Supermob

by Gus Russo

  At the time, Becker was assisting local crime writer Ed Reid in obtaining interviews and information for his forthcoming book on organized crime, The Grim Reapers (1969). Becker had known Reid through a mutual friendship with Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun, for whom Reid worked. "When my boss Gus Greenbaum got killed at the Riviera, everybody took off," said Becker, "all the owners, everybody, we all left. But I stayed around town and commuted between Las Vegas and Beverly Hills."41 Becker knew where the bodies were buried not only in Sin City, but also in Louisiana, where he had oil business with another Korshak associate, New Orleans godfather Carlos Marcello.

  On May 6,1967, Reid contacted the FBI in L.A., hoping to trade what he knew for some inside information. As a show of sincerity, Reid met with the FBI three days later and handed over his unfinished manuscript. Unbeknownst to Reid and Becker, Sid Korshak was not happy with their probings and the repercussions of Becker's knowledge for Korshak's friends. The very next day, May 10, an L.A. FBI agent was informed by a source who knew Reid that Sid Korshak had asked him "who Ed Becker was and advised that Becker was trying to shake down some of his [Korshak's] friends for money." Korshak added that Becker supposedly offered to "keep the names of these people out of the book" in exchange for a bribe. "Becker's a no-good shakedown artist," fumed Korshak. Most tellingly, a newly released, unredacted version of the FBI report noted another reason for the Korshak call to the source: Korshak told the source to make certain his, Korshak's, name was deleted from the book. The FBI reported that Korshak's name was removed, but in fact, it was not.42

  In a document released in 2005, the FBI added some clarification to Kor­shak's worries. A "well-to-do" source told the L.A. office that he had just spoken with Korshak about the possibility of Korshak's cooperating with Reid. The source said Korshak asked him to come to his ABC Booking office in Beverly Hills, where the two walked out front, so as not to be overheard. Once outside, Korshak confided the same thing he had to Harry Busch outside his Randolph Street office three decades earlier. "Korshak brought up the fact that he could not talk to the writer because it would mean his death," the source reported. "He said he could never walk away from those people [meaning the Italians]."43

  Ed Becker's first inkling of a rift with Sid Korshak came soon after Reid's book hit the stands. "I'd run into Hank [Greenspun] occasionally, and about the time we'd gotten through the book and the book was published, I had met him one day at one of the restaurants downtown, and he said, 'Well, you certainly pissed off Korshak,' and I said, 'What?' I knew I had problems with him through the hotel, but not personally. And he said, 'Well, we were talking and your name came up, and he said, 'You better tell him to watch out. He isn't long for this world if he keeps up this bullshit.' "*

  Korshak's fears about the continued heat being placed on Vegas were soon shown to be well-founded when the FBI leaked their casino wiretaps to a veteran Chicago crime reporter. Although Californians, most of whom were transplants themselves, had little interest in the true histories of the Midwesterners who had virtually hijacked their state, such was not the case back in their land of origin, where organizations like the Chicago Crime Commission, and reporters like Sandy Smith, continued to work their sources.

  Smith, by this time the dean of Chicago's crime reporters, had covered the underworld since the early fifties, cultivating sources both high and low. He was about to become the first of a parade of journalists whose careers were jeopardized for daring to take on the Supermob. Early in his career, Smith wrote for the Chicago Tribune, where he quickly learned of that paper's noninterest in Sid Korshak. "The Tribune never really tangled with him. I don't know what scared the editors about Sidney," Smith recently said. "I know the reporters were never afraid of him. But he was part of the fix that made the mob so strong in Chicago."44 Smith's experience at the Trib corroborates that of a close friend of Korshak's, who once recalled that he often heard Korshak boast about his ability to persuade key Tribune officials to take it easy on him in print.45

