was great access to women.”⁹¹

In 1938, Korshak's partner Ed King moved to New York, but before doing so transferred one hundred shares in the Industrial Trading Corporation to Korshak's Chicago bank account.⁹² In New York, King worked with fellow attorney Moses Polakoff for Meyer Lansky and was said to have tried to convince Korshak to move to New York and join Team Lansky, but Sidney was already smitten with California girls.

Before making the move West, Korshak partnered with a number of local attorneys, including Jack Oppenheim, who later became a partner in Arvey's firm. Their offices were at 100 N. LaSalle, another favorite spot of the Outfit's political connection guys such as Guzik, Humphreys, and Gussie Alex.⁹³ In December of 1939, Korshak became partners with Harry A. Ash, a former Cook County inheritance-tax attorney general of Illinois. That same year, Korshak briefly flirted with political office, running, with Tom Courtney as his endorser, unsuccessfully against Robert C. Quirk for the nomination of alderman on the Democratic ticket for the Forty-eighth Ward. Interestingly, Korshak admitted to the FBI that Charlie Gioe, Outfit bookie and co-owner of the Seneca, donated $100 to the cause.⁹⁴

A prudent ruler can not and should not observe faith when such observance is to his disadvantage.

THE YEAR 1940 GOT off to a bad start and only seemed to get worse, as Sidney Korshak became embroiled in two major scandals involving his Outfit-controlled union clients. Thanks to the efforts of crusading 132-paper syndicated columnist (and future Pulitzer Prize winner) Westbrook Pegler, the true agendas of Willie Bioff and George Scalise, president of the seventy-thousand-member Building Services Employees Union, would be revealed.

By sheer coincidence, Pegler, who had once worked the crime beat in Chicago, attended a 1939 party in Los Angeles where he was introduced to “Willie Bioff of IATSE.” But Pegler knew better—he remembered Bioff as the whore-beater of Maxwell Street, on the lam for an outstanding pandering indictment. In November 1939, Pegler outed Bioff, and in early 1940, Pegler gave his information to the Screen Actors Guild, which had an open investigation of Bioff and IATSE, the result of Bioff’s terrorizing of guild members with tire slashings—he also sought to control their union. SAG notified Chicago authorities, and Bioff was remanded to Chicago in April 1940 to answer the pandering charge. In the current vernacular, Bioff had been “Peglerized.”

It came out in later testimony that while Bioff was in Chicago waiting to be jailed for the pandering charge, he attended a series of conferences with Nitti, Ricca, Korshak, and Alex Greenberg, held at their various homes and at the Bismarck and Seneca hotels. At a Bismarck Hotel meet, Bioff was first introduced (or so he testified) to the Supermob's Sid Korshak. Prosecutors doubted this was the first time the two had met, since Bioff admitted under oath that he was involved in the Scalise affair, which also involved Korshak. In any event, at the Bismarck powwow, Charles “Cherry Nose” Gioe introduced his Seneca Hotel-mate Korshak to Willie Bioff.

“Willie, meet Sidney Korshak. He is our man,” Gioe declared. “I want you to do what he tells you. He is not just another lawyer. He knows our gang and figures our best interest. Pay attention to him, and remember, any message you get from him is a message from us.”

Over the next few weeks, Bioff said, he met with Korshak about a dozen times at cafes and hotels. Years later, when a California friend asked if he had defended Bioff in court, Korshak exploded, “Are you nuts? Of course not! I only counseled the bastard!”¹ In early April, Bioff began serving out his five months in Bridewell Prison, after which he returned to L.A. to continue IATSE thuggery.

But Westbrook Pegler had not yet finished his haunting of the Outfit and Sid Korshak. In his January 19, 1940, column, Pegler exposed George Scalise as another ex-convict and panderer. Pegler's article revealed that Scalise was a convicted white slaver who had served four and a half years in prison on that charge and had long been associated with gangsters such as Lepke Buchalter and Jacob Shapiro of New York's Murder, Inc.*

One week after Bioff's imprisonment, George Scalise was arrested in New York and indicted on fifty-two counts of embezzlement. The new Scalise charges were based on the discovery of phony accounts set up to siphon union money to Scalise, and by implication, to the New York mob and its partner in the scheme, the Chicago Outfit (the union was headquartered in Chicago and taking orders from Murray Humphreys). Another part of the scheme involved the establishment of new bylaws that permitted Scalise to gerrymander the union locals in ways that would consolidate his power. It was learned that in the previous three years, over $1.5 million had found its way from the union treasury into Scalise's private account. Not only was Sidney Korshak the union's counsel, but, what was more telling, authorities found evidence that he had helped set up the phony accounts.

Grand juries were convened in both New York and Chicago on the Scalise matter, and in Chicago, Sidney Korshak caught a break, simultaneously experiencing firsthand the importance of political connections. Korshak must have had to stifle a grin as he took the witness stand before the Chicago grand jury, waiting to be grilled by none other than his great friend, and the man who had just sponsored him for alderman, State's Attorney Tom Courtney.

Under less-than-hostile questioning, Sidney explained that the fees he had received—$5,000 as retainer and $3,750 for drawing up the bylaws that established the phony accounts—were not, to his knowledge, for the furtherance of Scalise's scheme. Thanks to Courtney's “grilling,” Korshak emerged from the incident unscathed, whereas Scalise was ousted from the union, convicted on five counts, and sentenced to ten to twenty years in the federal penitentiary.²

But Korshak's problems had just begun. In the fall of that year, one Louise Morris, a tenant of the Seneca, informed Chicago police captain John Howe that a group of men had been seducing underage girls in one of the building's apartments, coercing them into “immoral and perverse sexual acts.” Upon further investigation, Howe learned that five men in the building had previously been arrested for sex offenses against two underage girls. The men were Lou Pelton, a Capone associate connected with the Bartenders Union, a restaurateur named Gibby Kaplan, Joel Goldblatt, owner of the sixteen-location Goldblatt Brothers Department Store chain, and lastly, law partners Harry Ash and Sidney Korshak.

The Domestic Relations and Delinquency Court scheduled the case to be heard before Judge Victor A. Kula on December 16, 1940. However, when the Chicago Crime Commission checked the court records over the next few weeks, the case had simply disappeared. Although the names of the alleged female victims were located, the five men's names had vanished along with any record of how the case was resolved. It seemed apparent that, in this so-called most corrupt city in the world, money had changed hands in an amount that satisfied all concerned.³ (Ironically, Sidney's brother Marshall would become chairman of the Illinois Sex Offenders Commission, which sought to determine—with input from consultant Dr. Alfred Kinsey—the best treatment for sex offenders and the prevention of sex crimes.)

No sooner had the vice charges been dealt with than it was back to the Bioff business, which was about to explode again, forcing Korshak to deliver another “message from us” to Willie Bioff. In 1940, as the result of an ongoing IRS probe, MGM's Joe Schenck was indicted for tax evasion to the tune of $400,000. Facing 167 aggregate years for conspiracy and tax fraud, the movie honcho cut a deal and informed the authorities of the payoffs to Bioff and Browne.⁴ Schenck's disclosures led to the May 23, 1941, indictments of Bioff, Browne, and Nick Circella, at whose Colony Club the plot was hatched; Circella also functioned as the Outfit's watchdog over Bioff. While Bioff and Browne utilized legal stalling maneuvers, Circella went on the lam, only to be caught six months later hiding out with his girlfriend and Colony hostess, Estelle Carey. In late May, Sid Korshak, who was in Los Angeles pursuing his latest flame, a beautiful twenty-two-year-old Ice Capades skater named Bernice “Bee” Stewart, met with Bioff at the Ambassador Hotel to make certain he didn't “give up” his Chicago bosses.

At the meeting, Korshak was accompanied by two young women, one of whom was believed to have been Bee Stewart. Excusing themselves, the men spoke in private. “You will admit to being Schenck's bagman and do your time like a man,” Korshak explained to Bioff—there would be no mention of Nitti or the others. “He advised me to lie,” Bioff later testified.

Bioff knew that defying Korshak meant defying the Outfit. He accepted his fate and prepared for the trip back to New York to plead guilty. Korshak obtained $15,000 from Gioe, which he delivered to Bioff to defray his attorney fees.

Bioff did exactly as Korshak had advised him when the trial convened later that year: yes, he took some money, but it wasn't extortion, and it went no further than himself. Browne and Bioff were both found guilty of all charges and sentenced to ten years in federal prison, while Circella received eight. Prosecutors, however, knew the culpability went far beyond Bioff and Browne, since during the trial, studio head Harry Warner blurted out that Bioff had told him the money was “for the boys back in Chicago.” However, without a cooperating witness, prosecutors were unable to vet the lead.

On December 7, 1941, two months after the trial, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, forcing the United States into World War II. Although it couldn't be known at the time, the effect of the conflict on Japanese Americans would prove fortuitous for the Supermob. In the meantime, prosecutors in New York spent all of 1942 prodding at Bioff, Browne, and Circella to try to learn more about “the boys in Chicago.” If their intuitions were correct, the truth about “the boys” could be a career-maker for all the young feds. After months of fruitless questioning, their luck changed, albeit in a most tragic way.

At 3:09 in the afternoon on February 2, 1943, Chicago firemen were called to an apartment at 512 Addison Street on the North Side near Lake Michigan, where neighbors had smelled smoke. Racing up the stairs to the third-floor apartment, they found on the dining room floor the still-smoldering corpse of a redheaded young woman. Her remains were in a horrid state: she had been stabbed with an ice pick, beaten, and set afire after being doused with a flammable liquid. The “flash fire” had burned the flesh off her legs up to her knees. The apartment's condition bespoke a fierce struggle. The woman's blood and hair covered the walls and floors in the kitchen and dining room. In the kitchen, investigators found the bloody objects used to assault the woman before she was set ablaze: a blackjack, ice pick, knife, electric iron, and broken whiskey bottle.

The police concluded that the crime had occurred just hours before their arrival. The victim, it was later learned, was known to have been alive just two hours earlier, as she had been on the phone with her cousin when she had to answer the door. “I'm expecting someone” were her last words as she hung up. Although two fur coats were missing, the victim's much more valuable jewelry was untouched. Police wondered if the coats were taken to give the appearance of a robbery. Also, it was determined that the bottle of flammable liquid found in the ashes did not belong to the deceased or her roommate, and burglars are not typically known to carry combustibles with them to a heist.⁵ The last thing learned was the victim's identity—Estelle Carey, Circella's girlfriend.

Although it was far from certain that Carey's murder had anything to do with Circella's involvement with the extortion scheme—she maintained a slew of dangerous liaisons with jealous lovers—the three men held in stir were convinced of the connection.

“As soon as [Carey] was killed, that was the end of it,” prosecutor Boris Kostelanetz recalled. “[Circella] turned off, boom, just like an electric light.”⁶ When Murray Humphreys's aide Ralph Pierce was questioned in connection with the Carey murder, Sid Korshak represented him.⁷ Unlike Circella, Willie Bioff, fearing for his beloved wife, Laurie, and their children, reacted with rage, saying, “While we do time for them, they are murdering our families.” Bioff proceeded directly to the prosecutor's office, asking, “What do you want to know?” For his part, George Browne took the middle ground, cooperating only minimally with the investigators.

Within days, on March 18, 1943, conspiracy and extortion indictments were returned against Johnny Rosselli, Frank Nitti, Louis Campagna, Paul Ricca (De Lucia), and Charlie Gioe, as well as Phil D'Andrea, Frankie Diamond (Maritote), and a New Jersey union boss named Louis Kaufman, who'd helped engineer Browne's takeover of the Kentucky IATSE convention.

Six hours after the indictments were delivered, Frank Nitti, who was ultimately responsible for the scheme, put a gun to his head rather than face prison time or the wrath of Outfit bosses Tony Accardo and Murray Humphreys. At the time of Nitti's death, Alex Greenberg was in possession of $100,000 of Nitti's money, which he eventually returned to Nitti's estate.

* * *

Indictments, brutal murders, sex scandals, suicides—Sid Korshak probably thought it was a good time to “get outta Dodge.” On April 4, luck appeared in the unlikely form of a draft notice. Five days later, Korshak showed up at seven thirty A.M. and took his physical for induction into the U.S. army, in advance of being stationed at Camp Lee, Virginia, where he served throughout the war as a military instructor and a “paper-pushing” desk sergeant. One of his duties included vetting prospective candidates for officer candidate school (OCS), where he promoted one recruit by the name of Morris Dalitz, who would play a large role in the future success of Korshak.

Corporal Korshak took a leave on August 17,1943, to marry Bee Stewart at the Ambassador Hotel in New York City, before returning to active duty.

While Sidney was off learning how to break down an M1 rifle (and likely shopping in Arvey's PXes), the trial of the original “Chicago Seven” commenced on October 5, 1943. During the New York trial Bioff told the court that Sid Korshak was “our man in Hollywood.” In Chicago, the headlines hit: CHICAGO LAWYER “OUR MAN” SAYS BIOFF AT MOVIE TRIAL, declared the Sun. BIOFF NAMES SID KORSHAK AS MOB AIDE, echoed the Herald-American. The reportage would nag at Korshak for the rest of his life.

Eventually, Ricca, Campagna, Rosselli, D'Andrea, Maritote, and Gioe were sentenced to ten years in prison plus $10,000 fines. Louis Kaufman, the New Jersey union strong-arm, was given seven years.

Irv Kupcinet holds down the fort at the Pump Room's Table One (Library of Congress, Look Magazine Collection Table One at the Pump Room today (author photo)

After Korshak was discharged as a corporal in 1945, he and Bee set up their first home at the Seneca, and together they threw the best parties in pre-Hugh Hefner Chicago, where their female party guests presaged a Playboy Club-like atmosphere. As a former judge told the New York Times, “Sidney always had contact with high-class girls. Not your $50 girl, but girls costing $250 or more.” Rumors of Sidney's associations with “working girls” would follow him for decades.

The marriage put nary a dent in Korshak's prewar bachelor lifestyle, as he became a regular at the coveted Table One in the Ambassador East Hotel's Pump Room, and Outfit-attended boîtes like the Chez Paree and Eli's Restaurant. He struck up a lifelong friendship with Chicago Sun-Times entertainment/gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet, with whom he often shared Table One. The relationship between the two former Lawndale Russian Ashkenazim was symbiotic: Kup made certain Sidney and the rest of the Korshaks were portrayed in a good light in his daily “Kup's Column,” while Sidney, after his eventual move to Beverly Hills, helped Kup gain access to Hollywood celebrities and gossip. “Irv Kupcinet was always kissing Sidney's ass,” said former Chicago FBI man Fran Marracco. “Irv got his free meal. I'd bet a pension check that Sidney probably helped get Irv's son Jerry started as a director out in Hollywood.”*⁸

“When Sidney sat at Table One in the Pump Room, you'd see him with city politicians,” recalled Labor Department Chicago investigator Tom Zander.⁹ “At the Ambassador East, they treated Sid like he owned the place,” echoes Joel Goldblatt's widow, MJ.¹⁰ And while Sid schmoozed, his wife, Bee, was teaming up with Gussie Alex's gorgeous professional-model wife, the former Marianne Ryan, to produce fashion shows in the Chicago area.

I really have no power. All I have is friends.
–PAUL ZIFFREN¹¹

In hindsight, it now appears that Korshak was being groomed—the mob had decided to use the Supermob to help them go legit. What Willie Bioff had told the court about the Outfit's recruitment of George Browne could just as easily have applied to Sidney Korshak: “They said they could use a man like him. He has a nice clean background, and they need a front man like him—it is very important to them.”¹² Conversely, and perhaps more importantly, the Supermob was using the mob to further its own agenda. The symbiosis, or mutual parasitism, had its roots across the street from City Hall, where a number of Supermob associates, including Sidney Korshak, had recently moved their offices.

Upon his return to Chicago, Sidney Korshak took up with his brother Marshall in Suite 400 at 134 North LaSalle Street (aka the Metropolitan Building), a twenty-two-story office building directly across from City Hall, and just around the block from his former office at 188 W. Randolph. It seemed that the mob had its locus on Randolph, while the Supermob was a block away at LaSalle, which fittingly was the street on which Jake Arvey was born in 1895.¹³ “There were three offices in Suite 400, Marshall's, Sid's, and an associate,” recalled Chicago FBI agent Pete Wacks. “Interestingly, their suite was the only one with a back-door emergency exit.”¹⁴

Number 134 was known to be the place where the secret deals were cut with the pols like Tom Courtney working across the street; it was the other City Hall. As such, the building was under the routine scrutiny of well-meaning but impotent law enforcement officials. Among the numerous brokers networking in the halls of 134 was a close friend of both Korshaks’ who had also opened an office there in 1945, as well as one in Los Angeles, a man whom “Colonel Jack Arvey,” as he now preferred to be addressed, treated like a son. His name was Paul Ziffren, and he would become a key architect in the Supermob's successful infiltration of Southern California.

134 North La Salle Street (Karen Laurencell)

Six years younger than his friend Sid Korshak, Paul Ziffren always claimed he was born in Davenport, Iowa, on July 18, 1913, to Jacob Ziffren of Russia and Bella Minnie Rothenberg of Lithuania. Like Korshak, Ziffren had four siblings, brothers Lester and Lee, and sisters Betsy and Annette. Despite claiming this lineage, Ziffren (or anyone else, for that matter) could never produce his birth certificate from Davenport (Scott County), although a delayed birth certificate was filed in Des Moines in 1940. This was curious for at least two reasons: all the other Ziffren siblings had their birth certificates filed in a timely manner, and Iowa law permits a delayed birth certificate only for adopted children, and adoption court records are sealed.

A former Chicago political operative for Richard Daley has related a remarkable story that he said explains the curiosities. “In the early fifties I was working for the Daley camp at a time when Arvey had refused to endorse Daley for president of the Cook County Board,” the operative recently recalled. “I took it upon myself to tap Arvey's phones to see if he was on the take.” The tap relayed one conversation in which a local precinct captain was asking Arvey to have Ziffren, by then a force in California, intercede for a friend in hot water in Los Angeles. Referring to Ziffren, the caller then said, “C'mon, Jack. Look, we know Paul's your kid. You can talk him into it.” To which Arvey responded, “Don't bring that up. It's old history.”¹⁵

Interestingly, the possibility of Paul Ziffren being Arvey's illegitimate son has been bandied about for years by old Chicago pols that traveled in Arvey's sphere.¹⁶ Ziffren's FBI file notes informants who point out that Paul doesn't resemble his siblings, who were, unlike Paul, all delivered by the same physician. Conversely, when photo comparisons are made, Ziffren, although much taller than Arvey, bore an uncanny facial resemblance to the ward boss. Also, there is no record of the attending physician at Paul's birth. Shockingly, both Ziffren's grade school and high school records appear to have been written in one hand, and in one sitting, although they were for a number of different schools. Ziffren's FBI file concluded, “The natural parentage of Paul Ziffren, if ever learned, could explain his exceptional and early acceptance in Chicago political and organized criminal circles—upon which associations, coupled with his acknowledged intelligence, are based his phenomenal economic and political career.”¹⁷ (As a curious footnote to the adoption allegation, in 1937 law school student Ziffren spoke at the Chicago Philanthropic Club's “Orphans’ Outing” at the Congress Hotel.)¹⁸

A brilliant student, Ziffren attended Northwestern University Law School and financed his grad schooling thanks to a Pritzker Foundation scholarship (much more to be seen about the Pritzkers). In 1938, Ziffren passed the bar and immediately began working for the U.S. Attorney's Office for Northern Illinois, where he was the tax law specialist, handling over 130 civil tax cases and several major criminal prosecutions. Ziffren spent a brief period on the staff of the chief counsel of the IRS just before going into private practice in 1941. One of his cases was the government's ongoing effort to obtain $350,000 in back taxes from Al Capone.¹⁹ In 1941, Ziffren joined Gottlieb and Schwartz, where he was a tax case specialist at a time when crime syndicates were employing lawyers, accountants, and former IRS employees to oversee their investments. At this firm of thirty-two lawyers, Ziffren shared a suite with occasional Sid Korshak law associate Jack Oppenheim. When the FBI checked into Ziffren's background, a “number of persons” informed the investigators that “Ziffren was a shrewd, promoter-type attorney [who] placed his personal interests above those of the law firms with which he had been associated.”²⁰

Alex Greenberg's tax records disclose that Paul Ziffren handled Greenberg's taxes at Gottlieb and Schwartz, and that in 1943 Greenberg made an inappropriate deduction of some $27,265 paid to Ziffren.²¹ Those same records indicate that in 1946 Greenberg wrote checks to Ziffren totaling $25,000, Fred Evans ($20), and gave contributions to others in Arvey's Army, such as Arthur Elrod ($2,041) and Judge Abe Marovitz ($500).

Ziffren next became a full partner in his mentor's firm, Arvey & Mantyband, and was said to have been engaged to Jake Arvey's daughter. The engagement was broken off, but Jake Arvey stayed close, considering Ziffren to be, according to associates, like a son. After marrying the former Dorothy Kolinsky in 1937, Ziffren began traveling constantly, often to SoCal. The FBI had also learned that Ziffren was the tax specialist for American Distillers, which also retained lawyers Edward King, Sid Korshak, and his brother Marshall.

Sid Korshak and Paul Ziffren were friends to the end. Writer and former studio executive Dominick Dunne recalled meeting Korshak at Ziffren's home a few years after his own 1957 move to California at a party given for the writer Romain Gary and his wife, actress Jean Seberg. “Sidney was there, and I remember Natalie Wood was there,” remembered Dunne. “I mean, it was a jazzy Sunday-night group.” (Dunne was known to bring his camera to these parties. Unaware that he was not permitted to photograph Korshak, he casually took a picture from across the room. “I could hear this collective gasp. I didn't know what I had done, and then someone said, ‘Don't take a picture of Sidney!’ He was the presence in a room. There's always that wonderful feeling of knowing someone in the underworld.”)²²

Regarding Sidney Korshak, Ziffren said, “My relationship with Sid is essentially a social relationship. I consider him a friend of mine, but he never discusses business with me, nor do I with him”²³ Ziffren's friendship with Korshak would reach the height of its symbiosis decades later, when both were engaged in political kingmaking in Los Angeles. Before that, there was another friend of Ziffren's—perhaps his closest friend in life—who would be instrumental in facilitating the expansion of the Supermob. His name was David Bazelon.

David Bazelon, attorney (private collection)

The youngest of nine children, David Lionel Bazelon was born on September 3, 1909, in Wisconsin. His father died destitute when David was two, precipitating the family's move to the North Side of Chicago. Although his schooling was punctuated by periods of being forced to work—as a movie usher and store clerk—young Bazelon was considered an academic wunderkind, and, like Ziffren, some called him a genius. Bazelon attended DePaul and Northwestern undergraduate schools in 1926-27, then Harvard Law for one week, having to return home to care for his sick mother. In 1931, he transferred to Northwestern Law School, where he became undergrad Paul Ziffren's schoolmate and lifelong best friend, as Bazelon freely told the FBI.²⁴ In 1935, Bazelon married the former Miriam Kellner, who, according to congressional informants, was related to Jake Arvey.²⁵ On the same day in 1938, the two best friends were hired by the U.S. attorney's office, then, in 1941, they were hired together by the firm of Gottlieb and Schwartz, where they were both tax law specialists. Both Bazelon and Ziffren quickly became senior partners at Gottlieb, where Bazelon was said to be the attorney for Alex Greenberg's Canadian Ace Brewing Company.²⁶

Abe Pritzker (Chicago Jewish Archives, Spertus Institute)

Also commanding a suite at 134 was another firm critical to the expansion of the Supermob, not to mention the legitimizing of massive amounts of Outfit lucre. The amazingly long reach and ambition of Pritzker, Pritzker and Clinton would dwarf its role as a law firm and fold neatly into the world of the Supermob.

Nicholas Pritzker, another 1880s Jewish immigrant from Kiev, was so poor that he was taken in by Michael Reese Hospital the day it opened, treated for a cold, and given a $9 overcoat by the hospital. “Best investment they ever made,” said his son Abe. “I paid them back for that coat—about a million times.”²⁷

In 1902, Nicholas founded the Pritzker & Pritzker law firm, which later added Stanford Clinton to the partnership. Clinton later became the general counsel to the mob-controlled Teamsters Pension Fund and also represented Capone gang members like Al Hart's partner, Joe Fusco. Years later, when Fusco moved to Palm Springs, he was seen hosting the likes of son Abe Pritzker, as well as mob bosses Tony Accardo, Frank Costello, Rocco Fischetti, Jake Guzik, and Phil Kastel (Kastel had fronted for Frank Costello in introducing slots and big-time gambling in New Orleans during the Huey Long era). The Pritzkers’ firm also represented Jake Guzik, and the family were friends with the Korshak clan.²⁸ The FBI made note of the friendship of Korshak and Pritzker.²⁹

Patriarch Nicholas Pritzker was on the board of the department store chain owned by the Goldblatt brothers, also good friends and clients of Korshak's.³⁰ “I met Korshak when he was attorney for Goldblatts’ department store,” Abe recalled. “You know something? I like him.”³¹ Then, contradictorily: “He's done favors, but I've never used him because I'm afraid of his reputation.”³² Most insiders are convinced that Pritzker's statement is disingenuous at best, and one longtime attorney friend of Korshak's and Pritzker's knew it for a fact. Not long after his own passing of the bar, one young Chicago lawyer who stayed a lifelong friend of both men went to Abe Pritzker to try to secure his business for his fledgling practice. The attorney, who wished to remain anonymous, has a vivid memory of the encounter: “When I went to Abe Pritzker to try to get his account for my new law practice, he said he didn't need me. ‘We hire the best attorney in America,’ he said. ‘Sidney Korshak.’”³³

As will be seen, Korshak himself later told the Securities and Exchange Commission of his work for the Pritzkers, and Melville Marx also told the SEC that he believed Korshak was the Pritzkers’ labor lawyer in Chicago.³⁴ Marx's statement begs the question: Why would a law firm require a labor lawyer? The answer is that the successful legal practice was but the tip of the iceberg of a vast Pritzker commercial and real estate empire that would come to be worth billions, much of which would be hidden in offshore bank accounts to avoid paying taxes. Their varied interests included the Marmon Group, which oversaw dozens of corporations with diversified holdings in basic industries, natural resources, and real estate. The Pritzkers also came to own the Hyatt Hotel chain, with its hundred-plus international hotels. The New York Times noted, “Pritzker holdings are too numerous for any one member of the family to recall at any given moment.”³⁵ (For a more thorough accounting of the Pritzker holdings, see appendix B.)

Behind every great fortune there is a crime.

What is most relevant to the Pritzker role in the Supermob is the large number of Pritzker transactions that involved known crime figures, Supermob partners such as fellow 134 tenants Paul Ziffren and Sidney Korshak, as well as other notables including David Bazelon, Alex Greenberg, Murray Humphreys, and Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa.

Allegations of Pritzker-mob links have dogged the family from the earliest times. Jack Clarke, a renowned Chicago private investigator, recently recalled what he heard on the streets: “Frontier Finance was used and owned by the Pritzkers as a holding company and is believed to be the secret to the origins of the family's involvement with criminals. Pritzker lent to immigrants ‘five for seven,’ or five dollars lent against seven dollars repayment with interest. It was started on the West Side and the Pritzkers let the mob run it for them. This company office was where the mob held their meetings.”³⁶ Frontier Finance was a state-licensed loan company, with a number of legit investors, such as the postmaster of Chicago, a former chairman of the Cook County Republican Party, and a retired Chicago police captain. But curiously, the president of the firm was Frank Buccieri, brother of the notorious Fiore “Fifi” Buccieri, one of the Outfit's top gambling bosses and a dreaded “juice” collector.³⁷

Jack Dragna in a 1946 LAPD mug shot (author collection)

Stronger evidence was surfacing on the West Coast, where the LAPD observed Abe Pritzker meeting with Louis Dragna, brother of “L.A.'s Capone,” Jack Dragna, in the Los Angeles office of attorney Louis Hiller, a Korshak associate. Louis Dragna was a made mafioso, who later ran the L.A. family with Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno.* The LAPD developed information that Pritzker and Hiller were fronting for “gangland money.” The supposed purpose of the meeting was to bring the Dragnas, who had a million dollars to invest, together with the Pritzkers.³⁸

In the late forties, the Pritzkers, like most other savvy Chicago hoteliers, joined the new Chicago Hotel Association, a powerful group of approximately thirty owners that was somehow immune to strikes by the equally powerful Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union (HRE), a guild whose leaders were handpicked by the Chicago Outfit, and whose reach would soon extend to the West Coast. Not surprisingly, the labor negotiator for the HRE was Sidney Korshak, who told investigators that he was recommended for the job by Henry Crown's vice president, Patrick Hoy.³⁹ (Future players in the gambling mecca of Las Vegas occupied the 134 suite immediately adjacent to the Pritzker firm. Thanks to loans from the Outfit-Korshak-controlled Teamsters Pension Fund, Bernard Nemerov and Sam Tucker would become part owners of the Riviera and the Desert Inn, respectively—although many reported that Korshak was a silent partner in both. Lastly, Benjamin Cohen of Cohen, Berke and Goldberg maintained a suite at 134. Cohen, as well as eight other 134 tenants, would join Paul Ziffren in future hotel investments.)

If you want to get something fixed in Chicago, the person to see is Korshak, and it doesn't matter where he is at the time—all a person has to do is mention Korshak's name.

Sidney Korshak was, meanwhile, gaining experience in the labor-counseling game—Chicago style—while helping a man who would become one of his alleged Seneca “sex party” pals, department store owner Joel Goldblatt. Over the years, the friendship deepened, with the Korshaks and Goldblatts traveling to Europe together several times. Joel's widow, MJ Goldblatt, recently recalled, “Anti-Semitism was a motivating factor in the drive of both Joel and Sidney. Joel treated Sidney like a god. When Sidney came into the office, you'd think the pope was coming. Joel would disconnect the phones, close the doors, and order kosher hot dogs or corned beef.”

Two on the town: Mrs. Sidney Korshak (l.) and Mrs. Joel Goldblatt, 1955 (Chicago Tribune)

In 1946, Goldblatt engaged Sidney after labor organizers threatened him with strikes and extortion. It appears that the Outfit had two prongs of attack with regard to business targets: either force one of their unions on the business, or allow the owners to pay a fee to keep the unions out. Korshak was given the role of collector. Investigative reporter Sy Hersh, who would later interview Goldblatt and write the seminal exposé of Korshak for the New York Times, recently said, “After World War Two, [Korshak's] new, classier thing was to fix unions. He would get unions to strike, and then he would go to the people, say, ‘I can take care of it,’ and he would get a lot of money.”⁴¹ Mrs. Goldblatt remembered, “Goldblatts’ had union problems with delivery trucks. Sid had the know-how and the contacts to end any labor problems at the store.”⁴² The FBI looked into Korshak's alleged role with Murray Humphreys in the Goldblatt-union affair, but unable to find records of payoffs or testimony from witnesses, the Bureau declined prosecution.⁴³

Korshak resolved Goldblatts’ labor difficulties so smoothly that his name quickly circulated among other entrepreneurs hoping to fend off the unions. These clients were trying to avoid aggressive attempts by honest labor unions to organize their employees. They also wanted to avoid doing business with the mob-dominated unions that would keep wages low but demand heavy extortion payments. Korshak's growing reputation led to a relationship with an established banker, Walter M. Heymann, then a vice president of the First National Bank of Chicago and Joel Goldblatt's personal banker. Initially critical of Goldblatt's association with Korshak, within a year Heymann was recommending his most important clients to do business with Korshak; he continued in this for the next twenty years. One businessman described Sidney as “a consolidation of the payoffs.” Within a year Korshak had secured a number of furniture and manufacturing companies as clients.

Brian Ross, the iconic TV network investigative reporter—and to this day the only member of his profession to produce a televised exposé of Korshak (1978)—recently summed up Korshak's delicate position: “A guy like Korshak is essential for that bridge between polite society and criminal society. He's the one who can bridge that, one way or the other. Neither side quite knows what he's doing. It's a dangerous game for him, but that's where his place was.”⁴⁴

In 2003, Sandy Smith, the longtime dean of Chicago crime reporters, spoke at length about Korshak's place in the mob-Supermob hierarchy:

Actually, Sidney functioned as a gangster. He was their straight man. He would go to the corporations and those places that the gangsters couldn't get into, simply because they were such slobs. For instance, Giancana could not go in on his own. Nobody would want to get anywhere near him. Actually at the time, there were thirty-nine or forty police districts in Chicago—the mob operated in maybe half of them. The mayors knew exactly what was going on because on the street the collections from the mob were made each month. In other words the mob had to pay off people each month. There was a political payoff and a police payoff, separate ones. That's how the system worked. A lot of reporters knew exactly what was going on. In most of those thirty-nine districts I could've identified the cop who was collecting money for the captain from the mob joints and also who was collecting the political payoffs. Sometimes one collector handled both payoffs, but more often than not, given that Chicago was a place where nobody trusted anybody, there were separate collectors. That system existed for an awful long time in every police district in Chicago. The mob was into almost anything that was making money in any of those districts. There were payoffs for that. And every now and then, some cop who was handling the payoffs would disappear, go to Mexico and live there for the rest of his life. But this went on in every district in the city. But that's what made the Korshaks so strong. They played right into that. I'm not sure that there was anything in any other big city that was as tight as the relationships between the Korshaks and the mob and all that in Chicago. They were a force to be reckoned with.⁴⁵

While Sidney grew accustomed to his middleman role, his brother Marshall Korshak was well on his way to becoming Chicago's city treasurer, the second most powerful Democratic Party official in Chicago. The FBI noted, “His control of top city patronage jobs was regarded as absolute.” Attorney Timothy Applegate, who was the liaison between Hilton Hotels and its labor consultant Sidney Korshak, recently remembered Marshall's growing hold on the city's finances: “Marshall used to represent Hilton on property tax matters, and he received fifteen percent of whatever he saved us when our taxes were reviewed every four years. I became suspicious when the assessor started reviewing us every year for no reason—and of course Marshall then got his cut four times as often. So I went to see him in Chicago, where he and Sidney shared a big, palatial office. A few minutes later Marshall walked in the front door with his arm around the Cook County tax assessor, and Marshall said to me, ‘Tim, I want you to meet my best friend.’ It was an education as to how things worked in Chicago.”⁴⁶

Jack Walsh, the former Chicago-based IRS organized crime investigator who oversaw the 1980s prosecution of corrupt Chicago judges (Operation Greylord), knew the setup well. “Whoever holds the money strings in Chicago is the most important person in the city, other than Daley,” Walsh has said. “We found people in the treasurer's office connected to the hoods. Marshall had his own connections with organized crime.”⁴⁷ Chicago FBI agent Pete Wacks heard stories that Marshall was even run in on the occasion when suburban gambling spots were rousted. “There were hidden poker games, very typical,” said Wacks. “Certain people would be taken aside so their names wouldn't surface.”⁴⁸

“Marshall always had a police driver with a city car,” remembered former Chicago FBI agent Fran Marracco. “He had a lot of control in the Chicago police commission—who was hired, who was fired, promoted. He was very tight with old man [Mayor Richard] Daley. There was no way to delineate between the Korshak brothers—they were both tight with the Outfit. But that is Chicago.”⁴⁹ Lastly, another former Chicago FBI man, the late Bill Roemer, seemed to agree with Marracco when he told Vanity Fair magazine in 1997, “Marshall was an important legislator and politician, and of course we always felt that he was put in there because he was the younger brother of Sidney.”⁵⁰

In the ensuing years, Marshall Korshak would come to define the classic and articulate liberal politician, as he championed increases in workmen's compensation, increased benefits, aid to dependent children, and training facilities for the mentally handicapped. His popularity saw him voted one of the four best state senators by the Independent Voters of Illinois.

