Supermob

by Gus Russo

  Of course, the vitriol between Everett and Korshak virtually guaranteed little movement in the talks. "Marge can't stand the sight of Sid," said one racetrack insider.57 With the impasse ongoing, Korshak tried unsuccessfully to force a total shutdown of the track. Just then, Governor Brown played into Korshak's hands by trying to close the track down himself, claiming it was unsafe since so many critical employees were on strike—Brown told Ross he only wanted to shut the track down to show he was "pro-labor." Brown had hoped his new appointment of Korshak friend Gray Davis to the state Racing Board would lead to the desired shutdown. Davis's motion, however, was outvoted 3-2. Board chairman Charles Chatfield told Ross that Brown was under extreme pressure to go along with the shutdown, and that Korshak was behind it. Chatfield added, "We heard from both sides that Mr. Korshak was involved . . . He was the man behind the scenes directing the negotiations." Marge Everett told Ross, "I think he [Brown] was under tremendous pressure from Sidney Korshak." When asked if she saw the hand of Sidney Korshak behind Brown's decision, Everett responded, "Not only do I see the hand, I see the total image of Sidney Korshak." Brown made a general denial of the allegation.

  Eventually, Leo Geffner replaced Korshak and the strike ended. However, there was one curious footnote: in April 1979, not long after siding with Kor­shak at Hollywood Park, Brown traveled to New Hampshire, where he was entered in the state's presidential primary versus Georgia's Jimmy Carter, and where Korshak's Service Employees Union had dispatched campaign workers and cars to assist Brown's effort.58

  Unbeknownst to Ross and Silverman, as they were readying their report in May, Korshak was a topic of discussion among Teamsters insurance man Allen Dorfman, Chicago Outfit boss Joey "the Clown" Lombardo, the Outfit's Vegas enforcer Tony Spilotro, and two other associates in a conversation secretly taped by the FBI. Dorfman was discussing the problems they were having with West Coast Teamsters leader Andy Anderson.

  DORFMAN: "You know, he's absolutely an eighteen-carat cunt, but he belongs lock, stock, and barrel to Sidney."

  LOMBARDO: "All right."

  DORFMAN: "That I can tell ya."

  LOMBARDO: "How old is Sidney?"

  DORFMAN: "Ah, Sidney is seventy . . ."

  LOMBARDO: "Sidney Korshak. Well, if Sidney dies, who's got Anthony

  Anderson? Nobody?"

  DORFMAN: "Nobody. Nobody, he belongs to him lock, stock, and barrel."59

  Anthony Spilotro (Chicago Crime Commission)

  The highly decorated Ross, who has covered all manner of corruption and scandal, recently gave his summation of Sid Korshak, opining, "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 was a dangerous game for him, but that's where his place was."

  Brian Ross went on to spend eighteen years at NBC News, serving as chief investigative correspondent for the newsmagazine Dateline NBC.

  Along with producing partner Ira Silverman, Ross's work has been showcased throughout the years on NBC Nightly News. Ross joined ABC News as chief investigative correspondent in July 1994, where he has reported extensively for 20/20, Primetime Thursday, Nightlme, World News Tonightwith Peter Jennings, and Good Morning America. Over the years, Ross has scooped his peers on countless major stories and has won virtually every media journalism award possible. Thirty years on, Ira Silverman is still producing hard-hitting segments for NBC News and is a contributor to the New Yorker magazine. For his work in television news, he has received two Emmy Awards, the George Foster Peabody Award, the Columbia Dupont Award, the George Polk Award, and the Overseas Press Club Award.*

  Instead of prompting more law enforcement attention to the Supermob, Ross and Silverman's critiques inspired thirty-one-year-old syndicated cartoonist Garry Trudeau to fix his acid-penned talent on the Brown-Korshak affair. After originating as a feature in Trudeau's Yale school paper, his satiric Doonesbury comic strip started its national circulation in 1970 in twenty-eight newspapers and by 1979 was seen in over five hundred. Time magazine said of Trudeau, "Neither radicals nor reactionaries are safe from his artillery. Stuffed shirts of Oxford broadcloth or frayed denim receive the same impudent deflation. Yet Trudeau attacks with such gentle humor that even hard-nosed presidential aides can occasionally be heard chuckling over the daily White House news summary—when it includes a Doonesbury"

  In fact, Trudeau was often ahead of his time in taking on powerful, and seemingly untouchable, hooligans. As New York columnist David Rossie wrote, "Almost alone he has pointed up the hypocrisy that has attended the canonization of Henry Kissinger."60 (Thirty years later, the former secretary of state—and former squire to Jill St. John—is now widely perceived as a prime architect of the genocide the United States perpetrated in Southeast Asia.) Trudeau's incisive takes on pomposity and political fraud earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1974.