  By 1966, Smith was at the Sun-Times on the occasion of Marshall Korshak's most recent electoral campaign, this time for the important purse-controlling position of city treasurer. "Emmett Dedmon, the editorial director of the Sun-Times, wanted a memo with all of my information on the Korshaks," said Smith. "So I gave him that memo." The damning document not only disclosed Marshall's connection to the Playboy license fix, which Smith had nailed through well-connected sources, but it also detailed brother Sidney's checkered history with the Outfit. "The sources of information I had were telling me exactly what the Korshaks were doing," reported Smith. (An unsigned memo buried in the Chicago Crime Commission files, appearing to be Smith's, advised that organization to also lobby against the Korshak candidacy. The memo, which recalled the Playboy license and the linkage to Charlie Gioe, stated that if Marshall Korshak was elected, "it would be like naming a member of a law firm which has fronted for Syndicate mobsters since 1939—which took their money—because money which went to Sidney must have seeped off to Marshall Korshak . . . Marshall may be OK, but Sidney is the mob mouthpiece—fixer, lawyer, and front man . . . Sidney has awful power over Marshall.")46

  "And so, after reading my memo, Dedmon still endorsed Marshall Kor­shak," Smith recalled. "Once the Sun-Times endorsed Marshall Korshak, I wrote a memo to Dedmon afterward that read, 'I'm sorry, you get another boy' And I walked out. I couldn't do anything else but that. The managing editor, named Dick Tresvant, called me after I walked out and said, 'I'm sorry about this. Somehow we'll get you back.' But I told him it was too late."

  Marshall Korshak (Chicago Jewish Archives, Spertus Institute)

  Korshak's Republican opponent, Edward Kucharski, challenged Marshall to answer Smith's contentions, but he was simply ignored. When the local CBS TV affiliate sent a crew to put the questions to Korshak at a Democratic rally, an FBI report stated that "Korshak, obviously in discomfort and with a nervous twitch, evaded giving answers and instead called Kucharski a liar and a desperate man. Korshak also appeared at the CBS offices twice and refused to answer questions or be interviewed by Sandy Smith."47 In the end, Korshak won the election easily.

  For years, Smith blamed the Korshaks for his departure from the paper. When an investigator from the Chicago Crime Commission spoke with him thirteen years later, the investigator noted, "Smith stated that his sensitivity towards the Korshaks is still rather high inasmuch as Marshall Korshak was responsible for his leaving the Sun-Times and going to Washington."48

  Indeed, Smith was quickly snatched up by the Washington bureau of Time-Life, where his reporting included a seminal two-part series on organized crime for Life magazine, and this time he put his concerns about the Korshaks into print, becoming the second journalist after Lester Velie to do so. The articles, part one of which hit the stands on September 1, 1967, not only excoriated numerous friends of Sidney's, but also dared to detail the relationships between the hoods and the corporate and political upperworld. Among other passages in the piece was the following: "Some of Giancana's lieutenants have their own connections with politicians, officials and important people. Gus Alex has an especially warm relationship with Chicago city treasurer Marshall Korshak, and his brother Sidney Korshak. Sidney is a pal of other leading Chicago gangsters . . . 'A message from him [Sidney],' a prominent mobster was quoted on a witness stand, 'is a message from us.' On Alex's application in 1957 for an apartment in the Lake Shore Drive community he described himself as a $15,000 a year employee of Marshal Korshak, then a state senator."49

  Smith's articles benefited from assistance given him by a frustrated FBI, which leaked a nine-hundred-page bug and wiretap report on Caesars Palace to Smith. Since the Bureau was embargoed from using the illegal tap evidence, they decided to leak the material in hopes of arousing public disapprobation. Smith's articles stated emphatically that the soon-to-open Caesars, like so many other Las Vegas casinos, was actually owned by a gangster consortium that ultimately answered to the Outfit. In his Life seri
es, Smith also named "The Lady in Mink," Ida Devine, as the Outfit's new courier, and even displayed an FBI surveillance photo of her at a train station (the only way she would travel).

  Smith's expose went on to win an award from the Graduate School of Journalism of Columbia University. In two years, Frank McCulloch, having returned from his stint in Saigon, would join Smith at Life, where he headed Time-Life News Service's bureau in New York. There he organized an investigative "dream team" consisting of Sandy Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner Denny Walsh, Bill Lambert, and Russ Sackett. The group became a consistent thorn in the side of the Supermob. "This was the best investigative team U.S. journalism ever had," said McCulloch. "Among them they had sixty years of experience that they brought to bear."50

  Despite the accolades accruing to Smith and his colleagues, the fact remained that the Korshaks were unflappable; the Life series did nothing to rattle their rarefied world. In 1967, Sidney managed Chicago mob business interests when he arranged a sweetheart contract for the city's J. P. Seeburg Jukebox Corporation, with which the Outfit had done much business. At the time, the Teamsters were threatening to strike the company, and its owners, Delbert W. Coleman and Herbert Siegel, quickly found the best man to settle the dispute, referred to him by David Bazelon's former assistant at the OAP.