Although brother Sidney was prospering in his own way, his growing Chicago client base didn't prevent him from continuing his love affair with California. He was now spending so much time on the West Coast that he rented a house in the Coldwater Canyon area just north of the city; he would soon buy property at 17031 Magnolia, in Encino.⁵¹ At the same time, thanks to the increased scrutiny brought on by the Hollywood extortion scandal, plans were being made to invest some of the hoods’ profits in SoCal real estate, while simultaneously infiltrating both the political and corporate substructure of the state—this time without the burden of a Willie Bioff. This time they'd get it right: they'd use the Supermob.

In postwar Los Angeles, Korshak was received with open and familiar arms: Al Hart, Jake Factor, Lew Wasserman, Jules Stein, Ronald Reagan, and Walter Annenberg (Moe's son) had all relocated there; Abe Pritzker, Fred Evans, and Paul Ziffren were keeping a presence in Los Angeles, with Ziffren opening a satellite office on Spring Street downtown and renting a house in Coldwater Canyon near Korshak. Everything was in place for a massive reallocation of funds from Chicago to California, and with it, a near-total usurping of the state's political and economic system.

All of these Chicago emigres were bent on proving F. Scott Fitzgerald wrong when he said, “There are no second acts in American lives.” Indeed, California seemed to mandate that its citizens re-create themselves. Not only would they adopt new identities, but they would do it in a state that virtually invited the Chicagoans to hijack it. The Supermob had done its homework; there was not a chance of finding a better locale in which to build “Chicago West.”

Watch that fucking Bonanno … he wants what's ours—what's always been ours, California. He can't have Arizona, and he sure as hell can't have California!

THE MOVIE EXTORTION CASE left the Chicago underworld shaken and more resolute than ever to transfer its cash westward, into real estate and other legitimate business. California, with its lax law enforcement and legal double standard for the wealthy, was the most heavily invaded. It had the perfect climate, literally and figuratively, to expand their enterprise. All that the hoods needed was a front. Enter the Supermob, a cabal that had its own sights fixed on the Golden State.

For numerous reasons, Southern California was the ideal place for transplantation of the mob-Supermob alliance. Los Angeles, in particular, was known as a city receptive to both hoodlums and Jews. And, like Chicago, Los Angeles seemed to encourage corruption on a massive scale.

Founded in 1781, Los Angeles was incorporated as an American city on April 4, 1850. A census taken that year showed a population of 8,624, among them only eight Jews. However, one of those eight, M. L. Goodman, was elected to L.A.'s very first city council in 1850, and another, Arnold Jacobi, was elected in 1853—only eight Jews, yet two served on the city council. Isaias Hellman, who had arrived in 1859, went from a poor immigrant to clothing store owner to banker. In 1871, he partnered with former governor John Downey to found the Farmers and Merchants Bank, Los Angeles’ first bank. In 1890, Hellman left Los Angeles to become the president of Wells Fargo in San Francisco.² So influential was this small minority of Jewish businessmen that fully 40 percent of the housing constructed in Los Angeles since the end of World War II was financed and built by Jewish developers and bankers.

By 1908, some seven thousand Jews lived in Los Angeles, a city that mirrored Chicago in every way sociologically, while in no way climatically; it was like Chicago for people who preferred short sleeves to winter parkas. Like Chicago, Los Angeles’ power elite was historically anti-Semitic, with Jews similarly excluded from private clubs, law firms, and boards of institutions. This discrimination remained in place far longer than in most American cities, typified by the policies of the Jonathan and California clubs, which didn't admit their first Jewish members until the 1980s. Early-arriving Jews bent on assimilating lived and worked in downtown L.A., like the German Jews in Chicago living east of the Chicago River. As had happened in Lawndale, L.A.'s Jews became less and less kosher, with only one in five attending synagogue.

In the early twentieth century, when the Russian Ashkenazic wave hit the West Coast, it merely ignored the downtown status quo and developed its own shtetl ten miles to the west, a sort of West Coast Lawndale. The area was comprised of towns named Hollywood, Santa Monica, Brentwood, Malibu, and Beverly Hills, with countless Jewish-owned law firms and accountant offices springing up on Wilshire Boulevard and its environs. Historian Kevin Starr has written of the assimilated “Mid-Wilshire Judaism” that oversaw the building of the stunning Wilshire B'nai B'rith Temple at Wilshire and Hobart. “Wilshire Boulevard anchored the emergent Jewish Los Angeles,” Starr wrote.³ Among the Supermob associates who would also gravitate to Wilshire were Korshak, Hart, Ziffren, and Glaser. From then on, these two L.A.'s—downtown and Westside—would have almost nothing to do with each other.

Adding to the allure of the Westside for new Jews was the fantastic success of a new industry created by the first Jews to arrive there. With a determination rarely seen in an oppressed class, the Jews had always created their own economy. In Chicago, they had established their own banks, schools, hospitals, country clubs, legal societies, and indeed their own sophisticated version of organized crime. In Los Angeles, they did much the same, with one profound addition: they seized an unwanted commodity originally called flickers; we now call them motion pictures. The only major studio not founded by Jews was RKO, which was primarily a British venture.

Like Chicago's Supermob, practically all of L.A.'s motion picture sachems had their roots within a hundred-square-mile area in Russia's Pale of Settlement. Their families had all emigrated to the United States within ten years of one another, failed at a first career, then found the flickers, at the time considered an unseemly business by the WASP upper class. Among the titans of the new business were:

• Louis B. Mayer—He said that he'd forgotten exactly where and when he'd been born in Russia, but arbitrarily made the Fourth of July his birthday. With Samuel Goldwyn, he later headed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
• Joe and Nick Schenck—The brothers were born in Rybinsk, Russia (Joe in 1878, and Nick in 1881), and emigrated to the United States in 1893. Joe founded United Artists (with Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith) and was CEO of Twentieth Century-Fox, while Nick lorded over Loew's Theaters and MGM. Joe sponsored the creation of Todd-AO recording and Cinemascope.
• Jack and Harry Cohn—Sons of Joseph Cohen, a German Jew who ran a tailor's shop in New York's Upper East Side, and Bella Joseph Cohn, a Russian Jewess from the Pale of Settlement on the Polish border. Harry became president of Columbia Pictures.
• David O. Selznick—The son of Lewis J. Selznick, a Ukrainian Jew who'd immigrated to Pittsburgh and entered the jewelry business, a partner in the founding of Universal Pictures.
• Harry, Sam, Albert, and Jack Warner—Decided to buy a movie projector together and eventually started Warner Brothers. Their father, Benjamin Warner, had left his wife and daughter in Poland and gone to Baltimore as a cobbler until he settled in Youngstown, Ohio, and brought his family over.

Among the motion picture elite, expatriate Chicago Ashkenazim were everywhere:

• Barney and A. J. Balaban—The sons of a Russian immigrant grocer, they owned a string of large movie palaces before Barney became the chairman of Paramount Pictures.
• Adolph Zukor—Born in a small Hungarian village in the Tokay grape district. Orphaned early in life, he left for America and later founded Paramount Pictures. Zukor remained in Chicago and impressed another fur trader, Morris Kohn, and they became partners, and Zukor married Kohn's niece, Lottie Kaufman. By 1899 they moved the company to New York.
• Carl Laemmle—Born in 1867 in Laupheim in southwest Germany, he founded Universal Pictures with Selznick. Laemmle came to America in 1883 after his mother's death and ended up off and on throughout the beginning of his career in Chicago, where he owned the White Front Theater (1906) on Milwaukee Avenue.
• Irving Thalberg—Born in a middle-class section of Brooklyn in 1899. His father was a lace importer who had emigrated from a small town near Coblenz, Germany. Laemmle was impressed by Thalberg and offered him a job at Universal, where he quickly rose to the top of the studio's writer pool.

And there were more Chicagoans, such as Leo Spitz (RKO) and Sam Katz (VP of MGM). Chicago-born (or -bred) actors included Wallace Beery, Tom Mix, Gloria Swanson, Jean Harlow, and Paul Muni, many of whom started out at Chicago's Essanay Studios.

Screenwriter Michael Blankfort, who worked for many of the Jewish movie moguls, described their demeanor: “They were accidental Jews who rejected their immigrant background to become super-Americans. They were interested in power and profit. They would hardly ever touch a story with a Jewish character, and if they did, they cast a gentile for the part.” Harry Cohn added, “Around this studio, the only Jews we put into pictures play Indians.”⁴

California was virtually exploding, its population growing from 1.48 million in 1900 to 3.4 million by 1920, and 2 million more by 1930. But no city epitomized the spurt more than Los Angeles. Between 1920 and 1940, L.A. grew from 577,000 citizens to over 1.5 million. In just one four-year period in the 1920s, the self-proclaimed City of Destiny saw real estate transfers that amounted to $2.7 billion; building permits totaled an astounding $500 million between 1923 and 1927.⁵

Within this maelstrom, the Jewish film moguls sought to carve out their own territories. All that the thriving film sachems needed was a paradise in which to live unfettered and raise their children. Many of the most successful chose the Westside tract known as Beverly Hills. Originally the abode of the peaceful Gabrielino tribe, the region's native population was decimated in 1844 when European invaders introduced them to smallpox, wiping out two thirds of the Gabrielinos. Those who survived the epidemic soon succumbed to mistreatment by the European settlers.

The 5.69-square-mile subdivision was opened in January 1907, whereupon Wilbur D. Cook, influenced by landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted, created a garden city, with wide, curving streets leading to narrow switchbacks that hugged the hills just above. The city's first streets (Rodeo, Canon, Crescent, Carmelita, Elevado, and Lomitas) were constructed, and these winding roads were lined with palm, acacia, eucalyptus, jacaranda, and pepper trees. Developer Burton Green named the new city Beverly Hills on a whim, after noticing a news story on President Taft's recent vacation in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. Sales of lots were languid until Green built a world-class resort hotel, The Beverly Hills Hotel, in 1912.

Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford led the wave of movie stars to Beverly Hills when they built their mansion, Pickfair (1143 Summit Drive), in 1919. Stylish mansions began to spring up overnight, built by a torrent of new celebrity homeowners, among them Gloria Swanson, Will Rogers (the city's honorary mayor), Charlie Chaplin, Tom Mix, Carl Laemmle, Ronald Colman, King Vidor, John Barrymore, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Jack Warner, Clara Bow, Marion Davies, Harry Cohn, and Rudolph Valentino. By century's end, there would be 8,269 mostly well-to-do families residing within the city limits, among them Chicago's transplanted Supermob.

All that was missing was a place for the Jewish elite to schmooze. As in Chicago and elsewhere, the Jews were confronted with the entrenched WASP clubbism, prohibiting them from joining the established local watering holes/golf courses. The ongoing joke was that Groucho Marx was once invited to visit the “restricted” Los Angeles Country Club, and while his children were splashing in the pool, the president of the club quietly informed him that the club was restricted and his young ones would have to leave the pool.

“They're only half-Jewish,” Groucho replied. “Let them go in up to their waist.”

The club problem was rectified in June of 1920, when “Rabbi to the Stars” Edgar Magnin and a group of German Jews formed the Hillcrest Country Club on a 142-acre plot out in western Los Angeles just south of Beverly Hills on Pico Boulevard. Today the club boasts over six hundred members, who each pay a $40,000 annual membership fee. In addition to the fees and requisite sponsors, new members are said to have to document at least $50,000 given by them to charitable causes. On the occasion of an important new cause being defined, meetings of the membership were held wherein they had to stand up individually and tell the amount of their pledge. Such was the case when they raised $34 million to build Cedars-Sinai Hospital (where a wing is now named after Jake Factor's brother, Max). Regarding Hillcrest's strictures, Groucho remarked, “I wouldn't want to join a club that would have a person like me for a member.” That was only for laughs—Groucho became one of the club's stalwarts.

The new Ashkenazic Jews were first admitted when the 1929 Depression decimated the membership, making Hillcrest not merely a club for the assimilated downtown Jews, but a place where all Jews, and even a smattering of non-Jews, could congregate. Hollywood chronicler Neal Gabler noted the importance of this distinction: “Hillcrest forged an alliance between these groups that would strengthen the entire Jewish community, especially when it was confronted by the virulent anti-Semitism of the thirties or when it was needed to raise funds for Jewish causes.” The new openness paved the way for light moments (such as Harpo Marx playing a round of golf in a gorilla suit) and serious power brokering. Countless movie deals and business transactions were hatched in the club's dining room or on its putting greens. Gabler called it “the klavern from which all power emanated.”⁶

In addition to the moguls and movie stars like the Marx Brothers, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, Danny Kaye, and George Burns, after their arrival in the forties, virtually the entire Supermob were spending their leisure time at Hillcrest.⁷ And although Sidney Korshak was seen there, he was less than enthusiastic about its true raison d’être. When Beverly Hills restaurateur Kurt Niklas offended Hillcrest president Arthur Sinton by asking him not to bring his pipe into his eatery, Sinton responded by calling Niklas a Nazi and orchestrated a Hillcrest boycott of his establishment. Niklas's pal Sid Korshak gave his apt assessment of the clubbers: “Fuck ’em! … Listen, the guys that started that place, George Jessel and L. B. Mayer and Harry Cohn and the Warner brothers, guys like that—they wanted to be plain old rich Americans. They thought a country club would help them assimilate, be like everybody else. But now we've got a second generation that's spoiled to the core and thinks being a Jew is something special. I say, fuck ’em! You don't need Hillcrest!”⁸

An offshoot of Hillcrest was soon constructed to quench the one major vice that prevailed among the Jews. Although there was the occasional womanizing and even less alcoholism, the real Jewish weakness was gambling. Not allowed in Santa Anita Race Track, they built Hollywood Park in Inglewood. This “Hillcrest with furlong markers,” as it was called, was founded in 1938 by Jack Warner and six hundred shareholders that included Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, Walt Disney, and stars such as Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, George Jessel, and Wallace Beery. For forty years, the director of the park was Mervyn LeRoy. Here again, the Supermob, especially Sid Korshak, would come to wield power conferred on him by the alliance with the underworld-controlled unions.

Neal Gabler aptly summed up the Jewish milieu in Los Angeles when he wrote, “Their own lives became a kind of art. They lived in large, palatial homes, became members of the country club Hillcrest, subscribed to a cultural life, centered around the Hollywood Bowl, that simulated the cultural life of eastern aristocracy. They organized a system of estates, a rigid hierarchy.”⁹

Not only had Southern California proven hospitable to Jews, but it was also no less amenable to gangsters, who seemed virtually exempt from prosecution, just as in Chicago. In Los Angeles, Ben Siegel's successor as the mob's local wire-service boss, Mickey Cohen, was close friends with municipal officers at all levels. Artie Samish, a Cohen childhood friend and California lobbyist, who was called more powerful than the governor by Governor Earl Warren,¹⁰ remained a powerful ally of Cohen's. As Cohen explained in his autobiography, “See, if I had any problems with legislators in Sacramento on things like slot machines on premises, he nipped it in the bud. I was his right hand, and he was my godfather, my senior statesman.”¹¹ Cohen's friendly influence did not stop at the state capital—it extended into every important agency, including the police force and the mayor's office. “At one point in the 1940s and 1950s, I had the police commission in Los Angles going for me,” Cohen recalled. “A lot of the commissioners didn't have any choice. Either they would go along with the program, or they would be pushed out of sight … It was all the way up to the box at certain police stations … When I was in the mayor's corner, see, a certain amount was put into his campaign each time through my lawyers, Sam Rummel and Vernon Ferguson.” Cohen had the private numbers of the mayor's home and office to boot.¹² He also knew Richard Nixon, who, before running for Congress, demanded that Cohen come up with a $75,000 “contribution” to assure Nixon's leniency toward the local bookies. Cohen held a dinner with all the local hoods and came up with the money.¹³

Mickey Cohen (r.) with his enforcer, Johnny Stompanato (author collection)

The mobsters bonded not only with the local pols, but also with the moguls and their stars. It was yet another symbiotic relationship: the mob wanted the executives’ money and broads, and the Hollywood elite wanted the swagger they thought would rub off by association with hoods, in addition to the muscle they could bring to bear on the nascent labor movement. Much has been written about Frank Sinatra and Sam Giancana, George Raft and Bugsy Siegel (and later Sid Korshak), and Johnny Rosselli and moguls like Harry Cohn, who proudly wore the ruby pinkie ring given him by Rosselli, and proudly kept a framed picture of his idol, Benito Mussolini, on his desk. But there was more: Joe Schenk's earliest investors included New York underworld genius Arnold Rothstein; Longy Zwillman provided Harry Cohn with start-up money to take over Columbia; and Louie Mayer's “closest friend” was said to be hood Frank Orsatti.

One employed the other, and in return mobsters were favorably portrayed on-screen. The gangster fraternization went beyond the moguls to the actors themselves. Sam and Chuck Giancana alleged that the mob sponsored numerous stars, including the Marx Brothers, George Raft, Marilyn Monroe, Jimmy Durante, Marie McDonald, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Jean Harlow, Cary Grant, and Wendy Barrie. Jimmy Fratianno and Mickey Cohen both claimed that they knew half the movie people on a first-name basis. Robert Mitchum and Sammy Davis Jr. acted as character witnesses for Cohen during his numerous trials. The hoods bedded an endless parade of young actresses, such as Jean Harlow, who enjoyed the affections of Longy Zwillman, and Lana Turner, who lived with Cohen's boy Johnny Stompanato.

The camaraderie between the moguls and the hoods caught the eye of noir writer Raymond Chandler, who, after seeing a herd of moguls returning from lunch, wrote, “They looked so exactly like a bunch of topflight Chicago gangsters moving in to read the death sentence on the beaten competitor. It brought home to me in a flash the strange psychological and spiritual kinship between the operations of big money business and the rackets. Same faces, same expressions, same manners. Same way of dressing and same exaggerated leisure of movement.”¹⁴

When hedonistic studio chiefs or their stars risked potential vice or gambling scandals, they were happy to call on their new pals like Rosselli to make the problems go away. As Rosselli's biographers observed, “The sudden and enormous success of movies spawned an orgy of vice that threatened to shatter the industry. Drug use was widespread, including cocaine, heroin and illegal alcohol. Sexual favors were demanded by casting directors and became a sort of alternative currency.”¹⁵ When actresses such as Joan Crawford were blackmailed with porno reels shot in their youth, Rosselli and friends put the hammer to the extortionists. When the celebs or their employers got juiced up at Santa Anita or at Jack Dragna's offshore gambling ship The Rex, the hoods often took care of their markers.

At least that was on the surface. Behind the scenes, a subtler, criminal incursion was beginning, when into this dynamic mix of prospering Jews and mobster chic was added the post-World War II Supermob arrivals. Indeed, the Jewish population of Los Angeles exploded following the war, doubling by 1948, and doubling again by 1960. Jewish newcomers were so predominant that by 1950 only 8 percent of adult Jews in L.A. had been born here. But without doubt, the most important of the new arrivals hailed from Chicago, and they had names like Korshak, Ziffren, Hart, Factor, Stein, Wasserman, Evans, Pritzker, Annenberg … and a non-Jew named Reagan. These men represented a new kind of L.A. mogul, one that had ready access to the clout and lucre of the Chicago underworld. In no time, the new arrivals seized not only the entertainment juggernaut, but also the political clout that accompanied real estate investment on a massive scale.

The Chicago group took over. We used to sit around and wonder how they all got here.

While the land grab in the Western world is as old as Columbus, its place in California history provides a study of its sophisticated evolution. After the destruction of the native population, questionable legal precedents separating the Mexican population from their property established a sympathetic relationship early on between the territorial courts and the newly arrived white immigrants. Later, rampant land-title abuses, fraudulent mining claims, and water-rights disputes schooled an investing elite whose financial interests would parade under the guise of public welfare concerns aided and abetted by a compliant court system. The history of California is inseparable from its land or what lay beneath.

In the twentieth century, California land grabs were exemplified by the actions of the privately owned Los Angeles Water Company. Under the leadership of William Mulholland and former L.A. mayor Fred Eaton, the company bought large tracts of land from farmers in Owens Valley, 230 miles north of Los Angeles.* The sellers had been told that the purchases were needed to advance a study on the best ways to irrigate the valley, when the truth was just the opposite: the actual intent of the land grab was to build an aqueduct with which to drain the local Owens River down to the exploding L.A. metropolis. When the spigots were opened in 1913, the Owens Valley farmland quickly turned into a dust bowl, as the water supply evaporated. In addition to the human toll, native wildlife and vegetation were devastated. But the water supply allowed L.A. to modernize, and the San Fernando Valley to exist at all.

“The Rape of Owens Valley,” which inspired the fictionalized 1974 film Chinatown, was yet to experience its most tragic consequence. On March 28, 1928, one of the many dams linked to the aqueduct, the St. Francis, collapsed, sending a forty-foot wall of water into the Santa Clara Valley, claiming over four hundred lives. The subsequent investigation determined that an engineering flaw and “an error in regard to fundamental policy related to public safety” was the cause of the dam's failure. Mulholland was so distraught that he took a pair of pliers and pulled out all his teeth, then withdrew from the public until his death in 1935.¹⁷

Three decades after Owens Valley was denuded, it became the Supermob's turn to relieve unknowing Californians of their land. The decade from 1943 to 1953 was known as the Suede Shoe era, a time when FHA home-improvement-loan scandals swept the country, and returning GIs, anxious to purchase or improve their homes, were victimized by con artists who funneled mob money into collateral loans with the FHA. The mob too was investing much money in commercial real estate, especially hotels. With seemingly respectable attorneys and accountants as fronts, they channeled monies gained from gambling, vice, narcotics, extortion, etc., into legit properties that earned legit profit. The returning “clean” profits inspired the term comeback money. The gang that set the standard for this money laundering hailed from Chicago, and although much has been written about their self-admitted conquest, Las Vegas, few seem to want to discuss their first major target: the sunny expanses of Southern California.

What made California such an easy target for the mob-Supermob alliance was a classic example of good intentions gone awry. Lester Velie, one of the great investigative reporters of the century, wrote, “The late Senator Hiram Johnson, seeking to bar political bosses and machines forever, had designed California's open primary. Aspirants could run in Democratic or Republican primaries—or both—without party labels. Boss control of primaries withered, and then died altogether as reform laws barred parties from endorsing primary candidates. But something that Reformer Johnson didn't bargain for took the boss's place: money power.”¹⁸ Art White, a tireless political reporter with the Los Angeles Mirror, wrote about how this arrangement played into the hands of outside corrupters in the post-World War II period in California:

California was to become a state full of strangers, political waifs and mavericks who registered in their party of preference only to find that they had come to a place where political ideology was of no importance. Republicans ran as Democrats and Democrats ran as Republicans. With disconcerting regularity, Republicans, having won both party nominations, were elected in the primaries.

Since party designations had no meaning to the electorate, elections were won by the candidate with the most money, the greatest number of billboards, direct mail pieces, and the most radio time.

Any individual who could devise a system to furnish these campaign necessities on a sustained basis was on his way to becoming a political boss, California style. The boss … could have a say, perhaps the final word, in the appointment of judges from the municipal courts to the state supreme court. Other appointive jobs included inheritance tax appraisers, deputy attorneys general, state department heads and commissioners of departments. With a handful of such appointments in his pocket, the boss could protect his economic interests.¹⁹

In short, California was, by design, the perfect place to export Chicago-style patronage and political corruption. Fletcher Bowron, L.A.'s mayor throughout the war years, was a Republican reform politician often at odds with diehard business coalitions and organized crime cartels. Among his other powerhouse enemies, Bowron was at war with Los Angeles Times publisher Norman Chandler, who controlled the do-nothing police commission. For a time, Bowron and Chandler held an uneasy truce—Bowron promising not to reveal what his intel unit learned of Chandler's marital infidelities, and Chandler agreeing not to publish stories of police transgressions. But the truce broke when Chandler, at odds with Bowron's desire to obtain federally funded housing projects, began financing opposing candidates.²⁰

Mayor Bowron described the sociopolitical climate in 1940s California thus: “Los Angeles potentially is the most lush field for the activities of those connected with organized crime; with particular reference to commercialized gambling and vice, it is probably more true than for any city in America. We have considerable wealth here. We have a large population. We have free spenders here. We have people that like that sort of thing. It means constant and eternal vigilance to keep the city clean. We can't keep it entirely clean.”²¹

Adding to the city's woes was an understaffed police department that, according to the Association of National Chiefs of Police, was two thousand police short of the six thousand it needed to monitor the 453-square-mile sprawl.²² Incorporated towns, like Beverly Hills, thus sprung up with their own police departments that redefined the term lax.

When Bowron's political enemies attempted a recall in 1948, there were rumors of outside instigation. Bowron later testified, “Many of those behind [organized crime] were connected directly or indirectly with the recall movement. I don't merely mean that they had to eliminate me, but they have to eliminate those people that I try to represent, those who want laws enforced and want to see a clean city.”²³ Soon, rumors were flying that a mysterious group of non-Californians called The Big Five, hoping to open up the state to underworld control, were financing the recall. One associate of that group, a bookie and co-owner of the offshore gambling ship The Rex, James Utley, sent a courier named Polly Gould to Bowron in an effort to cut a deal: Utley said he couldn't pull out of the recall because the other participants were “bigger shots” than he, but he would quietly work for Bowron at the same time in exchange for a promise from Bowron not to raid his nightclub, The Tropics. Bowron replied, “I don't make any deals.”²⁴

Soon thereafter, based on a tip, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) began looking into the people behind the Hayward Hotel at 20 E. Sixth Street, the headquarters of the anti-Bowron movement. At the time, LAPD chief William H. Parker ran the most sophisticated police intelligence division in the country. Writer Frank Donner rightfully called him “probably the most respected public figure in Southern California and, next to J. Edgar Hoover, the most celebrated law-enforcement official in the country.”²⁵ Parker's investigation opened a Pandora's box of immense proportions, but one that to this day has been little known outside SoCal environs. And even there, the facts are so obfuscated that only the most determined investigators have grasped the full implications.

Chief Parker first entrusted LAPD Intelligence commander James Hamilton, and his chief investigator, Walter J. Devereux, with the Hayward Hotel inquiry. Hamilton worked closely with FBI agent, and later investigator for the DA's office, Julian Blodgett. When the evidence trail showed its labyrinthine complexity, involving countless shell and holding companies (all recorded in the L.A. county clerk's records warehouse), Hamilton shared the immense workload with top-notch Pacific News reporter and CBS News producer Robert Goe, who amassed hundreds of hours trolling through real estate and corporate filings, both in L.A. and Chicago. “Robert was a workaholic and was meticulous,” his widow, Wanda, recently recalled. “Whatever he did at any time would consume him. He was obsessed with the mayor's office. It kept him looking over his shoulder until the day he died—he wras very aware of the truth of California politics.”²⁶

Goe in turn passed his findings over to Mirror and Times reporters Art White and Jack Tobin. Ridgeley Cummings also conducted corroborative research in the journal the Government Employee.²⁷

According to the FBI, the Goe-White research was funded “by certain well-to-do Democrats who became concerned over the emergence in California of forces within the Party who were foreign to the California political scene and were suspected of injecting machine politics of such a nature as to pose a threat to the nominal Party hierarchy here.” Both the FBI and the U.S. Congress investigated some aspects of this takeover,²⁸ but the investigations were allowed to whither when neither the White House nor the attorney general showed any interest in pursuing the story.

The daunting private investigation in California would take even more years than the team was able to devote to it—it might never be fully explicated—but their findings painted a clear and consistent picture of a territory engulfed by Chicago money, much of it tainted. What was most disturbing was the degree to which high public officials, some of whom later became icons, appeared to facilitate, and profit from, these investments. Not surprisingly, the key players’ trails all seemed to lead back to the Seneca and Sidney Korshak.

Author and former investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times William Knoedelseder summarized the style of California crime that never seemed to make the newspapers: “In Los Angeles, organized crime has always operated as a more subtle, almost invisible force, employing more lawyers, bankers, and investment brokers than leg breakers and button men.” This climate bears much resemblance to corrupt Chicago, so much so, Knoedelseder writes, that “organized crime is often indistinguishable from legitimate business in Los Angeles.”²⁹

The Hayward Hotel today (author photo)

The first clue as to the scope and tainted pedigree of the massive Chicago investments in SoCal was the name listed as a co-owner of the Hayward, none other than Chicago Jake Arvey's boy Paul Ziffren. By this time, Ziffren was spending most of his year in California, soon to be a full-time resident. At the same time, Paul's younger brother Lester attended school at UCLA, where he romanced Jake Arvey's daughter, Helen Sue, also a student there.³⁰ The two were later married, and Lester established his own legal reputation in L.A., albeit much less controversial than Paul's.

A congressional informant noted that Paul Ziffren even added Arvey's name to his West Coast shingle. However, “Arvey made a special trip to Los Angeles ‘to have his name taken off,’ he having heard how ‘hot’ Ziffren was at the time.”³¹ Many astute Californians saw Ziffren as an emissary of Arvey's, dispatched westward to organize the California Democratic Party along Illinois “machine politics” principles. However, even these observers failed to grasp the full scope of Ziffren's business in their state.

“Ziffren made a big thing of his connection with Arvey when he first came out here,” said an old-time California pol. “He just mushroomed.”³² Attorney David Leanse, who worked with both Korshak and Ziffren after their moves to the West Coast, said, “Arvey's protégé in Chicago was Paul Ziffren. He didn't have the contacts with labor that Korshak had, but Ziffren represented savings and loans and lenders, and that put him in touch with the entertainment business a lot.”³³ But even that description misses perhaps the most important aspect of Ziffren's impact: his partnership in the reallocation of tainted Chicago money in his new home state. What Leanse and the others failed to see was, however, seen by those investigating the Hayward Hotel.

Connie Carlson, the retired organized crime specialist for the California attorney general's office, closely monitored the world of Ziffren and his other Chicago transplant pals. She recently spoke of Ziffren's appearance on the California scene: “When I first heard about him, it was negatively.” When Ziffren came here in the forties, it was like he was dropped out of the sky, and he became one of the top Democratic advisers to the Truman administration. Ziffren usurped all of the top Democrats overnight, and somebody in the White House went along with it. First Chicago exported the mob here, then the machine. The takeover was so quiet that no one ever knew it happened. Paul Ziffren became a social leader, sharing the Chandlers’ [owners of the Los Angeles Times] box at the Hollywood Bowl. He put every bit of his past behind him, whatever it was, good or bad.³⁴

Elevating the Hayward-Ziffren link beyond the mere suspicious were the unassuming names listed with Ziffren's among the shareholders of the hotel: Mathilda B. Evans and Esther Greenberg. In short order it was determined that Mathilda was merely lending her name in the place of her notorious husband, a genuine Capone Syndicate heavyweight and partner with Murray Humphreys, Fred Evans.³⁵ Fred had learned that the hotel's liquor-license application would require his fingerprints, a vetting he tried to avoid.

Evans, another Jewish brainiac, moved to Chicago as a child from St. Louis, turning into a financial hood with an impressive variety of income sources. He graduated from the University of Chicago as an accounting major and also studied architecture and engineering. He would soon earn the distinction of being Chicago's only college-educated Syndicate functionary. After the Depression, the distinguished-looking Evans sold jewelry, loan-sharked—loaning money to Syndicate bosses, such as Louis Campagna ($20,000), when they ran into tax difficulties—became a Loop banker, and bought and sold distressed merchandise, which he fenced with Capone Syndicate wunderkind (and an early Public Enemy Number One) Murray Humphreys. Their operation was housed in a Twenty-fourth Ward garage at Halsted and Van Buren streets, a few blocks north of the Maxwell Street Market. After his first wife, Donna Levinson, divorced him in 1924 on cruelty charges, he hooked up with Mathilda.

