Between You and Me

by Mike Wallace

  Zekman and a BGA investigator had come up with their own version of our phony clinic, in this case a neighborhood bar called (appropriately) the Mirage Tavern. Identifying themselves as the husband-and-wife owners of the tavern, they soon became clients of Barasch, who schooled them in the discreet niceties of bribe bestowal. His counsel was not confined to bribery: He also advised them on how to reduce their tax bite by shaving 40 percent off their income reports.

  For me, the high point of the assignment came when I interviewed Phil Barasch in a hotel suite we had rented. After asking him a few leading questions, which he parried, I summoned Zekman and her “husband,” the BGA watchdog, from an adjoining room. Once Barasch realized he had been set up, he reluctantly acknowledged that he had given the couple advice on how to pay off the city inspectors. But he vigorously denied that he had shown them how to falsify their income reports. Shifting to a sympathetic tone (and a more subtle ploy), I suggested there was no reason for him to be so uptight about it, because it was my understanding that people who ran small cash-oriented businesses like the Mirage Tavern routinely received

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  pointers from their accountants on how to conceal part of their income. I should also mention that even though our CBS camera was quietly rolling, we were in a private hotel suite where there was a strong sense of being cut off from the rest of the world. Which helps to explain what happened next. When Barasch agreed that the wide-spread practice of tax fraud was “common knowledge,” I gently moved in for the payoff, using a phrase that I would later adopt as the title of this book.

  W A L L A C E : I know it’s common knowledge, and apparently, you are among the people who do it. That’s all that we’re trying to— I mean, look, between you and me—

  B A R A S C H : Yeah.

  W A L L A C E : —you do it, everybody does it.

  B A R A S C H : I presume everybody does it to an extent . . .

  W A L L A C E : You mean, if they wanted to put every tax accountant in jail who did that kind of thing—

  B A R A S C H : They’d all be in.

  Between you and me! Poor Phil Barasch had allowed himself to forget that our interview was being recorded on-camera, and when we broadcast the piece a few weeks later, his statement that “everybody does it” (including him) was made “between you and me” and the millions of viewers who were watching 60 Minutes that night. In large part because of that admission, a federal grand jury subpoenaed Barasch’s records and those of five other accountants who had been hired by the Mirage Tavern.

  A California story that caught our attention had to do with a clinic at a spa called Murrieta Hot Springs. It promised to provide

  “miracle cures” to victims of cancer and other serious diseases.

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  From various sources, we heard about complaints that the man who ran the place, R. J. Rudd, went out of his way to court wealthy patients who, once enrolled in the cure program, were pressured into making large financial contributions to the clinic. Acting on the theory that it takes a con game to catch a con man, the producer of the story, Marion Goldin, and her film crew—cameraman Greg Cook and soundman James Camery—enrolled at Murrieta under false pretenses. Camery identified himself as a wealthy investment counselor who was suffering from an illness that had recently been diagnosed as leukemia. Cook claimed to be Camery’s concerned nephew, and to justify the camera equipment he had brought with him, he said he was a professional photographer, which actually was not that far from the truth. As for Goldin, she pretended to be the ailing man’s longtime secretary. To enhance the impression of afflu-ence, our 60 Minutes trio arrived at the clinic in a rented Rolls-Royce.

  During their weeklong stay at Murrieta, our three poseurs were able to obtain enough information to prove that the clinic was an utterly fraudulent enterprise that had indeed been established for the sole purpose of prying donations out of wealthy patients, most of whom were elderly as well as ill. With their hidden camera and microphone, Goldin, Cook, and Camery were able to film and record most of that evidence. When the time came for me to appear on the scene, I had all the ammunition I needed to confront Rudd with a flurry of incriminating practices, from bogus diagnoses (Camery, who in truth was in fine health, was told by the doctor who examined him that his illness was not leukemia but a “leaky lung” that required treatment) to phony medications that were nothing more than place-bos. But when I accused him directly of running “a con-game operation,” he piously denied it.

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  When we probed into Rudd’s shady past, we learned that Murrieta had been preceded by several other fraudulent schemes he had concocted over the years, and in other states besides California. In a spin-off of the title from an avant-garde French film, Last Year at Marienbad, we called our report “This Year at Murrieta,” and a few months after we broadcast it in January 1978, Rudd was convicted in Florida of bilking an elderly woman stricken with leukemia out of twenty-five thousand dollars in a land-investment swindle. The Murrieta Hot Springs health spa was declared bankrupt with liabilities of nearly thirty-seven million dollars.

  Early on in my interview with R. J. Rudd—before I revealed that the wealthy folks who had arrived at his clinic in a Rolls-Royce were, in reality, members of the 60 Minutes team—he tried to impress me with his academic credentials. He boasted that he had a Ph.D. each in economics and philosophy, and to back up those claims, he showed me his diplomas from Christian Tennessee University and Trinity Christian College in Florida. I had never heard of either school, and with good reason; when we did some checking, we learned that Rudd’s diplomas were nothing more than mail-order degrees from fic-titious universities. We naturally included his phony education in

  “This Year at Murrieta,” and in the flood of mail that came our way after we aired the piece, we read about numerous other people who had acquired sham diplomas. Our curiosity aroused, we went to work on an investigative story called “A Matter of Degrees.”

