Supermob

by Gus Russo

  With Korshak's counsel, Reagan recommended that SAG strike against the producers, but with a twist: MCA would be immune from the strike action. What happened was, Milt Rackmil, president of MCA's production arm, Universal, secretly met with Re and promised that MCA would endow $2.65 million toward an actors' pension fund in exchange for immunity from any work stoppage. Furthermore, in a sweetheart deal that bore all ten fingerprints of Sidney Korshak, SAG would agree to drop its demand for the pre-1960 residuals. After a perfunctory six-week strike, which started on March 7, 1960 (and exempted MCA), the SAG membership agreed to the terms proffered by Rackmil.

  MCA's retaining of its huge movie catalog, eventually worth hundreds of millions, dwarfed the $2.65 million donated to the SAG fund. The settlement created a schism in SAG, as some of the membership were overjoyed by the prospect of a pension and welfare fund, while others, especially the older stars of the pre-1960 films, felt as though they had been sold out. "In no way did we win that strike—we lost it," said one member.

  As first chronicled by authors and latter-day Supermob gadflies Dan Moldea and Dennis McDougal, a legion of actors went public with their feelings:

  • Bob Hope, one of Reagan's closest friends, bitterly stated, "The pictures were sold down the river for a certain amount of money . . . and it was nothing . . . See, I made something like sixty pictures, and my pictures are running on TV all over the world. Who's getting the money for that? The studios. Why aren't we getting some money . . . ? We're talking about thousands and thousands of dollars, and Jules Stein walked in and paid fifty million dollars for Paramount's pre-1948 library of films and bought them for MCA . . . He got his money back in about two years, and now they own all those pictures."

  • Gary Merrill: "Reagan sold us down the river."

  • Gene Kelly: "Reagan didn't pump for residuals at all."

  • June Lockhart: "Reagan and MCA sold us out."

  • Mickey Rooney was among the most passionate when he said, "The crime of showing our pictures on TV without paying us residuals is perpetuated every day and every night and every minute throughout the United States and the world. The studios own your blood, your body, and can show your pictures on the moon, and you've lost all your rights. They own you, and they own the photoplay. We're not human beings, we're just a piece of meat."21

  Two months after "The Great Giveaway," and with SAG members calling for his resignation, Reagan suddenly remembered that he could not legally hold the SAG presidency since he was also a 25 percent owner and occasional producer of General Electric Theater. Reagan resigned his post on June 6 and quit the SAG board on July 11. At the time, Reagan said, "I know I came back for a purpose, and it's been accomplished."

  Over the next few years, Ronald Reagan cashed in on his GE Theater while becoming more politically active and increasingly conservative. In 1960, Reagan supported Republican presidential candidate, and fellow red-baiter, Richard Nixon, warning that the Communist Party "has ordered once again the infiltration" of the movie industry. "They are crawling out from under the rocks," Reagan intoned.

  While Wasserman and Stein nurtured the career of Ronald Reagan, fellow Supermob associate Paul Ziffren was seeing to it that the former Chicagoans were well entrenched with the state's Democratic up-and-comers. In 1958, Ziffren backed his brother's boss, and Korshak's friend, California attorney general Pat Brown, in his gubernatorial run against incumbent Republican senator William Knowland, scion of the Joseph Know-land Oakland Tribune empire. To this end, Ziffren formed the highly secretive Southern California Sponsoring Committee, unregistered with any state regulatory agency. Ziffren told one wealthy Democrat that the idea was to enlist one thousand of his friends to donate $1,000 each, and to function as an emergency fund for the Democratic Party. The group opened an account in Al Hart's City National Bank in Beverly Hills.

  That year, Sid Korshak was observed in a meeting with Ziffren at the home of actress Rhonda Fleming, known to have been very close to Sidney. Also participating was Superior Court judge Stanley Mosk, a University of Chicago graduate.22 The purpose of the meeting was unknown at the time, but would become obvious soon after the election.