Evans was convicted of a crime only once—storing illegal alcohol—and was known to favor the criminal use of the trained mind over the trained trigger finger. With Humphreys, Evans took over the mob-controlled laundry rackets, cornering the market on sheets and towels dispensed in Chicago's countless hotels and brothels. In November 1940, he was indicted with Humphreys for embezzling the Bartenders Union out of $350,000 (he skated when Humphreys fixed the jury). In 1959, he was implicated in the 1953 kidnapping-murder of six-year-old Bobby Greenlease—Evans was caught purchasing a money order (paid to the Outfit's Lenny Patrick) with marked bills that had been paid out in the botched Greenlease ransom.³⁶

Like Mathilda Evans, Esther Greenberg was performing the same signatory function for her spouse, the notorious Alex Greenberg.³⁷ When he testified under immunity in Chicago, Greenberg related how he had become enticed into the world of real estate by Manhattan Brewing's former president Arthur C. Lueder, also a former postmaster for the city of Chicago. “Leuder would appraise real estate in bankruptcy proceedings at a low figure,” he told a federal grand jury on February 29, 1944. “Several of us would form a pool to buy up these properties, then we took care of him with a share. That was good for one hundred thousand a year for each of us.”³⁸

Bit players in the Hayward included Joseph Best, also on the Seneca board with Greenberg, and the president of Hayward Hotel; and Sam Levin, believed by Chicago authorities to have purchased seventy-five jukeboxes from Capone hood Joe Peskin, also known as Sugar Joe Peskin.³⁹ In addition to the Hayward connection, Ziffren and Evans were linked when police found that they were coholders of a liquor license for another hotel owned by the consortium.⁴⁰

Chicago Crime Commission director Virgil Peterson informed both the Kefauver Committee and the LAPD of the implications: “It is quite likely that the Hotel Hayward may be a mob-owned hotel. In any event, it would appear likely that the stock allegedly held by the wife of Fred Evans is probably actually held by Evans himself.”⁴¹ In fact, Evans admitted to Congress that he owned 14 percent of the Hayward, brought into the investment by Paul Ziffren's brother-in-law, and Hilton Hotel executive, Joseph Drown. He further testified that he put a 10 percent interest of another hotel, the San Padre in Bakersfield, California, in his children's names. Evans explained that he first met Alex Greenberg during the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, when Greenberg asked him to place Manhattan Brewery ads on popcorn boxes sold at Evans's concession (run with Murray Humphreys). He also informed Congress of three other Chicago properties he co-owned with Greenberg.⁴²

The same year as the Hayward purchase, Ziffren divorced his wife, Phyllis, despite, according to the LAPD, Alex Greenberg's intervention to try to save the marriage. Ziffren continued to invest that year, when he became trustee and executor for lawyer (and Greenberg's Seneca partner) Benjamin Cohen. Together, Ziffren and Cohen held stock in the San Diego Hotel and the Morris Hotel in Los Angeles. But the realization of the notorious Evans's partnership with the notorious Greenberg and the supposedly clean Paul Ziffren inspired an investigation of California real estate transactions that would be passed down to two generations of public and private investigators for the next two and a half decades. It turned out that the Hayward investment was just the beginning of a frenzy of tainted California hotel and real estate purchases. What most disturbed investigators was the appearance of assistance coming from Ziffren's closest friend, David Bazelon, by then a high-ranking member of the Truman administration—who just happened to control millions of dollars’ worth of recently seized real estate that was in need of new owners.

What we call real estate—the solid ground to build a house on—is the broad foundation on which nearly all of the guilt of the world rests.

BY THE MIDFORTIES, Paul Ziffren was already a California resident, although for the next six years he remained listed in Chicago as working out of Arvey's office at One North LaSalle, and he still had a listing at 134 N. LaSalle. In Los Angeles, Ziffren represented celebrities with tax problems, such as actor Errol Flynn, who the IRS declared owed $333,000 in back taxes and penalties.¹

Picking up on Ziffren's drive and intellect, a West Coast friend asked him, “Why don't you go into politics?” To which Ziffren responded, “I want to make money first.”² And Paul Ziffren knew just how he was going to do it: by joining up with his Supermob pals in a glut of property investments with some of Chicago's most notorious Syndicate financiers.

Not long after his friend Paul Ziffren left the Gottlieb firm for California, David Bazelon followed suit, leaving the practice in 1946 for a position as Attorney General Tom Clark's assistant attorney general, promoted a year later to being in charge of the lands division, giving up a $50,000-a-year private practice for the $10,000-a-year post.³ According to a later congressional probe of Bazelon, the word in Chicago was that the firm was happy to see Bazelon depart “because of their fear that Bazelon's client, [Capone's financial whiz] Arthur Green [sic], might get them into serious trouble.”⁴ At the time of the job change, Bazelon supposedly told one intimate that he was worried about the IRS looking into his work for Alex Greenberg's Canadian Ace Brewing Company, and that he “needed a federal judgeship to get himself cleaned up.”⁵

From his lands division vantage point, Bazelon was well aware of recently seized properties, and real estate that was in tax arrears. Perhaps not coincidentally, pals Bazelon and Ziffren went on a property buying-and-selling spree that appeared to be blessed with the Midas touch. But close scrutiny of these investments gives a telling clue as to how the American underworld discreetly, and successfully, laundered its money in the twentieth century, the massive financial shift occurring soon after World War II.

In 1947, Abe Pritzker and Paul Ziffren (whose college tuition was financed by the Pritzker Foundation) partnered with Assistant Attorney General Bazelon to form the Franklin Investment Company in Ohio. With Ziffren as VP of Franklin Investment, the intent was to invest in debt-ridden hotel properties such as the 650-room Neil House and the 1,000-room Deshler-Wallach Hotel in Columbus. During this period, Franklin controlled virtually all of the first-class hotel rooms in Columbus. One participant in the Franklin deal told the Bureau that Pritzker was a silent partner, through Ziffren, and that “his participation came as a surprise to the other parties in interest.”⁶

David Bazelon owned 25 percent of Franklin, which Abe Pritzker apparently gave him. At a meeting six years later, Pritzker claimed he gave Bazelon the stock because he “was just feeling good and generous and was grateful to Bazelon for things he had done for his son, Jay Pritzker.”⁷ The favors also likely included the original tip that the Deshler and Neil hotels were in deep tax troubles with the federal government, information to which both Bazelon and Ziffren would have been privy. Conflicting records had shown that Bazelon paid $6,200 for the stock, but Pritzker denied this. “Bazelon hadn't paid a penny for his stock in the Franklin Hotel Company,” Pritzker insisted. “That stock was given to him.”⁸

The Deshler-Wallach Hotel (from a postcard)

Franklin's taint went beyond the previously noted Pritzker connections; it more importantly swirled around the fourth partner in the enterprise, a close friend of Pritzker's named Arthur Greene, the man who lent Ziffren $11,500 to purchase his shares of Franklin and caused so much concern about Bazelon at Gottlieb and Schwartz.

Investigative author Ovid Demaris referred to “Abe & Art” as “the most mysterious financiers in Chicago.”⁹ Another Jewish emigre like his pal Abe Pritzker, Arthur Greene was described by the Chicago Crime Commission as “the financier for Jake Guzik of the Capone organization.” The CCC went so far as to refer to Greene as “the brains of all the Chicago rackets.” Greene headed up a dozen companies, most notably the Domestic Finance Corporation, a small loan corporation. Well-placed informants told the CCC that Greene's Domestic was instrumental in setting up Charlie Gioe's Reddi-Whip underworld partnerships. Greene was also the investment agent for Charles and Rocco Fischetti, and East Coast bosses Meyer Lansky and Abner “Longy” Zwillman. Interestingly, Greene was close to the Roosevelt White House, via FDR's businessman son James Roosevelt.

According to LAPD information, Greene somehow figured in the California expansion of Jules Stein's MCA, through a relative named Edwin Greene, who was an MCA VP. “Abe and Art” were also on the deed of trust of the Ronan Investment Company property at 5050 Pacific Boulevard in Vernon, California, having loaned hundreds of thousands of dollars to the purchase of Ronan, which had at least seven subsidiaries. Ronan had been formed by William Ronan of Chicago, who had been fired from the Civil Service Commission (a post he attained through the offices of Arvey) in 1942 when it was found that he had whitewashed the investigation of four police captains accused of being on the dole of the Syndicate's gambling bosses.¹⁰ On July 15, 1957, Greene supplied $173,000 to his Ronan Investment Company to purchase the Davis Warehouse, a property that the county tax assessor's records show to have had an actual value of $2 million.

Greene's stock in Franklin was, per underworld custom, placed in his wife Shirley's name, although the Ohio secretary of state's records show Arthur Greene as secretary of the company. Simultaneously, Pritzker, Ziffren, and Greene formed Lakeshore Management Company, one of whose officers named M. Woolen also held stock in the Seneca Hotel with Alex Louis Greenberg.

The Franklin investing group named Julius Epstein as president of Deshler Hotel. Epstein also co-owned the Hollenden Hotel with slot king Nathan Weisenberg in Cleveland; the hotel was the headquarters for the Mayfield Road Gang (one member of the gang was Thomas McGinty, who operated Meyer Lansky's Nacional Casino in Havana). Epstein was also one of Greene's principal real estate agents in Chicago, and by the midfifties, Epstein and Greene controlled $85 million worth of property in Chicago, New York, and California, including dozens of Midwest shopping centers (American Shopping Centers Inc.) valued at over $65 million, and over eight thousand hotel rooms. Pritzker's law partner Stanford Clinton was listed as secretary of Deshler.

When the Franklin Corporation was dissolved on October 25, 1949, then federal judge Bazelon sold his Franklin/Deshler stock back to the tax-exempt Pritzker Foundation for $190,000. An insider to the deal told the FBI that Pritzker remarked, “You know, it's always the way when you give somebody something and when you want it back, they want a big price for it.”¹¹ The FBI concluded that any violations of the law that may have occurred involving the sale back to Pritzker were not within the jurisdiction of the Bureau but, nonetheless, deemed the buyback “suspicious.”¹² Ziffren sold his shares simultaneously for a tidy $25,000 profit.

But there was even more to the Deshler setup than the questionable partnership members and the $190,000 stock gift from Pritzker to Assistant Attorney General David Bazelon. Corporate records in Ohio show that the new Deshler Corporation sublet the premises of the hotel to the Hilton Hotel Corporation, of which Paul Ziffren's thirty-nine-year-old brother-in-law, Joseph Drown, was a vice president, it becoming the Deshler-Hilton—and Hilton opened up its own can of underworld worms.

The Supermob's rush to buy hotels as investment properties was officially on.

To understand why a Ziffren/Bazelon relationship with Hilton Hotels should have raised eyebrows, it is necessary to trace the origins of the Hilton empire. Hilton Hotels Inc. was created in 1946 when Paris Hilton's greatgrandfather Conrad Hilton merged with Arnold Kirkeby to form the new venture. At that time, fifty-nine-year-old New Mexico native Conrad Hilton had already established a chain of ten hotels, predominantly located in the Southwest.¹³ Hilton was anxious to expand eastward and internationally and thus agreed to a merger with another hotel scion, Arnold Kirkeby.

Arnold S. Kirkeby was born in Chicago in 1900. In 1928, he married Carlotta Maria Cuesta, the daughter of a wealthy Tampa, Florida, cigar maker. In Florida, he dabbled in real estate under the banner of the Chicago-Florida Realty Company, and his career in hostelry began with the formation of the National Cuba Hotel Corporation Inc. in the 1920s, incorporated in Delaware as the National Hotel of Cuba Corporation. In the mid-1930s, National Hotel of Cuba merged with Eastern mob boss and Cuban casino owner Meyer Lansky and opened an office on Flagler Street in Miami—Lansky later admitted his participation with Cuba National in his testimony before the 1951 Kefauver Committee investigating organized crime. Under the Kirkeby umbrella, Lansky, Frank Costello, and New Jersey boss Abner “Longy” Zwillman operated the Nacional, then the largest gambling casino in the world, in Havana. Meyer's brother Jake was the Nacional's floor manager.¹⁴

When he appeared before the Kefauver Committee in 1951, Jules Endler, a bar owner in Newark, New Jersey, admitted that he acted as a go-between in securing Longy Zwillman's interest in Kirkeby and the Nacional. As he told committee counsel Richard G. Moser, “Kirkeby called me and told me how many bonds I could have … and he gave Zwillman half of what I got … I invested ninety-two thousand dollars.” (Endler also noted other partnerships he had entered into with Zwillman, such as a real estate venture—a former U.S. post office building worth $1.4 million—in Louisville, Kentucky; and Hollywood production deals with luminary partners such as Harry Cohn at Columbia, Fred Allen, Morrie Ryskind, Jack Benny, Sam Wood, Claudette Colbert, and Don Ameche, in which Zwillman held an 8 percent investment stake; and $41,000 invested in New York's Sherry Netherland Hotel, owned by Kirkeby.)¹⁵

Among the Chicago shareholders in Kirkeby was one Jules Stein, MCA founder.¹⁶ Other Hilton partners of record from Chicago were Blanche Greene and Shirley Greene, Arthur's wife and daughter, respectively. Of course, they were fronting for Arthur, much as Alex Greenberg's wife had fronted for him in the Hayward Hotel deal.¹⁷ Under this thin guise, Greene and Hilton acquired the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco in 1944 and the Plaza Hotel on Vine Street in Hollywood. Jake Arvey's pal Colonel Henry Crown put up $3 million for Hilton to buy New York's Waldorf-Astoria.¹⁸ Crown ultimately owned 150,000 shares, or 8.7 percent of Hilton's stock. The FBI received information that Chicago Outfit boss Tony Accardo and underbosses Gus Alex and “Strongy” Ferrarro had obtained large blocks of the Hilton chain. According to an FBI report, “These individuals had apparently penetrated into the Hilton chain through Jake Arvey, Sidney Korshak and Henry Crown in the days when Hilton was starting to acquire numerous hotels.”¹⁹

LAPD Intelligence files revealed that on April 16,1940, Arnold S. Kirkeby became president of Cuba National, and Ernest Ponterelli of the Capone Syndicate became VP (his brother Michael was said to be a high-ranking member of the Mafia's ruling clique, The Unione Siciliana).

With this 1950 document, Longy Zwillman became one of first hoods to secretly invest in Hollywood (Kefauver Committee investigative files, Library of Congress)

Predictably, Paul Ziffren became the attorney representing Hilton in L.A. and within three years handled approximately $1 million in transactions for the expanding corporation. Joseph Drown, another Chicago native, came to California in 1939 and acquired controlling interest in twenty-nine hundred acres above Sunset Boulevard, then called the Botanical Garden. It would later become known as Bel-Air and the Brentwood Estates. In 1944, the day his daughter was born, Drown partnered with his brother-in-law Ziffren and Conrad Hilton in acquiring the U.S. Grant Hotel in San Diego, as well as The San Diego Hotel, in partnership with no fewer than eight tenants of 134 N. LaSalle,* including future Supreme Court justice Arthur J. Goldberg and Seneca co-owner Benjamin Cohen. Sid Korshak's L.A. attorney pal Greg Bautzer was also involved. Drown went on to develop vast acreage in the Santa Monica Mountains and was also an owner of El Rancho Casino in Vegas with G. Sanford Adler, a known associate of mob boss Joseph “Doc” Stacher. With Johnny Rosselli, Drown also founded in 1947 the short-lived Beverly Club, a dining room and bar (with secret gambling in the back).

Eventually, Kirkeby Inc. obtained some of the crown jewels of hostelry: The Kenilworth, and Belle Aire, in Miami; Chicago's Drake, Stevens, and Palmer House hotels, and The Blackstone Restaurant; the Warwick, Gotham, Waldorf-Astoria, Roosevelt, Plaza, Astor, Hampshire House, and Sherry Netherland hotels in New York; the Nacional, which was openly run by Lansky in Cuba; in Los Angeles, The Sunset Towers, Beverly Wilshire, Hilton, and Town House on Wilshire Boulevard; and in the nation's capital, The Willard, Mayflower, and D.C. Hilton hotels.²⁰ Not surprisingly, Hilton was, according to the Korshak brothers, the largest client (by room count) of their Chicago Hotel Association, a membership that rendered them virtually immune from union strikes.²¹

Police files in L.A. and Chicago point to many of the Kirkeby holdings in those cities as meeting spots for the underworld elite: Frank Costello maintained a suite on the thirty-seventh floor of the Waldorf in New York (where he was often seen with Joseph Kennedy); the Blackstone and Drake in Chicago were overrun with Outfit members; and Bugsy Siegel had an apartment in the Sunset Towers, where he was once busted for bookmaking. Don Wolfe, an author who grew up among the Beverly Hills elite, has vivid memories of Arnold Kirkeby's world. “My brother was a close friend of Buzz Kirkeby, Arnold's son,” Wolfe recalled in 2005. “I used to go up to the mansion to swim in their tropical pool, which had a waterfall. Several times I'd see Bugsy and Virginia Hill there with Arnold. I later found out that Kirkeby used a lot of Syndicate money. Within a certain crowd in Beverly Hills it was common knowledge that the Kirkebys were swimming in mob money.”²²

Indeed, that crowd included the FBI, which noted in its Bugsy Siegel file, “The Mafia operates through its New York headquarters, where Frank Costello and Joe Adonis, using Siegel as a front, have put themselves in the hotel business though Siegel and under the trade name of the Kirkeby Hotels.”²³

As an aside, the Kirkeby properties served as convenient places for assignations coordinated by others in the Supermob. LAPD intel files refer to Paul Ziffren delivering call girls to Tahoe gambler Mandel Agron at Kirkeby's Beverly Wilshire; Ziffren's name appeared in the “trick books” of a number of L.A. call girls (Carol Brandi, Paula McNeil, and Marilyn Anderson), according to LAPD files. Under Ziffren's phone number was printed the word “French.”²⁴ Various sources described Ziffren as a womanizer, one saying, “Paul had a lot of girlfriends around town who might sing for you.” Another said that he “knew from Bonanno's mistress, a former prostitute who serviced Ziffren often, that the great Democrat led a secret life of diapered sexual infantilism.”²⁵

There were numerous Kirkeby subsidiaries as well, among them:

• Kirkeby Realty and Grant Realty, both of which employed Paul Ziffren's secretary Edith Cutrow as executive secretary, and which held over $4 million in assets.
• Kirkeby Ranch Corp. This time, Paul Ziffren's brother Leo's secretary, Jean Staley, was on board.
• The CVC Company, which, with a loan from Kirkeby, financed development of three hundred lots in Beverly Hills. Leo Ziffren handled the loan, which was negotiated by City National Bank of Beverly Hills, of which Arnold Kirkeby was a director, Sid Korshak a shareholder. City National's founder was none other than Chicago's Al Hart, who had parlayed his distillery profits into his new banking endeavor.

In July 1953, Kirkeby-National changed its name to Beverly Wilshire Hotel Corp., and by 1954 Kirkeby's Hilton Inc. would comprise twenty-eight hotels when it merged with Statler Hotels on October 1 of that year. By 1979 that number would explode to 185 domestic and 75 international facilities, and at century's end Hilton had a value of $6.2 billion. Arnold Kirkeby died on March 1, 1962, when the American Airlines flight he was on crashed into Jamaica Bay, New York.** His body was never recovered, and all ninety-five passengers perished, making the crash the greatest civilian U.S. air tragedy to that point.***²⁶

Conrad Hilton died of pneumonia in 1979 at age ninety-one.

Ziffren's investments in the Hayward, Deshler, Kirkeby-Hilton, and Franklin were just the beginning. A year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, a new corporation had appeared on the Los Angeles scene, a real estate holding company called Store Properties Inc., headquartered at 714 S. Hill Street in Los Angeles. Store's owner of record was one Sam Genis, a known associate of mob bosses Longy Zwillman, Doc Stacher, Frank Costello, Joey Adonis, and Meyer Lansky. Genis's criminal record showed that he had been arrested for bad checks in Florida, embezzlement in New York, and mail fraud and securities law violations in Georgia. When he died in a 1958 auto accident in L.A., his probate (which was handled by Paul Ziffren and Al Hart) revealed that he had started Store with a $93,000 loan from none other than Paul Ziffren. In 1947, Genis transferred half the stock in Store, worth $720,000, to Ziffren.

By 1957, Store Properties had bought thousands of acres of land in over three hundred transactions worth $20 million in Lcs Angeles alone. When Store's other California purchases are factored in (in San Bernardino, Fresno, Oakland, and San Francisco), the estimate approaches $100 million. Then there were the additional investments in such states as Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Florida, Illinois, and New York. One of the properties in the Store umbrella, a plush motel in Phoenix, Arizona, was co-owned by Jake Arvey's chief Chicago protégé, Arthur X. Elrod.²⁷

But just as in the Hayward and Deshler deals, Ziffren's Store Properties venture was tied to the notorious Alex Greenberg, who, in so many words, informed the Kefauver Committee in 1951 that he was a “silent owner” of Store Properties. This was backed up by Kefauver Exhibit #70, which included Greenberg's tax returns and detailed his income from Store Properties. Those same records list among his income for 1947 $4,338.34 from his “Partnership with Paul Ziffren.”²⁸ Greenberg admitted that he was the actual owner of a square-block building at 333 E Street in San Bernardino, valued at $900,000. The trouble was, Greenberg's name appeared nowhere on the deed of trust involved. The “official” owner was Genis's and Ziffren's Store Properties. (See appendix C.)

Store also partnered with FDR's son James Roosevelt and San Francisco real estate mogul James Swig, who later became Pat Brown's statewide finance chairman in his successful California gubernatorial campaign.²⁹

By 1948, Ziffren had placed his Store stock in his new wife Muriel's name (he had been introduced to her by Bazelon);³⁰ likewise, Genis transferred his shares to his wife, Sayde.

Central to the Ziffren issue are the legal ramifications of forming a business with the full knowledge that one's partner's contribution was obtained through criminal activities or was being used to launder the lucre of organized crime. Andrew Furfaro, the former organized crime and corporate-corruption chief for the Western Division of the IRS, has no doubt about the culpability of such a “clean” entrepreneur. “If you have knowledge that the money was stolen or contraband, you're still liable,” Furfaro said emphatically in 2004. “It's called aiding and abetting.”³¹

It is impossible to know whether any or all of the above investments were the result of insider information from Bazelon's land office about the fiscal or proprietary health of the properties involved. But there is little doubt that the investments that followed bore the taint not only of underworld partnerships, but also of inside information that allowed the purchasers to profit off the misery of 120,000 innocents.

The December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese provided an inadvertent boost for the fortunes of the Supermob. The payoff was not immediate, taking three and a half years to transpire, but it was profound—a direct result of profiteering from the misery of thousands of wrongfully detained Americans.

Imagine the tragic effect had the United States confined every American-born and foreign-born Muslim to a three-and-a-half-year imprisonment after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the country. Add to that horror the impact on these innocents had all their property, which had been earned over two generations, been seized and auctioned off for pennies on the dollar, much of it going to buyers with inside information about the choicest parcels. In 1942, this is exactly what happened to the nisei, or Japanese Americans, and the Supermob was the insider. Ironically, the process by which this largely Jewish cadre acquired Japanese property bore a resemblance to the Aryanization of Jewish property in Nazi Germany.

The first Japanese arrived in the United States in 1869, establishing the Wakamatsu Colony in Gold Hills, California. Although initially welcomed as a form of cheaper labor than even the irascible Chinese, they soon became pariahs when, through backbreaking hard work, they saved enough to purchase land, mostly in the form of farms, small hotels, and other commercial real estate; and what they couldn't buy, they leased for farming. Soon, the Japanese became a major economic force in the state: in 1940, the 535,000 acres of nisei farms, situated on the state's most fertile property, were worth $72 million plus $6 million in equipment; California's ninety-four thousand Japanese raised 41 percent of the state's staple “truck” crops, such as celery, carrots, onions, lettuce, and tomatoes.³² Other commercial real estate in downtown areas was valued in the millions, but would be worth much more in the near future as the city populations were unknowingly on the verge of a postwar explosion. The success of the Japanese in California brought out so much latent racism and xenophobia among the whites that in 1913 California passed the Alien Land Law, which prevented noncitizens from buying any more land.

The impressive ascendancy of the nisei came to a screeching halt almost immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack; within two hours, police were arresting everyone who looked Japanese in the L.A. district known as Little Tokyo.³³ The next day, the U.S. Treasury froze Japanese bank accounts and seized all Japanese-owned banks and businesses; two days after the attack, Japanese-language schools were closed. But the U.S. citizenry called for much more. Fueled by reports of “magic cables,” intercepts of communications among Japanese diplomats that allegedly discussed the recruitment of nisei spies, the American paranoia, especially in California, reached a fever pitch.

Columnist Westbrook Pegler led the outcry in the national press, writing, “The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now—and to hell with habeas corpus.”³⁴ Syndicated Hearst sportswriter Henry McLemore wrote of the Japanese Americans, “Herd ’em up, pack ’em off and give them the inside room in the badlands. Let ’em be pinched, hurt, hungry and dead up against it … Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.”³⁵

California's attorney general (and future governor and Supreme Court chief justice), Earl Warren, voiced the hysteria for California politicians in congressional testimony:

There is more potential danger among the group of Japanese who are born in this country than from the alien Japanese who were born in Japan. We believe that when we are dealing with the Caucasian race, we have methods that will test the loyalty of them, and we believe that we can, in dealing with the Germans and the Italians, arrive at some fairly sound conclusions because of our knowledge of the way they live in the community and have lived for many years. But when we deal with the Japanese, we are in an entirely different field and we cannot form any opinion that we believe to be sound … I believe, sir, that in time of war every citizen must give up some of his normal rights.³⁶

Thus, ten weeks after the outbreak of war, on February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which gave to the secretary of war the power to exclude any persons from designated areas in order to secure national defense objectives against sabotage and espionage. More specifically, the order mandated the detaining of all persons believed to be a possible danger, especially the West Coast nisei. Over the objections of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, whose Bureau was tasked with arresting religious and community leaders, all 120,000 West Coast Japanese were placed in temporary facilities and given less than two weeks to make arrangements for the sale of their property before being transported to concentration camps in the desert Southwest, where they would spend the next three and a half years. The incarcerations initiated a lifelong, and historically significant, behind-the-scenes feud between Hoover and Warren.* Interestingly, during his tenure as chief justice of the Supreme Court (1953-69), one of Warren's favored law clerks was Ken Ziffren, son of Paul.³⁷

Like a man without a nation
In a camp of concentration
With a stamp of degradation and shame
To a place they call it Manzanar by name

Initially, the Japanese were given a mere forty-eight hours to leave their homes for transport to temporary holding stations. Said one victim, “The evacuation was unquestionably harsh and pitifully unjust. To command bewildered women with children suffering in mental agonies through internment of their husbands by the FBI to pack and evacuate in forty-eight hours was inhumanly harsh and unjust … Children were crying, boys and girls dashing in and out to help their mothers on whose shoulders the world came crashing.”³⁹ (The roundup was so thorough that for the next four years the movie moguls had to settle for Caucasian actors made up to look oriental for the spate of war movies that followed. Peter Lorre's portrayal of {tip image="images/ebooks/supermob/Mr-Moto.jpg"}“Mr. Moto”{/tip} and Paul Muni as an Asian peasant were most memorable.)

After a few days of that humiliation, the “detainees” were ordered onto transport buses with no room for their few salvaged belongings. One federal official reported on what was left behind at the Japanese community on Terminal Island in Los Angeles harbor: “One of our workers who was on the island the day after the evacuation said that fishing nets, fishing trucks, rubber boots, household goods, and all kinds of equipment, enough to fill at least eight trucks, had been abandoned.”⁴⁰

The government then delivered the nisei to “relocation centers” in desolate interior regions of the West where they were housed in hastily built, barbed-wire-ringed desert barracks, the largest in California (Tule Lake, 19,000) and Arizona (Poston, 17,814). Ironically, some of the Japanese were housed in the same Owens Valley (the Manzanar Camp) that had had its water stolen four decades earlier by Mulholland et al.—forcing the military to find ways to bring water back to the valley to sustain the prisoners.**

Surrounded by armed guards in barracks that measured 20 by 120 feet, the internees were divided into four or six rooms, each from 20 by 16 to 20 by 25 feet, with two families of six each often sharing but one room. A visiting reporter from the San Trancisco Chronicle described the quarters at Tule Lake: “Room size—about 15 by 25 … Condition—dirty.” The rooms had no running water, and some center's evacuees lived without electric light, adequate toilets, or laundry facilities. Mess halls planned for about three hundred people had to handle six hundred or nine hundred for short periods.

And then there was the weather.

The detainees endured temperatures as low as 35 degrees below zero in winter and 115 above in summer. In July, evacuees doused their cots with cool water in an effort make sleep possible. In the Arizona camps, dust storms regularly sent torrents of sand through wide cracks in the poorly constructed barracks. Nisei Monica Sone described a dust storm on her first day at Minidoka Camp: “We felt as if we were standing in a gigantic sand-mixing machine as the sixty-mile gale lifted the loose earth up into the sky, obliterating everything. Sand filled our mouths and nostrils and stung our faces and hands like a thousand darting needles. [Inside] the dust poured through the cracks like smoke.” One visiting journalist to the Manzanar barracks wrote that “on dusty days, one might just as well be outside as inside.” Of course, the outside held the additional thrill of rattlesnakes and other poisonous desert wildlife.⁴¹

As if the nisei collective memory needed more trauma, there was one last insult to weather: when they emerged from their concentration camps over forty months later, all their possessions were gone.

The issue of the nisei's abandoned property was dealt with in the same harsh manner as the prisoners themselves. Suddenly without employment, they could not afford mortgage payments or indefinite storage for their possessions. Given mere days to sell their homes, businesses, and all the belongings they could not carry, their plight defined a “buyer's market.” Victims told Congress's Tolan Committee of their losses:

• The $125 sale of a new pickup truck with $125 worth of new tires alone.⁴²
• A federal official collected solid stories of victims “selling three- and four-hundred- dollar pianos for five and ten dollars, of selling new refrigerators and new stoves for small amounts.”⁴³
• One Japanese American sold his strawberry-farming operation for $2,000; the purchaser resold it for more than $10,000.⁴⁴
• Nisei owners of an ice cream parlor had a $10,000 inventory plus $8,000 in equipment, but sold it all for $1,000.⁴⁵

One victim lamented, “It is difficult to describe the feeling of despair and humiliation experienced by all of us as we watched the Caucasians coming to look over our possessions and offering such nominal amounts knowing we had no recourse but to accept whatever they were offering.”⁴⁶ And not all property losses were monetary. The army forced victims to sell, give away, or euthanize family pets.⁴⁷

But for speculators with deep pockets, the real bargains were in houses, undeveloped nisei land, and commercial property such as stores, warehouses, and hotels. In February 1942, one American official directing internments noted that victims could “either turn over their business to their creditors at great loss or abandon it entirely.” This official referred to “commercial buzzards” who took “great advantage of this hardship, making offers way below even inventory cost, and very much below real value.”⁴⁸ Initially, the Federal Reserve Bank had authority to act as a go-between, matching prospective buyers with Japanese American sellers. If sellers wished, the Federal Reserve Bank would act as their agent and liquidate property on their behalf. In the rush to make a sale, property was unloaded for a fraction of its value.

Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron assured a U.S. congressman, “Property within this city formerly occupied or used by the Japanese will not remain idle or fall into a state of disrepair.”⁴⁹ And a May 1942 congressional report noted, “Liquidation of real and personal property held by evacuees is proceeding at a rapid pace.” Nisei who owned property that could remotely be viewed as in a strategic location, such as near a port or a military base, were in an even worse position. Once Executive Order 9066 was in effect, and the military had designated the land that the Japanese held to be strategically vital, all Japanese property claims to the land were null and void; in many cases, the military either kept the land for its own use or sold it to presumably loyal white farmers. A representative of a grower association in Salinas said, “We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown man.”⁵⁰ What gives credence to the allegation of a hidden Anglo agenda to take over the Japanese land is the obvious and damning fact that the United States did not inter Germans and Italians, with whose homelands we were also at war.

When the Japanese were released from the camps in 1945, they were not quickly reimbursed for their property losses, and when they were finally “compensated,” the dollar figure was puny. The Federal Reserve estimated that the direct property seizures from the nisei were worth $400 million (in 1942 dollars), approximately $2.7 billion today, and the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians estimated the total income and property losses at between $810 million and $2 billion (inflation-adjusted). Insultingly, in 1948 Congress passed the Evacuation Claims Act, which gave the detainees seventeen months to make a claim from a paltry $31 million fund. Kotkin and Grabowicz wrote, “For the most part, the war all but wiped out Japanese-owned business in California, long the goal of many Anglos.”⁵¹

Despite their best efforts, the Japanese could only sell a fraction of their holdings in the brief time allotted. Thus, on March 11, 1942, FDR signed Executive Order 9095, establishing the Office of Alien Property. This new office, under the umbrella of the Department of Justice, spent the next few years seizing, inventorying, and finding buyers for millions of dollars’ worth of property taken not only from the Japanese but also from German nationals. Even more disturbing, many of the seized properties were sold via no-contest sealed bids, overseen by a key appointee of President Harry Truman. When Truman became president after FDR's death just weeks after his 1945 inauguration, he undertook the cronyism typical of a new leader, making payback appointments favored by key power brokers and supporters. Predictably, he made a number of appointments at the suggestion of one of the most powerful pols in America, Colonel Jack (Jake) Arvey, and one of those appointments would have a profound impact on the success of the Supermob's Western investments, and the tragic plight of the nisei.

“The most human president, for whom I have affection like that for my father, is Harry Truman,” Jake Arvey once said. “I am prouder of his friendship for me than I am of any political associations I have.”⁵² Arvey's tribute was not an understatement, for the ward powerhouse believed Truman saved his life during World War II. “I was a member of the 33rd Division which was supposed to make the invasion of Japan,” Arvey wrote. “We might have been annihilated—[Truman's] dropping of the bomb averted that.”⁵³ Less than a year before, Arvey and his “Bloody 24th Ward” minions had used Outfit muscle to turn out the widest margin of victory of any ward in the entire country for the 1944 Roosevelt-Truman ticket: 29,533 for FDR to 2,204 for Dewey. In that effort Arvey assigned two of his ward's most notorious committeemen, Peter Fosco, and Arthur X. Elrod, who had gained notoriety for, among other things, turning out absurd Democratic electoral pluralities in the precinct where he was captain, to seal the deal. Fosco was an admitted close friend of Outfit boss Paul Ricca and a dominant figure in the Building Laborers’ Union, where he manipulated the city's labor force with the likes of Curly Humphreys and Sid Korshak. Elrod had come up in the 1920s as a business front and bail bondsman for the North Side Moran gang. He later worked as a private secretary for North Side gunman and vice king Jack Zuta, who became the most notorious brothel owner in Chicago.*

The Truman-Arvey relationship grew stronger due to their beliefs concerning the Jewish homeland. Arvey had been passionate about a pending UN resolution on the founding of the state of Israel and had worked tirelessly in the Israel bonds movement.⁵⁴ Cook County state's attorney Ralph Berkowitz recalled, “Jack Arvey told Truman that if he does not recognize the state of Israel, then he couldn't guarantee that he could carry the Twenty-fourth Ward [in the 1948 presidential election]. Let alone the county and the state.” When Truman came around and endorsed the resolution on March 16, 1947, Arvey delivered. “I worked harder for him in ’48 than I have ever worked for a candidate in my life,” Arvey recalled.⁵⁵

In 1948, Arvey's push was considered critical to Truman's eventual victory, with Truman's campaign chairman saying that they would only declare victory when they won Illinois. Truman carried the state of Illinois by 33,612 votes (.9 percent). However, his margin of victory in Cook County, where Elrod's precinct gave Truman a 300-to-1 victory, was 200,836 votes (9 percent). When the final count was tallied, Truman received 303 electoral votes, with 266 needed to win. Illinois had 28 votes. Irv Kupcinet, not only Korshak's dining pal, but also a close friend of both Truman's and Arvey's, wrote, “Arvey's work … laid the groundwork for the surprising victory of Harry Truman in 1948 … [Arvey] worked night and day for Truman's nomination at the 1948 convention.”⁵⁶

(Left to right) Jake Arvey, Averell Harriman, Estes Kefauver, Harry Truman, Richard Daley (Corbis/Bettmann)

When Truman appeared at a party in Chicago after the election, Elrod presented him with the precinct tally sheet displaying the ludicrous totals. Truman jokingly asked Elrod, “Who was the one?” To which Elrod replied, “I don't know, I'm still looking for him.”

