by Gus Russo
On June 9, 1984, Jackie Presser, the Teamster boss who had been instrumental in Reagan's election, decided Sidney had become too hot, the last straw being Sidney's parasitic connection to a $60,000 organizing fee that the International Brotherhood of Teamsters sent to the West Coast once a month for two years to organize dockworkers. By 1983, the International had poured $1.2 million into the endeavor, Korshak's cut being an exorbitant $800,000. Despite the huge retainer, Korshak hadn't handled any cases, and the dockworker organizing effort had brought in all of about two hundred new Teamsters. "That's nothing for all that money," said Presser.
Most disturbing was an FBI report from a high-level Teamster informant (unnamed, but likely Presser) that Korshak had enlisted his son Stuart's law firm, Wyman, Bautzer, Rothman, Kuchel, and Silbert, of Century City to funnel the lion's share of the money."56 Regarding the firm's money laundering: " . . . one of the many ways of accomplishing this is through the overcharging of legal fees and taking the overcharges and laundering those funds through West Germany. Source further advised that he does not know how or why the funds are passed through West Germany or where the funds go from that point, but did advise that it may be only a coincidence, however, Lorimar Productions in Hollywood, California, receives funding from some source in West Germany. 57
It is not known how or if the FBI resolved this sensitive raw intelligence.
The Teamster leadership wasn't the only entity with the impression that Korshak had outlived his usefulness. Presser, who had since turned FBI informant, told his government contacts that the New York and Chicago families "are concerned about his image and want Korshak to 'phase out.' *58 Senior Teamster adviser Duke Zeller added that Presser's hatred of Korshak was the by-product of Presser's siding with the Cleveland hoods over Korshak's pals in Chicago. "[Presser] wanted Korshak out of the Teamsters," Zeller stated. "His ouster was part of the deal Jackie made with his mob friends to secure his election as Teamster president.59
Presser was also known to have been obsessed with Korshak's influence in the Reagan White House, believing Korshak was responsible for his recent fall from grace with officialdom. The FBI seemed to agree: in a 1981 memo, the Bureau noted that "Korshak was a strong contributor to President-elect Ronald Reagan's campaign, and possibly Korshak will push to have Reagan's support for [Roy] Williams for the presidency of the IBT at the upcoming IBT National Convention to be held in Las Vegas in June 1981."60 (Williams was, in fact, elected and became the first labor leader invited to the White House to consult with President Reagan.) In another FBI report, it was noted that Korshak was actively negotiating with the leaders of the Boston Mafia to convince them that their support of a different Teamster presidential choice—deleted in the document, but likely Presser—"would go contrary to the desires of the Chicago mob."61
According to Presser, Korshak also used America's best singer as his liaison to Reagan. "It's that damn Sinatra and his ties to Nancy, I know it is!" Presser screamed to Duke Zeller. According to Zeller, Presser said that he "always felt that Korshak was dealing with the White House and had some sort of revolving-door status there. Jackie was both jealous of it and feared it."62 In a recent conversation, Zeller added, "Jackie was very respectful of Korshak and also was somewhat frightened of him. And he always blamed Korshak. He said he thought that Sidney had poisoned Reagan on him."