  Throughout July and August 1979, Trudeau's strip featured Duane Dela-court, Brown's fictitious "secretary of symbolism," as he attempted to control the spin on the Brown-Korshak relationship, with special attention to Korshak's $1,000 donation to the 1974 war chest and the Hollywood Park story covered by Ross and Silverman. The July 18 episode depicted Ross as "Roland Hedley, Jr." saying to the camera, "But ABC News has learned that Brown was seen lunching at The Bistro, Korshak's restaurant, the day he moved to close the track. Brown was said to have had the duck." Another rendition showed a Brown associate named "Gray," an obvious reference to Gray Davis, calling Korshak a "local lowlife, an alumnus from the Capone mob." In still another, the Brown character questioned, "What's an 'undisputed mobster' anyway? Isn't that just a tired cliche?" Pressured, Trudeau's Brown said, "Okay, so I may have run into him [Korshak] a few times at Lew Wasserman's parties . . . Lew Wasserman. He's a movie mogul. He has to deal with Korshak to get his movies made."

  At least seven California and Nevada newspapers refused to carry part or all of the eleven-part series on Brown and Korshak, citing the potentially libelous and unsubstantiated information—the papers were legally responsible for Trudeau's assertions. It was not the first time that Trudeau's occasionally incendiary strip had been pulled; previous episodes on Elizabeth Taylor, homosexuality, and premarital sex had been deleted around the country. What made this exceptional was that in this case, the censoring papers were primarily in Korshak's two areas of influence, California and Nevada. The TosAngelesTimes refused to run the cartoon because they thought its contents were "unsubstantiated and possibly defamatory." The paper inserted in its place a parody strip entitled Gonesbury, which depicted Trudeau being asked by his lawyer, "Do you have any proof?"—to which Trudeau responds, "Hell, I don't need any proof. This is just a cartoon." The San Trancisco Chronicle inserted the following panel in place of the popular strip: "Yesterday's and today's episodes of Doonesbury, as well as certain others in the current sequence, will not be published in The Chronicle. These episodes are being omitted because they contain allegations that could be extremely libelous against a private citizen. The Chronicle regrets this necessary action and assures its readers that Doonesbury will remain a regular Chronicle feature."61

  Garry Trudeau's July 11, 1979, Doonesbury. One of his many strips from the summer of 1979 lampooning the Brown-Korshak relationship (© GB Trudeau. Reprinted with Permission of Universal Press Syndicate)

  In response to the brouhaha, Trudeau said, "I fully respect the right of a subscribing newspaper to choose not to publish [Doonesbury]"*'62 Most papers, however, carried the panels without incident; interestingly, their lawyers had come to a different conclusion from those on the West Coast. Even the Chicago Tribune carried the controversial serial, although that decision infuriated Korshak's pal Irv Kupcinet over at the Sun-Times; Kup labeled the pieces "deprecatory and libelous" and quoted from Gonesbury instead.63

  Brown claimed that he was "flattered" by Trudeau's attention, even though the series was "false and libelous." He called the stories "a great co
up for Gray Davis because not many chiefs of staff have made nationally syndicated cartoons." As expected, Sid Korshak was unavailable for comment. (Brown was not the only pol tainted by a donation from Sid Korshak. In 1980, Chicago reform mayor Jane Byrne was ridiculed in the press for accepting a $2,000 donation from Korshak, in addition to $5,000 from the Outfit's committeeman friend John D'Arco, $3,000 from three Tony Ac-cardo- controlled unions, $2,000 from the Outfit's front man at Duncan Parking Meters, Jerome Robinson, and $5,000 from the Pritzkers. The $1.5 million fund drew the reprobation of Tribune columnist Bob Wiedrich, who wrote, "Not only is it business as usual at City Hall, the mobsters and the fixers and the ripoff artists have gained an even firmer foothold under the Byrne administration. If you were the reform mayor of Chicago, would you accept $2,000 from Sidney Korshak, the Los Angeles lawyer who has served as the Mafia's errand boy for so many years he looks like the Godfather?")64