Two years later, Elrod and Fosco organized a torchlight parade for Truman, with Elrod acting as chauffeur for Sid Korshak's friend Vice President Barkley in the motorcade.** In 1952, the IRS investigated Arvey for possibly having been given tax concessions because he was so close to Truman.⁵⁷

Part and parcel of the Arvey-Truman symbiosis was Truman's obliging of Arvey's wishes when it came to federal appointments. At Arvey's urging, Truman appointed Arvey protégé Michael Howlett, then the Illinois secretary of state, to be the regional director of the Federal Office of Price Stabilization. Another Truman-Arvey appointment was that of Chicago attorney Daniel F. Cleary to the chairmanship of the War Crimes Commission.

But by far the most controversial Truman-Arvey appointment now appears to have been a major boost for the investment wishes of the old Capone mob and their allies in the Supermob, giving them their turn at the California land grab.

“Ex-Chicagoan in Control of Enemy Assets”

On June 1, 1947, Assistant Attorney General David Bazelon, who had been a top Democratic Party fund-raiser in the 1944 elections, was promoted to custodian of Alien property, prompting him to declare, “I am probably in a sense one of the largest businessmen in the country. On top of that I'm my own lawyer.”⁵⁸ Once installed, Bazelon hired Pritzker's son, Jay A. Pritzker, who became the special assistant to the director in the Alien Property office.⁵⁹ Jay was, like Paul Ziffren, a former classmate of Bazelon's at Northwestern. It was now clear why Abe Pritzker had been “grateful” to Bazelon and therefore gave him his Franklin stock. Jay's acceptance of the new post raised eyebrows, since the wealthy Pritzker heir was lowly paid and resided in the pricey Willard Hotel for the duration of his one-year employment. Speculation arose that since Jay's bill at the Willard dwarfed his meager paycheck, there must have been some other purpose for his taking the position. That contention was buttressed when, according to congressional investigators, Jay utilized his new insider information to purchase stock in a knitting-machine manufacturing company that had been vested (seized) by the Alien office. His $73,000 investment was said to be worth $1 million.⁶⁰

David Bazelon, director of the Office of Alien Property (Corbis/Bettmann)

Bazelon's assessment of his new clout was not an understatement. The Office of Alien Property (OAP) confiscated 415 businesses with a total valuation of $290 million in tangible assets alone, and over six thousand German patents (worth exponentially more than the businesses) that would be given to U.S. businesses. One congressman spoke of the businesses and capital under the control of the OAP, saying, “They are the biggest plums in the entire Truman administration.”⁶¹ Journalist Robert Goe wrote, “The Alien Custodian could use his discretion as to whether properties were put out for sealed bid, or negotiated … it is clear that there is much room for preferential treatment by the Custodian.”

Preferential treatment is exactly what happened, and, not surprisingly, among the earliest recipients were Paul Ziffren and other “connected” Chicagoans. When the FBI searched the Alien Property Custodian Office files five years later, it found letters showing that Ziffren and Bazelon had been interested in obtaining four commercial buildings in L.A. from the OAP at least as early as August 23, 1946. Even prior to that, in April 1941, when Ziffren and Bazelon were at the Gottlieb firm, Ziffren had inquired of the Treasury Department about the regulations concerning “freezing the funds of certain foreign countries.”⁶² This was a full two months before the United States actually froze the funds of the enemy Axis powers, in solidarity with those already at war with Germany, leading to speculation that Ziffren had insider information of what was about to occur. The FBI further learned that “Bazelon and Ziffren had been involved in numerous transactions over a period of years and frequently had made each other partners in such transactions.”⁶³

According to a U.S. Department of Interior report of 1944, 216 hotels in California were seized from the nisei by the government. By war's end, that number had risen to 1,265. It was the responsibility of David Bazelon to find buyers for these properties, the most highly valuable being in California, which was in the midst of a postwar boom. A number of the choicest parcels went to Bazelon's best friend, Paul Ziffren, in partnership with his regular unsavory clique.

Almost immediately after Bazelon assumed his new post, Jake Arvey's great friend Colonel Henry Crown purchased a twenty-six-thousand-acre abandoned coal mine in Farmersville, California, from the OAP for $150,000.⁶⁴ The coal alone on the property was valued in the tens of millions.

Ben Weingart, 1950 (photographer unknown)

Another purchase from the OAP seizures was the Los Angeles Warehouse Properties Co. on 326 N. San Pedro Street. This was a massive building and lot, previously owned by a Japanese national, purchased in January 1948 by Bazelon's best friend, Paul Ziffren, and seven partners. One of the senior partners, Ben Weingart, was a major purchaser of alien land, including dozens of parcels and hotels in the Wolfskill tract, the skid row area of L.A. Weingart also acquired Japanese properties in Whittier, Santa Ana, Pasadena, Southgate, Bakersfield, Fresno, and Stockton.⁶⁵ In the late 1940s, Weingart bought thirty-five hundred acres of land north of Long Beach and oversaw the building of seventeen thousand homes on the site, thus giving birth to the city of Lakewood. Weingart also built the Lakewood Shopping Center, the first large-scale shopping center in the country.***

Almost immediately, the OAP came under suspicion of being an insider gravy train, prompting a Senate investigation of its methods. On March 7, 1948, the Chicago Tribune summarized the allegations Congress hoped to investigate:

At least a score of former New Dealers, close friends of the administration and former federal employees, have been put on the payrolls of the firms the United States operates or placed in strategic positions as directors. Some of them draw as much as $50 thousand a year. In half a dozen multimillion dollar corporations, former government workers and their political pals are in on the ground floor in anticipation of the time these firms are sold to private management … Some concerns, such as the $80 million General Aniline Film Corporation, are suffering from undercover jockeying of powerful political and financial groups which hope to get these lush properties when Uncle Sam puts them on the auction block … The alien property investigation will inquire into reports that law firms and lawyers with right connections have found a “paradise” in rich fees and costly litigation involving seized properties.⁶⁶

As damning as these allegations were, they were far from representative of the worst secrets hidden behind the doors of the OAP.

Several of us would form a pool to buy up these properties, then we took care of him† with a share.

The most troublesome aspect of the Warehouse deal was that seven years later, on March 14, 1955, Ziffren's name on the deed was replaced with that of David Bazelon, who now held 9.2 percent of the multimillion-dollar real estate holding company—with no record of any cash outlay.⁶⁸ Interestingly, Bazelon's name was deleted from a number of official records, although it appears in some as early as 1948. Journalist and investigator Robert Goe wrote, “Title Insurance Trust officials have stated for the record that they knew of the Bazelon roles in the Warehouse Properties deal. Since their information is not reflected in their own reports to the City of Los Angeles, it may be that someone high in the Trust office has caused this knowledge to be removed from the files.”⁶⁹ Goe called it “a deliberate attempt to cover up the ownership of the property.”

In August of 1959, the City of Los Angeles, reportedly due to the influence of Paul Ziffren, purchased the massive Warehouse Properties parcel for $1.1 million in furtherance of its Civic Center Master Plan. The Warehouse lot was situated in the center of a location earmarked for purchase by the federal government for the new $30 million Customs Building. Brother Leo Ziffren had also been seen massaging the deal in the office of the city's chief of the Bureau of Right of Way and Land.⁷⁰ David Bazelon's cut was over $100,000.⁷¹

It wasn't just Japanese property that was seized by the OAP then directed to the Supermob. Friends of Bazelon's profited off German seizures as well. In a purchase that was not divulged for other bidders, the Ziffren group relieved the Office of Alien Property of the Luxembourg-based Rohm Haas Chemical Corporation in Philadelphia for $40 a share, when it was worth $125. Their $1 million investment in 1948 was worth $40 million by 1954.

Since the purchase was not divulged to others, only the custodian, David Bazelon, would have known of it.⁷² Interestingly, one of Bazelon's and Ziffren's associates at Gottlieb, William J. Friedman, became the director of Rohm Haas after the purchase. The FBI in Los Angeles was informed years later that Jake Arvey and Sidney Korshak divided about $12 million worth of the Haas stock.⁷³ When Custodian Bazelon appointed a friend's law firm to handle the legal aspects of one German seizure, Truman's Attorney General James Howard McGrath refused to pay their exorbitant bill, reportedly saying he “dare not approve the fee because the situation is so ticklish in the Department of Justice right now that he doesn't know what furor it might cause.”⁷⁴

On May 16, 1957, Attorney General Herbert Brownell wrote Hoover asking him to investigate the Rohm Haas acquisition by a “Chicago group” and the possibility that Bazelon was paid off with the Warehouse Properties stock gift. “The Chicago group included Ziffren, Sidney Korshak … and Jacob Arvey, the well-known Chicago politician with whom Ziffren formerly shared a law office.” After only two weeks, the FBI delivered its conclusion: Bazelon's OAP indeed controlled 70 percent of Rohm, while the group headed by his best friend, Paul Ziffren, held the remaining 30 percent. The Bureau, incredibly, was not asked to see if Ziffren's $40-per-share price was (as it appeared) well below the true value.

The FBI's conclusion to its inquiry was a tribute to bureaucratic buck-passing: “If by some arrangement or ‘deal’ this purchase was actually done, it would appear to have been a private transaction and does not fall within the scope of this inquiry.”⁷⁵ A top Wall Street stock analyst recently reviewed the FBI's file and translated the obtuse stockbroker jargon: “There is clearly the possibility of impropriety. Bazelon was in a position to know the true worth of the [Rohm] company and to influence whom they sold it to. The only way to know is if Bazelon did something to help Ziffren buy it for cheap—like telling the original owners, ‘I'm going to fuck you if you don't sell to my friend for such and such a price.’ … The FBI is saying, ‘We had a very limited investigation.’ Nobody asked them to go further. It was totally not a complete investigation. There were enough ways for them to get to the bottom of it, but they weren't asked to.”⁷⁶

On October 21, 1949, David Bazelon became, at age forty, the youngest federal judge in history, appointed by President Truman to the most important circuit court in the United States, the Washington D.C. Court of Appeals.⁷⁷ Bazelon's new posting was made as a “recess appointment,” a presidential ploy often used to secure a controversial enlistment while potentially disapproving congressmen are on break.†† It was believed by some that Arvey arranged the appointment as payback for his support of Truman in the 1948 election.⁷⁸ Former secretary of the interior Harold L. Ickes, writing in the New Republic, called the appointment “deplorable” and showed great prescience when he advised, “Certainly the Senate would do well to investigate closely Bazelon's conduct of the Office of Alien Property.” He added that he'd assumed that the Truman administration's appointment of Tom Clark to the Supreme Court was as bad as it would get, but he added regretfully that Bazelon's naming was an “all-time low.” Ickes next wrote Truman in a last-ditch effort to sink the nomination, arguing, “I happen to know a good deal about Bazelon and I consider him to be thoroughly unfit for the job that he holds, to say nothing of a United States judgeship, either on the Court of Appeals or on the District Court.”⁷⁹ (Ickes was also a former Chicago newsman and outspoken opponent of political corruption and collusion with the Capone Syndicate.)

Los Angeles Mirror journalist and tireless researcher into the L.A. real estate purchases Art White summarized the importance of the expansionist decade:

During these years some hundreds of associates of Greenberg, Evans, and others of the Capone crime syndicate, and of Arvey and Ziffren, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into California. They bought real estate, including hotel chains through apparently unrelated corporations from San Diego to Sacramento. They invested in vast tracts of land, built or bought motels, giant office buildings, and other commercial properties. More importantly, they invaded the loan field, establishing banks and home loan institutions. By 1953, Ziffren and his associates had gained control of an enormous block of California's economy. They could finance political campaigns with the best of the native barons.⁸⁰

When the FBI reviewed White's research into the extent of the relationship between the Capones and Ziffren, it concluded with a rare declaration vindicating White's conclusions: “The extraordinary success of this adventurer [Ziffren]—and by the same token his backers, who can be traced right into the Midwest and East Coast hoodlum world—has been proven and documented.”⁸¹ (Author's italics.)

For a more detailed, but still partial, list of the properties acquired by the combine of Chicago's Supermob associates, see appendix A.

Along with Chicago's tainted money and mob-controlled unions now flooding the West came a need to manage the requisite labor and political issues that accompanied them. Who better for the role of underworld liaison to the upperworld than the suave Chicago attorney already comfortable with the Capones, and already schooled in the intricacies of labor “negotiating”? Who better than Sidney Roy Korshak?

The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.

BY THE LATE FORTIES, the Supermob's takeover of the Golden State was well under way: Paul Ziffren had relocated his law practice from 134 N. LaSalle Street in Chicago to 9363 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills and, through pal David Bazelon, had helped his Chicago friends invest their profits in numerous tracts of West Coast land; Al Hart was a thriving California distiller, racetrack owner, and soon-to-be bank owner; Joe Glaser had moved his Associated Booking to L.A., and likewise, Jules Stein and Lew Wasserman (who had been elevated by Stein to MCA president in December 1946) opened their MCA headquarters there and absorbed the 250-client talent pool of the Zeppo Marx Agency when they purchased that Hollywood powerhouse; MCA client Ronald Reagan was now in Hollywood, a bad actor, but a better politician who was about to become president of the Screen Actors Guild (1947-52, 1959), where he would protect MCA's interests; Jake Factor was finally in prison, but would soon land in Las Vegas before settling in L.A., with his brother Max, as a prominent real estate investor and philanthropist; Philadelphian Walter Annenberg expanded his publishing empire and built his palatial 392-acre estate, Sunnylands, in Rancho Mirage, California, going on to become a key supporter of both Ronald Reagan's and Richard Nixon's political careers; and Hilton scion Arnold Kirkeby had landed in the tony Bel-Air enclave, where he built the most expensive private home in America.

Remaining behind in Chicago—although financially connected to California—were Jake Arvey, the Pritzkers, Henry Crown, Alex Greenberg, and Arthur Greene. Sidney Korshak was still dividing his time between the two outposts, due in large part to his advisory role with the Outfit, which was now trying to secure an unthinkable early release for its brethren incarcerated in the Hollywood extortion case.

By the late forties, Bioff, Browne, and Schenck had already been released from prison, but the rest were still cooling their heels in stir, while their confreres on the outside lobbied the Truman administration for an early release. According to Bureau of Prison records housed at the National Archives, Sidney Korshak visited Charlie Gioe in Leavenworth twenty-two times. Korshak was not Gioe's attorney of record, and it is widely assumed that he acted as an information conduit, updating Gioe on the negotiations with Truman's parole board. Korshak told the FBI that the visits were merely to update Gioe on the status of an Antioch, Illinois, real estate sale by Gioe's wife, whom Korshak was helping.

Among other services rendered, Korshak admitted that he solicited letters of character reference for Gioe and enlisted one of his law associates, Harry Ash, to agree to act as Gioe's parole supervisor. Since Ash was also Chicago's superintendent of crime prevention, he was considered by Korshak to be above reproach.²

After intense pressure applied to politically vulnerable President Truman and his parole board, the convicted Outfit felons were indeed released early (over the objections of prosecutors and prison wardens) on August 18, 1947, their terms cut by a third. The subsequent uproar led to a major congressional investigation and forced Harry Ash to resign his Chicago civic post.* Although the Hollywood extortion convictions gave the outward appearance of rescuing the movie business from the underworld, it actually distracted the public from a handoff to the more sophisticated Supermob, which would control huge segments of the business with remnants of the underworld. The new partnership was, like the Bioff gambit, mutually beneficial, especially when entertainers found themselves in the mob's crosshairs. Such was the case in November of 1947, when the nascent comedy team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were appearing in Chicago at the Chez Paree. When on the road, the duo famously partook in the female temptations that presented themselves; however, when Martin and Lewis sought to make whoopee with two lovelies that were already spoken for—by Joe Accardo's boys—they took their very lives in their hands.

“I got them out of Chicago about two steps ahead of Dean getting killed,” recalled their agent, Abbey Greshler. “I did it with the help of Sidney Korshak. He's a very dear man, but some people say he's the mob's attorney. I never asked him that. You learn not to ask.” It was to be one of countless rescues Korshak would perform over the years for celebrities who thought they could play ball with the boys in the big league.

It wasn't as if Martin and Lewis were naive as to whom they were entertaining. Lewis had first run afoul of a loudmouthed front-table thug when Lewis grabbed his shoulder and said, “Hey, pal, the show is up here!” The “pal,” who turned out to be Outfit enforcer Charlie Fischetti, shot back “the look” and warned, “If you don't move away right now, I'll blow your fuckin’ head off.” When Lewis realized whom he had crossed, he apologized profusely. (For decades thereafter, the Fischetti family sent substantial checks each year to Lewis's muscular dystrophy telethon.)³

One year later, Lew Wasserman decided he wanted Martin and Lewis in the MCA stable. The MCA boss ordered two men to break into Greshler's office to steal their contract, whereupon MCA made them a better offer. Although the duo ended up at MCA, Greshler obtained a huge legal settlement in the subsequent lawsuit filed against MCA. Of course, no one was about to charge Wasserman or Stein criminally, which should have occurred.⁴

As the second half of the century began, trouble for both the underworld and the Supermob loomed in the persons of journalist Lester Velie and ambitious politician Estes Kefauver, a freshman U.S. senator from Tennessee.

Forty-two-year-old Velie, an award-winning New York-based crime reporter, was an unlikely foe for the forty-one-year-old Korshak, given that he also hailed from Kiev and the University of Wisconsin, where he and Korshak were 1926-27 classmates. By 1950, Velie was writing crime exposés for Collier's magazine, where he was an associate editor. His most recent investigation, aided by Chicago Crime Commission director Virgil Peterson, was an in-depth profile of the Capone heirs’ political connections. The seven-page article appeared in the September 30, 1950, Collier's issue and devoted the first-ever investigative ink to Sidney Korshak. The article noted Korshak's association with Jake Arvey, Alex Greenberg's Seneca, Charlie Fischetti, and others. During his research, Velie visited Korshak's LaSalle Street office, where he eavesdropped on visits and phone calls from Arvey, Arthur Elrod, George Scalise, Dan Gilbert, and “layoff” bookie Joe Grabiner.

The Velie investigation intrigued Kefauver, who was about to embark on a mammoth congressional probe of organized crime, with the subject of Sid Korshak. A legislator with presidential aspirations, Kefauver had persuaded Congress to have him oversee an ambitious, and first-ever, probe into the murky underworld. The senator and his investigators announced that they would crisscross the country in their efforts to clarify the state of American lawlessness.

Dalitz testifying before the Kefauver Committee in Los Angeles, February 28, 1951 (Cleveland State University, Special Collections)

Before Kefauver visited Chicago in October of 1950, he made it known that one of his prime targets would be one of Lester Velie's prey, the Supermob's Sidney Korshak. In July, shortly after receiving Velie's draft, Kefauver announced his committee staff's September trip to the Second City and obtained Korshak's tax records for 1947-49 from Secretary of the Treasury John Snyder.⁵ Those records showed that Korshak was declaring an average yearly income of approximately $94,000 ($1.4 million converted to 2004 dollars).⁶ His brother Marshall reported a $46,000 average for the same period. Committee investigators in Chicago also subpoenaed Korshak's financial records from 1945 to 1948, and Korshak promptly complied with the request. The full-court press continued as former Chicago detective William Drury was enlisted by a Miami newsman to monitor Korshak's movements, the reports of which were shared with Kefauver's investigators. The Drury surveillance operation ended abruptly on September 25, 1950, when Drury was shot to death in his garage. Thus, when the committee touched down in Chicago, the prospects for a Korshak inquisition were expected to intensify.⁷

Another potential pitfall for Korshak was the committee's interest in Dan Gilbert, Korshak's key connection in the Chicago State's Attorney's Office. Under oath, Gilbert admitted his gambling links with the Chicago Outfit, a disclosure that had to heighten the investigators’ interest in his associates such as Korshak. But by the time the Kefauver Committee arrived in Chicago to conduct formal hearings, Korshak and the Outfit had devised a scheme to ward off the committee's namesake. Just like other Washington insiders, the Supermob was aware of Estes Kefauver's vulnerabilities.

Prior to his marriage to the former Nancy Pigott in 1935, Estes Kefauver had a reputation as a stereotypical Southern ladies’ man, a landed-gentry Lochinvar. After his marriage, Kefauver cleaned up his act—at least in Tennessee. Charles Fontenay, who covered Kefauver for the Nashville Tennessean, wrote, “A lot of people knew of his propensity for women, but he was clean as a whistle in Tennessee.”⁸ However, in Washington, and wherever else his travels took him, Kefauver was known as a legendary drinker and womanizer. William “Fishbait” Miller, the longtime House “doorkeeper,” who supervised some 357 House employees, called him the “worst womanizer in the Senate.” On Kefauver's premature death of a heart attack, Miller wrote, “He must have worn himself out chasing pretty legs.”⁹ The senator himself provided the fuel for the talk. When on tour in Europe, Kefauver caused a scandal after escorting a famous call girl to a society ball. On another occasion, he trysted with a woman in Paris who was not told of his wife in Tennessee. Afterward, Kefauver recommended his courtesan to a friend who was about to tour France.¹⁰

On future campaign junkets, Kefauver became infamous for dispatching his aides to procure women. New York Times columnist Russell Baker recalled one night with the candidate on the tour bus when Kefauver was feeling particularly randy. On arrival in a small town “in the middle of the night,” Baker overheard Kefauver telling one of his minions, “I gotta fuck!”¹¹ Irv Kupcinet called Keef “the worst womanizer I've ever known. Whenever he came to town … he let the word out: ‘Get me a woman!’ He would have put Gary Hart to shame.”¹² Capitol Hill lobbyist Bobby Baker, who would become the first American to have a scandal named after him, wrote that Kefauver regularly put himself “up for sale.” According to Baker, “[Kefauver] didn't particularly care whether he wras paid in coin or in women.”¹³

On October 4, 1950, Kefauver and his senior staff descended on Chicago, where Kefauver took a room in the Kirkeby-owned Palmer House, while the rest of the staff and investigators stayed at the hotel that was also home to Outfit mastermind Curly Humphreys (as well as being the Outfit's former meeting place), the Morrison. Perhaps not coincidentally, Chief Counsel Rudolph Halley complained that the staff's phones were tapped. However, he never learned of the Outfit's planned setup of the committee's chairman. In June 1976, reporters Seymour Hersh and Jeff Gerth began to unravel the inside story of Kefauver and Korshak in a four-part profile of the well-connected Supermob lawyer in the New York Times. A close friend and business associate of Korshak's told the writers how Korshak and the Outfit blackmailed the ever-randy Kefauver. The informant, unnamed in the article, related that he had seen compromising photos of the senator taken in a suite at the luxurious Drake Hotel, which was of course owned by the Kirkeby-Cuba National-Lansky consortium. Recent interviews have shed more light on the incident.

The source who was shown the photos turned out to be none other than Joel Goldblatt, who, by the time he was approached by Hersh, had had a falling-out with his pal Sidney over Sidney's standing up for Joel's ex, Lynne Walker Goldblatt, in their divorce proceedings.¹⁴ Goldblatt was notoriously jealous, and Korshak's friendship with Lynne put him over the edge. “Sidney double-crossed him,” remembered Goldblatt's then secretary and future wife, MJ Goldblatt. “He came into the courtroom and kissed Joel's ex on the cheek.”¹⁵ It is now understood that Kefauver was enticed to the Drake, where two young women from the Outfit's Chez Paree nightclub entertained him. “The Outfit had a guy at the Drake, a vice cop who moonlighted as the hotel's head of security,” a friend of the Korshak family recently divulged. “Korshak got the girls; the security guard set up an infrared camera and delivered the prints to Korshak.” Sandy Smith, the veteran Chicago crime reporter, recently said, “I knew that district and its cops and the other people who were involved in that kind of thing.”¹⁶

The confidential source added that a private meeting was arranged between Kefauver and Korshak. In the brief encounter, Korshak flung the incriminating photos on Kefauver's desk. “Now, how far do you want to go with this?” Korshak asked. Kefauver never called Korshak to testify before the committee, despite his being the first of eight hundred witnesses subpoenaed. A committee internal memo noted that they had hoped to interview Korshak, “but were forced to forgo that pleasure because of the chairman's recall to Washington.”¹⁷

Finally, in October 1950, committee investigator George Robinson, who had merely intended to return Korshak's subpoenaed files, interviewed Korshak. Korshak told Robinson, and reporters afterward, that the committee's interest in him was generated by Lester Velie's article in Collier's. Korshak informed Robinson that Velie not only exaggerated the facts, but often invented them. According to Sidney, Velie had a hidden motive for his broadside: he'd held a twenty-four-year grudge against Korshak since their college days at Wisconsin, where boxing champion Korshak punched Velie—then Levy—in the nose. Incredibly, Korshak told the press that he never met Scalise (whom Velie saw with him in Korshak's office) and never represented Charlie Gioe (Korshak had handled his Hollywood extortion difficulties). In a brilliant choice of words, Korshak declared, “My records will show that I never represented any hoodlums.” Of course, Korshak was famous for his lack of record keeping. He called Velie's piece “a series of diabolical lies,” and Velie “a journalistic faker and an unmitigated liar.” Korshak's words to the press would be his last. If he had been discreet before, from now on he would be near invisible, his name all but vanishing from the public consciousness.¹⁸

Kefauver's kid-glove approach to Korshak was trumped by his virtual incompetence in dealing with another key Supermob member, Alex Louis Greenberg. On January 19, 1951, Greenberg testified before Kefauver and admitted to his co-ownership of both the Seneca and California's Store Properties with Paul Ziffren, Sam Genis, James Roosevelt, et al. His IRS statements in the committee's possession corroborated the partnerships. To what should have been an eye-opening revelation, Kefauver merely remarked, “I just marvel that you can have so many businesses.” Greenberg replied, “Thank you.”

Greenberg ended his testimony by offering the committee an invitation: “The next time the committee comes to Chicago, I would like to have the committee stop in the Seneca Hotel … We operate a very nice hotel … [we have] very liberal rates. We got good food over there. Might as well give the Seneca a boost.”¹⁹ There was no follow-up questioning about Greenberg's investment role for Nitti, Capone, and the rest; no interest in the partnership with the notoriously connected Sam Genis or the myriad of properties obtained from Ziffren's close friend who headed the Office of Alien Property, Judge David Bazelon**²⁰

With Velie and Kefauver summarily dismissed, Sidney Korshak set about joining his compadres in California, albeit now with greater respect from the Chicago hoods.

“Sidney became a legend after the Kefauver incident,” remembered a top Chicago PD detective. “It was the key thing that impressed [boss Tony] Accardo and the others.”²¹

Korshak's gossip-writing pal Irv Kupcinet recently said about his highflying friend, “He knew and had the backing of Tony Accardo. Tony Accardo loved him; he depended on him. [He] was considered to be the fair-haired boy in the organization with the blessings of Tony Accardo.”²²

Tony “Joe Batters” Accardo (author collection)

Korshak's future success would require a delicate balancing act consisting of serving his Outfit patrons in Chicago, who felt they'd “made” him, and promoting the interests of himself and the rest of the Supermob, now becoming entrenched in California business and politics. It is one of the many great “unknowables” in Korshak's life: how much of his West Coast relocation was based on his own desires and how much came from an Outfit dictum. “Turned” mobster Joe Hauser voiced his opinion to a House subcommittee in 1983, saying, “Organized crime leader Tony Accardo, who I have known for many years as Joe Batters, told me on several occasions that he had sent Korshak to Los Angeles to represent the mob there.” Frank Buccieri, brother of infamous Outfit juice collector Fifi Buccieri, recently said, “Sidney paid homage to Accardo. Accardo was telling him what to do. When Sidney was in California, he was still taking orders from Accardo. Absolutely.”²³

Leaving his sponsors behind, Korshak said good-bye not only to bitter Illinois winters, but also to the normal workplace. As the new fixer for both the Outfit and the Commission, Korshak only required a telephone, which he wielded like a scepter in the coming years, playing the highly compensated middleman between corporate supplicants and the hidden Eastern powers in Chicago's Outfit and New York's Commission.

By this time the Korshak family had expanded to include not only Sidney and Bee, but also their two young sons, Harry (b. 1945) and Stuart (b. 1947), on whom Sidney doted. For relaxation Hollywood-style, the Korshaks often joined the Ziffrens and pals at the hottest Hollywood nightspot, the Mocambo, located at 8588 Sunset Boulevard, and later immortalized in James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential. A sort of West Coast Chez Paree, the Mocambo, which opened in 1941, was described as “a cross between a somewhat decadent Imperial Rome, Salvador Dali, and a birdcage.” The latter reference was to the club's aviary, which housed macaws and cockatoos. In addition to virtually every notable Hollywood actor,* mobsters such as Mickey Cohen, Ben Siegel, Johnny Stompanato, and Johnny Rosselli frequented the club and were in fact rumored to have a stake in it. Author and Beverly Hills native Don Wolfe said that, among the “in crowd,” the Mocambo's true ownership was well-known. “Charlie Morrison had Bugsy as a silent partner,” said Wolfe. “That's why it was one of the hoods’ favorite hangouts.”²⁴ In 1943, Frank Sinatra made his L.A. singing debut at the Mocambo.

In August 1952, Korshak pal Harry Karl threw a bash at the club in honor of Sidney Korshak and Jake Arvey, who flew out West for the event. The Chicago Tribune covered the Korshak-Arvey lovefest at the club and reported, “The guests numbered some 300 from the Hollywood blue book, or telephone book, and some politicians.”²⁵ Karl, the adopted son of Russian immigrants Pincus and Rose Karl, had inherited his father's $7 million estate (and shoe factories and three hundred retail outlets) and moved from New York to Beverly Hills.**²⁶ According to a Karl family member, Korshak and Karl were “as close as brothers” since the 1930s, when both were chasing starlets in Hollywood. According to the LAPD, there were hidden dimensions to the Karl-Korshak friendship. An informant told officials (just before he was blown up) that “Karl's Shoe Store was a front for the Chicago mob and that Korshak was the contact man.”²⁷

Professionally, Korshak continued to network with the best of them, not skipping a beat when it came to courting important L.A. lawyers, judges, police officials, and corporate moguls. During these years, Korshak was also often seen at Hillcrest, working the power-wielding clique, as opposed to the celebrities who drew the attention of most.*** While the showbiz types frequenting the “men's only” dining room were entranced by iconic regulars such as Groucho or Milton Berle or George Burns, Korshak was buying lunch for brokers he might need at some future time. Fellow L.A. attorney and Korshak friend Leo Geffner recalled meeting him for lunch one day: “This guy sits down with us—I didn't catch his name. He was very friendly with Sid. After he left, I asked who he was. The Beverly Hills chief of police!”²⁸

Among Korshak's earliest dining partners was San Francisco district attorney and future governor of California Edmund “Pat” Brown, whom he met in the midforties. The commonalities of Korshak and Brown included their lenient views toward the underworld. Korshak's ethics were well-known nationally, and Brown's were certainly familiar to San Franciscans. Among his other curious actions, in 1947 Brown asked that murder indictments be dropped against three Colombo crime-family members, after a jury was already thirty hours into deliberations. He then promised the prosecutors that he would resubmit the case—he never did.²⁹ Brown, the son of a San Francisco gambler, would display this curious attitude as a private citizen in 1977, when he wrote a character reference letter for New Mexico organized crime boss John Alessio when Alessio applied for a racetrack license.³⁰

By 1947, a new lunch partner, attorney and future L.A. Superior Court judge Laurence “Larry” Rittenband, had joined Korshak's entourage. After Korshak introduced Brown to Rittenband that year, the two formed one of L.A.'s most powerful law firms. Rittenband went on to become the most senior judge in Santa Monica. According to former Sacramento Bee reporter Richard Brenneman, who interviewed Rittenband extensively in 1976, “Rittenband topped the Santa Monica courthouse seniority list, where he handled his pick of the criminal cases—he loved mysteries—and presided over the courthouse's weekly Friday-morning law and motion calendar, ruling on all pretrial motions and arguments for all the Superior Court civil departments in the building.”³¹ Two decades later he would officiate at the marriage of Sidney's son Stuart. Pat Brown became California attorney general in 1951, and then governor of the state in 1959. Sid Korshak was a key supporter of both Pat's and his son Jerry's future political careers.

When Brenneman asked Rittenband how he justified his association with Korshak, given his ties to the Chicago underworld, the judge seethed. As Brenneman later noted, “His face burning, he made a dismissive wave of the hand and muttered, ‘Hell, that's what you had to do in those days to get by.’”

Another new and important Korshak L.A. friend was the prominent Hollywood divorce lawyer Gregson “Greg” Bautzer. A Los Angeles native and son of a Yugoslavian fisherman, Bautzer began his legal career in the thirties, calling studio mogul Joe Schenck “my mentor.” A partner in the Beverly Hills law firm of Bautzer, Grant, and Silbert, he was the prototypical Hollywood ladies’ man: a handsome, impeccably dressed defender of maligned actresses caught up in nasty divorce squabbles. Among his clients were Lana Turner, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, Ginger Rogers, and Jane Wyman (Reagan's ex). He never tired of telling his tale of deflowering Lana Turner (“I didn't enjoy it at all” was Turner's less-told side of the story). Male clients included George Raft, Clark Gable, Rock Hudson, and Arvey partner Henry Crown. Bautzer was also a volatile drunk, kicked out of places like the Beverly Hills Hotel dozens of times for besotted behavior. His name appeared regularly in the local rags, which reported on his babe of the month, usually a beautiful young starlet, or his long-running relationships with A-listers such as Turner and Crawford. (The term A-list was coined by gossip columnist Joyce Haber in reference to revelers on Sidney Korshak's Invitation list to his sumptuous holiday parties.)