  "So we called Jay Pritzker [and asked him], 'Is Korshak the best?' " Siegel said recently.

  "Absolutely" was Pritzker's reply.

  "So we hired him," said Siegel. "The problem went away immediately. And what he wanted for his fee was a new Cadillac, which was then worth about five thousand dollars. I guess he didn't want there to be any record of it."51 For Seeburg, Korshak's fee was a bargain: the deal cost Seeburg's two thousand employees $10 a week in wages each, saving the company $1 million a year. And it was just the beginning of the relationship between Seeburg's Del Coleman, the Harvard-grad son of a tavernkeeper, and Sid Korshak, who negotiated Coleman's 1969 divorce. It was also the beginning of a friendship with Coleman's wife, Jan Amory Coleman, a relationship that was revelatory of another side of the enigmatic Korshak. In a recent interview, Amory (who ultimately divorced Coleman) spoke at length about her friend Sidney Korshak:

  Del Coleman (Robert Lightfoot)

  I met Sid when I became engaged to Del. I was awfully young at the time, and Sidney went with me and we picked out the ring, and he said to me, "Honey, I'm advising you not to marry him." And I said, "Why?" He said, "It doesn't matter why. Take it from me, don't marry him." I said, "But I'm in love with him." And he said, "I don't care. You're making the biggest mistake of your life." And this was kind of a father image talking / to a daughter, concerned.

  But I ignored him and went ahead with the wedding, a small wedding in Del's apartment in Chicago. Sid was the best man. For his toast he said, "I told her not to do it." Within days I knew I was going to be depressed, and Sidney of course had predicted it.

  We separated eight weeks later, and when Del asked me to give the ring back, he said, "Sid will tell ya to give the ring back. I'm gonna put him on the phone." And poor Sidney gets on the phone and he said, "Listen and listen good. I'm gonna tell him that I told you to give the fucking ring back. But I'm telling you put it in the safe, give it to charity, and don't give it back to that bastard." So I said, "Okay, Sidney." He said, "Now put him on the phone and tell him I told you to give the ring back." And I did it and ended up keeping the ring.

  Sid was very private, sort of the ultimate WASP that way, without actually being a WASP. He was discreet and protective of his friends. I think he had more woman friends than men friends. He had a very gruff way of talking in a kind of a diamond-in-the-rough way, but he wasn't tough at all. He was sweet and kind and loving, but I never saw him laugh. Women adored him because he was so masculine. He was a woman's friend, I'm telling you. He flirted, but he was a woman's friend. It was kind of like, "You know I'm here to protect you." I miss him a lot. I thought about him recently when I lost all of my money in the market and I started to go into business—because I'd never worked. Sidney would have just said, "Here's one hundred and fifty million dollars, go have fun in Newport." He wouldn't have gotten me a job, he would have just said, "Here's the money." He was the most generous man.

  I miss Sidney every day. There aren't too many men out there that you can say, "I lost my last dime, I can't pay the rent," and they'll just send the check over within seven minutes.

  I called him at his house when I owed a phone bill and I couldn't pay. He took care of it right away and he said to me, "Honey, when you marry a rich husband, pay me back." I think he respected the fact that he remembered when he had nothing, so if somebody went through a rough time, he was just always there. Sidney was a kind, kind human being covered up by a little bit of a rough facade.52

  Amory also recalled that Korshak told her how, when Del was at Harvard, he had been recruited by the mob. "Sidney told me that," said Amory. "It's kinda like CIA recruitment, you know?" Actually, it was not uncommon for organized crime to entice promising young lawyers and business majors right out of Ivy League schools into their world. In any case, Coleman's Seeburg was now part of a long list of Korshak's well-heeled clients, as his career continued to skyrocket.