  Whereas Trudeau's take on the Brown-Korshak-Hanley web was primarily for giggles, behind the scenes Hanley and Korshak's mob connections were the focus of an investigation with deadly serious implications. Although there was little chance that their superiors would ever authorize indictments of Supermob bosses such as Korshak, intrepid FBI agents continued to dissect the periphery of their world in the hopes of winning at least minor victories. So it was that in 1979, the FBI "turned" insurance salesman Joseph Hauser, who had been convicted with Nixon's attorney general Richard Kleindienst for swindling the Teamsters Pension Fund by trading kickbacks for Teamster insurance contracts.* Once embraced by the Teamsters, Hauser's insurance business swelled to over $180 million in premiums, much of which he siphoned off for personal gain.

  For the next few years after his conviction, Hauser agreed to wear a wire, in what was ultimately a successful, if dangerous, effort to entrap mobsters, especially the tried-and-true Italian versions such as New Orleans's Carlos Marcello. (The sting was known as BRILAB.) Hauser's lack of success in bringing down non-Italian Supermobsters like Korshak was not for lack of trying. Throughout his period of cooperation, and in later congressional testimony, Hauser described Korshak as having been set up in California by Tony "Joe Batters" Accardo, and how Korshak's Hotel Union pals Ed Han­ley and Herman "Blackie" Leavitt were likewise "handpicked by Tony Ac­cardo." Hauser added that Hanley, whom he witnessed in constant close coordination with Korshak, extorted L.A. restaurants such as Nicky Blair's, which was bombed for not paying up.65

  In Los Angeles, Paul Ziffren, who spent the period in his typically low-key, celebrity-tax-lawyer role, weathered an internecine feud that saw him leave his partnership with his brothers Lester and Leo at Ziffren and Ziffren (housed coincidentally in the Kirkeby Center on Wilshire Boulevard). However, he was not orphaned for long, thanks to an invitation from Ronald Reagan's personal lawyer, William French Smith, to join his legal powerhouse, Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher. "Paul and I used to be on the political debating circuit together," Smith told the Tos Angeles Times. "This goes back to the Eisenhower campaigns. We debated on radio, on TV, all around. It was during that period I developed a high respect for his talents."66 Simultaneously, Ziffren and travel company chairman Peter V. Ueberroth were named by the U.S. Olympic Committee as permanent chairman and president- general manager, respectively, of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee for the 1984 Olympic Games.

  Meanwhile, Korshak's thirty-two-year-old son, Stuart, was welcomed into another very fraternal L.A. legal convergence, Wyman, Bautzer, Chris­tianson, and Silbert. Stuart, an associate at that company, must have felt like family, as he was welcomed into a firm that boasted the likes of Greg Bautzer, Eugene Wyman, Harvey Silbert, Frank Rothman, Senator Thomas Kuchel, and Stanley Zax, all of whom figured so prominently in the successes of his father and others such as Lew Wasserman and Howard Hughes.

  As for Stuart's parents, Sid and Bee were continually seen on the Beverly Hills social pages throughout the period. In July 1981, Sid gave away actor David Janssen's widow, Dani Greco, in marriage to director Hal Needham; sixteen months earlier, Korshak had handled David Janssen's funeral arrangements.67 Taking place on the Universal western set, the marriage ceremony was attended by, among others, Paul and Mickey Ziffren, George and Jolene Schlatter, Rod and Alana Stewart, Suzanne Pleshette, and Tina Sinatra.68

  Sid and Bee on the town, 1985 (private collection)

  In August 1979, sources within the Department of Justice Organized Crime Strike Force leaked that it had informants and "other information" that the Riviera Hotel was still "controlled by the Chicago Mafia through Mr. Kor­shak and eastern Mafia figures" linked to Meyer Lansky.69 However, not the Strike Force probe, the California Crime Commission report, the NBC reports, or even Doonesbury had any derailing effect on Korshak and the Su­permob, especially since the group's invulnerability was about to be cast in stone when their fair-haired boy Ronnie Reagan assumed the U.S. presidency the following year, naming Ziffren's partner William French Smith as his attorney general.