As in any good networking friendship, the benefits were mutual. When Bautzer client Susan Hayward was scheduled to be the focus of a 1955 Confidential magazine exposé, Korshak had it spiked. (Hayward tried to kill herself that year during a bitter child-custody battle, and public screaming matches with her ex were grist for the local media.)³² On November 29 of that year, Confidential publisher Bob Harrison, a Korshak pal, wrote Korshak at his 134 N. LaSalle office, “Dear Sidney, In accordance with your request, we are dropping the Susan Hayward story from the upcoming issue of Confidential. Love and Kisses, Bob.” For his part, Bautzer introduced Sidney to up-and-coming film producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and his cousin Pat DeCicco, a hard-partying Hollywood agent, and an alleged Hollywood front for New York's Lucky Luciano.³³ Broccoli went on to produce the lucrative James Bond film franchise, occasionally with the labor-consultation expertise of Sid Korshak.

Eventually, Bautzer graduated from the divorce courts to the world of corporate law, which opened up vast new possibilities for himself and his friends such as Korshak. Later, he formed the L.A. powerhouse law firm Wyman, Bautzer, Christianson, and Kuchel.³⁴ Thomas Kuchel, a protégé of Earl Warren's, would become a U.S. senator from California, a position from which he introduced tax legislation at the urgings of Lew Wasserman that allowed huge tax write-offs for the movie industry. Bautzer helped Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky set up the corporation from which the Flamingo Hotel-Casino was born. Bautzer had actually been deeded the land by Moe Sedway and then transferred it to Siegel. At the Flamingo, Bautzer associated with another investor, Al Hart. The two had known each other since at least 1937: it was Bautzer who originally owned Maier Brewing and sold it to Hart that year.³⁵

Howard Robard Hughes (Library of Congress)

By far the most brilliant, powerful, and eccentric person that Bautzer brought to Korshak was a Susan Hayward boyfriend and Bautzer client soon to be dubbed “the billionaire kook,” Howard Robard Hughes. The Texas-born Hughes had taken a sizable inheritance from his father, the founder of Hughes Tool Company, and parlayed it into numerous profitable endeavors when he started Hughes Aircraft, a major World War II contractor, and Trans World Airlines (TWA). In the early 1920s, Hughes entered the world of motion pictures through his uncle, Rupert Hughes, a famous author and movie producer. Howard produced twenty-six films, each of poor to average quality. However, he excelled in the role of producer-cum-babe-magnet, dating an enviable roster of the most desired women in Hollywood.†

Greg Bautzer met Hughes in 1947, when the competing cocksman made a pass at Bautzer's latest flame, Lana Turner. Hughes not only landed Turner, but also engaged Bautzer as his Hollywood attorney. Within a year, Hughes had achieved the producer's dream, acquiring his own studio, the Joseph Kennedy-created RKO, for $8.8 million. The purchase was a steal, as RKO was one of the most powerful studios of its time. But Hughes's Midas touch deserted him as a studio honcho, leading to massive financial losses and employee layoffs. Part of the reason for the decline was that Hughes's interest in the studio was, like that of many moguls before and after him, motivated by factors other than the bottom line. Noah Dietrich, Hughes's right hand, and director of Hughes Tool Company, described his boss's connection to RKO: “Howard's involvement with RKO had other motivations than the pursuit of profits and furtherance of the art of the cinema. It also aided the exercise of his libido. I was never certain throughout Howard's long association with the motion picture industry whether his amours were an offshoot of that activity or film production was a screen for his romantic adventures.”³⁶

By 1952, Hughes, who was enduring endless complaints from the company's stockholders, was ready to sell RKO. Hollywood had “grown too complicated,” he said. Bautzer's firm was to handle the details of the sale.³⁷ When Bautzer passed Hughes's dictum on to Sid Korshak, the former Chicagoan seized the opportunity to solidify his entrenchment in the movie business. While not yet possessed with pockets deep enough to contribute to the $1.25 million down payment,†† Korshak was happy to be the behind-the-scenes facilitator, putting together a purchasing syndicate, with the understanding that he would become the new owners’ “labor consultant” at a rate of $15,000 per year. He proceeded to convince Bautzer's law partner Arnold Grant to become chairman of RKO (for $2,000 per week), if Korshak could assemble a group of investors. When Grant (who was already the president of Al Hart's Del Mar Turf Club) agreed, Korshak set about synthesizing a motley group of investors hailing from his corrupt Midwest stomping grounds.

First there was Ray Ryan of Evansville, Indiana. Ryan was a gambler and a partner in a Texas oil venture with New York mafioso Frank Costello, his lieutenant Frank Erickson, and George Uffner, an ex-con and underworld leader.³⁸ Other Korshak recruits were the regionally notorious Ralph Stolkin and his father-in-law, Abe Koolish. Chicagoan Stolkin had amassed a fortune by selling a sort of take-home lottery contraption known as the punchboard, which had been invented in 1905 in Chicago.††† This easily rigged contraption, although legal, paid off so rarely that complaint letters about Stolkin filled boxes in Better Business Bureau offices nationwide. The device, like the modern lottery, preyed on the poorest people and predictably drew its share of mob and small-time con-man purveyors. For a time, the hapless Chicagoan Jack Ruby ran a punchboard con before moving to Dallas, where he would take out JFK's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963. But Stolkin turned the scheme into an art, earning over $4 million as the “Punchboard King of America” in the 1930s to 1950s.

The third partner, Stolkin's father-in-law, Abe Koolish, was no shrinking violet himself, having been indicted in 1948 after years of warnings by the Federal Trade Commission in a mail-order insurance fraud scheme. The charge was dropped only because the indictment was “faultily drawn.”‡ With Stolkin, Koolish also plied the old con of running “charity drives” that were actually profit-making machines wherein the managers siphoned off most of the donations for “expenses.” It is a classic con that is still ongoing. Rounding out the quintet of investors were a Ryan partner, Edward “Buzz” Burke, and Sherrill Corwin, a Los Angeles-based director of the Theater Owners of America.

After negotiations, the RKO sales agreement was signed in Hughes's Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow on September 23, 1952, and within three weeks it started to fall apart. On October 16, the Wall Street Journal began a series of exposés regarding the new owners. RKO's NEW OWNERS: BACKGROUND ON GROUP WHICH NOW CONTROLS BIG MOVIE MAKER: A PUNCHBOARD KING, A MAIL ORDER CHARITY MOGUL, AND A GAMBLING OILMAN blared the first headline. Describing Sid Korshak as the “catalytic agent” in the sale, the story recounted all the aforementioned details about the new owners’ true professions. Over the next few days, the Journal and Time magazine continued to pound away at the new owners, citing, among other evidence, Frank Costello's recent Kefauver testimony wherein he disclosed his partnership with Ryan.

Six days after the first Journal piece, the new owners began resigning from the RKO board; none of them could easily afford the glare of increased public (or official) scrutiny. Sid Korshak and Arnold Grant were the last to go, on November 13. For the next few weeks, RKO was in disarray, as the syndicate defaulted on their next installment. However, by February 1953, Hughes had named a new board and taken control of the stock. In what the Journal called “the financial feat of the year,” Hughes also kept the $1.25 million down payment proffered by the Korshak syndicate, moved to Las Vegas, and continued to search for new buyers. But he had ignited a lifelong feud with Sid Korshak that would play out over the next two decades in the Las Vegas gambling mecca.³⁹

Years later, Korshak disclosed the reason for the depth of the vitriol to a business partner. “Korshak told me that Hughes himself had leaked the [Stolkin] story,” the associate wrote, “knowing it would kill the deal and make him over $1 million richer, the down payment that Hughes never returned to the potential buyers. Hughes had bested Korshak, a fact that the latter neither forgot nor forgave.”‡‡⁴⁰ A former Hughes employee seemed to corroborate Korshak's intuition, saying, “Howard Hughes knew the kind of people he was dealing with; he knew their backgrounds, and he knew their associations. That was the way he operated. In the case of the Stolkin group, he took their down payment and then waited. At the right time, he leaked the story to the press.”⁴¹ Former L.A. private detective Ed Becker agrees, saying, “Howard Hughes and his entourage had about ten trained security people, and they of course would have checked out Korshak immediately because Hughes obviously killed the RKO deal.”

Another possible reason for Hughes's alleged leak was that in January 1953, Sidney Korshak filed a divorce suit on behalf of Chicagoan Theodore Briskin against his wife, twenty-one-year-old starlet Joan Dixon, an actress under contract to Hughes.⁴² (Typically, Korshak would get the last word when he brokered the sale of five of the Outfit's hottest Vegas hotel-casinos to Hughes on April Fools’ Day, 1967. The underworld, however, kept its boys in the pits and count rooms and, over the next three years of Hughes's custodianship, relieved the recluse of over $50 million of his profits.)

RKO continued its free fall, as stockholder lawsuits began piling up. The troubled studio's featured player Dick Powell chided, “RKO's contract list is now down to three actors and one hundred and twenty-seven lawyers.” Hughes finally sold RKO in 1955, netting himself a $6 million profit.

Stolkin bounced back quickly, but temporarily, hawking a thirty-two-hundred-acre Florida pastureland he dubbed Coral City.*⁴³ Abe Koolish and his son had a more ignominious future, continuing their bilking of unsuspecting charities. From 1952 to 1959, the Koolishes siphoned an astounding $11 million from the Sister Elizabeth Kenny Foundation of Minneapolis, their fee for soliciting $19 million in contributions to the fund for polio-afflicted children. The Koolishes’ plundering of Sister Kenny prompted a state prosecutor to later say, “The Kenny Foundation was like a subsidiary of Koolish.” The scam was finally broken in 1960 by thirty-two-year-old Minnesota attorney general Walter Mondale, making headlines for a year, and catapulting Mondale into prominence. “I went into office in May unknown, untested and very young and inexperienced,” Mondale later said, “and within a month I was a very well-known state figure … It was a major source of strength to me.” Mondale went on to become a leading Democratic senator (1965-76), vice president of the United States (1977-81), and a Democratic presidential nominee (1984). The Koolishes spent seventeen months in the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute and repaid a mere $1 million to the Sister Kenny Foundation.⁴⁴

Of course, much more would be heard from Howard Hughes as well. In the aftermath of the RKO sale, Hughes personally authorized a $205,000 loan to Vice President Richard Nixon's brother, Donald, allegedly to boost the sagging finances of Donald's restaurant (which featured the appetizing-sounding “Nixonburger”) in Whittier, California. However, just days after the December 1956 “loan,” Hughes's TWA airlines was granted a lucrative route to Manila, then a route to Frankfurt, and a fare increase. Within a few months more, according to the director of the Hughes Tool Company, Noah Dietrich, the IRS granted Hughes tax-exempt status for his Hughes Medical Institute, a shell organization created to foster the illusion that Hughes Aircraft was controlled by a public trust. On the first day alone that the exemption took effect, Hughes saved $1 million. Two decades later, the loan would play a huge role in the careers of both Richard Nixon and David Bazelon.⁴⁵

With the advent of the Velie and Kefauver investigations, the Supermob was beginning to lose its cloak of invisibility, if only to a few far removed from the nation at large. The most public difficulties centered on a Supermob partner in the Ohio Franklin Investment deal. In 1952, Art Greene was found guilty of stock fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission and sentenced to two years in prison. Considering his affiliations with notorieties such as Gioe, Zwillman, and Lansky, Art Greene, the Franklin partner of Pritzker, Bazelon, and Ziffren, got off easy.

Most of the attention to the Supermob was occurring well behind the scenes, especially in Washington, where both Congress and the FBI were receiving disturbing reports about the workings of David Bazelon's Office of Alien Property. Among the protestations arriving on Capitol Hill was one from a confidential informant who advised, “Bazelon, while with the Office of Alien Property, saw to it that concerns in which he had an interest received preferential treatment in obtaining material from sources under the control of the Office of Alien Property.”⁴⁶ The first reports found their way to the House Judiciary Committee, which oversaw the OAP.

At the time, popular forty-six-year-old Kentucky Democrat Frank Chelf, who went on to serve ten successive terms, chaired the committee. Chelf initially assigned a subcommittee to look into the possibility that OAP had favored certain companies in making allotments of materials recovered from seized enemy properties. The congressional investigators chose to begin by focusing on two specific allegations: (1) whether Bazelon had obtained lucrative stocks in German banks seized by the Custodian Office, and (2) if it was a mere coincidence that as custodian he appointed a Chicago friend to appraise a seized German coal mine and that when the mine was auctioned, it was purchased by another friend of Bazelon's.

However, during the committee's investigation, highly placed confidential sources attested to a litany of disparaging allegations about the OAP custodian, including:

• Bazelon saw to it that concerns in which he had an interest received preferential treatment in obtaining property and goods under the control of the Office of Alien Property.⁴⁷
• Bazelon was given his judgeship thanks to an inner circle of the Democratic Central Committee, which regularly met with Bazelon in “an unidentified room in the Mayflower Hotel.”
• Bazelon appointed attorney friends such as Democratic Party honcho William Boyle, Harold Horowitz, and Arnold Shaw (Shapiro) to be the legal representatives of vested companies, which resulted in their obtaining lucrative fees.⁴⁸ According to the president of the Norfolk and Southern Railway, Joseph Kingsley, Boyle had paid large sums of money to Bazelon, who, to conceal it, used the name Weld in his dealings with Boyle. Kingsley added that Bazelon was “scared to death” that this information would be disclosed.⁴⁹ Shaw was a former assistant to Bazelon and was “said to have done the ‘dirty work’ for Bazelon.”⁵⁰
• Bazelon, according to “reliable information,” had “obtained control of certain hotel interests on the West Coast, formerly in the hands of [Office of] Alien Property,” and “Ziffren and Bazelon formed a partnership for the purpose of administering warehouse properties which were under the control of Alien Property.”⁵¹
• Bazelon “shows up in San Francisco in a shady manner as aligned with a Los Angeles lawyer [Ziffren] in owning or being equal counsel for hotels in Stockton, Modesto, San Francisco, Fresno, Bakersfield, etc., which were formerly handled by OAP after being taken over from Japanese and others.”⁵² (Author's italics.) (Note: Bazelon's benefactor Abe Pritzker was also heavily invested in San Francisco. According to a former Department of Justice Strike Force officer, Pritzker worked in partnership there with hotel and real estate tycoon Donald Werby, who the source believed was dispatched westward from Chicago by none other than Al Capone.)**
• David Bazelon's brother Gordon, also an attorney, appeared to be the recipient of special treatment when he was indicted by the IRS for income tax evasion. The committee noted that “the case was extremely good from a prosecutorial viewpoint.” However, when the case was forwarded to the Department of Justice, where brother David was assistant attorney general, it simply vanished. Recall that David had previously been assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago in charge of federal tax matters. (There were also uninvestigated reports that David Bazelon's father-in-law, corporate executive M. J. Kellner, relied on David when he got into tax trouble.)⁵³

The “Chelf Committee” declined to publish a report of its findings, opting instead to forward the material directly to the Justice Department for further disposition. In those days is was not uncommon for a committee to avoid writing a report on a politically sensitive investigation. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and racketeer specialist Clark Mollenhoff wrote of how Congress demurred when investigating labor corruption: “It is often forgotten that pitfalls were there for committee members or staff investigators who tackled the job … Where investigations could not be stopped, union influence was used to cripple the investigators by sharply limiting their funds or curtailing their jurisdiction … One of the finest investigators to tackle the union racket was out of a job for six months because he was blackballed by union-influenced Congressmen … The heroes of the 1953 to 1957 period were Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. Some had their investigations ended by political pressure; some gave up in frustration.”⁵⁴

With the buck thus passed, the responsibility to act shifted to the Department of Justice. After receiving the Chelf data, Attorney General James McGranery on August 8, 1952, instructed J. Edgar Hoover to look into the Bazelon affair, but drastically limited its scope to just the Franklin Hotel allegations—understandable since McGranery was Bazelon's boss and friend at the department.⁵⁵ The FBI thus opened a new subject header: “Judge David L. Bazelon; Misconduct in Office.” Their investigation proceeded quietly for the next five years and, as noted in the previous chapter, corroborated the accuracy of the Goe/White research, labeling the Bazelon-Ziffren dealings in Rohm Haas and other OAP transactions “suspicious.” But since their initial charge was to conduct a narrow investigation of just the Franklin deal in Ohio, they conservatively refused to expand the probe. The FBI's liaison to the Department of Justice, Courtney Evans, wrote, “We will take no action in this matter in the absence of a request from the Attorney General [Herbert Brownell].”⁵⁶ Brownell and his Justice Department, however, declined to pursue the evidence against a sitting federal judge (Bazelon) and the man who had, by the report's closing, become the Democratic National Committee chairman from California (Ziffren). Interestingly, after an exhaustive search by National Archives staff, all Justice Department records on the Bazelon investigation have turned up missing.⁵⁷

David Bazelon successfully weathered the 1952 House Judiciary probe, the protracted five-year investigations by the FBI (which yielded a 561-page report), the LAPD investigations, and a two-decade, if below-the-radar, investigation by reporters Robert Goe and Art White. Bazelon's future accomplishments as a jurist were groundbreaking, transforming the U.S. Court of Appeals (where he mentored clerks such as Alan Dershowitz) into the second most powerful judicial jurisdiction after the Supreme Court. Among his many praised opinions: he extended the rights of the accused and the breadth of the insanity defense to include those with inborn mental defects; in 1973, as head of the nine-judge appellate panel ruling in the Watergate case, he ruled that President Nixon had to hand over the infamous White House tapes; and he ruled that patients confined to public mental institutions were entitled to treatment, as opposed to being merely warehoused.

Judge Bazelon (far right) and fellow members of Big Brothers of America meet President Kennedy, April 4, 1961 (Corbis/Bettmann)

In 1962, Bazelon would briefly be considered for a Supreme Court post by the Kennedy administration, which was considering candidates to replace the retiring Judge Felix Frankfurter.⁵⁸ However, for reasons unknown, the Bazelon nomination was never proffered,*** and another Chicagoan, Arthur J. Goldberg, got the nod. Goldberg was not just another friend of Abe Pritzker's, having been a partner in his law firm, but more interestingly, an investor with Paul Ziffren and Benjamin Cohen in the San Diego Hotel.

In February 1970, according to the FBI, Bazelon stayed at the mob-frequented La Costa Resort, his bill comped by the hotel. David Bazelon passed away in February 1993, whereupon the D.C.-based Mental Health Law Project changed its name to The Bazelon Center for Mental Health.⁵⁹

Meanwhile, undeterred journalists Lester Velie, Robert Goe, and Art White continued the thankless job of poring over real estate records and business filings, stored in clerks’ offices and corporate records warehouses around the country. They were energized by the realization that Paul Ziffren was becoming a major political force in California and in the nation. In truth, his ascension was nothing short of meteoric.

Ziffren's early strength came from his ability to raise money for Democratic candidates. When he solicited funds for Helen Gahagan Douglas in her senatorial campaign against Richard Nixon, Ziffren's methods were mysterious, but few Democrats cared. When a naive young Colorado businessman was recruited by Ziffren to be Douglas's campaign finance chairman, the Coloradan knew something was wrong. “Paul was really the finance chairman,” the businessman candidly admitted to Lester Velie. “I was the front. When I tried to determine the sources Paul was tapping, I got nowhere. He wasn't going to let me know the sources.” The young man recalled how he could hardly pry Ziffren away from his long-distance phone calls to Chicago. He never learned who was on the other end.⁶⁰

In 1953, Ziffren had been elected the Democratic national committeeman for California, a position that saw him hailed for “reinventing” the California Democratic Party, which captured both houses of the state government for the first time in seventy-five years. National Democratic Chairman Paul Butler said, “Paul Ziffren has been the greatest single force and most important individual Democrat in the resurgence of the Democratic Party in California.”⁶¹ That same year, Bautzer-Korshak pal Pat Brown became attorney general of California, and Lester Ziffren, Paul's brother, became Brown's assistant attorney general for the Southern California Region, where he would serve for seven years.

If anyone doubted that the Supermob was now untouchable, these developments should have proved dispositive. In fact, the goings-on were still far from public scrutiny. However, the trio of investigators remained undaunted and labored to stop what they perceived as a legitimizing of shady operators and mob-tainted money in California. Often their discoveries were forwarded to the FBI and absorbed into its investigation of the Supermob. The problem for the tireless reporters was getting their work into print. A veteran Chicago newsman who followed Korshak's career recently recalled two instances when he was ordered by a senior editor to remove Korshak's name from unfavorable articles. And articles about Korshak specifically were never even green-lighted. “You couldn't get a story about him in the paper,” the Chicago Tribune scribe said. “How many battles do you have to lose before you get the message? There was something special about Korshak.”

With these investigations ongoing, sources kept a steady stream of Korshak intelligence flowing into various agencies:

• In July 1951, an informant reported that Korshak was making an effort to fix the case of an arsonist.
• Virgil Peterson of the Chicago Crime Commission noted that just after Christmas, 1954, Jake Arvey flew to New Orleans to meet Frank Costello's slot machine and jukebox partner, “Dandy” Phil Kastel, at Kastel's palatial Louisiana estate. In noting “unimpeachable sources,” Peterson reported that Arvey's travel arrangements were made by Korshak, who drove Costello to the house.⁶²
• LAPD intel sources in 1954 reported that, even on the West Coast, Korshak was “currently in touch with Capone Syndicate members.”
• Other sources reported that Korshak was “sponsoring” First Ward alderman John D'Arco's Anco Insurance Company, a partnership of D'Arco and Buddy Jacobson (an aide to Korshak mentor Jake Guzik). Anco had been set up as a means for funneling graft money to First Ward secretary Pat Marcy, and from there to the Outfit.*

By 1954, the yeomanlike work of Goe, White, and Velie was gaining more adherents. In addition to the Judiciary Committee's and FBI's plumbing of the Bazelon allegations, the LAPD opened its investigation of the Hayward Hotel.⁶³ The directors of the LAPD intel division also began corresponding with the Chicago Crime Commission regarding the Hotel Hayward ownership.⁶⁴ LAPD intel chief James Hamilton also sought Peterson's advice regarding Bazelon, Ziffren, and Warehouse Properties.⁶⁵ Suddenly, Los Angeles authorities were interested in all things Chicago. LAPD intel chief Hamilton wrote Peterson with a query about Abe Pritzker after he was prompted by an intel division report that noted suspicious movements by Pritzker in Los Angeles:

Abe Pritzker, a Chicago attorney with offices at 134 N. La Salle Street, which is the same address as that of Sidney Korshak's office, has been closely connected with members of the Capone syndicate, Tony Accardo, and other underworld characters. It is believed by the undersigned that Pritzker may be active locally, as a front for eastern hoodlum money to be invested in the Los Angeles area. Pritzker was at the office of attorney Louis Hiller, 6399 Wilshire Blvd., LA; was there discussing the investment money without the definite plan being indicated. Those present at the meeting included Hiller, Pritzker, and Louis Tom Dragna [L.A. Mafia underboss, brother of “the Al Capone of Los Angeles,” Jack Dragna]. Hiller indicated that he had a million dollars available for investments.⁶⁶

Meanwhile, the business aspirations of the Pritzker legal clan began to explode. In 1957, they created the Hyatt chain of hotels when Jay Pritzker bought a small motel near the Los Angeles airport from Hyatt von Dehn, a real estate developer. Pritzker's intuition was that business executives craved luxury hotels near major airports—and time would prove him correct. The seminal purchase was initiated in a coffee shop named Fat Eddie's outside LAX, where Jay scribbled down his $2.2 million purchase price on a napkin.

The Pritzkers soon developed a reputation for their canny business modus operandi, being fast to move into a deal and quick to get out if they had to minimize a loss. They also became the avatars of a business technique called asset management, wherein the backer does not directly manage the property and the managers do not directly fund the projects. Since it is so expensive to build hotels and takes three to five years to see profits, the Pritzker family and the management teams of the Hyatt hotels only invest $400,000 to $800,000 per hotel and then get a backer like Prudential Insurance or the Ford Motor Company, companies with “staying power” to foot the several-million-dollar bill to actually build the hotel. Five decades later, the Hyatt chain (with over seventy-four hotels in twenty-seven countries), and other Pritzker holding companies, are worth anywhere between $5 billion and $7 billion, with annual revenues of $1.3 billion. The Pritzkers also became one of the country's largest hospital operators, acquiring six of their own and operating fifteen more under lease and contract management.⁶⁷ (See appendix B for more examples of Pritzker business interests.)

Profits, however, were not the only constants in the Pritzker saga. Rumors flew that, as with their questionable real estate partnerships in the forties, the Pritzkers’ new Hyatt endeavor was similarly tainted. One IRS informant who was quoted as saying that “the Pritzker family of Chicago through their Hyatt Corp. initially received their backing from organized crime” was later identified as F. Eugene Poe, the late president of a bank in Perrine, Florida, and vice president of the offshore tax haven where the Pritzkers hid their wealth known as Castle Bank, about which more will be seen.

Michael Corbitt, who was recruited as a teenager into the operation of Outfit slot boss Pete Altieri, got a glimpse of what lay beyond the Hyatt facade. After he was promoted into the world of mysterious Chicago slot king Hy Larner, who trafficked in drugs, guns, and gambling machines in far-flung locales such as Spain, Japan, Iran, and throughout Central America, Corbitt kept running into the name Hyatt. As he later wrote in his book, Double Deal, “Whenever possible, Hy wanted us to put his guests up at a Hyatt … It was common knowledge that most of the Pritzkers’ financial backing at that time came from the Teamsters, meaning pension fund manager Allen Dorfman.”⁶⁸ Corbitt, who ran a Chicago security company as his “day job,” elaborated about the Hyatt connection shortly before his death in 2004:

“My first job was the construction of the Hyatt at 151 East Wacker. After the Hyatt was built, I became the security director for the Hyatt chain in Chicago. They were a big Chicago chain—they weren't around the world like the way they are now. I had very close ties to the Pritzker family only through my Outfit connections. Our connections to the Hyatts all over the country were solid. At the time, we were dealing directly with Abe Pritzker. We could get in places that were sold-out; even if they were sold-out, we'd get the presidential suite. I know for a fact that we never got a bill. There is no way Larner wasn't with the Pritzker family.”⁶⁹

Like James Hamilton, Los Angeles district attorney Thomas C. Lynch wrote to the CCC's Virgil Peterson for information on Paul Ziffren and Jake Arvey.⁷⁰ That same year, it had been disclosed that Ziffren was the subject of a federal probe into the activities of Enterprise Construction and its subsidiary, United Credit Corp., of which Ziffren was VP and tax attorney. A high government source reported that Enterprise, which had made over $10 million in loans to home buyers, would be charged with misuse of FHA mortgage funds, including kickbacks from loan proceeds, failure to require down payments, exorbitant prices, etc. The source noted that the statute of limitations might inhibit prosecutions for crimes that may have been perpetrated in the late 1940s. Ziffren was reported to have financed United Credit with a fund set up for his wife, Muriel.⁷¹ One U.S. senator referred to Enterprise/ United as “the top racketeering outfit in the fleecing of home owners in the Los Angeles area.”⁷²

When an FHA officer investigating so-called suede-shoe artists visited Enterprise and attempted to warn them that they were on the verge of getting into a legal quagmire, he was quickly advised as to exactly who was calling the shots.

“I went to United Credit to induce them to be more careful in choosing their contractors,” said FHA officer William Murray Jr. “Morrie Siegel, a vice president of Enterprise, tried to impress me by mentioning names of influential people he knew. He intimated he could make things uncomfortable for me. There was a signed picture of President Truman on the wall. I couldn't see to whom it was autographed, but Siegel and the others of the company there kept looking at it, as if to leave me draw the conclusion how important they were.”

If the show-and-tell failed to impress, what happened next certainly did, when Murray was reassigned and demoted. “Later I heard that United Credit was responsible for my being banished to the salt mines of Long Beach [California] because I had gotten in the company's hair,” he told a Senate committee investigating FHA fraud.⁷³ Eventually, Enterprise saw its California contracting license revoked and was forced out of business.

Investigators’ interest in Ziffren heightened when they noticed the removal of Ziffren's name from the Warehouse Properties partnership papers in exchange for that of his best friend, David Bazelon, the man who was in charge of selling it for the government eight years earlier (see chapter 5). There is no public record that Ziffren received even one penny for his interest. The new partnership papers state candidly that the purpose of the partnership is “for convenience, in connection with the contemplated sale to the City of Los Angeles.”⁷⁴ The notary on the papers of incorporation was Leo Ziffren, Paul's brother. As previously noted, the Warehouse property sale to the city eventually netted Bazelon a $100,000 windfall.

A young Francis Albert Sinatra (Library of Congress)

As the Supermob prospered, investigators noticed another curious trend under way in 1954: Sidney Korshak and Frank Sinatra, who were by now good friends, began directing their pals to a recently opened bank, guaranteed to be friendly to the Supermob. In no time, studio moguls and A-list celebrities closed accounts in their former institutions and opened them with the City National Bank of Beverly Hills, founded on January 1, 1954, by none other than Al Hart with the intent of servicing the real estate and entertainment industries.⁷⁵ Initial capitalization for the bank was provided, according to Dunn & Bradstreet, by Chicago's American National Bank, the same institution that provided additional financing for the likes of Arthur Greene and the Hilton chain. According to the IRS, Sidney Korshak held stock in American National, and, completing the circle of insiders, the American National officer who facilitated the capitalization was William J. Friedman, the same man who was Ziffren's partner at Gottlieb, and who became the director of the Rohm Haas enterprise that was seized by David Bazelon's OAP.

One of Hart's partners in the new venture was Samuel W. Banowit, who was in turn partners with both Alex Greenberg in the Spring-Arcade Building, and with David Bright, associate of Gerry Restituto, the Mafia boss of San Joaquin Valley, with whom he invested in the three-hundred-thousand-acre Bright-Holland Ranch in Lassen County, California.

Hilton's Arnold Kirkeby was also a director of the bank, and Sidney Korshak a major stockholder.⁷⁶ Paul Ziffren's son Ken, himself a future L.A. power attorney, would eventually join the bank's board of directors as well.

An LAPD memo of August 3, 1958, lists City National Bank among a dozen businesses believed to be fronting for and/or doing business with the mob. Robert Goe's sources stated that the bank had “a number of directors who appear to be nominees or ‘front men’ for such individuals as Joseph Fusco.”⁷⁷ However, given the extreme laxity of law enforcement in L.A., not to mention Hart's great friends in the attorney general's office, the bank was never adequately investigated, and it would become the largest independent bank in Los Angeles, with $3 billion in capitalization and a total of fifty-four offices throughout California.⁷⁸

Like so many other mysterious Chicagoans now doing business in L.A., Al Hart was a mystery to some in law enforcement, but not all. David Nissen, former chief of the L.A. division of the U.S. attorney's office, recently said, “Al Hart was a big Democratic fund-raiser. I always thought he was with the mob people, but I never had any actual basis for that.”⁷⁹ Nissen was likely unaware of the FBI's file on Hart, which noted his partnership with Bugsy Siegel, and numerous convictions with the Chicago mob. But others had no doubt about Hart's leanings. “Hart was Korshak's banker and he was the banker for the Democratic Party in California and later the Republican Party—whichever side they decided to support,” said veteran Chicago private investigator Jack Clarke recently. “Hart was the major banker and a major player in politics, and he was well-known among the organized crime guys because when they were investigated, they would put money in his bank. They knew he wouldn't allow the IRS inside the front door of the bank, and he wouldn't turn over his records. Hart and Korshak were really tight. All the friends of Korshak who wanted to protect their money but to still have it close at hand put all their money there.”⁸⁰

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wendell Rawls, who spent years investigating corruption in the Southern California entertainment community, heard the same thing. “You could deposit any amount in Hart's bank without letting the IRS know,” said Rawls. Hart's unusual business practices were well-known in the state attorney general's office in Sacramento. “We had a joke that City National Bank was the closest thing to a Swiss bank in the United States,” said the AG's investigator Connie Carlson. “Al would handle any transaction that you needed handled discreetly.”⁸¹ A 1970 FBI memo summarized, “Cleaning up [mob] money by a bank is an old trick, but an effective one and the City National Bank is as uncooperative [with IRS] as the bank of Las Vegas and a known front for the mob in Los Angeles.”⁸²

When he was tipped to Hart's possible connection to Meyer Lansky, L.A. district attorney crime investigator James Grodin did a background check and learned a fraction of the true story. “I went to the DA's office and ran a criminal history on Hart,” Grodin remembered. “I learned that he went to prison in the thirties for some kind of land fraud in San Bernardino.” Further proof of Hart's dubious associations comes from former L.A. private detective Ed Becker. When he needed a $10,000 loan, Becker was advised by Chicago's Johnny Rosselli to “go see Al.” Becker said that Hart came through, despite being unable to read the business proposal. “He was illiterate,” said Becker.⁸³

With his client-friendly banking practices, Hart became the banker to the stars, often seen socializing with them. “Al Hart was a great friend of everybody,” said acclaimed television comedy producer George Schlatter recently. “I managed Ciro's, and when we were running short, Al Hart would delay payment of the bill for liquor—which was not totally legal, but very friendly.”⁸⁴ Helping his friends with investments was just part of what made Hart a good friend. He was said to have had a $250,000 investment in the Broadway musical My Fair Lady, among others, and that he often tipped his friends and bank clients to similar opportunities. Hart's celebrity clients were, and are, countless, from Frank Sinatra on down. Sinatra's (and later JFK's) girlfriend Judy Campbell recalled a 1959 Hawaiian vacation with Frank, Peter and Pat Kennedy Lawford, and Al Hart, whom she described as a “koala bear,” with his “paunch and saddlebags” protruding from an unfashionable pair of swim trunks.⁸⁵ Jim Grodin remembered seeing Hart around town and had a vivid recollection of his persona: “Hart was a member at Hillcrest, but he was a real ‘dee's, dem's, and doe's’ guy—a gangster type, so he didn't fit in. He was always using foul language, even in front of women. But the members tolerated him because he gave them no-interest loans from his bank.”