  Although Ziffren raised eyebrows with his secretive sponsoring committee, Brown's opponent, Knowland, sank even lower and attempted to tarnish Brown in a classic "guilt by association" charge—an association with Ziffren, to be exact. To understand how Knowland would be aware of Ziffren's associates, it is first necessary to scrutinize Knowland's. Know-land was a political bedfellow of Richard Nixon's, and the two shared the friendship of Beverly Hills attorney Murray Chotiner, who had, at age thirty-three, masterminded Earl Warren's campaign for the governorship and Nixon's 1950 congressional bid. In that contest, Nixon smeared opponent Helen Gahagan Douglas with red-baiting charges that often appeared in the form of flyers written by Chotiner. Knowland repeatedly sparred with Nixon over who was the most aggressive commie fighter.

  Paul Ziffren (Library of Congress)

  By definition a member of America's Supermob, Chotiner specialized in representing underworld types, such as Pennsylvania Mafia boss Marco "the Little Guy" Reginelli, and Angelo "Gyp" DeCarlo, in their legal battles with the feds. As might be expected, the two Beverly Hills attorneys Korshak and Chotiner were close friends, with Marshall Korshak telling a friend, "Every client Chotiner had, he first checked out with Sidney."23 Interestingly, Chotiner, the son of a Pittsburgh cigar maker, and Sid Korshak shared the friendship of New York lobbyist Nathan Voloshen, who in turn was close to future Speaker of the House John McCormack.24 Through Korshak's New York associate George Scalise, Voloshen obtained underworld clients such as Salvatore Granello, Manuel Bello, and Anthony DeCarlo.25

  As mentor to both Nixon and Knowland, Chotiner toured the country in 1955, giving secret lectures to GOP "political schools" at the request of the Republican National Committee. A copy of the Chotiner lecture was leaked to the Democrats, one of whom described the transcript as "probably one of the most cynical political documents published since Machiavelli's ThePrince or Hitler's Mein Kampf, . . . a textbook on how to hook suckers."

  Not long after Chotiner became Knowland's campaign manager, Know-land came into possession of real estate records linking Pat Brown's backer Paul Ziffren to Alex Greenberg, Sam Genis, and the rest of Chicago's underworld. With Chotiner's unsavory connections, it is likely that Know-land had inside information on the deals. It is also possible that the damning material came from journalist Robert Goe, who was eager to expose the Arvey-Ziffren infiltration of the state.

  In the campaign, Knowland attacked Brown's keystone supporter Ziffren with the Capone-Greenberg, Hayward Hotel, and Seneca connections, etc.

  Although there was no evidence that Pat Brown had knowledge of or condoned Ziffren's business partnerships, Knowland tried to make the mud stick. In speeches widely covered by California newspapers, Knowland warned of "the existence in California of a shadowland powerful force infiltrating our political and economic life." He called it "an overworld." (Compounding the bad news that year for Ziffren was word from Chicago that in November 1958, after a two-and-a-half-year investigation, Ziffren's forty-one- year-old brother, Herman, was arrested in Illinois on three counts of violating the White Slavery Traffic Act. Specifically he was charged with transporting three women across state lines for immoral purposes. Fifteen months later he received a $4,000 fine.)26

  Of course, Knowland was correct about what Ziffren was pulling off, even though Brown may not have realized it. Veteran New York Times L.A. Bureau chief and California political scholar Gladwin Hill pointed out, "Whatever his shortcomings, Knowland was given neither to falsehood nor to gratuitous aspersion."27 For his part, Ziffren called the charges "scurrilous nonsense" and implied that Knowland was anti-Semitic.28

  After the Knowland charges appeared in the press, the FBI's L.A. Field Office opened what would become a 386-page file on Paul Ziffren. The file, which remained open for five years, represented a compendium of allegations again
st Ziffren, with virtually no editorializing, and no conclusions made by Bureau headquarters. There was no indication that the material was forwarded to the Department of Justice for action.