Hollywood Teamster leader Marty Bacow agreed that Korshak was merely coasting on his reputation. "Korshak bullshitted around a lot of people," Bacow believed. "Everybody believed he has these Mob guys behind him and all of this. Well, they're all away now. There is nothing left of them. When his name came up in my conversations, I said, 'Don't tell me about Sidney Korshak. He couldn't make a move without getting permission. He was an order taker.' And that was the end of it."63 Paramount Pictures president Frank Yablans noted recently that, as Korshak's reputation began to take a hit, even his closest friends, such as Lew Wasserman, began to put some distance between themselves and the aging Fixer. Yablans said recently that the deaths of Sidney's Chicago patrons were crucial to the sea change. "After they were gone," Yablans said, "Sidney started to lose his power. He still had influence in Chicago and Vegas, but he lost it in Hollywood. In Chicago and Vegas, people respected him for what he'd done. But not in Hollywood—Hollywood only respects you for what you can do." Perhaps the hardest pill to swallow was the loss of Wasserman, for whom Korshak had done so much to keep his studio strike-free. Yablans said that Korshak's "old school" style just "brought Lew too much heat." Yablans added, "At the end of his life, Sidney was very bitter about Lew, bitter about everything . . . Not because he regretted the life he lived, [but] because he couldn't live the life anymore."64
Whereas Korshak's prestige was in decline in 1984, his friend Paul Ziffren was enjoying the kind of public lionizing afforded only a few of the Chicago expatriates. On July 28, the games of the XXIII Olympiad opened in Los Angeles, due in large part to the work of Ziffren, the founding secretary of the L.A. Olympic Organizing Committee, which was the only bidder for the games. After serious economic problems caused by the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, the 1984 Olympic Games saw, for the first time ever, corporate sponsors for the event, with forty-three companies licensed to sell "official Olympic products. The corporate sponsorships caused the 1984 Olympic Games to be the first Olympics to turn a profit ($225 million) since 1932.*
In some circles, Ziffren was practically deified when the final tallies came in for what were the most financially successful games in history:
• The games provided over seventy-four thousand new jobs for city workers.
• They brought an amazing $3.3 billion into the local economy.
• The engineers laid miles of fiber-optic cable under the city, making L.A. the first U.S. city with that added infrastructure, and giving it a huge advantage in the booming communications market.
• With the massive $225 million surplus, the Amateur Athletic Foundation was endowed, housing the largest sports library in North America. In 1988, that library was named The Paul Ziffren Sports Research Center.
Nineteen eighty-five saw another Sandy Smith-style casualty in the journalism ranks. Just as Smith had sacrificed his Chicago Tribune job over that paper's perceived coddling of the brothers Korshak, Dick Brenneman would do likewise at the Sacramento Bee, where he had diligently been preparing his own Korshak investigation. Brenneman was drawn to the world of Sid Korshak when he met Korshak and Judge Rittenband while covering the Polanski trial for the Santa Monica Evening Outlook. Over lunch at the Hillcrest, as Brenneman remembered, Korshak mostly complained about finding good household help.65 For years thereafter, Brenneman tracked down both the paper and the people that might shed light on Korshak's power.
"[LAPD lieutenant] Marion Phillips and Jack Tobin gave me introductions to scores of sources," recalled Brenneman, "and I dropped their names to countless others in the years that followed." Like many before him, Brenneman began securing Supermob files from the Chicago Crime Commission and various federal agencies such as the Department of Labor, where he learned that the agency held a sixteen-inch-thick printout on Korshak's labor activities (that file has since been destroyed). During his research, Brenneman spoke with many of Phillips's and Tobin's best sources, insiders who described the strange bedfellows that appeared to link prominent California pols to Korshak and ultimately to the bank accounts of the Chicago Outfit bosses. However, after years of exhaustive work, Brenneman's editors refused to green-light an article in 1985. The decision staggered the diligent and meticulous Brenneman, who felt compelled to do what Smith had done years earlier. "I quit the Bee after they killed my Korshak story," said Brenneman. 66 At present, Brenneman is the managing editor of the BerkeleyDaily Planet.
On November 21, 1985, the Chicago Sun-Times interviewed Abe Pritzker in advance of his upcoming (January 6) ninetieth birthday.67 AT 90, PRITZKER STILL FEELS LIKE A MILLION ran the headline. Just ten weeks later, on February 8, 1986, Abe Pritzke
r died at Chicago's Michael Reese Hospital. To the astonishment of those unfamiliar with the world of offshore tax havens, Pritzker's survivors had the audacity to claim only $3,000 in taxable assets.