Despite the lack of deference to the distaff side, Hart had a reputation as a player. “Al Hart had many mistresses,” said Peter Lawford's longtime manager Milt Ebbins. “And he made them a lot of money in investments.”⁸⁶ Sid Korshak's daughter-in-law Virginia Korshak is more blunt, saying that Hart was a serial womanizer: “Al Hart was a little dog. He was a little wreasel.”⁸⁷ MCA starlet Selene Walters, whose great looks made her one of Hollywood's most in-demand dates, knew Hart and went on one date with him.* “Hart took out very young starlets while he was married,” said Walters. “I didn't like him—he was crude and sinister. I was wary and afraid of him. His bank was the only one that terminated my account because he said it wasn't large enough. That hurt me very much because I had gone out with him.”⁸⁸

Among those most frequently linked to Hart were actresses Martha Hyer and Pier Angeli. According to Hart's FBI file, one of his women reported that her home had been burglarized of $79,000 in furs, jewelry, and paintings on the evening of October 31, 1959. It was being widely reported that Hart, who admitted to the LAPD that he had a key to the house, had engineered the break-in after the affair fizzled. He allegedly told one friend, “[Name deleted] was no damn good, and if he [Hart] went to her house and took his things back, it would not be burglary since, after all, he had given them to her in the first place.”⁸⁹ The FBI was not allowed to pursue the case because there was no evidence of an interstate crime, and the Beverly Hills police typically treated Hart with the same preferential treatment afforded celebrities.

With the exception of Charlie Gioe, who was gunned down on a Chicago street in August, 1954 was notable for Supermob close escapes. The next year was not so fortuitous. Among those whose luck ran out in 1955 was Willie Bioff, who had assumed a false identity after his Hollywood-extortion prison term and lived for a decade in Phoenix, where he befriended and advised Senator Barry Goldwater, who only knew him as William Nelson. In 1955, Bioff had the temerity (or lunacy) to take a job under the name of Nelson as an entertainment consultant for Las Vegas’ new Riviera Hotel and Casino, built with $10 million in Outfit money, behind a front group of Miami investors. Interestingly, the Riviera land was leased from an L.A. consortium that included Greg Bautzer's law partner Harvey Silbert, who was also Frank Sinatra's personal attorney, and a close Korshak friend. When the Chicago Outfit ID'd Bioff, his days were numbered. On November 4, 1955, as Bioff left his Phoenix home's front door and entered his pickup truck parked in the driveway, he had no idea that the Chicagoans were onto the man who'd testified against them. If he had had that knowledge, he would never have cranked the ignition that blew him into a hundred pieces.

A month later, on December 8, 1955, sixty-five-year-old Alex Louis Greenberg, the man who could link so many California up-and-comers to questionable Chicago investment money, was killed gangland-style as he and his wife, Pearl, were leaving Chicago's Glass Dome Hickory Pit Restaurant on the South Side's Union Avenue. As the couple walked to their parked car, two gunmen emerged from the shadows and dropped Greenberg with four .38-caliber bullets before calmly walking away; Paul Zifrren's real estate partner had been hit in the forehead, chest, left arm, and groin. Just months earlier, Greenberg had orchestrated the merger of Wisconsin's Fox Head Brewing Company, which was heavily invested in by Murray Humphreys and Joe Batters Accardo, and Fox Deluxe Beer Sales of Chicago. The new company served as a legit front and money-laundering sieve for the Chicago Outfit.⁹⁰ At Greenberg's funeral, one of Frank Nitti's cousins stayed on to make sure the body was properly disposed of. He reported back to his family, “Now he's the richest son of a bitch in hell.”⁹¹ In the coming weeks, police rousted over seventy-one hoods in their attempt to break the case. They never did.

The Chicago Tribune's obituary concisely described Greenberg's legacy, although it has long since been forgotten: “Under his guidance, it is understood, the mob moved into ownerships of hotels, restaurants, laundries, cleaning establishments, and bought stock in banks, major industries, and entertainment enterprises.”⁹²

Alex Louis Greenberg handled all investments and financial matters of every type for and on behalf of Frank Nitti.

With so many diverse holdings, Greenberg's probate took over five years to sort out. However, as expected, the final accounting stated that the estate included $964,252 in stock in the Seneca, over $1 million in liquid assets, dozens of real estate parcels, and thousands of shares in a variety of blue-chip stocks. It came as no surprise to those familiar with the financial connection between the mob and the Supermob that the family of Frank Nitti, Al Capone's successor, made claims against the estate. The Chicago Daily News wrote, “The widow of Frank ‘the Enforcer’ Nitti charged that Greenberg failed to repay more than $2 million entrusted to him by Nitti for investments.” (Author's italics.) The probate also noted that Paul Ziffren owed Greenberg's estate $19,939.50.⁹³ Annette Nitti finally agreed to a $35,000 settlement in 1960.

While Greenberg's murder hogged the Chicago headlines, Sidney Korshak continued to fight his battles in private. In 1955, he narrowly escaped prosecution for possible violation of the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947. He and Murray Humphreys had been implicated in their dealings with Goldblatt Brothers, accused of using strong-arm tactics to prevent Goldblatt employees from unionizing.⁹⁴ The Bureau learned that Pritzker was Goldblatt's attorney of record, but Pritzker would defer to Humphreys and Korshak whenever a stalemate occurred.⁹⁵ Federal agents also noted that one union organizer at Goldblatt's had been murdered in 1933.

Korshak was first put on Goldblatt's retainer in 1950 for $6,000 a year, increased to $10,000 by 1954. According to the FBI, the IRS had carefully been watching Korshak's finances for at least four years, but found nothing out of order. When interviewed by Bureau agents, Korshak admitted that he had known Humphreys since about 1929.⁹⁶ Indeed, Korshak had been seen for years meeting with Humphreys at Fritzel's Restaurant. Prosecution of Korshak was ultimately (and typically) declined by the Department of Justice.

Like the reporters whose editors blanched at the prospect of a Supermob exposé, FBI agents knew all along that their superiors did not share their interest in men like Korshak. One memo generated by the L.A. Field Office stated the obvious: “Due to his position as a prominent attorney, and because of the Bureau's previous instructions that any Korshak investigation be handled in a circumspect manner, [the L.A. office] does not desire to write a report or make Korshak the subject of an active investigation under the Criminal Intelligence Program.”⁹⁷

Sidney Korshak was not alone in his feeling of legal invulnerability. The same FBI kid-glove approach applied to Ziffren, despite what the LAPD was telling them. “He is considered by officials in the Los Angeles Police Department as a vociferous enemy of law enforcement,” an FBI memo noted, “and has been described by LA Chief of Police William H. Parker as a ‘force of evil.’”⁹⁸ But Paul Ziffren had little to fear from the FBI, Chief Parker, Hamilton, or the rest—he simply informed his brother, the assistant attorney general, and his pal the attorney general, that he was upset. On May 22, 1956, Ziffren wrote a letter to his brother's boss, Attorney General Pat Brown, saying, “I want to congratulate you upon your decision to investigate law enforcement in Los Angeles … I have been increasingly alarmed by the activities of the Chief of Police of the city of Los Angeles, with particular reference to the mysterious and highly secret intelligence division operated under his direction.”⁹⁹ However, on this occasion, Ziffren's impressive connections failed him. Brown, who now seemed to want to distance himself from the Ziffren taint, responded vehemently, calling his blast “unfortunate … unjudicious … and unwelcome.” It was to be merely the first salvo in Brown's attempt to discard any negative baggage that might forestall his quest for higher office.

The national political stage was no less bothersome for Ziffren as Estes Kefauver, who was attempting to parlay his crime-probe celebrity into a presidential candidacy, began blasting Ziffren from the stump—something he had avoided in his vaunted investigation. In a speech given in San Diego on May 30, 1956, Kefauver singled out Ziffren in a stinging condemnation of “bossism” in California. Noting Ziffren's backing of his Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson, Kefauver declared that if Stevenson won, Ziffren and his associates would become “the czars of California democracy.” Kefauver referred to Ziffren as “Arvey's protégé here.”¹⁰⁰ A Chicago Tribune columnist wondered, “How much of a piece of Stevenson does [Arvey] own, and, by extension, how much of a piece of the candidate does Korshak own? And, if they have a piece, how much of that piece can the mob call theirs?”¹⁰¹

SID KORSHAK'S LIFE IN Beverly Hills was developing into a contradictory combination of sphinxlike mysteriousness and high-profile socializing with the world's most famous celebrities.

As Sid's gatekeeper to the underworld, Chicago's Curly Humphreys decreed that no one besides himself be allowed to communicate directly with the gang's golden boy. Korshak was so valuable that he had to stay insulated from gangsters. Soon, the Chicago FBI would succeed in wiretapping the Outfit's meeting places and discover that when Korshak communicated with Humphreys by phone, the two spoke in code, Korshak referring to his superior as “Mr. Lincoln.”

One of Korshak's closest Hollywood pals described how Korshak's wife, Bernice, obtained a glimpse of Sidney's furtiveness early on. After returning from the honeymoon, Mrs. Korshak read from a list of coded messages that awaited her new husband.

“George Washington called, everything is status quo. Thomas Jefferson called, urgent, please call ASAP. Abraham Lincoln must speak with you, important. Theodore Roosevelt called three times, must connect with you before Monday.”

“Your friends sure have a strange sense of humor,” said Bernice. “Who are they?”

“Exactly who they said they were” was Sidney's terse response. “Any other questions?”

According to producer Bob Evans, who was told the anecdote by Bernice, “Fifty years later, Bernice has never asked another question.”¹

For his part, Korshak remained as low-key, blended-with-the-woodwork as possible. Among those few who traveled with him, Korshak's avoidance of cameras was notorious, as Dominic Dunne had discovered.

Given that Los Angeles was, and is, an “industry town” with the Supermob pulling many of its strings via MCA, Al Hart's bank, and the cadre's links to so many swank hotels and properties, Sidney Korshak and associates now counted the country's top celebrities among their closest friends, among them Cyd Charisse and Tony Martin, the Kirk Douglases, Dinah Shore, David Janssen (Sidney was the best man at Janssen's 1975 marriage to Dani Greco, who called Korshak Janssen's “surrogate father”), Jack Benny, John Gavin, Vincente Minnelli, Dean Martin, John Ireland, Donna Reed (and husband Tony Owen), George Montgomery, Warren Beatty, Korshak mistresses Rhonda Fleming, Stella Stevens, and Jill St. John, and James Bond producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli. Hollywood gossip columnist Joyce Haber wrote, “Sidney Korshak is probably the most important man socially out here.”

Near the top of Sidney Korshak's list of chums was the skinny Italian crooner from Hoboken, New Jersey, Frank Sinatra. By the 1950s, Frank and Sid were already fast friends. Although the details of their initial meeting are unknown, they shared so many friends and commonalities—Giancana, Accardo, Humphreys, Wasserman (Frank's agent), the Chez Paree, and Las Vegas—that the two likely knew each other since the earliest times. Interestingly, although Sinatra projected the tough-guy “Chairman of the Board” persona, by all appearances one of the few men he deferred to was Sid Korshak. “Frank was definitely subservient to Sid,” said one friend of both who asked not to be named. “They would say Sid was the only one even Frank Sinatra knew not to fool with,” recalled screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz.² George Jacobs, Sinatra's valet from 1953 to 1968, saw an almost brotherly bond between the two. “Sidney and Frank were good friends,” Jacobs said recently. “They were very dear friends. They used to hang out at La Costa [Country Club] because there was a lot of money from ‘the boys’ there.”³ Early Korshak law partner Edward King told an acquaintance that he knew for a fact that Korshak interceded directly with Harry Cohn to land Sinatra the role that saved his career, some say his life, in 1953's From Here to Eternity.⁴

Legendary television comedy producer George Schlatter remembered the informality of the relationship. “Frank used to call Bee [Korshak], Dinah [Shore], and his wife ‘lady broads,’” said Schlatter, “which was the best of all worlds. You can't say that today.”⁵ One friend of both men, who asked for anonymity, spoke at length about the relationship:

Sidney would talk about how Frank and his father's friends from the firehouse in Hoboken would sit around in the living room, tossing firecrackers at one another and roaring with laughter. Sidney also talked about Frank's mother, Dolly, and how she dominated the world's greatest lover's life. And the only peace the great man would ever have was during that time of the year when she'd go to her cottage at [Al Hart's] Del Mar. Sid used to say that when Dolly died in 1977, Frank was finally on his own.

When Sidney and Bee visited Frank and Barbara [Marx Sinatra] for the evening, Sidney would insist on going upstairs and watching his favorite TV program, which was Kojak. Sidney would go to watch Kojak while Frank was making spaghetti. I guess he was rather annoyed and offended that Sidney had left the table.⁶

Of course, the parties at Sinatra's were not immune from Korshak's demand for privacy. One exceptional faux pas was committed when the press was given a list of guests at a Sinatra birthday bash, a release that inadvertently included Korshak's name, which was supposed to have been redacted; according to one reveler, Korshak made his irritation known to Frank.

It was inevitable that a volatile performer like Sinatra would occasionally seek out Korshak's professional expertise, and his periodic wise counsel only strengthened their bond. Irv Kupcinet, who named Sinatra as one of Korshak's closest friends besides Wasserman and Ziffren, saw evidence of the tutelage. “I know Frank leaned on him a lot for political and legal advice,” Kup said in 1997.⁷

One of the earliest known examples of this occurred when Sinatra was compelled to testify before a grand jury in 1955. It seemed that on November 4, 1954, Sinatra had driven a blind-with-jealousy Joe DiMaggio to Marilyn Monroe's place, where the ex-Yankee slugger had hoped to affect their pending divorce by catching Monroe in a sapphic assignation. When the duo and their two detectives forced their way into a neighbor's apartment by mistake, the incident became known as the Wrong Door Raid. Before long, Sinatra's personal thugs had beaten one of the detectives for leaking the story to the press. And Florence Kotz, the unaware neighbor, wanted her shattered door replaced.

The day after Sinatra was subpoenaed to testify before a March 1955 grand jury looking into the affair, the singer abandoned his legal team of record and called the Fixer, Sidney Korshak, who coached him for the appearance. Sinatra escaped indictment and started dating Monroe himself. He settled with Florence Kotz out of court.⁸

Korshak's rescue of Sinatra was just one of countless such interventions for which Korshak would become famous among the “in crowd.” It seems that his snatching of Martin and Lewis from the mob's clutches in the forties was just the beginning of his Tinseltown altruism. Anecdotes abound describing Korshak's quick fixing of a problem for a celebrity or his or her child, especially when one of them fell behind with their bookie debts or crossed the legal line with powers that be. In 1958, when Kupcinet got pinched in L.A. for drunk driving, Korshak came to his rescue, referring him to his nephew, attorney Maynard Davis, who represented Kup in court as Uncle Sidney sat through the entire trial as a spectator—one of the few times he actually appeared in a courtroom. Although the judge intoned, “There's been an attempt to fix this case … cases cannot be fixed in L.A. Being from Chicago, the defendant may not be aware of this. But this is not Chicago!” Kup was acquitted.⁹

Korshak pals Bugsy Siegel and George Raft (Library of Congress) Irv Kupcinet interviews George Raft (Library of Congress, Look Magazine Collection)

One of the most often cited celebs for whom Korshak played protector was a tough-guy actor from New York's Hell's Kitchen, George Raft (born Rollo). After a stint as a driver for bootlegging kingpin Owney Madden, Raft came to Hollywood, where gangster chic held sway, and quickly found film work portraying the stereotypical hood. His depictions were nothing if not authentic, benefiting from his friendship with the likes of Bugsy Siegel, who lived with Raft when Siegel first came out West to run the Chicago Outfit's race wire. By the 1950s, Raft was fronting a Cuban casino, the New Capri, for Meyer Lansky and New York mafioso Charlie “the Blade” Tourine. In 1965, Raft was convicted of tax evasion, but a benevolent judge fined him $2,500 instead of ordering a prison term.¹⁰ According to crime expert Hank Messick, “Raft became involved in some complicated crime deals that ultimately led to the murder of syndicate accountant Benjamin Berkowitz.”¹¹ (In 1967, Raft was barred from England as an undesirable after fronting for a large casino in London.)¹²

Although he occasionally acted in bona fide hits like Scarface, Ocean's Eleven, and Some Like It Hot, Raft was notorious for making horrendous career choices, among them turning down lead roles in such “bad scripts” as High Sierra (1941), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), and Double Indemnity (1944). No doubt due to his friendship with occasional Korshak client Bugsy Siegel, Raft became friends with Korshak and thereafter fell under Korshak's protective umbrella.

“George spent many Sundays at Korshak's, and Sidney often helped him out financially,” said Raft biographer Dr. Lewis Yablonsky.¹³ Attorney friend Leo Geffner recalled a later period when Raft seemed to live at the Korshaks’ home. “George had no money so he became Sidney's gofer,” said Geffner. “He would answer the phone or just sit around like one of the family.”¹⁴ Fellow Korshak pal Kirk Douglas recalled one such Sunday at Chez Korshak. “After a barbecue at Sidney Korshak's house one day, I walked into the kitchen and was astonished to find George Raft doing the dishes,” Douglas wrote in his autobiography. “I backed out and mentioned this to Sidney. He said, ‘Oh, George likes to do that.’”¹⁵ When Yablonsky's authorized biography of Raft was published in 1974, Korshak was among only two people cited for special thanks by Raft. Calling him a “special friend,” Yablonsky wrote, “Sidney Korshak has generously helped George through many difficult periods in recent years; without his compassionate support and wise counsel this book might never have been completed.”¹⁶

Movie producer Fred Sidewater also took note of Korshak's charity toward Raft. “Sidney actually gave George a job as a messenger because his career was gone,” Sidewater remembered in 2003.¹⁷ When there was talk of a potential Raft biopic, auditioning actors, such as Bob Evans, were submitted to Korshak for his approval.¹⁸ On the occasion of Raft's death in 1980, Korshak delivered the eulogy, saying, “He came from poor beginnings, but he never turned his back on anyone.” Graciously calling Raft an “industry giant,” Korshak added that Raft was actually a modest man who considered himself “such a lousy actor he never saw any of his pictures.”¹⁹

Among other examples of “Sidney to the rescue”:

• Lounge singer and girlfriend of Johnny Rosselli, Betsy Duncan Hammes, recently recalled Korshak's help for an ill-planned singing engagement: “I'd never been to Hawaii, so I took this awful job there, but I had to book my own room. When I got there, every place was sold out, so I was stranded. I called Sid at the Polo Lounge and he called over and got me a room at the Surfrider, one of the best places in Honolulu at the time. Then my friend Rita May, of the May Co., who came with me, was unable to cash her checks there until Sid made another call and set them straight. Sid helped out friends of friends too. I know this guy in Chicago who got caught writing bad checks. He was part of the Rosenwald family [Sears Roebuck Inc.]. I called Sid, who knew the family well, and he made a call and took care of it.”²⁰
• Jan Amory, former wife of Korshak client/partner Del Coleman (Seeburg Inc.), recalled a weekend she spent with a movie producer who began acting “weird” and started to frighten her. Amory called Korshak at one in the morning. “I'll be right over,” Korshak said. As she waited by the open door for Korshak, the producer tried to pull her back inside. Amory then told him that someone was coming to pick her up. “Who is it?” he demanded. Suddenly Korshak appeared and said, “It's me, and move away from her. I'm taking her back with Bee and myself now.” The producer immediately cowered and said, “I'm so sorry, Sidney.” According to Amory, “All of the sudden, it was like the Red Sea parted.”²¹
• Amory also recalled that when she and husband Freddie Gushing, a banker with Lehman Brothers, were living in Paris, Freddie lost his driver's license after a speeding conviction. Amory called Korshak in L.A., and he asked for the name of the French prosecutor. “And all of the sudden, a week later Freddie's license was returned,” Amory said with astonishment.
• One Korshak friend, who wished anonymity, joined the chorus with his story: “Once, when I took a photo to the best framer in L.A., somehow in conversation it came up that I was close to Sidney. The framer told me, ‘I'd be dead if it wasn't for Sidney. The French Mafia had put a contract out on me, and a friend of mine got in touch with Sidney, who got his Italian friends to get it called off.’ He absolutely refused to accept payment from me.”²²
• Recently deceased world-famous comic Alan King recalled being turned away from a posh European hotel that claimed it had no vacancies. King calmly walked to a lobby phone to call his Vegas pal Sid Korshak in Los Angeles. According to King, before he hung up the phone, the hotel desk clerk was knocking on the phone booth door—as if by magic, a luxury suite had become available.²³

There was, according to some, one glaring exception to Korshak's Hollywood altruism, and surprisingly, it involved one of Sinatra's best friends, Sammy Davis Jr. By 1956, the African-American Davis was a bona fide song-and-dance star, with hit albums, a sellout live act in Vegas and elsewhere, and a legion of A-list friends. Even a 1954 auto accident that cost him his left eye failed to derail his skyrocketing career. But Davis was also on good terms with the hoods who had a lock on the country's nightclub business; he was known to be especially well connected in Chicago, where, in leaner years, he had often borrowed money from Sam Giancana. It was believed by many that the mob had their hooks so far into Davis that they practically owned him. George Weiss, the composer of Davis's breakout 1956 Broadway musical Mr. Wonderful, spoke of witnessing how Davis had to obtain the mob's permission to appear in the show.²⁴

Sammy Davis was able to balance his mob flirtations, but not those with Caucasian blond women, for whom he had powerful attraction. Of course, midcentury America was the last place a black man wanted to be caught in an assignation with a white woman, but Davis forged ahead as though he were living in a more tolerant European capital. When his affections were aimed at the hottest ingenue in the Columbia stable of hotheaded Harry “White Fang” Cohn, it was quickly made clear that he had crossed the racial Rubicon.

Having just come off film triumphs Picnic and The Man with the Golden Arm (opposite Frank Sinatra), the Chicago-born Marilyn Pauline Novak, aka Kim Novak, was being groomed to be a huge earner for the mob-connected Cohn. But soon after a brief first meeting in Chicago at the Chez Paree, then a date at the home of Korshak's friends Tony Curtis and wife Janet Leigh, the twenty-three-year-old blond “sex symbol” Novak and the thirty-one-year-old black entertainer Davis had (according to Davis) fallen in love. The affair was fueled by the excitement of having to arrange furtive meetings wherever possible. But despite their best efforts, the word got out, and it got out first to Harry Cohn, who, rightly convinced that the affair would destroy Novak's career, immediately hired detectives to follow the lovers. The racial flames were fueled when Irv Kupcinet wrote in his January 1, 1958, column in the Chicago Sun-Times that the two were engaged, and that Kup had a copy of the marriage license to prove it (he never produced it).²⁵

Cindy Bitterman, a close friend of Davis's, who was employed in Columbia's publicity department, recently recalled a dinner party she attended at the time with Cohn and other Columbia honchos. “At dinner, the names of Kim and Sammy came up,” Bitterman told Davis biographer Wil Haygood. “Cohn had no idea of my relationship with Sammy. He asked somebody at the table, ‘What's with this nigger?’ My stomach started cramping. ‘If he doesn't straighten up,’ he starts saying about Sammy, ‘he'll be minus another eye.’ I went to the bathroom and threw up. I threw up out of fear and greed and Hollywood money making.”²⁶

“Harry Cohn wanted him dead,” said comic Jack Carter, Sammy's Broadway costar in Mr. Wonderful. “What he was cocking around with was the mob,” said Jerry Lewis. “They had a lot of money in Columbia—namely Harry Cohn—and I knewr it.”

Among the first warnings came from Steve Blauner, an agent with General Artists Corporation, who railed at a nonplussed Davis, “You stupid son of a bitch! How long you think it'll be a secret? They'll kill you!” Soon, Harry Cohn summoned Davis's adviser Jess Rand to his office. “I know the right people,” Cohn bellowed. “I'll see that he never works in a nightclub again.” Back in Chicago, where Davis was doing a gig at the Chez Paree, a mysterious stranger paid a visit to Davis in his hotel room and warned the singer that his remaining eye was on the line because of the affair.

“If you fuck with my right eye,” Sammy shot back with uncharacteristic bravado, “I'll kill you.” Before leaving, the man made certain Davis saw his gun, saying, “Don't ever say that, kid, unless you mean it.”²⁷

Cohn, who apparently was not about to wait for Davis to fall in line, decided to confront Novak. In an interview thirty years later, Al Melnick, Novak's first agent, said, “There's no doubt about it. Harry called a very highly placed attorney, a man in with the mob, and he arranged a serious action against Sammy.”²⁸ For most knowledgeable insiders, that could only mean one man: Sid Korshak. According to actress Dana Wynter, the ex-wife of Korshak's close friend Greg Bautzer, the fixing talents of Korshak were indeed brought into play. In a recent interview, Wynter recalled a confrontation that bore the earmarks of an earlier power play with Estes Kefauver:

Harry Cohn called her in and said, “Look, knock it off.” Apparently Kim didn't feel like obeying orders and it came down to calling her in again, this time with Sidney sitting behind the desk with Harry Cohn and saying to her, “Look, you absolutely got to stop this.” And she said, “Why should I? It's my private life.” At which point Sidney asked her to look at some pictures. Apparently Sammy Davis had cameras set up in the bedroom and had a whole file of these things, with various prominent white actresses, and this was his thing, and she looked at them and then started to tear them up, and then Sidney said to her, “Don't bother to tear them up, because we have the negatives.” Then he said, “We're telling you, if he doesn't stop it, he'll lose his other eye.”²⁹

After the meeting, Korshak met with Greg Bautzer and laughed about the incident. “I heard Sidney say it, and to Greg and to me,” said Wynter. “He had just come from Columbia and was crowing about it.”

Screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz, who came to work alongside Korshak years later, heard another version of the story from Korshak. “We were sitting up late at night at the Riv in Vegas,” remembered Mankiewicz, “and someone mentioned Sammy Davis, which I said may not be the best place to talk about it ’cause Sidney was sitting right there. So Sidney said, ‘What, the I'll-put-your-other-eye-out story?’ I turned red as a Coke machine. He said, ‘I never said that. I threatened Sammy with something much worse. I told him if he ever saw Kim Novak again, he'd never work in another nightclub for the rest of his life. For a compulsive performer like Sammy, that's way worse than death.’”

This version is supported by Bob Thomas, Cohn's biographer, who said, “Sammy was presented with simple alternatives: end this romance or find himself denied employment by any major nightclub in America.”³⁰ And Sid Korshak was the attorney most connected to the lucrative venues of Las Vegas, Chicago, and elsewhere.

Whatever the details of Korshak's threats, the fact was that they were beginning to take effect. “What is it they want me to do?” Davis asked his longtime agent, Arthur Silber Jr. “Are they telling me that I'm not good enough to be seen with a white woman? Do they want me to get my skin bleached white? What is it? I'm a human being. Why can't I be with the woman I love?”³¹

Sinatra's valet, George Jacobs, an African-American, remembered when Sinatra heard about the Cohn threats. “When Sinatra got wind of it, it brought up a lot of bullshit,” Jacobs said. “Frank came to his defense when that happened. He didn't call them, but he wouldn't hang out with the guys from Columbia anymore. He never invited them to anything he had going on. Frank would see them at parties at Romanoff's and he'd walk right by them like they weren't there. He didn't like them at all. Sammy was like a little brother to him, and he took very good care of him. The only time I saw Frank angry with Sammy was when Sammy was smoking weed. Sinatra was against narcotics.”³²

The word was now out that Davis not only had to break off with Novak, but also had to marry a black woman to end the threats once and for all. “The gossip,” remembered Annie Stevens (the wife of Sammy's conductor Morty), “was already backstage: Sammy has to get married—or he'll be killed.” According to Arthur Silber Jr., Davis's father was warned by L.A. mobster Mickey Cohen that Harry Cohn had put out a mob contract hit on his son. “He said Harry Cohn is going to send some guys to break both my knees,” said a hysterical Sammy Davis, “and put out my other eye if I don't find a black girl to marry within forty-eight hours!” With that, Davis quickly offered $10,000 to a black Las Vegas singer he barely knew if she would agree to marry him for one year only—and just for appearances. The girl, ironically named Loray White, had a crush on Davis and quickly agreed, thinking (wrongly) that the bond might last.³³ Davis's mother, Elvera, later said, “He married her because, if he had not, they would have broken his legs.” According to Davis's autobiography, Yes I Can, just before the wedding, Davis received a call from his friend Sam Giancana, who told him, “You can relax, kid. The pressure's off.” However, on their wedding night, Davis got blind drunk and tried to strangle his new bride.

On February 27, 1958, six weeks after the Davis-White vows, Harry Cohn died of a heart attack. When over a thousand showed for the intimidating mogul's funeral on the Columbia lot, comedian Red Skelton quipped, “Well, it only proves what they always say—give the public something they want to see and they'll come out for it.”³⁴ Sammy and Kim continued to sneak around for a few months, but the situation proved untenable and the affair ended. “I don't think Sammy ever took anything harder in his life than the breakup with Kim Novak,” wrote Arthur Silber. And one year after it began, the marriage to Loray White was over.

Just as he had with the stars, Korshak solidified his relationships with the movie moguls. With the studios at the mercy of the mob-controlled craft unions and talent agencies, dealing with Korshak became the first order of business for any studio that wished to stay solvent. Korshak's indispensable mediating skills set a trend in Hollywood that exists to this day. As many a producer can attest, in modern Hollywood, the entertainment business is now virtually run by attorneys. And the Teamsters are still ubiquitous on movie sets. One Hollywood insider recently joked, “In Hollywood, they cast a lawyer like they cast an actor. And they probably cast the lawyer first.”

Typical of Korshak's clout was his effort on behalf of an anonymous Hollywood agent who recalled being threatened by mob muscle over an entertainment deal that had fallen through: “I went to Sidney and explained the situation, told him I was concerned, and he made a phone call, I never heard from them again.”³⁵

Former Los Angeles FBI agent A. O. Richards recently recalled what he was told by informants regarding Korshak's utility in Hollywood: “We knew he was strong and he had a lot of power and was a big man and all of that, but he kept a fairly low profile out here. The two big areas that Korshak was close to, that we could determine, were the unions and the movie industry. That was his forte. It was one of those things we knew, that he was practically behind everything that happened and knew about everything that happened. He could control them so that there wouldn't be a strike. That was his style—behind the scenes.”³⁶

Fellow L.A. FBI man Mike Wacks exhibited some frustration when he remembered the industry collusion with the Fixer. “It was well-known in the industry that if you were going to make a movie, the talk around town was that you'd have to use the Teamsters,” Wacks said. “Of course, you better get it straightened out with Sidney before you get those Teamsters over there, or you could have problems. He'd get a consulting fee from both ends—the producers as well as the Teamsters. I wish we could have proved that, but that was what the talk around town was, that he got paid off by both sides.”³⁷

Certainly Korshak's strongest and most potent mogul friendships were those with Jules Stein and Lew Wasserman. According to Roy Brewer, the IATSE representative in L.A. in the fifties, Korshak helped MCA obtain Teamsters Pension Fund loans when it ramped up its production wing after Reagan and SAG granted the all-important waiver.³⁸ A measure of how much Korshak was revered by Stein was reported by L.A. County district attorney investigator Frank Hronek, a story confirmed by veteran Los Angeles Times reporter Jack Tobin and others. “Frank Hronek was our ‘overcover’ Hollywood guy in the DA's office,” recalled former DA John Van DeKamp. “He and his colleague would go from bar to bar and pick up all the gossip.”³⁹ Hronek, a former Czechoslovakian freedom fighter in World War II, had befriended Stein's Czech secretary, who became the first to tell him of a revealing incident in Stein's MCA suite. According to the secretary, when Korshak entered the office, Stein stood up from behind his desk and walked around to Sidney, saying, “Sidney, you sit there. That's your chair, not mine. You sit there. That is your chair behind the desk.” Korshak, without hesitation, made himself comfortable in the chairman's seat.

“The woman was flabbergasted!” Hronek later recalled. “Here's the man who created MCA and he is saying to Sidney, ‘That's your chair!’ And of course Sidney didn't say, ‘Oh, no.’ He went over and sat down.” According to the secretary, a short time after Korshak made himself comfortable, another visitor entered the room, a man of diminutive stature. After serving coffee and liqueurs, the secretary left the room with Stein. Now, Korshak and “the little man” were alone together behind closed doors for about twenty minutes, after which the man left, met downstairs by a waiting limo, and Korshak summoned Stein back into his own office.

Alone with the secretary later, Hronek showed her some photos, hoping she might be able to identify “the little man.” One police mug shot caused the secretary to nod her head vigorously; she was certain that this one man, whoever he was, was the man alone with Korshak in Stein's office. The man in the photo was Meyer Lansky.⁴⁰

Interestingly, it is believed by some that Stein drew the line at being seen publicly with the lawyer so obviously in league with the Chicago Outfit. The late Chicago judge Abe Marovitz, himself no stranger to “the boys,” said just before his passing, “Jules had to do certain things to not be harmed, to be able to do business … Jules wouldn't want someone like Korshak bragging that Jules is his friend.”⁴¹

Typical entry from Lew Wasserman's daily MCA phone logs (confidential source)

Stein's MCA heir Lew Wasserman was, if anything, closer to Korshak than to Stein himself. Several people who knew both men asserted that Korshak was Wasserman's closest friend, period. Former senior MCA executive Berle Adams said that the tall trio of Wasserman, Korshak, and Paul Ziffren were together so often that they were nicknamed the Three Redwoods.⁴² When NBC News obtained Wasserman's MCA phone logs years later, they revealed that Wasserman spoke with Korshak religiously at the beginning and the end of each business day. “Lew and Sidney were joined at the hip in the fifties,” former MCA agent Harris Katleman told Wasserman biographer Connie Bruck. “Sidney did whatever Lew needed.”⁴³

Former Los Angeles DA John Van DeKamp was well aware of the Korshak-Wasserman relationship. “Wasserman used to go to Korshak quietly when there were labor problems in the industry,” Van DeKamp explained recently. “And for some reason he was regarded as the person who could fix these things, and how he'd fix them you never knew. Of course, you can be a mediator without being a criminal fixer. On the other hand, the suspicion always was that some money must have changed hands. But you could never prove it.”⁴⁴

Occasionally, Korshak's favors for Wasserman were only partially related to business. “Sid did something really interesting for Lew Wasserman once,” remembered Jan Amory, “when Lew and Edie wanted to go to the Hôtel du Cap in Antibes [French Riviera], which Sidney also loved, at a time when the unions were threatening a strike. Lew said to Sidney, ‘I don't know what to do. Edie is dying to go to the Hôtel du Cap.’ And Sidney said, ‘When do you want them to strike?’ Lew said, ‘Well, we'll be back September second.’ Then Sidney said, ‘Okay, they'll be striking on September third.’ And that was it.”