  We soon discovered that diploma mills were a thriving industry from coast to coast. After looking over the crowded field, we decided to concentrate on California Pacifica University in Los Angeles. We were drawn to that college by its promotional brochure, which characterized California Pacifica as “the custodian of the intellectual capital of mankind.” Our next move was to provide a “student” worthy of

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  that academic bastion. We arranged for a 60 Minutes cameraman, Wade Bingham, to meet with the president of California Pacifica, Ernest Sinclair.

  Bingham, who was in his early fifties, had attended college as a young man for just one year. But Sinclair assured Bingham that his thirty years as a cameramanwere all the credits he needed for a master’s degree in business administration. Bingham paid $2,150 for tuition, and although he never went to class, never read a textbook, and never took an exam, he received his degree from California Pacifica.

  Not long after Bingham’s “graduation,” a film crew and I visited the California Pacifica “campus,” which was located in a Hollywood building just above a wig shop. I’ll never forget the expressiononErnest Sinclair’s face whenwe walked into his office. Eventhough he was talking onthe phone at the time, he promptly acknowledged our arrival.

  S I N C L A I R : (On phone) Hey, wait a minute. Hey, 60 Minutes is in here. Can you believe it?

  W A L L A C E : How are you?

  S I N C L A I R : 60 Minutes here! Hold the phone.

  W A L L A C E : Nice to see you.

  S I N C L A I R : (Still on phone) I’m trying to tell you his name.

  Let’s see . . . Hey, this is my favorite. Gosh! What’s your—

  What’s your last name?

  W A L L A C E : Wallace. Mike Wallace.

  S I N C L A I R : Mike Wallace!

  The
effusive greeting was typical of Sinclair, who turned out to be one of the most engaging rogues I’ve ever encountered. His flaky exuberance was a large part of his charm, and when I questioned him, he cheerfully admitted that his fake-diploma operationwas a lucrative

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  racket. I complimented him on the slick brochure for California Pacifica and the impressive array of faculty members featured in it. I then asked him about some of them, starting with a man named Mario Ugarte, who was identified as the dean of the college of education.

  W A L L A C E : Is he here now?

  S I N C L A I R : He’s not here.

  W A L L A C E : Rosalba Riano, the administrative assistant?

  S I N C L A I R : Right. We did make communication with her by telephone, and she is alive and well, and she’s in New York in the garment district.

  W A L L A C E : But she’s no longer your administrative assistant?

  S I N C L A I R : No. I know I’m— No, she never did come to our school.

  W A L L A C E : Terrel Harvey, is he still deanof your college of law?

  S I N C L A I R : I could— I could probably say yes, and I could probably say no.

  Although his glib patter was entertaining, Sinclair was talking himself into serious trouble, and he must have understood that, because he was no stranger to legal difficulty. He already had served time in three states for mail fraud, and a few days after we broadcast

  “A Matter of Degrees” in April 1978, he was arrested and once again charged with that crime. Ingratiating to the end, Sinclair later wrote from prison to let me know that he intended, finally, to go straight and to thank me for helping put him on the road to reform.

  And so it went through the late 1970s and beyond as we steadily built up our investigative credentials and infused 60 Minutes with a bold new spirit and identity. It was around this time that someone

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  came up with the line “You know it’s going to be a tough week when you show up at your office on a Monday morning and a 60 Minutes camera crew is waiting there.” The remark soon became a kind of defining mantra that we heartily embraced. In the eyes of our admirers, our show had become a television descendant of the muckrakers, that vigorous breed of reformers whose moral passion and diligent reporting did so much to strengthen the craft of journalism back in the early 1900s.

  We also had more than a few detractors. For the most part, the criticisms that came our way had to do with the various deceptions we employed to get the goods on our quarries. By the early 1980s, the complaints had become so frequent that almost every time we aired an investigative story, our tactics were called into question. So we decided to confront the accusations directly in the open forum of our own broadcast, and in September 1981 we launched the new season with a special edition of 60 Minutes, a program devoted entirely to the subject of our alleged transgressions.

  We invited three distinguished print journalists to appear on the show: Eugene Patterson, the crusty veteran editor of the St. Peters-burg Times (and before that, The Atlanta Constitution and The Washington Post); Ellen Goodman, the syndicated columnist from The Boston Globe; and Bob Greene of Newsday, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his work as an investigative reporter. In one of his rare on-camera appearances, Hewitt sat in on behalf of 60 Minutes, and so, in my humble, self-effacing way, did I.

  To provide stimulus for our panel discussion, we looked at excerpts from some of our more flamboyant investigative pieces, including “The Clinic on Morse Avenue” and “This Year at Murrieta.”