  Knowland's attack on Brown had little impact, but the senator's antiunion, pro open shop (right-to-work) platform infuriated organized labor. In addition, Knowland's wife (known as the Martha Mitchell of the sixties' *) sent a caustic seven-page letter to two hundred Republican leaders throughout the state, calling organized labor "a socialist monster." Thus it was no surprise when Brown won the election by a huge 20 percent margin, with over five million votes cast. It was a momentous win for the revitalized Democratic Party, which captured not only the governorship for the first time in twenty years, but both houses of the legislature for the first time in seventy-five years. For Knowland, the defeat initiated a long downward spiral, both professionally and personally. When Knowland's wife, Ann, initiated divorce proceedings in 1972, she threatened to hire Paul Ziffren as her representative. "He hates your guts," Ann told Knowland.29 The 1958 defeat also gave Nixon sole claim to the state's red-baiting pedagogy, making him the official right-wing standard-bearer from California*

  Governor Brown quickly appointed Judge Mosk, the man who had recently huddled with Ziffren and Korshak, as attorney general. The Los AngelesMirror editorialized that Mosk would never have become AG "were it not for the strength he gained from Paul Ziffren."30 The FBI echoed the conclusion when it noted in Ziffren's file that "[Mosk] owed his job at least in part to the genius of Ziffren."

  Despite his candidate's winning the governorship, Paul Ziffren was still dogged by Knowland's Supermob allegations. On April 20, 1959, when Ziffren, in his capacity as the California Democratic national committeeman, lobbied in Sacramento for bills that would place stricter regulations on police arrest procedures, he was questioned in the open legislature about his Capone affiliations. One senator intoned, "I don't intend to let the Capone mob tell us how to write a law of arrest. I think we're entitled to know where these bills came from and who's behind them." Ziffren's only reply was "My own background has nothing to do with the merit of these bills."31

  To the press, Ziffren said it was "ghoulish" to bring up the names of his business partners. (Greenberg had already been gunned to death, and Evans was about to be. On August 22, 1959, Evans was shot to death in Chicago, and typically for that city, no one was ever charged. At his probate hearing, it was estimated that his nonliquid real estate holdings approached $11 million.)

  "I don't believe in character assassination," Ziffren informed the media. "Greenberg was honorable in all the dealings I had with him."32 Ziffren also pleaded ignorance of what Evans's and Greenberg's underworld connections might have been. This contention borders on the ludicrous for numerous reasons: Ziffren's mentor, Arvey, was Greenberg's longtime partner in Lawndale Enterprises; Ziffren's college classmate, best friend, investment partner, and law partner, David Bazelon, had helped in the tax case against Greenberg's investment client Frank Nitti and handled Greenberg's Canadian Ace Brewery legal affairs; the longtime cohort of Ziffren's partner Fred Evans, Murray Humphreys, was Public Enemy Number One in the 1930s, and their indictment for embezzling the Bartenders Union out of $350,000 was front-page news in Chicago just a few years before the Hayward purchase, while Ziffren and his firm were Greenberg's tax lawyers; Greenberg's mob ties were well-known to the U.S. Attorney's Office, where Ziffren previously worked; Ziffren's partner in Store Enterprises, Sam Genis, was a convicted check kiter and associate of Lansky, Zwillman, and Costello; at the Lansky infiltrated Kirkeby-Nacional organization, Paul and Leo Ziffren handled legal matters, while their executive secretaries sat on the board, and Paul's brother-in-law was the VP of the company; lastly, Ziffren was Greenberg's tax attorney at Gottlieb and Schwartz, filing returns that showed his payments to Evans—this was in 1943, when Greenberg paid Ziffren for help in dealing with Greenberg's being implicated in the massive front-page-news Hollywood extortion scheme by the Capone mob.

  Considering that Ziffren was an unquestioned genius in both tax law and investing, it strains credulity that he was unaware of the connections of his numerous tainted partners.

  Despite the allegations, Ziffren's power was at such a zenith that he was able to accomplish the unthinkable, convincing the Democratic National Committee to hold their 1960 presidential convention in Los Angeles, wresting it from the proponents of favored cities including Chicago, where Jake Arvey lobbied for the event. With this move, Ziffren was stepping out from Arvey's shadow once and for all, letting it be known that he was now an independent kingmaker.

  In recognition of Ziffren's contributions to the party, the California Democratic Committee rewarded him with a fete in his honor at Arnold Kirkeby's Beverly Hilton Hotel on June 23, 1959. Among the two thousand in attendance were a sponsoring committee that included all the partners (except for Bazelon) in the L.A. Warehouse Company, Sidney Korshak, Eugene Wyman, and Jonie Tapps (a producer pal of Johnny Rosselli's). In the festivities, Ziffren was saluted by Stanley Mosk and regaled by a performance from Korshak's great friend Rhonda Fleming.