Robert Evans, actor, 1958 (Photofest)

If Korshak and Wasserman were somewhat considered equals, another Korshak relationship is usually described in clear paternal terms. His camaraderie with then actor (and co-owner with his brother Charles and tailor Joe Picone of women's pants manufacturer Evan-Picone) Bob Evans would grow stronger from their first meeting in the fifties until their estrangement four decades later, during which time Evans rose to the top of Hollywood moguldum, only to crash and burn in the hedonistic excesses of the 1980s. According to Evans, during the intervening years, Korshak wras, in Mafia patois, “my consiglieri.” Evans adds, “He said he was my godfather too.”⁴⁵ He maintains that, for the next thirty-plus years, the two met every day for an hour when they were in town, or, if one was not in L.A., they spoke by phone daily. Journalist, and later Paramount executive, Peter Bart explained Evans's attraction this way: “Evans idolized gangsters, but he was fascinated with Jewish gangsters—Bugsy Siegel—not Italian ones.”*⁴⁶

Bob Evans (born Robert J. Shapera), the son of a successful Harlem dentist, has described a vivid memory of his first glimpse of the man he reverently calls The Myth one blistering-hot Palm Springs afternoon in the early fifties. The occasion was a mixed-doubles tennis match at the Palm Springs Racquet Club, where Evans observed the four players finish their match and walk over to an elegant man “as if they were looking for approval.” In his autobiography, Evans described the barely smiling sphinx as a “ruggedly handsome man, at least six foot three,” wearing a black silk suit, with a starched white shirt and tie. “He wasn't even perspiring,” wrote the infatuated Evans. “In all the years I'd gone to Palm Springs, never had I ever seen anybody dressed this way.” When the quintet headed into the clubhouse, Evans inquired of him at the reception desk.

The desk clerk was barely able to utter the name. “S-S-S-S … Sidney K-K-K-K … Korshak,” he stuttered.

“Who is he? What does he do?” asked Evans. But the clerk rushed off without answering, thinking the better of it. Nonetheless, the two soon met and initiated a long friendship.⁴⁷

A few years later, Korshak assumed his “protector” role for Evans when Sid and Bee dined with Evans at Le Pavilion in New York, which at the time was the finest and most elite French restaurant in the city. Another couple, unknown to Evans, were also in the party, the male half of which “made John Gotti look like a fruit.” Evans, nothing if not narcissistic, began flirting with the man's beautiful date, much to Korshak's consternation. The next thing he knew, Evans was being kicked hard in the shins by the Fixer, who then played out a scene with the randy young actor.

“Bobby, you're late,” Korshak said, looking at his watch. “The script—you were supposed to pick it up twenty minutes ago.”

“What script?” asked an obtuse Evans, who was soon blasted with an even more painful kick under the table. “Then I got the look, the Korshak look,” Evans later wrote. “Houdini couldn't have disappeared quicker.”

The following morning, Korshak called Evans and let him know how close he had come.

“Schmuck, if you'd stayed one more minute, you'd have gotten it to the stomach,” Korshak informed him. “Not a punch—lead!”

“Who's the guy?” asked Evans.

“It's none of your fuckin’ business,” Korshak answered. “His broad's got one tough road ahead. Been married a week and the doorman won't even say hello to her—that's how tough the guy is. And you, schmuck, you're coming on to her. Tony was gettin’ hot—I could see it. You're lucky your eyes are open.” (The epilogue was that after the woman and her tough husband divorced a few years later, no matter where the divorcee relocated—Chicago, Los Angeles, Hawaii—no one had the guts to date her, despite that she was drop-dead gorgeous.)⁴⁸

This incident was to be the first of many of Korshak's rescues of the reckless Evans over the next thirty-plus years. When Evans's brief acting star began to fade in the late fifties, Korshak tried to resuscitate it by interceding with Columbia chief Harry Cohn to hire Evans. “Are you kidding?” Cohn supposedly said. “The kid's a bum. He never even called me back when he was big.”⁴⁹

“Sidney was like a godfather to him,” suggests Jan Amory. “I think he was trying to set him on the straight path. I just don't know, but I think Sidney liked the glamour and the girls at Bobby's, but Sidney was not into any of the drugs or any of that stuff. He would have two whiskeys and that would be it.”

Evans relished the vicarious thrill of being in the company of a force such as Korshak. “We were at ‘21’ one night,” Evans recounted. “Sidney used to stay at the Carlyle, and he said, ‘Let's walk.’ He had two hundred thousand-dollar bills in his pocket. I said, ‘Are you crazy? How can you walk with all that money?’ And he said, ‘Who's gonna take it?’”

WHILE ZIFFREN, GREENBERG, and the rest continued their assault on Western real estate, Sidney Korshak was practically living out of airports and hotels as he expanded the Supermob's inroads into American labor. With the Chicago underworld fast establishing outposts on the West Coast, the gang increasingly relied on Korshak to represent its unions in L.A. one day, and in Chicago the next.

In the early fifties, the Supermob's “labor consultant” racket was largely confined to Chicago and Hollywood, where the remnants of the Bioff-Browne takeover still held sway over many craft unions. In fact, the Bioff-Browne template was what likely inspired the Supermob's move to expand its labor power nationally, giving Korshak his Platinum Club frequent-flier status. The Hollywood takeover strategy came so close to succeeding—brought down largely by the inclusion of Willie Bioff—that the Chicago Outfit and the Supermob thought it was worth another try. This time the target would not be just Hollywood, but every city dependent on keeping peace with organized labor. Instead of IATSE, the target wrould be the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT); and in place of Willie Bioff and George Browne, the new facilitators would be a Detroit Teamster leader named James Riddle Hoffa and a Chicago insurance salesman named Paul “Red” Dorfman.

In operation since 1903, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America, commonly known as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, or simply the Teamsters (named after the wagon drivers who commanded a “team” of horses), was involved in numerous violent strikes during a period when employer abuse of workers enjoyed a free rein. In one 1905 example, a tragic hundred-day strike against the Chicago-based Montgomery Ward Company left twenty-one dead and cost about $1 million ($20 million in 2006 dollars). After establishing strongholds in Detroit and Chicago, the Teamsters set about forcing independent unions to capitulate and antiunion companies to reconsider. Often these “negotiations” utilized violence as a tactic of first choice. Teamster rank-and-file passions were fueled by the success of their union in creating better working conditions, including standardized contracts, shorter workweeks, and the right to overtime pay. When the automobile came into widespread use in the twenties, the IBT expanded to include truck drivers, and its membership skyrocketed to over 1 million by the time Sidney Korshak became involved in the early fifties.

The Supermob infiltration strategy consisted of providing underworld support for amenable Teamster leaders in exchange for a deal wherein Korshak would become the union's key “labor negotiator” (of course, Korshak would secretly cut sweetheart deals with employers). The Teamsters would set up a fund from which the mob and Supermob could make massive low-interest commercial loans. In return, the fund accrued the interest on the loans, and the chosen Teamster leaders would receive not only financial kickbacks, but also mob muscle with which to guarantee their leadership positions. Few underworld eyebrows were raised when the chosen instruments turned out to be Red Dorfman and Jimmy Hoffa.

Red Dorfman's willingness to partner with the underworld was a given. As titular head of a number of labor unions including the Waste Handlers Union (controlled by Sid Korshak's immediate superior, Murray Humphreys), Dorfman was, according to the FBI, one of the five or six closest men to boss Joe Accardo. A Chicago Teamster described him as “a hood's hood,” while another Teamster said, “He was a small, thin, red-haired guy who'd walk in and throw two bullets on a guy's desk and tell him, ‘The next one goes in your fuckin’ head.’” He had been indicted in 1928 for election fraud and in 1942 for a brass-knuckle assault on a fellow union boss.* Dorfman's purchase with the mob made him a perfect match for Teamster up-and-comer Jimmy Hoffa when the two met in 1949.

James Riddle “Jimmy” Hoffa was born on February 14, 1913, in Brazil, Indiana, the son of a coal driller who died of an occupational respiratory disease when Hoffa was only seven. Quitting school after the ninth grade in order to help support his family, Hoffa went to work in a grocery warehouse, where he first became involved in the labor movement at age seventeen when he organized a strike. This was during the era when company goons, labor goons, and police goons were constant physical threats. “When you went out on strike in those days, you got your head broken,” Hoffa remembered to the Detroit News. “The cops would beat your brains out if you even got caught talking about unions.” In these formative years, Hoffa's car was bombed, his office smashed, and he was once arrested eighteen times in a single day.

But Hoffa was a tough fireplug of a man, seemingly born to lead the fledgling labor movement. Rising quickly up the ranks, Hoffa was appointed by Teamsters president Dan Tobin as a trustee in charge of examining the union's financial books in 1943, an appointment that would be key to his appeal to the Supermob. In 1946, Hoffa became president of a Teamsters local in Detroit, working under the corrupt union president Dave Beck. In this position, Hoffa was involved in a second critical Teamster evolution when he helped restructure the previously autonomous locals to consolidate power within the central organization. By 1952, Hoffa had won election as international vice president of the Teamsters under Beck, who was already under investigation by federal agencies.

Hoffa formed his first known coalition with organized crime when he requested help from some of Detroit's east-side gangsters to roust an opposition union, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). By the late forties, with his ambition to ascend the Teamster national power structure in overdrive, Hoffa knew that to achieve his goals he would require the allegiance of the all-powerful Chicago Outfit, which by now had a vise grip not only on Chicago's influential local Teamsters, but on the locals of numerous cities west of Chicago.¹

Tom Zander (pseudonym), a retired organized crime investigator for the Chicago office of the U.S. Department of Labor, remembered well the takeover days. “The Chicago Teamsters were very corrupt, except for one or two locals,” Zander recently said. “The mob took the Teamsters over in small ways: first they'd pinpoint certain locals and go after the treasurers and members of the joint council. They did it principally by payoffs or threats. Once they got one or two key guys, they were in. They got to the pension fund real quick. It was their bank. They used the money to build Las Vegas, and Sidney was in it very deep.”²

An FBI intelligence report noted, “The labor racket's web had at its center Sidney Korshak, and around him were Murray Humphreys, Gus Alex, Joey Glimco, and Jake Arvey.”³

Joey Glimco, 1959 (Chicago Crime Commission)

In 1949, through a union-busting Michigan steel hauler named Santo Perrone, Hoffa met Dorfman, who then introduced Hoffa to boss Accardo, Humphreys, Ricca, and the rest. Hoffa also became close friends with Korshak underling Joseph Glimco (ne Guiseppe Glielmi), appointed by Humphreys in 1944 to run the fifteen powerful Teamster taxicab locals of Chicago. Predictably, Hoffa and Korshak developed a powerful association. “Sid was the closest person to Hoffa,” recalled Leo Geffner, an L.A. attorney who associated with Korshak.⁴ Andy Anderson, who became the head of the Western Conference of Teamsters, remembered Korshak in constant contact with Hoffa until Hoffa's imprisonment in 1967: “[Hoffa] checked with Sidney on everything he did, and he still got in trouble.”⁵ In an interview in 2003, Anderson hinted at the kind of power Korshak held over Hoffa: “He knew Hoffa well. In fact, he used to say to me, ‘Do you want a job with Hoffa? I'll get you promoted and you can get a job with Hoffa.’ And I'd say, ‘No, I don't like him.’ He said, ‘Okay, thanks for telling me.’”⁶ MCA agent Harris Katleman went so far as to say, “Sidney Korshak controlled the Teamsters.”⁷

According to the FBI, Red Dorfman suggested to Humphreys that if the Outfit's Teamster locals, which Humphreys controlled, would back Hoffa's advancement, Hoffa would return the favor by making Sid Korshak the Teamsters’ national labor negotiator. Simultaneously, all businesses dealing with Korshak would be required to take out insurance with Dorfman's agency, the newly constituted Chicago branch of the Union Casualty insurance company, run by Red's son, Allen. During the ensuing years, father and son Dorfman were estimated to have received over $3 million in annual commissions, $5 million by 1963. A government asset manager, brought in to clean up the operation in the 1970s, reflected, “It looks like it was an unwritten rule that when you got a loan from the fund you bought insurance for your property from Allen Dorfman.”

After the 1952 Teamster convention, where Hoffa was seen schmoozing Glimco and other hoods, it was understood that Hoffa would be the real power behind the “front” president, Dave Beck. According to Johnny Rosselli's friend L.A. mobster Jimmy Fratianno, Beck agreed to retire after one five-year term, while Hoffa worked behind the scenes to broaden his own power base, simultaneously proving to his underworld sponsors that he was capable of ruling. Among his first decrees was the anointing of Dorfman's insurance agency as the carrier for the Teamsters’ Central States Health and Welfare Fund.

In 1954, aware of the windfall about to descend on Dorfman's insurance company, Sidney Korshak purchased $25,000 worth of stock in the agency. The stock soared one year later when, in March 1955, Hoffa created the Central States Pension Fund. Employers paid $2 per employee per week into the new fund (or $800,000 per month), which accrued to $10 million the first year; by the early sixties it held $400 million in its coffers, eventually topping off at $10 billion. In creating the fund, Hoffa also fought for more union leaders on the Teamsters’ board of directors, and the fine points of the deal dictated that Hoffa would appoint Red's son, Allen, a college phys ed teacher, to administer the pension fund loans. Technically, a Teamster fund board of trustees, with Allen as a “consultant,” had to authorize the loans, but in actual practice, Allen with his intimidating underworld sponsors called the shots on loan approvals. Of course, applicants were “strongly urged” to buy business insurance from the Dorfmans.

Under the new protocols, the hard-earned dues of truckers, warehousemen, and taxi drivers from the twenty-two states comprised by the Central Fund would subsidize business ventures of questionable pedigree in Nevada, California, and elsewhere. And for the next twenty-five years, Allen Dorfman disbursed the assets of a fund that by 1961 had lent over $91 million in low-interest (6 percent) loans. In all, some 63 percent of the fund's holdings were made available to borrowers.

Two retired trustees of the pension fund stated that Korshak was in the critical position of anointing prospective trustees, and James C. Downs attested that Korshak got him an appointment with Hoffa to apply as a loan analyst for the fund, a position he later resigned. “I don't know if I could have seen Hoffa if it wasn't for Sid,” Downs said. One Teamster associate recalled that Korshak was responsible for appointing Abe Pritzker's law partner Stanford Clinton as the general counsel for the Fund.⁸ Clinton, who represented Outfit boss Joe Batters Accardo, introduced Pritzker to Jimmy Hoffa and Dorfman and received a piece of Pritzker's Burlingame (California) Hyatt Hotel for his efforts.⁹ Journalist Knut Royce located two letters from Abe Pritzker to Red Dorfman's son, Allen, asking for help in obtaining Teamster loans.¹⁰ Consequently, between 1959 and 1975, the Pritzkers would obtain $54.4 million in Teamster loans, some for use in Las Vegas casino construction. A circumspect Sid Korshak told the SEC in 1970, “It is possible that Hyatt Hotels talked to me about the possibility of making an acquisition in Nevada.”

Federal documents obtained by Sy Hersh in 1976 showed that Korshak played a huge role in arranging many of the fund's other loans. Reportedly, Korshak used Donald Peters, head of Chicago Teamster Local 743, as a key liaison to the Teamster board. Korshak and Peters, according to one source, had been close since the 1940s, and Peters had, like Korshak, been one of the early investors in Red Dorfman's insurance agency. “He was always Sidney's boy,” said one prominent Chicago businessman. “Sid dealt with nobody as much as Don Peters.”

Actor-singer Gianni Russo (no relation to the author), who came up in the world as a courier for New York mob boss Frank Costello, remembered Korshak's power when he shared Table One with him at the Pump Room. “He'd negotiate all the deals with the pension fund money,” said Russo. “Whatever it was, whoever it was for, Sidney would be the guy who'd come and polish it up.”¹¹

The timing for Korshak's putsch with the pension fund couldn't have been better, since his sweetheart deal-making was soon to be diminished by the 1959 passage of the Landrum-Griffin Act. This legislation gave union members more power and compelled unions to file hundreds of written reports about all aspects of their activities with the Department of Labor, making sweetheart contracts negotiated quickly by the likes of Korshak impossible. Korshak's success now depended more on his ability to ensure freedom from strikes than his furtive negotiations of low-wage settlements.

Due to the Teamster connection, Sidney Korshak's workload grew exponentially. He was now in a position to broker countless Teamster loans, control strikes, and begin the creation of his own mythic legacy, of which by all accounts he was quite proud. With the Chicago mob's labor genius “Curly” Humphreys slowing down as he approached age sixty, Korshak likely assumed the time was right to stretch his wings and emerge from Humphreys's long shadow—or so he hoped.

The entire Humphreys-Korshak labor scheme had recently been facilitated by the passage of the Taft-Hartley Labor Act of 1947, which prevented employers from cutting deals with union leaders. This dictum, however, left the playing field open to the middleman, who was happy to take the bribes himself after seizing control of a particular union.

By now, all who sought to make good with the Teamster juggernaut courted Korshak. In 1955, Anthony Inciso, a Capone- and Accardo-affiliated racketeer and United Auto Workers union boss, gave pricey gifts (including $1,000 diamond rings) to five Teamster officials, and a symbolic $360 money clip to Sidney Korshak. Inciso admitted to a Senate Labor Committee that he gave the gifts to “anyone that had done us a favor. It wouldn't be honest to bring them money, so we bring them a token of appreciation.” Inciso's honesty notwithstanding, he was convicted on twenty-two counts of a federal indictment charging him with violation of the Taft-Hartley Act. On June 23, 1960, he was sentenced to ten years and fined $22,000. He began serving his sentence on December 4, 1961. Senator Paul Douglas, Democrat of Illinois, had allegedly told Inciso that he had disgraced the labor movement.¹²

Korshak's Teamster dealings were next in the public spotlight in 1956, when he was listed on both the Sponsors’ Committee and the Entertainment Committee for an April 20 testimonial dinner held to honor Jimmy Hoffa in Detroit.¹³ Sidney's party pal Joel Goldblatt headed the sponsoring committee for the $100-a-plate dinner, with the $250,000 take used to build a children's home in Israel.¹⁴

Back in California that same year, Jake “the Barber” Factor's brother, Max, who was trying to weather a move to unionize his cosmetics company, engaged Korshak. Royston Webb, the company's British attorney, remembered Korshak at the firm:

I was the general counsel for Max Factor in the UK and also the director of personnel. I remember going across to the old Max Factor headquarters, which was on Hollywood Boulevard, opposite the Chinese Theater, to see my counterparts in Los Angeles—a chap named John McKenna. We were just talking of general personnel and union issues, which I handled in the UK, and I said to John, “Well, who deals with them over here, John?” He said, “Sidney Korshak.” I think they were paying him about fifty thousand dollars a year. I said, “Is he coming in today?” I was told, “Oh, no. He doesn't come in. He's not coming in today.”

“Well, when will he come in?”

“He doesn't come to the office at all,” McKenna said.

So I said, “How does he deal with any union problems you have?”

He said, “You don't understand. Sidney is connected.”

I just thought, “This is not how we would do business in England, but then, this isn't England.”¹⁵

As his workload became burdensome, Korshak created a new paradigm for himself, wherein he would act as a referral service, shuffling the hard work off to a chosen colleague and keeping a healthy share of the fee just for making the call. Such was the case when he engaged Nathan Shefferman's Industrial Relations Associates of Chicago to handle the labor troubles of the Indiana plant of the Brooklyn-based Englander Mattress Company, which had Korshak on retainer. When the workers wanted to form a Teamster local, in the face of a company that was strongly antiunion, they turned to Shefferman, whose close friend Korshak was consulted only to put the fine points on the contract. After it met with Korshak's approval, it was sent up to Hoffa for his imprimatur.

Suddenly, Englander seemed eager to recognize the new Teamster local, and few who were privy to the deal questioned why. It seemed that Korshak had arranged for the workers to receive $37 take-home pay weekly, far below the national average of $53 for factory workers. Englander was now more than happy to allow workers at its Alabama, Illinois, New York, Washington, and Texas plants to become Teamsters.¹⁶ For his role in backstabbing the workers, Shefferman was paid $76,000. (When Korshak, who claimed to have received only a $2,000 fee, was informed of this by Bobby Kennedy during later congressional testimony, Korshak feigned poverty, saying that, by comparison, “I am being grossly underpaid.” Few would agree.)

But the truth was more complex. From the perspective of most Teamsters, their lot was far better than at any other time in history. Although some workers were receiving less pay, many others experienced just the opposite, with safer working conditions, guaranteed overtime pay, health benefits, etc. Also, from this point on, many Teamsters were paid handsomely to featherbed, wherein the union dictated that more workers were hired than were actually needed for a job. Some investigators, such as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wendell Rawls, asserted that middlemen such as Sid Korshak had little difficulty in rationalizing their actions. “Korshak didn't think he was stealing from workers because he believed he was getting more money for the Teamsters than they ever dreamed they'd get,” Rawls recently said. “And he deserved his commission. These negotiators got more sit-around Teamsters hired. If one worker complained about that, another would hit him with a crowbar.”¹⁷

Occasionally, Korshak's double-dealing went sour and led to frayed relationships, such as with Charles W. Lubin, the innovator who conceived of freezing baked goods for later sale in supermarkets. Lubin's brainstorm led to the founding of his now famous Kitchens of Sara Lee brand, and predictably, the improvement sent jitters throughout bakers’ unions, who feared their orders would decline. Lubin enlisted Korshak to work out the difficulties, and he did so with his trademark one or two phone calls. However, one year later, after Lubin learned that Korshak was playing both sides, he fired him. According to a Korshak associate, Korshak was furious. “He called Charlie [Lubin] up and threatened him by saying that he'd better not ‘walk alone at night.’” The source added that Lubin was badly shaken by the warning.¹⁸

A great deal of my business is transacted on the telephone.

By the end of 1956, the nation's lawmakers were swamped with reports that Teamster officials were looting the members’ pension fund and forging alliances with the underworld. In December, the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field was established to investigate the contentions, holding its first hearings on January 30, 1957. Chaired by a devout Baptist Democrat from Arkansas, Senator John J. McClellan, the “rackets” investigation would eclipse even the Kefauver probe in its scope, lasting over two and a half years and hearing fifteen hundred witnesses whose recollections (or lack thereof) were laid out over twenty thousand pages of testimony.

Chairman McClellan made it clear early on that his investigation would be a continuation of the xenophobic battles of the pre-Prohibition era, with Italian and Irish hoods cast as the country's chief law enforcement adversaries. He viewed the prospect of twentieth-century immigrant witnesses in self-righteous disgust, saying, “We should rid the country of characters who come here from other lands and take advantage of the great freedom and opportunity our country affords, who come here to exploit these advantages with criminal activities. They do not belong in our land, and they ought to be sent somewhere else. In my book, they are human parasites on society, and they violate every law of decency and humanity.” In fact, most were charged with transgressions that paled in comparison to those being committed right under his nose by his party's national committeeman Paul Ziffren.

In his Supermob advisory role, Sidney Korshak called and met with his cronies and, by their own admission, ordered them to stonewall Kennedy, which they did. “I called Sid,” one such associate told Sy Hersh in 1976, “and said, ‘Robert Kennedy is asking to see me.’ He said, ‘Don't say anything, and call me when he leaves.’” The witness said he was “tough and uncooperative” with Kennedy and, as was demanded of him, called Sidney with the news. According to the unnamed witness, Korshak was “overjoyed.”¹⁹

The many inherent ironies of McClellan's probe surfaced almost immediately, when the “McClellan Committee” chose as its chief counsel Robert F. Kennedy, the seventh child of Boston millionaire and former Roosevelt administration diplomat Joseph P. Kennedy. Over the years, countless firsthand witnesses have attested to Joseph Kennedy's pattern of working in consort with the underworld to establish his fortune. Bobby Kennedy, who had cajoled McClellan into forming the panel, quickly commandeered the probe, on which his brother Jack served as a Senate member, with a style alternately described as either forceful or bellicose. When the thirty-one-year-old Kennedy traveled back to Massachusetts for Christmas in 1956, he excitedly announced the full-blown inquiry to his father. Papa Joe, fully cognizant of the extent of the upperworld-underworld alliance that had helped build his dynasty, was not impressed.

According to Bobby's sister Jean Kennedy Smith, the argument that ensued at Hyannis Port that Christmas was bitter, “the worst one we ever witnessed.”²⁰ Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. described the row as “unprecedentally furious.”²¹ The politically savvy father warned that such an upheaval would turn labor, especially Hoffa's powerful Teamsters, against Jack in his presidential quest. Longtime Kennedy confidant Lem Billings recalled, “The old man saw this as dangerous … He thought Bobby was naive.”²² Bobby, however, saw things differently, believing such a crusade would actually enhance the family's image.

One of Kennedy's key targets, Teamsters VP Jimmy Hoffa, said years later, “You take any industry and look at the problems they ran into while they were building it up—how they did it, who they associated with, how they cut corners. The best example is Kennedy's old man … To hear Kennedy when he was grandstanding in front of the McClellan Committee, you might have thought I was making as much out of the pension fund as the Kennedys made out of selling whiskey.”

Despite the committee's concentration on Hoffa and typical low-life mob thugs, Bobby Kennedy felt compelled to make a cursory show of interest in the Supermob types. “Bobby was always interested in Korshak,” said Tom Zander, a Labor Department investigator who funneled evidence to Kennedy during the hearings. “When he was on McClellan, he asked me about Korshak.”²³ Consequently, committee investigator James J. P. McShane obtained files on Marshall Korshak and Gus Alex, and, according to a Chicago Crime Commission (CCC) memo, “Bobby Kennedy was fully briefed on the contents.” Brother Sidney was next. On March 28, 1957, Kennedy investigators Walter Sheridan and Pierre Salinger met with Sid Korshak in his 134 N. LaSalle office for a preinterview, in anticipation of Korshak's eventual testimony in Washington.* Regarding the Shefferman-Englander dealings, Korshak explained that he had received a paltry $2,000 for mediating a dispute between the Coca-Cola Company and Englander's unions. In Salinger's background report to Kennedy, he described Korshak as being “extremely close to the old Capone mob.”²⁴

After his polite chat with the investigators, Korshak returned to business as usual. His reverie was only briefly disturbed by another blast from his college rival, Lester Velie. In the July 1957 issue of Reader's Digest, Velie, who was likely leaked material by either Sheridan or Virgil Peterson of the Chicago Crime Commission, wrote an article entitled HOW INFLUENCE-PEDDLERS SHORTCHANGE THE UNION WAGE EARNER. In the piece, Velie recounted Korshak's friendships with Charlie Gioe, Nathan Shefferman, and his role in arranging sweetheart contracts for employers such as Englander.

Meanwhile, the Teamsters were preparing to name a new international president to replace Dave Beck, who stepped down in May after receiving federal tax and larceny charges, the result of McClellan Committee revelations. Throughout the summer, Korshak's underworld associates set about assuring that their man Hoffa was guaranteed the open position. When the word came down to Dorfman, he instructed his close friend Johnny Dio (Dioguardi) of New York to organize Teamster “paper locals,” which had the sole purpose of ensuring Hoffa's control of the New York Joint Council of the Teamsters.

Any doubts that Hoffa would be a determined leader were dispelled on August 22, 1957, when he did verbal battle with firebrand Bobby Kennedy. In what was a classic example of the immovable object meeting the irresistible force, Hoffa, who viewed Bobby as a spoiled rich kid, sparred for two days with Kennedy, who in turn believed Hoffa to be evil personified. “We were like flint and steel,” Hoffa wrote in his autobiography. “Every time we came to grips the sparks flew.”²⁵ The great theater that was expected by millions of television viewers was delivered in spades, with name-calling and high sarcasm in great abundance.

“It was just a match of two absolutes,” commented historian Ronald Steel. “Bobby Kennedy saw Hoffa as absolute evil. And so he could elevate this struggle against Hoffa into some kind of titanic moral issue, which is why he became so dedicated to it.”

Hoffa's nonstop evasion was met with Kennedy's mocking, superior attitude. When the two brawlers needed a breather, there was no bell to save them, so they just stared at each other for minutes at a time, ending only when Hoffa winked. “I used to love to bug the little bastard,” Hoffa recalled.

Even during lunch breaks, Hoffa made certain Kennedy knew he meant business as the jousting spilled out into the Senate office building hallways and nearby restaurants, at one point escalating from the verbal to the physical. According to Hoffa, he was walking to a table at a nearby restaurant when he heard someone yell, “Hey, you!” Before he could respond, a hand grabbed him and spun him around. It was Bobby Kennedy. Hoffa's tough union pedigree made him act instinctively.

“My hand shot out and grabbed him by the front of his jacket and bounced him up against the wall—hard,” Hoffa wrote. “‘I'm only gonna tell you this one time. If you ever put your mitts on me again I'm gonna break you in half.’”²⁶

When Hoffa's testimony resumed that afternoon, the altercation led to the following Q&A:

Kennedy: Did you say, “That SOB, I'll break his back”?

Hoffa: Who?

Kennedy: You.

Hoffa: Say it to who?

Kennedy: To anyone?

Hoffa: Figure of speech … I don't even know what I was talking about and I don't know what you're talking about.

Kennedy: Uh … Mr. Hoffa, all I'm trying to find out, I'll tell you what I'm talking about. I'm trying to find out whose back you were going to break.

Hoffa: Figure of speech … figure of speech.

For all intents and purposes, the interrogation duel ended as a draw.

On August 28, 1957, one month before the Teamster convention, the OCID (Organized Crime Intelligence Division) unit of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) watched surreptitiously as the Teamsters’ executive board met with Jimmy Hoffa and three powerful residents of the Windy City at L.A.'s Townhouse Hilton Hotel. An LAPD memo in the files of the Chicago Crime Commission gives further details of what the OCID witnessed: “According to information given to the LAPD, three men are with Hoffa for the purpose of aiding his cause in becoming President of the Teamsters Union. It is claimed that the men in question are: Murray Humphreys, Marshall Caifano, and [Humphreys aide] Ralph Pierce—all of whom are well-known Chicago hoodlums. It is stated that a member of the Executive Board is being taken before these men singly, and they are advising members of the Executive Board in no uncertain terms that Hoffa is to be the next President of the Teamsters Union.”

To no one's surprise, Hoffa became president at the October 4, 1957, Miami IBT convention. Allen Friedman, a muscleman for the Cleveland Teamsters local, described a coronation that mimicked the 1934 IATSE convention that anointed George Browne. “The delegates who elected Hoffa, usually the business agents, trustees, secretary-treasurer, and presidents of the various Teamster locals, had been carefully rigged,” Friedman wrote. “Hoffa's men had meant to cover their tracks. They had stolen ballots that went against them and rigged both the seating and voting so inappropriate voting took place. Then they tossed the documents into the incinerator, blaming the maid for the action.”²⁷ According to one report, Curly Humphreys, who was known to frequent the Sea Isle Hotel in Florida, was on hand one month later at Miami Beach's luxurious Eden Roc Hotel to watch from the shadows as Hoffa accepted the Teamster presidency before seventeen hundred roaring delegates.

In the aftermath of Hoffa's election, the Chicago underworld's personal friendships with Teamster officials only grew stronger. The wife of Korshak's controller, Curly Humphreys, witnessed the goings-on. Jeanne Stacy Humphreys remembered that Curly became close to John T. “Sandy” O'Brien, the international vice president of the Teamsters, whose wife, Marge, just happened to be the secretary of the Teamsters Pension Fund. Humphreys also maintained a close personal relationship with Hoffa, who often vacationed at Humphreys's Key Biscayne home. FBI bugs heard Curly tell Joey Glimco, “Hoffa was the best man I ever knew.” According to Humphreys, whenever the Outfit told Hoffa to do something, “He just goes boom, boom, boom, he gets it done.” Humphreys added, “One thing I always admired about the guy, they tried to fuck him, but he never took a bad attitude about it.” On occasion, Humphreys even lent his legal expertise to Hoffa. “I worked on this case for him,” Humphreys said, “and paid out a lot of money for him and never got it back.” Despite the warming relationship with the new Teamster boss, both the hoods and the Supermob would wait a suitable amount of time before making withdrawals from their new bank. But once they commenced, they would be ravenous.

* * *

On October 30, 1957, barely four weeks after Hoffa assumed the Teamster presidency, Korshak appeared before Bobby Kennedy and the full committee. With Kennedy conducting all the questioning, Korshak deftly explained his dealings with Shefferman and Englander by pointing out that the lower wages were complicated by the variant costs of doing business in different areas of the country. Surprisingly, Kennedy seemed satisfied with Korshak's answers.

The only other major point of interest was Korshak's labor assistance given to Jake the Barber's brother, Max Factor, in Los Angeles. The union organizer at Max Factor Cosmetics, Michael Katz, knew enough to find Korshak at the Beverly Hills Friars Club, where he was lunching with Jake the Barber.

“I believe I was in the Friars Club in California,” Korshak explained. “I received a telephone call from Mr. Katz. He met me in front of the place. He told me that he was organizing the company, and that he was having difficulty getting together with management. He understood that one of the Factors was from Chicago. He asked if I would arrange a meeting with management.”

Korshak giving testimony before the McClellan Committee, October 30, 1957 (Corbis/Bettmann)

“Which Factor was that?” Kennedy asked.

“This was a Mr. John Factor [Jake the Barber]. Mr. John Factor was in the club at this particular time. I asked Mr. Katz to wait. I walked in and told Mr. Factor what I had just learned from Mr. Katz. Mr. Factor said the only one that he knew at the plant was his half brother, and that he was in Europe at the time, so he couldn't or wouldn't talk to anyone else. I went out and communicated that to Mr. Katz.”