  As for Korshak, he continued in his fixer role as successful as ever. In the fall of 1979, when Wasserman's Universal Pictures was filming its John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd movie The Blues Brothers in Chicago, there were few who doubted that the name Korshak would lurk somewhere in the shadows. As expected, when the production-location scouts ran into snags, Sidney came to the rescue.

  The movie's climactic scene called for a massive SWAT team to take on "Jake and Ellwood Blues" in Daley Square, where the glass-walled lobby of the Cook County Center was to be rammed by the "Bluesmobile." When the Cook County Board refused the request, director John Landis turned to Wasserman's savior, Sidney Korshak, who was also known to the film's producer, Bernie Brillstein. According to Landis, Korshak asked, "What do you need?" After Landis described the problem, Korshak answered, "Let me see what I can do." According to Landis, "Suddenly, all the doors were open." The city's chief administrator at the time, Paul McGrath, was stunned by the acquiescence. "Doing things like that was absolutely unheard of," Mc­Grath said in 2005.70 Keeping things in the family, Marshall Korshak's daughter Margie handled the PR for the movie.*

  As the year drew to a close, the Supermob suffered one more loss among its ranks. In December 1979, Al Hart died at age seventy-five. His Tos AngelesTimes obit was headlined ALFRED HART: PHILANTHROPIST.

  Sid Korshak continued to be observed hobnobbing with Oval Office residents, both past and present. In addition to his recent sightings with White House aspirants Jerry Brown, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan, Korshak attended a February 1980, Frank Sinatra-hosted, $l,500-per-plate benefit dinner for a local hospital in Palm Springs with former president Gerald Ford. The Department of Justice noted that, although he could have chosen to dine with the president, Sinatra instead chose another power player's company: "Of all the people Sinatra could have sat with during the party, Sinatra chose to sit with Sidney Korshak and his wife." And as with the Jerry Brown fund-raiser two years earlier, Ed Hanley, of the corrupt Culinary Union, was also in attendance as one of the only two guests to receive comp tickets to the benefit.71

  *Bee contributed her dessert recipes to both Barbara's and Dinah's celebrity cookbooks (The Sinatra Celebrity Cookbook, and Someone's in the Kitchen With Dinah).

  *Daughter Tina alleged that Marx later confided to a friend, "This time, I married for money." (Sinatra, My Fathers Daughter, 159)

  *'Together, Barbara and Bee renamed rooms after Frank's recordings: Frank's office was now "My Way"; the projection room, "Send in the Clowns"; the guesthouses, "High Hopes" and "Young at Heart"; the quarters where JFK trysted with his lady friends, "The Tender Trap"; and the main building became "The House I Live In." For Frank's projection room, Korshak removed the old gold draperies and busy carpet. "We redid it very simply," said Korshak, "with a lot of off-white textured fabrics and furniture from J. Robert Scott." With architect Ted Grenzbach, Korshak added travertine floors for Barbara's new master suite, a Jacuzzi and exercise room, renovated the well-used projection room, and purchased new lawn a
nd pool furniture.

  *At this time, the Bistro's treasurer was Jerry Orbach, and among its sixty-one stockholders were Jack Benny, Harris Katleman, Beldon Katleman, Doris Stein, and Jack Warner.

  †Polanski was charged with furnishing quaaludes to a minor, child molestation, unlawful sexual intercourse, rape by use of drugs, oral copulation, and sodomy.

  *As promised, Polanski made Kinski a star when he cast her as Tess in the film Tess (1979), which told the tale of an innocent young servant girl entrapped by a lecherous older man. In 1989, the fifty-six-year-old Polanski married twenty-three-year-old actress Emmanuelle Seigner.

  *Klutznick also played a large part in the creation and development of the state of Israel and was the backstage contact responsible for the Soviets allowing Jews to leave the country.

  *According to Vaira's report, "Hanley was born in Chicago on January 21, 1932. His associates include Joey Aiuppa, organized crime boss of Chicago, and organized crime figures John Delasandro and Rich Conboys. Hanley's brother-in-law is Frank James Calabrese, burglar and loanshark collector. Hanley was handpicked for his current position by Joey Aiuppa. Hanley started his union career in 1957 as Business Agent for Bartenders Local 450 in Cicero, Illinois, and held a similar post in Local 278 of the Chicago Bartenders union, both of which are tightly controlled by Aiuppa. In 1962 Hanley became president of the Culinary Workers Chicago Joint Executive Board, which is also under the control of organized crime. He became International President in 1973."