  Most of the criticisms were voiced by Patterson and Goodman, and they centered on our use of hidden cameras and other furtive tech-

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  niques. The phrases used most frequently in the objections were

  “ambush journalism” and “entrapment.” To no one’s surprise, Hewitt and I did not agree with those assessments, especially when it came to the charge of entrapment. We noted, for example, that although the two men who had presented themselves as comanagers of our mock clinic in Chicago were, in reality, staff members of the Better Government Association, at no time and in no way did they suggest the clinic was seeking kickbacks of any kind. In every case, it was the visitors from the laboratories who initiated those offers, and all we did was document their proposals.

  It was altogether fitting that I was the correspondent on the hot seat when we faced our critics that night. There’s no denying that, for better or for worse, I was the on-air reporter who was most closely associated with our adventures in investigative journalism. One reason for that was because the producers I worked with were especially eager to explore that challenging terrain, and let me take a moment here to doff my cap to two of them in particular: Barry Lando and Marion Goldin. Lando produced the Chicago stories on our bogus clinic and Mirage Tavern, as well as some others of that nature before he moved on to Paris, where he became my main producer on the assignments that took me to the Middle East and other overseas locations. The many stories I did with Goldin included the California pieces on Murrieta and Ernest Sinclair’s diploma mill.

  Even though I did not agree with the charges leveled against us on that special edition of 60 Minutes (a broadcast that, by the way, was Goldin’s idea), I didn’t think we were entirely blameless. In my opinion, our major fault was an excess of zeal. There were times when we got so caught up in the investigative fever that we adopted a sort of crusade mentality and wound up doing reports that projected more heat than light. One day in 1980 another member of my producing team, Norman Gorin (who also did some first-rate work in the

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  investigative sphere), received a call from a friend who said he had a story proposal. Gorin had a keen sense of humor, and his first response was: “Yes, but is it a national disgrace? It has to be a national disgrace. That’s the only kind of story I’m allowed to work on these days.”

  As we moved into the 1980s, we trimmed our sails a bit, in terms of both the tactics we used and the number of pieces we did. When I say “we,” I’m referring to all the correspondents who worked on 60

  Minutes. Just because I was more heavily involved in investigative reporting than my on-air colleagues were doesn’t mean that they steered clear of the genre. All of them had delved into scams of one kind or another, and eventhough we cut back onthe volume, all of us continued through the years that followed to take on periodic assignments that enabled us to add fresh portraits to our respective rogues’ galleries.

  Twenty-one of those portraits were selected for publication in a 2003 book called Con Men. Compiled by a freelance editor named Ian Jackman, Con Men is (in the clarion boast of the subtitle) an om-nibus of “fascinating profiles of swindlers and rogues from the files of the most successful broadcast in television history.” The opening chapter is an account of my 1978 story on R. J. Rudd and his contemptible clinic at Murrieta Hot Springs, followed by other pieces we did over the next two decades, various stories by each of the show’s correspondents.

  I was asked to write anintroductionto the book, and I beganit by recalling a comment that Morley Safer made back in 1981 or there-abouts. “A crook,” he said, “doesn’t feel he’s really made it as a crook until we’ve told his story on 60 Minutes.” Over the years we’ve done our best to give more thana few crooks the recognitionthey deserved.

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  S E V E N

  T H E G E N E R A L A N D T H E

  W H I S T L E - B L O W E R

  G e n e r a l W i l l i a m C . W e s t m o r e l a n d OF ALL THE CONTROVERSIES I’VE been caught up in over the years, none was as traumatic as the firestorm that erupted in 1982 after we broadcast a CBS Reports documentary called “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception.” That furor was one for the ages, and before it finally ran its course over
three years later, my CBS colleagues and I had to go through the ordeal of a $120 million libel suit. In addition, I was stricken with a severe case of clinical depression. The irony is that until we did that documentary, I had a fairly cordial relationship with the principal figure in our story, General William C. Westmoreland. I certainly did not agree with all his military assessments and optimistic predictions when he was in comB E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

  mand of our forces in Vietnam, but I had no reason to question his honor or integrity. And Westmoreland had indicated that he had some respect for my work as a reporter.

  I first met the general in March 1967, when I began a two-month assignment in Vietnam. This was over a year before the birth of 60

  Minutes, and I had been working as a field correspondent since the summer of ’66, when I relinquished my anchor post on the CBS

  Morning News. Most of my reporting during this period dealt with domestic politics and civil rights, which was just fine, except I wanted to take a break from that drill and spend some time overseas.

  By the mid-1960s, no foreign story was bigger than the war in Vietnam, so I asked my bosses to send me to Saigon.

  I was told in advance that Westmoreland welcomed the arrival of older reporters in Vietnam, in large part because he believed that those of us who had served in World War II (I was a junior naval officer in the Pacific theater) were more likely to be in tune with the values and judgments of senior officers like him. I don’t know how much that mattered, but I will say that, like millions of other Americans, I was an early supporter of our military mission in Vietnam. As time went on, I began to question the decisions that gradually transformed the conflict into a full-scale American war, and by 1967, I shared in the growing concern over the fact that even after all those escalations, we’d been unable to achieve the victory we’d been led to expect.