  One of Korshak's most powerful patrons was the founder of the Gulf & Western Corporation, Charles Bluhdorn, for whom Korshak served as personal attorney and labor adviser. The association with the man some called the "Mad Austrian" would have profound international repercussions for Korshak, his friends, and the movie business for the next ten years. His appeal to Korshak was obvious: not unlike Abe Pritzker, Bluhdorn had risen from humble beginnings to build one of America's greatest, and most diversified, conglomerates. Bluhdorn was a man with labor issues and truckloads of disposable income that he couldn't wait to spend—just the sort of man who appreciated the unique talents of a Sid Korshak.

  The Mad Austrian

  Charles Bluhdorn was what would have to be described as a character. Born in 1926 to Czech parents in Vienna, Austria, Bluhdorn and his family fled to England just before Hitler annexed their homeland. Young Charles was considered such a "hellion" that at age eleven he was sent off to an English boarding school to be disciplined. In 1942, Bluhdorn emigrated to the United States to attend City College and Columbia University in New York, although he never earned a degree. In 1946, after one year in the air force, Charles took work at the Cotton Exchange, earning just $15 a week, and soon after, having discovered that Americans have an immense passion for coffee, decided to become an entrepreneur by importing coffee from South America.

  Charles Bluhdorn, "The Mad Austrian" (Corbis/Bettmann)

  Not yet satiated, Charles realized there might be even more money in selling and distributing replacement car parts than in importing coffee; during this period just after World War II, Americans were forced to take better care of their cars by replacing defective parts, instead of just relying on trade-ins. Thus, in 1949, Bluhdorn acquired Michigan Bumper, a small auto-parts company that developed fan belts, hubcaps, and oil filters. In a short time, at only thirty years of age, Bluhdorn became a millionaire. In 1956, Bluhdorn purchased a majority interest in the Michigan Plating and Stamping Company, which manufactured rear bumpers for Studebakers. The following year, he merged Michigan Plating and Stamping Company with the Beard and Stone Electric Company of Houston. The acquisition of Beard and Stone Electric Company provided Bluhdorn with an authorized auto-replacement-parts distributor. In 1958, he combined these two companies to form Gulf & Western Corporation, the name suggested by the geographical location of the two merged companies.

  Like Pritzker, Bluhdorn began absorbing smaller, disparate companies at a frantic pace. "My wife thinks I'm nuts," Bluhdorn told an interviewer. "But when you're building something, you're spinning a web and tend to become a prisoner in the web." Mrs. Bluhdorn was not the only one critical of the Mad Austrian, whose employees took "great pleasure mimicking his Hitlerian inflections, referring to him as Mein Fuhrer, behind his back." In
fact, one executive recalled that every time Bluhdorn lost his temper, "these little white foamy stalagmite, stalactite type things appeared on both sides of his mouth. I thought, 'Does he have rabies?'" Former Paramount Pictures assistant production chief Peter Bart described Bluhdorn as a "dynamic, utterly reckless, Austrian-born wheeler-dealer who had come very far, very fast."53

  Eventually, Gulf & Western controlled over one hundred other firms, including TV production center Desilu Productions, publisher Simon &C Schuster, and clothing lines Kayser-Roth, Catalina, Cole of California, Jonathan Logan, and Oscar de la Renta. In addition, Gulf & Western owned nuclear power and mining interests, racetracks, professional sports teams, insurance companies, farm supplies, and missile parts. Academician Ben Bagdikian noted, "Almost every American buys the company's goods." The company also owned 8 percent of the arable land in the Dominican Republic. Within twenty years, G&W was grossing $5.3 billion annually and ranked sixty-first on the Fortune 500. In 1963, Bluhdorn purchased a thirty-acre estate in Ridgefield, Connecticut, where he quietly provided the community with a motorboat for the police department and a trailer for the scuba team.54

  By the midsixties, few would have guessed that Bluhdorn was interested in acquiring a company like Paramount Pictures, which, at the time, was close to bankruptcy, with most of its meager profits coming from leasing old films to television. The studio's anticipated blockbusters such as CircusWorld and The Fall of the Roman Empire (both 1964) had greatly underper-formed at the box office, and Newsweek reported that the company "has not been managed to realize its full potential."55 However, some, such as Paramount's hot-tempered VP Martin S. Davis, saw the company as ripe for a takeover, and they also believed it could be turned around with new blood at the helm and on the board. On March 23, 1966, with Davis's prodding, the thirty-nine-year-old Bluhdorn purchased enough stock to land a position on the company's board of directors; at the time, the average age of Paramount's board members was seventy.