Korshak explained that his contact with Katz was accidental and should not be taken to mean he was in the employ of Max or Jake Factor, Royston Webb's observations notwithstanding. Korshak said that he probably told Katz as much. “I would have told him I have no interest whatsoever in the Max Factor Company, and that John Factor wasn't interested in the Max Factor Company,” Korshak told Kennedy.²⁸

For reasons unknown at the time, Kennedy's “interrogation” of Korshak came off as a lovefest in comparison to his treatment of Hoffa. At the close of questioning, Kennedy went so far as to compliment Korshak, calling him “very cooperative.” And when Kennedy wrote his memoirs of the probe, The Enemy Within, he failed to mention Korshak's name at all—this despite the fact that both the FBI and Kefauver had made Korshak one of their chief labor-corruption targets.

With Bobby Kennedy's crusade behind him, Sid Korshak returned to business as usual. In January 1958, Korshak, Joe Accardo, Curly Humphreys, Sam “Mooney” Giancana, and Jackie “the Lackey” Cerone met at Giancana's Armory Lounge in Chicago's Forest Park suburb to work out Accardo's looming problems with the IRS. It seemed that the most powerful underworld boss in America was having difficulty explaining his vast income—he needed a legit job quick. Also in attendance were representatives from the Fox Head Brewing Company, which was heavily invested in by Humphreys. The FBI's informants revealed that Korshak drew up a bogus contract for Accardo, saying that he was a “salesman” for Premium Beer Sales Inc. For his services, Korshak received a $500 fee, but later told the FBI that he only reviewed the contract.²⁹ Interestingly, Accardo's daughter Marie Judith Accardo would soon be seen working as a secretary in Korshak's Chicago office.

“Sidney and Accardo were extraordinarily close,” said a longtime Chicago attorney friend of Sidney's. “When Marie was growing up, Accardo wanted her protected when she went into the workforce, so he sent her to work for Sidney and Marshall. The point is that Sidney was so close that Accardo trusted his daughter with him. And Sidney was not a guy to trust around women.”³⁰

While in Chicago, Korshak attended to his legit clients as well. When the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper moved its headquarters in 1958, circulation director Louis Spear called Korshak to halt a strike by paper haulers who refused to unload papers that were now shipped by river to the new shorefront location. As Spear recalled in 2004, Korshak placed one call, and the strikers returned to work.³¹ In New York that year, Korshak helped restaurateur Toots Shor resolve problems with his workers’ union.³²

Although Bobby Kennedy seemed quite satisfied with Sidney Korshak's testimony, he was nonetheless spoiling for a fight with one of Sidney's early sponsors, Gussie “Slim” Alex, ostensibly a “salesman” for the mob-owned Atlas Brewing Company. He later claimed to work for Blatz Brewing of Milwaukee, owned by Schenley Industries, a Sid Korshak client. A Greek hood who ran vice rackets in Chicago's Loop district, Gussie was, like Korshak, a direct subordinate of the gang's labor and political Einstein, Curly Humphreys, and was soon to become the Chicago Outfit's master courier, supervising the transportation of the Las Vegas casino skim to Swiss banks. The committee drew up a subpoena for the vaunted hood, but the trouble was, the committee staff couldn't find him to serve it. Alex and his wife, the former Marianne Ryan, had disappeared from their beautiful riverfront 4300 North Marine Drive apartment in late October. Just as the hoods had gone into hiding during the Kefauver probe—tabbed Kefauveritis—they did much the same when Bobby called, and one of those suffering from “Kennedyitis” was Gussie Alex.

Committee investigators in Chicago were told that the best way to find Alex was to talk to Sid Korshak, who was known to all to be tight with Gussie. In Chicago, local investigators referred to Korshak as “Gussie's man.”³³ It was quickly determined that Alex's sister was married to Korshak Teamster associate Joey Glimco, and that Alex had taken over numerous Outfit financial machinations from Jake Guzik, for whom he used to bodyguard, when Guzik died in 1956. A confidential 1958 FBI report stated, “Gus Alex had moved up to an important position in the crime syndicate of Chicago … Sidney Korshak, well-known Chicago attorney, was the person who advised top racketeers in Chicago insofar as their legitimate enterprises were concerned … Gus Alex was the hoodlum closest to Korshak and … this was the basis for the belief that Alex had moved into a high echelon of the syndicate.”

Bee Korshak striking a pose, 1957 (Chicago Tribune) Model behavior: Bee Korshak(r.) and Marianne Ryan Alex attend a 1953 Chicago premiere (Chicago Tribune) Dinah Shore with Bee Korshak at Shore's divorce hearing (photographer unknown) Gus Alex's, 1959 mug shot taken after being picked up on the lam in L.A. with Sid Korshak (Chicago Crime Commission)

Once when Gussie applied for an apartment in an exclusive Lake Shore Drive complex, attorney Korshak wrote a letter of recommendation, saying about the infamous gangster, “He is a man of excellent financial responsibilities who will be an excellent tenant.”³⁴ On another occasion, Alex used Sidney's brother Marshall's name when applying for memberships in Chicago's exclusive Standard Club and Whitehall Club. According to the FBI, Alex had claimed employment with Marshall as a front “for the last five years.”

In fact, the relationship had only strengthened over the years, thanks in part to the friendship of their spouses. Alex and Ryan had met in the late forties, when Alex happened into the College Inn, where Ryan was moonlighting from her contract modeling gig at Marshall Field's Department Store. By all accounts, there was an instant attraction between the handsome, debonair hood and the copper-blond beauty, who was well aware of Alex's line of work. When word of their relationship got back to Marshall Field's, Ryan was fired. After Gussie Alex and Marianne Ryan were married in Santa Barbara, California, in 1950, Alex introduced his bride to Sidney, whose wife, Bee, was an established model. Over the next decade, Bee and Marianne produced numerous fashion shows in the Chicagoland environs.

The new Mrs. Alex was a perfect match for Korshak's wife, Bee. Not only were they married to “connected” Chicago men, but they were both drop-dead beautiful, young, blond models. Just as Gussie had used the Korshaks for references, his wife similarly used Bee Korshak's name when applying for modeling work. Chicago Tribune crime reporter Sandy Smith recalled that the paper ran a picture of Bee with Marianne when they attended a theater opening together. When Smith showed the picture to Sidney Korshak, he candidly admitted to Smith that he had known Gus Alex quite well for many years.³⁵ Throughout the fifties, the Alexes and the Korshaks became best pals, often seen dining together at Table One of the Pump Room and vacationing in Europe. The association held other benefits for Ryan, who, after her eventual divorce from Alex, moved to California, where she became a wardrobe assistant for one of Bee Korshak's best friends, singer and television star Dinah Shore.

When Korshak moved in on Las Vegas, he often booked Shore into prime lounges via his ABC Booking Agency. In a 1963 FBI interview, Korshak told the agents that he, his wife, and their two teenage sons “were taking off with Dinah Shore, television entertainer, and her oldest child, for a two-month tour of Europe.” George Schlatter, the executive producer of Dinah's hit TV series, recently described Dinah's friendship with the Korshaks. “Dinah was close to Sidney and Bee, who is a hell of a lady,” recalled Schlatter. “Very, very funny, gaudy—she and Dinah were like the Green Berets of fun. When I became the producer of the Dinah Shore Show, we started using couturier clothes, and Dinah and Bee would go to Europe and come back with a boatload of clothes. They just had the best time ever.”³⁶ When Shore wrote her cookbook Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah in 1971, she used a number of Bee's recipes, calling her “indefatigable,” and “a dear friend of longstanding.” Shore added, “Once we even traveled through Europe—not by road map—but by the stomach, literally deciding where we wanted to go and when, according to what restaurant we'd heard about.”³⁷

When Korshak hosted a fifty-first birthday party for Chicago Ford dealer Charley Baron at Las Vegas’ Tropicana Hotel, he enlisted Dinah to perform.³⁸ In 1962, when Dinah divorced George Montgomery, Bee was her “corroborating witness,” testifying that Montgomery was “remote and withdrawn.”³⁹ Dinah described her friend Sidney Korshak to the Los Angeles Times in 1969, calling him a “friendly man, sweet and sort of shy. He's not the kind you'd catch doing the Watusi.” Like Korshak's other friends, Shore couldn't help but be aware of the furtive side of his life, saying that, at a party, Korshak would suddenly get an important phone call. “He disappears,” Shore said. “He's gone for the evening.”⁴⁰

Pursued by both committee staff and FBI in 1958, Gussie Alex took off on an international tour that saw him elude his hunters for ten full months. Using his wife's maiden name, Gussie traveled under the name Michael Ryan and set a new standard for high living while on the lam. Always one step behind, the Bureau ascertained that the couple had frequented luxurious places the agents would likely never experience:

• Arnold Kirkeby's Beverly Hilton Hotel and his Continental Hilton in Mexico City.
• The mob-connected Flamingo, Sands, and Desert Inn hotels in Vegas.
• The high-end shops on Rodeo Drive, where owners said that he was a regular customer.
• The baths at Desert Hot Springs, California; also at Korshak's leased Villa #32 at Palm Springs’ Ocotillo Lodge.
• The Palm Springs Racquet Club, where the Korshaks were members.
• He was seen driving both a Cadillac and a white Lincoln Continental Mark III convertible, the plates of which traced back to Sidney Korshak.

When Chicago FBI agents contacted Korshak on July 14, 1958, at his 134 N. LaSalle office, he initially claimed to have neither a social nor a business relationship with the known Outfit boss. However, when confronted with the license plate traces, the witnesses to Alex in Korshak's Palm Springs getaway, and Alex's alleged employment with Korshak's brother Marshall, Korshak opened up and admitted that he knew Alex, but only because of his wife's friendship with Marianne Alex. Yes, he knew Alex was in California, where he had given Marianne free use of his luxury cars, but only because his wife's friend Marianne was visiting her mother in Montrose—not because Alex was avoiding the subpoena. When Chicago FBI man Bill Roemer then asked Korshak about the whereabouts of his wife, Bee, he pointedly replied, “I'll tell you where you can reach her. She's having dinner at the Mocambo [in Los Angeles] with Peter Lawford and his wife—you know, Bobby Kennedy's sister.” When Roemer reported the intelligence to his superiors in Washington, he assumed that they would authorize a confrontation with Bee Korshak at the upscale eatery. Johnny Leggett, the THP (Top Hoodlum Program) coordinator at headquarters, responded, “Are you kidding, Roemer? They wouldn't touch that with a ten-foot pole.”⁴¹

According to the FBI report of the interview, “Korshak indicated that he would attempt to get word to Alex that he should accept the subpoena.” Just over one week later, Alex returned to Chicago, where on July 23 he was served with his subpoena in front of his apartment building. On July 31, at ten thirty A.M., Alex finally appeared before Bobby Kennedy in Washington. After almost a yearlong, expensive search for the elusive hood, Alex gave no more than his name and the following phrase (thirty-nine times): “Under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, I decline to answer on the ground that my answer may tend to incriminate me.”⁴² (Alex was next surveilled by the Bureau visiting Korshak's new Bel-Air manse. On September 9, 1959, Alex was grabbed by the LAPD and questioned about why he was in L.A. Alex was uncooperative, but made a point of saying he would call his lawyer, Leo Ziffren, Paul's brother. “That and ten cents will buy you a cup of coffee,” responded one of the officers. Alex paid a $10 fine, was photographed and released.)

Four months after Korshak's friend Gussie Alex came off the lam, Korshak dealt with a family tragedy when his troubled fifty-five-year-old brother, Ted, died on November 18, 1958.⁴³ According to the Chicago Crime Commission, Ted, who often used an alias, was a narcotics addict and somewhat of a con man. He had been arrested often over the years and had spent time in a narcotics hospital in Lexington, Kentucky.

Although the McClellan hearings led to indictments against some ninety-six hoods, curiously absent was any criticism of their white-collar and Supermob partners. Opinions vary as to why men like Korshak again escaped unscathed. Tom Zander, Bobby Kennedy's Labor Department contact, recently defended Kennedy's performance. “We had to be very careful because the mob was wiretapping us,” Zander said. “I had to get one phone, a direct line to Bobby, which was specially rigged to go directly to a central box. Bobby Kennedy was no-holds-barred. When he treated Korshak with kid gloves at the hearings, he must have had a reason for it. It was a feint. Bobby was very good at that.”⁴⁴

Attorney Adam Walinsky, Robert Kennedy's legislative aide and speech-writer during President Kennedy's administration, explains Kennedy's benign approach to Korshak as a function of the social learning curve. “The committee saw Dave Beck and he was clearly a crook,” Walinsky said. “But the connections between the Teamsters and the pension fund and the families and all that, they don't get to understand that until much later. They're shoving a stick into an anvil. They have no idea what's going on there. During our Senate campaign in 1964, people on the inside were discovering for the first time that the building that was leased by Joint Council 16 of the Teamsters [the very one used by Dio to fix Hoffa's election] belonged to Joe Kennedy. People were first discovering who's connected to whom in that respect as late as 1964.”⁴⁵

But Jerry Gladden, both a former chief investigator for the CCC and a Chicago police intel officer, saw a different rationale for Kennedy's performance. “It had been Kennedy's policy throughout the hearings to shy away from matters concerning possible political corruption,” Gladden explained in 1997. Gladden said it was the same policy that was employed in the Chicago PD. “We didn't look at any political guys if we wanted to stay in the unit.”⁴⁶

Others detected darker hidden political considerations in Kennedy's demonization of Hoffa and his seeming disregard of the Supermob. Chicago investigator Jack Clarke, who headed the investigative unit for Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley, and occasionally counseled Bobby Kennedy, detected Bobby's personal agenda. “If Bobby really wanted to investigate organized crime, he never had to leave Boston,” Clarke recently said. “The McClellan thing was a show. Bobby thought it was just good politics.”⁴⁷ Clarke's view was supported by Bobby's friend, anticrime journalist Clark Mollenhoff, the Washington editor of the Des Moines Register. Mollenhoff, who had prodded Bobby Kennedy for months to spearhead such an investigation, met with little success until he called Bobby and introduced his brother Jack's presidential aspirations into the debate. “Kefauver did his investigations five years ago and it got him enough clout to beat your brother's butt [at the 1956 Democratic National Convention],” Mollenhoff wrote. Suddenly, Bobby's interest was piqued. “Well, why don't you come down and we'll talk about it.”

Even more suspicious was the friendship of the Kennedy and Korshak families. The Chicago Tribune noted, “Among [Marshall Korshak's] friends over the years were members of the Kennedy family.”⁴⁸ When Marshall was honored at the Palmer House as the 1967 Israel Bond Man of the Year, the keynote speaker was Bobby's sister Eunice Kennedy's husband, R. Sargent Shriver, who'd managed Papa Joe Kennedy's Chicago Merchandise Mart since 1945.*⁴⁹ The Shrivers and the Sidney Korshaks were often seen together at theatrical openings at such venues as the Shubert Theater, and “Sarge” was a regular at the Pump Room—where Korshak held court at Table One—of the Ambassador East, where Joe Kennedy maintained an apartment. As seen, Sidney's wife Bee socialized in Los Angeles with Bobby's other sister Pat and her husband, Vegas Rat Packer Peter Lawford.

“It is true that the Korshaks were very close with the Kennedys,” said one of Korshak's closest and oldest Chicago attorney friends. “When [JFK's brother-in-law] Sarge Shriver came to Chicago, Marshall took him under his wing and became his number one adviser in politics. Marshall got Shriver on the Board of Education, that's how it started. Later, Marshall ended up with Joe Kennedy's Merchandise Mart account for his firm. Sidney was also friends with them. Part of it has to do with Judy Campbell, but there's also a Marilyn Monroe consideration. I won't say any more about that.”⁵⁰ There were many linkages between Sid Korshak and the Kennedy-Monroe affair, the most obvious being Korshak's friendship with Peter Lawford, JFK's brother-in-law and Monroe's closest confidant at the time of her August 1962 overdose.

Marshall Korshak escorts Bobby Kennedy on the stump in Chicago (Chicago Jewish Archives, Spertus Institute)

Marshall was also close to intimate Kennedy family adviser Hy Raskin, an attorney for MCA who was soon to play a key role in maneuvering Bobby's brother Jack into the White House.⁵¹ Chicago journalist Roy Harvey wrote in 1979, “In addition to bringing to the Police Board his many years of experience, Korshak is also hailed for his top-flight Zionist and Kennedy connections.”⁵² When he was campaigning in Chicago on October 17, 1962 (staying at Kirkeby's Blackstone Hotel), Bobby's brother Jack, by now president of the United States, was invited to attend a reception in Marshall's honor slated for Sunday the twenty-first.⁵³ Although Kennedy had planned to remain in Chicago through the weekend and would likely have accepted the offer, he was unable to attend because, unbeknownst to Marshall (and the rest of the country), Soviet medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) had been discovered in Cuba on the fifteenth and Kennedy had to cut short his visit and return to the White House to manage the crisis. Kennedy announced the missiles to the world on Monday the twenty-second.⁵⁴

Connie Carlson, former longtime crime investigator and Supermob watcher for the California Attorney General's Office, remembered well the Kennedy-Korshak axis. “Joe Kennedy was friends with Sid Korshak,” said Carlson. “Before the Kennedy campaign of 1960 became really big, Joe had contact with Korshak, we had heard. There was a time when JFK came here for a fund-raiser, then went to Vegas with the Rat Pack. I think Korshak was involved in that.”⁵⁵

Veteran investigative reporter Wendell Rawls recently opined that, in Bobby's zeal to “get Hoffa,” he all but ignored Hoffa's contributions to American labor. “Hoffa gave them respect, made them indispensable,” Rawls argued. “Bobby Kennedy drove the Teamsters to Nixon [in 1960] by his treatment of Hoffa. RFK thought Hoffa was a thug, but they lost sight of where these guys were before Hoffa. But Bobby was always rich, so he didn't get that.”⁵⁶

The focus on Hoffa as the devil incarnate also distracted the committee from the shenanigans of the Supermob types. Philip Manuel, an investigator for the McClellan and other federal probes, recently spoke at length about the committee's work in that regard:

That's really why I got the McClellan Committee into the hearings on stolen and counterfeit securities, because while the mob guys made the papers, it took the financial guys on the other end to really make it work. One of my pet peeves was that I thought the committee really had a golden opportunity to go after people such as the non-Italians. They really provided the cover and support and the chutzpah to make a lot of the mob activity a reality. I wanted to expose both ends of that. So I got into that and started proving my case before a lot of people knew what I was up to. I'm not talking exclusively about the Italians, because it's much more complex and interesting than just that.

The first person that you have to point to, to make the case of simplification, is Bobby Kennedy. And while he was going after people that he wanted to go after, I think a lot of his father's friends got detected. That's been my thesis all along.⁵⁷

Manuel would make the same case, again in vain, three decades later when he was an investigator for the President's Commission on Organized Crime.

If nothing else, the hearings positioned both Kennedy and Hoffa squarely in the national public consciousness. Kennedy's book on the hearings, The Enemy Within, became a brief best seller, with Joe Kennedy personally optioning the film rights to Twentieth Century-Fox for $50,000—the talk was that Paul Newman would play the role of RFK. Of course, given Hollywood's entrenchment with Sid Korshak and Hoffa's Teamsters, the idea that a film that portrayed Hoffa as the bad guy would actually be produced was little more than a fantasy. No sooner had the deal been reported than Fox producer Jerry Wald began receiving threatening phone calls and letters from Teamster leaders and rank-and-file members. One labor thug warned the studio that if the picture was made, Teamsters would refuse to deliver the print to theaters.⁵⁸

Ralph Clare, the founding president (in 1930) of Studio Transportation Drivers Local 399 of the Teamsters, the oldest and most powerful Teamsters organization in Hollywood, went so far as to call the L.A. field office of the FBI to complain. Clare, who lunched regularly with Sidney Korshak and was in a position to shut down every studio in Hollywood, told the Bureau “that a picture of this type would cause unfavorable reaction within many of the labor organizations in Hollywood and that it would disparage labor unions in general.” Clare added that Barney Balaban at Paramount had been offered the film, “but had rejected it because Paramount did not wish to get into a controversial situation.”⁵⁹

Philip Manuel, commissioner, President's Commission on Organized Crime, 1986 (National Archives, commission files)

For his part, Hoffa retained Korshak friend and Washington power lawyer counterpart Edward Bennett Williams for the purpose of filing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, should the film actually get made. Predictably, the film was scuttled, although a completed script was delivered in April 1962 by the Oscar-winning scripter of On the Waterfront, Budd Schulberg.**

Although Kennedy's McClellan investigator Pierre Salinger wrote a background report describing Korshak as being “extremely close to the old Capone mob,” he had no qualms about asking Korshak for a campaign contribution seven years later when Salinger ran unsuccessfully for California's U.S. Senate seat (Korshak'donated over $10,000). “The fact is that I needed to raise $2 million,” Salinger later said.⁶⁰

There was one last curious cross-pollination. When he became attorney general of the United States in 1961, Robert Kennedy hired Jules Stein's thirty-year-old son-in-law, a bright New York lawyer named William J. vanden Heuvel, as special counsel to the Justice Department. The hiring was especially peculiar because the Justice Department was waging a massive antitrust investigation of vanden Heuvel's father-in-law. (Jules had met vanden Heuvel in Bangkok in 1954 and years later introduced him to his daughter Jean, who was fresh from a four-year affair with writer and Nobel laureate William Faulkner.⁶¹ The Stein-vanden Heuvel marriage produced two daughters, one of whom, Katrina vanden Heuvel, would inherit $8.5 million upon Jules's death in 1981⁶² and go on to become editor and publisher of the Nation in 1995.)

The Bobby Kennedy nuisance had no effect on Korshak's skyrocketing career. According to the LAPD, Korshak wisely added to his investment portfolio during the period: “In 1959, Korshak had an interest in the American National Bank of Chicago. Held 1,500 shares in Merritt, Chapman & Scott Co. [a large building contractor]. Had shares in the [Al Hart's] City National Bank of Beverly Hills and had an oil partnership with Roy Huffington, Inc., 2119 Bank of the Southwest, Houston, Texas.”⁶³ He now maintained swank residences in the Beverly Hills Hotel, New York's Carlyle Hotel, an undisclosed Paris location,*** the Drake in Chicago, and a condo in Palm Springs’ Ocotillo Lodge—these in addition to his primary Beverly Hills abode. In an FBI interview in June 1959, Korshak indicated “that he and his law partners maintain on a permanent basis Room 2001 in the Essex House in New York City.”

As the decade waned, Korshak attended to still other obligations. Among the more bizarre favors Korshak performed in 1959 was the hosting of the marriage of Joan Cohn, widow of Columbia Pictures mogul Harry Cohn, to shoe-store magnate Harry Karl in his (Korshak's) Chicago apartment, with Korshak's friend Judge Joseph Drucker presiding.⁶⁴

An FBI document reported, “After about three weeks, Joan Cohn Karl filed divorce proceedings against Harry Karl in Los Angeles Superior Court … The speculation was that Harry Cohn was fronting for Chicago investors in Columbia Pictures and when he died [in 1958] his $4 million estate went into probate and the marriage of Karl and Cohn was contrived as a method through which the real investors in Columbia Pictures could regain title to their property without disclosing themselves on public records.” Essentially, the gambit, most assuredly concocted by Korshak, gave Joan time to shift Cohn's assets and not pay inheritance tax. The suspicion of an arranged marriage was fueled by the fact that just three days before the marriage to Cohn, Karl had proposed marriage to actress Debbie Reynolds, a friend of the Korshaks'.⁶⁵ (Only a year earlier, Karl, with the advice of Korshak, had divorced—for the third time—the fragile actress Marie McDonald. After the third divorce, McDonald, who was carrying on a long affair with Bugsy Siegel, was supposedly kidnapped, and Korshak was photographed accompanying Karl to his ex's home.⁶⁶ She was soon returned safely, and no explanation was ever given for the abduction. Soon thereafter, the distraught actress began trying to kill herself, finally succeeding in 1965.)†

Harry Cohn, it will be recalled, received start-up money for his studio from New Jersey mobster Longy Zwillman, one of the East's most successful bootleggers, and a cofounder of Murder, Inc. Zwillman's lover, Jean Harlow, was the costar of the movie Riffraff with Korshak's former fiancee, Dorothy Appleby. Zwillman's links to Korshak also included his use of Arthur Greene (partner of Korshak's Chicago pals Ziffren, Pritzker, and Bazelon) as his investment adviser, leading Zwillman into dabbling in Hollywood productions, Vegas’ Sands Hotel, and Kirkeby-Hilton stock purchases.

Korshak's connivance for Joan Cohn was not his only visit to widow's walk that year, and his next rescue was also connected to Zwillman. In April, Korshak came to the aid of Zwillman's widow, Mary. The fifty-five-year- old Longy had hung himself on February 26 in the basement of his Newark, New Jersey, mansion rather than face hard time for tax evasion.†† According to his FBI file, Sidney Korshak accompanied Mary Zwillman to Las Vegas, where he helped her dispose of Longy's interest in the Sands Hotel and Casino. Thanks to Sidney's intercession (for another hefty fee), Mary Zwillman paid minimal inheritance tax, and most of Zwillman's assets simply vanished.

Much as midcentury represented the high point of the mob's long run, so too it was for the Supermob, and Sid Korshak played it for all it was worth. He was now frequently seen at the exclusive Beverly Hills Friars Club on Santa Monica Boulevard, described by the FBI in 1960 thus: “The Friars Club continues to operate as a plush gambling joint and lists among its members such notorious characters as Johnny Rosselli, Jake Factor, [DELETED], and others. Also among the membership are numerous Las Vegas hotel owners and pointholders. There are also legitimate people in the entertainment and business field who are members, but these people seldom appear at the club.”⁶⁷

By the late fifties, the Korshaks were also part-time residents of Palm Springs, where they had a condo, Villa 32, at the Ocotillo Lodge, built by the “Singing Cowboy” Gene Autry on 1111 E. Palms Canyon Drive. The lodge was known as a celebrity retreat; however, it was located in a town that was also fast becoming an underworld retreat, a place where the nation's hoodlum elite convened to plan their crime conspiracies. The Korshaks would eventually purchase a home there and become regulars at elite watering holes such as Charlie Farrell's Racquet Club on North Indian Canyon Drive.

In addition to the powerful Chicago Outfit boss (and close Korshak friend) Joe Batters Accardo and Al Hart's former partner Joe Fusco, over a hundred known gangsters boasted homes in the sun-drenched town located at the base of the San Jacinto Mountains. The town's local paper called Palm Springs “the second home” to top officials of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union, a client of Korshak's, and a body under constant scrutiny by the feds, who believed the low-paid union officials were bilking their union treasuries to purchase the pricey desert getaway abodes.*⁶⁸ Former Riverside County sheriff Ben Clark opined, “Some big hoodlums may put their heads together in Coachella Valley and plan a crime, but the actual crime they're planning won't occur here; it may happen in Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, New York, or New Jersey.”⁶⁹

In addition to the hoodlum element, already owning homes in Palm Springs were Korshak friends such as Harry Karl, Lew Wasserman, Greg Bautzer, Dinah Shore, Swifty Lazar, Max Factor, Kirk and Anne Douglas, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Tony Martin and Cyd Charisse, Moe Annenberg's son Walter, and Frank Sinatra, who had homes there dating back to 1947, when he built a house on Alejo Road, and who, in the mid-fifties, lived on Wonder Palms Road, situated along the seventeenth fairway of the new Tamarisk Country Club, the main house later outfitted by Bee Korshak.⁷⁰

Korshak's Ocotillo Lodge acquisition was but a prelude to the main event: in June of 1959, Korshak purchased a secluded mansion, built in 1948, from Harry Karl for the astonishingly low price of $53,000.**⁷¹ (On his 1961 application for homeowner's insurance, Korshak gave the assessed value of the home as $300,000. In 2004, the property was assessed at over $3 million.) The new Korshak home was located at 10624 Chalon Road, a switchback that boasted elite Hollywood homeowners such as Henry Fonda, John Gavin, Neil Simon, and Gene Wilder. Located in the upper reaches of exclusive Bel-Air, the semicircular, gated home, which borders the property of auto tycoon Lee Iacocca, was a tasteful blend of art deco and classical. The marble-floored manse is situated on a two-acre parcel, replete with gardens, guesthouses, and pool. The entrance, in the inner part of the semicircle, is windowless, contrasting with the outer rim and its floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook the gardens and flowing streams.

Completely hidden from the road by a gated, eight-foot wall, the site became legendary not just for the Korshaks’ annual Christmas Eve dinner parties, but also for its extravagant amenities. Bee Korshak took great pride in her interior-decorating abilities, later outfitting the homes of a number of SoCal bourgeoisie, including the Palm Springs pad of her great friends Frank and Barbara Sinatra.⁷²

Kurt Niklas, owner of the celeb haunt Bistro restaurant in Beverly Hills, attended many of the Korshak soirées and wrote of their extravagance in his memoir, The Corner Table: “Four hundred people minimum, maybe more; it was hard to estimate because it lasted all day and you could come and go at your leisure; you could stay five minutes or five hours, the Korshaks didn't care. Anyone who was anybody was invited, and a few people who preferred anonymity. There was always an orchestra, comprised of some of the finest musicians in Los Angeles, and the caviar and champagne was the best that money could buy … The Korshak mansion had a grand dining room with three tables that sat eight people each.”⁷³

10624 Chalon Road (various views, author photos) Korshak party invitation and reminder (Dominick Dunne)

Other Chez Korshak luxuries included one of the best wine cellars in Los Angeles, a walk-in vault,*** chauffeurs’ quarters, and a world-class art collection. Virginia Korshak, the ex-wife of Sidney's son Harry, recalled, “There were Rembrandt sculptures, original Picassos, Renoirs, and Chagalls. But it was all very tastefully done.”⁷⁴ Ron Joy, an L.A. photographer who dated Frank Sinatra's daughter, Nancy, remembered his visits to the manse. “I attended a couple parties there with Nancy. The house contained a fabulous art collection that had to be valued in the millions.”⁷⁵ Fellow L.A. attorney and Korshak friend Leo Geffner recalled that not a room was left unadorned; no matter where one went in the Korshak home, one was reminded of the owner's success. “You'd go to the bathroom in his house, and you'd see a small Degas, a Cezanne, a Matisse!” said Geffner. “He didn't know anything about art. I think it was more, this is what you do when you're rich, you have art.”⁷⁶ Geffner, clearly stunned by the collection, which included pre-Colombian art, recently added, “I can't exaggerate what that collection was like. Sidney had a New York curator on retainer whose job was to find art for the collection.”⁷⁷

Whether to protect the art or the family from enemies of Korshak's mob associates, one bizarre fixture at the house left guests a tad unnerved: armed guards. Hollywood producer of The Godfather Gray Frederickson, who co-produced the 1973 film Hit! with Korshak's son Harry, remembered his forays to Camp Korshak: “It was walled and gated, with armed guards on the grounds. Harry told me the guards were there to protect their art collection.”⁷⁸ Former Sacramento Bee reporter Dick Brenneman, who followed Korshak's life closely, recalled, “I was told that the guards were former Israeli army members, brought in to ‘to protect the Degas.’”⁷⁹ Former studio executive turned writer Dominick Dunne was invited to the Korshaks’ annual holiday bash and came away shaken. “That was the first house I ever went to in my life where there was a guard with a gun at the door,” Dunne said in 1997. “It gave me the creeps, if you want to know the truth … I went to visit Phyllis McGuire once in Las Vegas—incredible woman. A guy with a machine gun answered her door. But it was at Sidney's that I saw that first.”⁸⁰ Friend Leo Geffner added that, in later years, one of the guards was often seen driving Sidney around Los Angeles. “He had a dual-capacity bodyguard/chauffeur who hung around the house,” remembered Geffner.⁸¹ More typically for this locale, the grounds boasted a sophisticated electronic security system as backup to the armed protectors.

The sale by Harry Karl would not go unappreciated by Korshak, who returned the favor when he discovered that Karl had a boyish crush on actress Debbie Reynolds, who just happened to be a friend of Sid and Bee's. Reynolds had met Karl when she'd raised funds for the Thalians, a group of actors who donated to various children's charities. Among the many donors were the Sid Korshaks and Al Harts. But the softest touch in town, according to Reynolds, was playboy heir Harry Karl. For months Karl had been sending flowers and begging Reynolds for a date, only to be rebuffed by the actress, who was just recuperating from her breakup with Eddie Fisher. Thus, in December 1959 Sidney played the yenta, calling Reynolds with a request.

“Won't you please accept a call from Harry, Debbie? It's eating him up inside. He just wants a chance to talk to you.”

“No, Sidney,” Reynolds replied. “I don't need this.”

After another call from Sidney, Reynolds relented and went for a dinner date with Karl. Surprisingly, the duo clicked, and soon they rented a Malibu beach house together and married in 1960. When the couple attempted to buy the MGM backlot, their personal banker, Al Hart, raised $5 million for them, but the deal fell through nonetheless. Between introducing her to Karl and booking her regularly into his Riviera Hotel, where he reportedly negotiated a million-dollar deal for her debut, Korshak helped to make Debbie a wealthy woman. However, that wealth disappeared when the marriage fell apart fourteen years later.†

It was a time when all was splendid in the Korshak world: behind the gate, the tiled, circular Chalon driveway was jammed with the finest cars available—a personal obsession of Sidney's—that numbered at least six at one time: Rolls-Royces, Jaguars, Porsches, Bentleys, Cadillacs, and Bee's Karmann Ghia convertible; Bee became a club tennis player and world traveler; teenage sons Stuart and Harry were seen being chauffeured to Pasadena's Polytechnic School, where Stuart was student body president; Sidney even began collecting the requisite mistresses, the most obvious expression of male power and success, who were openly invited to the Korshak holiday parties. When Korshak applied for homeowner's insurance, he stated that his net worth was now $2 million, a gross understatement.⁸²

Given the hedonistic trappings, one would think that the fiftyish Korshak might have turned into a Hefner-like hermit and enjoyed his Garden of Eden exclusively. But by all accounts, sybaritic Sidney was rarely there to enjoy the paradise he had crafted in the hills of Bel-Air. Not only was he keeping a hectic schedule with trips to Europe, New York, Chicago, and Palm Springs, he began wearing out a trail to a city that epitomized the most recent successful partnership of the underworld and the Supermob: Las Vegas.