In contrast, the IRS asserted that they underestimated their estate by a mere $97 million, and owed $53.2 million in back taxes. The case was settled for $9.5 million, thanks to the efforts of their tax lawyer Burton Kanter. In April 1986, the President's Commission on Organized Crime delivered its final report, entitled The Impact: Organized Crime Today, to President Ronald Reagan. Although the investigation ostensibly looked hard into labor corruption, the final document suspiciously neglected to mention Reagan friend Sid Korshak. This despite hearing damning Korshak testimony from the likes of Jimmy Fratianno, who told how Aiuppa had upbraided him for contacting Korshak, and current Teamster president Roy Williams, who informed the commissioners that Korshak was "a member" of the mob and controlled Andy Anderson for them.68 Fratianno went so far as to tell the commission that Korshak "practically runs the Mafia industry."69
In fact, over half of the eighteen commissioners filed supplemental views or dissenting opinions on the report, charging that too many "dark places" had been ignored. "Poor management of time, money, and staff has resulted in the commission's leaving important issues unexamined," one wrote. "The true history of the commission . . . is a saga of missed opportunity." When asked by writer Dan Moldea why Korshak's name had not appeared in the final report, one commissioner replied, "That's a sensitive area. Korshak did come up in a couple of interviews and in one of the staff reports. But there was dissension about him throughout the life of the commission . . . Several of us wanted to highlight him, particularly since he played such an important role in the Hilton hearings in Atlantic City. But it was just not meant to be. There were forces that didn't want Korshak touched. So the commission just rounded up the usual suspects."
Another commissioner, who also preferred to go unnamed, recently added, "In many executive sessions that we had—not testimony, but meetings of the committee—there was a lot of talk about Korshak and of doing a separate investigation just on Korshak. We were known as the Gang of Five because we were the people dissenting to a lot of things the committee was doing. We didn't make a lot of friends with that." One final commissioner went further, citing a nine-hour meeting prior to the release of the final report. "Leaving Korshak out of the final report was no accident. A conscious decision was made to leave out any reference to him, and we were told about it at that meeting. It was too late to do anything about it. We [the commissioners] really never had a chance to see the final version of the report before it was released. I felt there was pressure to keep Korshak out. And where that pressure came from, well, your guess is as good as mine."70
Although it was now clear to all that Korshak would never be made to explain his six-decade dance with the Chicago Outfit, there was at least one personal repercussion from the onslaught to his reputation that had begun with Sy Hersh's revelations: Korshak began to distrust many of his lesser acquaintances, becoming even more careful, and retreating still further from the spotlight, if such a thing was possible. According to Bistro owner Kurt Niklas, the Korshaks' annual Christmas-bash guest list was slashed from four hundred to a mere twenty-four trusted dinner guests.71
For Korshak, his once legendary "fixing" was all but a memory, save for the occasional sage advice given to an old friend. Such was the case after a man went on a violent rampage in Gianni Russo's State Street Club in Las Vegas on October 30,1988. After a broken-bottle brawl, Russo, who for many years had delivered messages from back East to Korshak at the Bistro, shot and killed the madman, who had threatened to murder a waitress. Within three days, Korshak had heard about the incident and called Russo.
"Are you okay?" Korshak asked.
"Yeah," replied Russo.
"Here is what I want you to do. I want you to jump on a plane, and go to L.A."
"When?" Russo asked.
"Now. There are two guys I want you to go see. Robert Shapiro at Twentieth Century Tower and Alan Smiley."
At the time, Shapiro, the future defender of O. J. Simpson, was a partner at Bushkin, Gaims, Gaines and Jonas, while Smiley was best known as the pal of Bugsy Siegel, who was with him when he was murdered in 1947. Russo w7ent to the Las Vegas airport, where Korshak had a prepaid ticket waiting. Upon arriving in L.A., Russo proceeded directly to Shapiro's office as instructed by Korshak. Shapiro told Russo, "Sidney is very worried." However, after Russo explained the details, Shapiro concluded that the DA would rule it justifiable homicide. Shapiro gave him his home number and said, "Just call me if you need anything."
From there, Russo went to Smiley's penthouse apartment on Doheney Drive, where Smiley asked the same questions as Shapiro. He then said that he had been worried that the killing was drug-related. "That's why I told Sidney to have you come and see me today," explained Smiley. "If you need anything, you know where to find me."72
Russo concluded that the intervention was just a case of Korshak looking out for an old friend. "They just needed to check everything out," Russo said. "Sidney was just being overprotective. Steve Wynn* called me that night and said, 'Did you go?' I said, 'Yeah. How the fuck did you know?' He said, 'Sidney called me.' "73
As predicted, no charges were filed. The Vegas DA indeed called it justifiable homicide.