  The glow would not last long. The gala at the Beverly Hilton masked a growing tension in the Brown-Ziffren camp. Ziffren was becoming a lightning rod for controversy, and while he had undeniably played a huge role in the Democratic Party's resurgence, not all party faithful sang his praises. "I dislike him with a passion," said one Democratic legislative leader.33

  Not long after his election, Governor Brown started to distance himself from Ziffren, warning him to not take credit for the election. "I am the architect of my own campaign," Brown told local scribes. In part motivated by Brown's desire to avoid contamination with the Greenberg deals, the rift would last years and lead to Ziffren's retirement from the Democratic Committee's top post. Brown, however, felt no such need to part company with Sid Korshak, since the Fixer was virtually unknown to the public at large.

  Not only were they frequently seen dining together, but also, according to some, were making critical state government decisions. Dick Brenneman, who developed well-placed sources when he investigated Korshak for the Sacramento Bee, was informed by a judicial source that Brown had convened with Korshak since the early fifties at Harry Karl's mansion (which Korshak later purchased) on Chalon Road in Bel-Air. According to the source, one purpose of the meetings was for Brown to vet his judicial appointments with Korshak.34 Brenneman was further told by LAPD lieutenant Marion Phillips, who often surveilled the Korshak crowd for LAPD intel chief Jim Hamilton, that there were also numerous such Brown-Korshak huddles at Chez Karl.

  In January 1960, Attorney General Mosk announced his intent to go after white-collar crime, especially in real estate investment. The implications of such a probe were not lost on knowledgeable California journalists, who knew that such a crusade by Mosk would likely expose the Ziffren-Greenberg nexus. As the Hollywood Citizen News wrote, "If Attorney General Mosk isn't careful, he may find himself soon treading on the toes of his political mentor, California National Committeeman Paul Ziffren, whose phenomenal economic penetration of California and criminal affiliation is a matter of record. 35

  Circumstantial evidence suggests that Ziffren may later have acted to short-circuit Mosk's agenda in 1964, when Alosk was the presumed Democratic front-runner in the California senatorial race—and yet mysteriously dropped out of the contest that spring. Thirty years later, in a 1994 cover story in the T.A. Weekly, Charles Rappleye and David Robb reported that Mosk's sudden exit was the direct consequence of an extramarital affair he'd been having with a young woman deeply involved in the world of organized crime. Chief William Parker's LAPD had reportedly come into possession of compromising photos of Mosk and the young woman. Interestingly, the LAPD's files reference Ziffren's own dalliances with hookers. Connie Carlson, one of Mosk's most trusted investigators in the AG's office, recently said, "Mrs. Edna Mosk told me about how Ziffren tried to block Mosk's advancement."*36

  Edmund "Pat" Brown, Paul Ziff
ren, and John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign (TimeLife)

  Brown's people also accused Ziffren of having tried to persuade Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy to run in the California primaries against "favorite son" Brown. (Kennedy, a well-known pal of the Vegas Supermob, told an adviser that support from Ziffren and his Democrats was critical to his presidential ambitions.)37 Finally, on June 19, 1960, the party's delegates voted 115 to 3 to replace Ziffren as party chairman. Stanley Mosk was voted to replace him. It had been rumored that Brown promised Mosk the state's Supreme Court chief justice post if he would go up against Ziffren.* The press interpreted Ziffren's defeat as a big victory for the governor, "who had gone all out to oust the incumbent committeeman. It ended a bitter fight which has torn the Democratic ranks, particularly in Southern Califor­nia." 38 Another paper ran an editorial stating, "Last Saturday the chickens came home to roost."39

  When Mosk stepped down from his Democratic National Committee post in 1961, he was replaced by yet another Chicago-born attorney, Eugene Wyman, Greg Bautzer's law partner. As chairman, Wyman proceeded to entice contributions to the party from his closest well-heeled pals, chief among them Al Hart, Jake "the Barber" Factor, and Sid Korshak. All were said to be major contributors, although Korshak rarely gave in his own name. "He had to do something with all that cash!" remarked one friend.40