by Gus Russo
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 preHugh 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 boites 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
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)
"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.
134 North LaSolle
J really have no power. All 1 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.
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 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.
134 North La Salle Street (Karen Laurencell) of Russia and Bella Minnie Rothenberg of Lithuania. Like Korshak, Ziffren had four siblings, brothers Lester and Lee, and sisters Betsy and Annette.
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 & Monty-band, and was said to have been engaged to Jake Arvey's daughter. The engagement was broken off, but Jake Arvey stayed close, considering Zif
fren 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 col lection)
"My Best Friend in the World"
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
The P r i t i k e rs
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.)
Abe Pritzker (Chicago Jewish Archives, Spertus Institute)
Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
HONORE DE BALZAC, FRENCH REALIST NOVELIST (1799-1850)
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 appro
ximately 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 personhas to do is mention Korshak's name.
FBI INFORMANT.40
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."