One Last Attemptaan MCA Probe
While Korshak's history was being whitewashed in Washington, Wasserman's was about to be similarly glossed in the Golden State. In the interim since he'd first affixed the 1976 Hersh articles to his St. Petersburg, Florida, refrigerator, U.S. Attorney Marvin Rudnick had relocated to the L.A. Strike Force, where he was able to exercise his interest in the likes of Korshak and Wasserman. It was a period of some concern for the Supermob's entertainment wing; over a dozen grand juries were impaneled across the country to delve into corruption in the record business—MCA Music was among those under close scrutiny; on February 14,1986, Ross and Silverman aired a piece on NBC Nightly News that pointed out the mob's relationship with the industry, again with MCA implications.74 Soon, Rudnick would jump into the fray fully loaded.
At the center of the allegations was Sal "the Swindler" Pisello, a New York pizza and ice cream distributor, who had no experience in the music business, but had nonetheless had a strong business relationship with MCA since 1983. In fact, Pisello was a street hood in the Gambino family, who smuggled heroin into the country inside frozen fish and bragged about the executions he had carried out.
Among other things, Pisello had arranged for MCA to purchase the catalog belonging to Chicago's Chess Records, which featured black artists like Chuck Berry, Etta James, Muddy Waters, and The Dells. MCA also used Pisello to sell off its "cutouts"—otherwise nonsellable older recordings. Legitimate distributors who refused to purchase the musical junk because the promised sweeteners (good records) were not included were routinely roughed up by Pisello's enforcers. Over the years, numerous Eastern crime families had feasted at the trough of cutout records supplied by MCA through Pisello. MCA lost as much as $3 million on these deals, while Pisello made at least $600,000. Unwitting MCA employees were startled at how Pisello was received when he visited MCA headquarters. According to Los Angeles Times reporter Bill Knoedelseder, who covered Pisello's connection to MCA, "He had the run of the place."75
Pisello was just one of many embarrassments nipping at MCA's heels. According to U.S. Attorney Carolyn Henneman, New York mobster and convicted tax cheat Edward Sciandra had been directing "hundreds of thousands of dollars" of MCA's Universal division film processing to a company "in return for ten percent in cash under the table."76
With the blessing of L.A. Strike Force chief David Margolis, Rudnick subpoenaed four top MCA executives, who quickly advised that they would plead the Fifth before the L.A. grand jury. Simultaneously, Strike Force member Richard Stavin was spearheading a second, but overlapping, investigation of MCA's VP and chief of Universal's $100 million
home-video distribution wing, Eugene F. Giaquinto, a former New Yorker. According to FBI wiretaps placed at MCA headquarters, Giaquinto was continuing to send Universal's videographic business to a mob-infiltrated Pennsylvania firm, North Star Graphics, even though it had been caught bilking Universal out of hundreds of thousands of dollars back in 1981.
One wiretap had Giaquinto telling the Mafia contact at North Star to stop the bilking or he would have his New York boyhood pal John Gotti read him the riot act. The taps also revealed that Giaquinto enlisted Gotti-Gambino soldiers to come to L.A. to put a stop to production of a biopic of Meyer Lansky that Godfather star James Caan wanted to make with the Genovese mob, with whom Caan was quite friendly—Giaquinto had dreams of making his own Lansky-approved film. However, neither film was ever made.77 Giaquinto was fired from MCA when the probe was made public, but he was never indicted.
The wiretaps also revealed the possibility that mob money was being laundered through at least four motion picture productions, but that the mob worried whether Wasserman's successor at MCA would be someone with whom they could continue to conduct business as they had with Giaquinto. Stavin told CBS's 60 Minutes in 1989 that the tapped conversations "are quite clear that Giaquinto was the Mafia's man within MCA."78 In April 1988, Pisello was convicted of tax evasion on $400,000 in unreported MCA income and sentenced to four years in prison. Rudnick and Stavin hoped that this would be just the beginning of a probe that would determine why MCA would be in business with this crowd. In fact, it was the end of the investigation—a typical "show bust" that saw the low-level Italian connection collared, while the Supermob enablers skated.