Supermob

by Gus Russo

  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.)

  Gus Alex's, 1959 mug shot taken after being picked up on the lam in L.A. with Sid Korshak (Chicago Crime Commission)

  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.

  The After math

  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 de-monization 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 over
dose.

  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 Huffing-ton, 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 ha
d 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.