Reporter

by Seymour M. Hersh

  In those first few weeks in New York, I tried like hell to get Abe to assign me to the team dealing with the city’s budget crisis and the Ford administration’s refusal to provide any bailout funds. The very man who insisted that I had to expand my reporting skills to compensate for the paper’s failings on the Watergate story was absolutely not interested in turning those acquired skills to reporting on the city’s crisis. Abe simply saw me as a go-to guy on national security. As such, I was told I was free to fly back and forth to Washington as much as I needed.

  I pouted. I still had weeks of accumulated vacation time, so I began playing a lot of midday tennis with some new Times colleagues who loved the game. The group occasionally included James Goodale, the paper’s general counsel, who had a significant role in the paper’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers. Goodale was a terrific athlete who did not worry about taking long, long tennis lunches. I traveled on and off to Washington and wrote occasional stories about the clumsiness of the Senate’s investigation into CIA abuses or about a new tell-all book by a burned-out former CIA agent. It was blah-blah stuff until I again ran into Adam Walinsky, the bright lawyer who had worked for Bobby Kennedy when he was attorney general and in the Senate and knew me slightly from my days in the 1968 McCarthy campaign. Walinsky was an organized-crime buff, as was Kennedy, and he challenged me to do an exposé of a low-profile Los Angeles lawyer named Sidney Korshak. Walinsky depicted him as one of the major players in organized crime. He had ties to many corrupt leaders of organized labor, and especially to the Teamsters Union, long before it was taken over by Jimmy Hoffa. Korshak, who grew up on Chicago’s West Side, had been a common street thug as a youth but had expanded his authority and influence after going to law school. He was a fixer and middleman who had never been indicted, although many grand juries had considered doing so. If I decided to take him on, Walinsky added, I’d be wise to hire a guy named Jeff Gerth, a graduate school dropout from Columbia University who had written some of the best stuff on the mob for various alternative media.

  The Times was ecstatic that Hersh was finally getting off his ass to do a juicy story, and I was given carte blanche to do what I wanted. If I needed some kid to help out, so be it. I went looking for Gerth and found him playing the piano in the middle of a sunny afternoon in Berkeley, California, and realized within a few minutes that Walinsky had been right—the kid had it. He was a lot younger than I was, unattached, willing to travel, and totally sure of himself when it came to facts about organized crime. I hired him and off we went. We were both loners, and we both wanted to get things right the first time. Within a few weeks, we had tracked down a highly secret FBI file on Korshak that told how he had morphed from a small-time lawyer and fixer in Chicago in the 1930s into a big-time lawyer and union fixer in Los Angeles who was socializing a few decades later with the likes of Lew Wasserman, a leading theatrical agent in Hollywood, and the leadership of the Democratic Party. Korshak could stop a Teamsters strike on a Hollywood set with a telephone call and had enough power to save Frank Sinatra’s career by ordering that he be cast for a major role in From Here to Eternity. Korshak was considered essentially untouchable by 1976. The late Jimmy Breslin, the New York columnist, was said to have always insisted that the mob was run by nine Italians and a Jewish lawyer named Sidney.

  The FBI files showed that Korshak had made one big mistake in his career: He had betrayed a leading Chicago businessman by testifying against him in a divorce suit. The businessman owned a chain of department stores in Chicago, a strong union town, and had turned in the early 1940s to Korshak, still a small-time fixer, for help in bribing the Teamsters Union. The leadership got rich while the cost of shipping dropped and the rank and file earned less.

  The businessman became a source for the FBI but knew better than to testify in court or on the record about their joint criminal activities. The guy still wanted payback, though, and we offered him a safe way to get it. Betraying a key mobster is not done lightly, to be sure, and so Jeff and I did all we could to mask our informant’s identity as he led us to others who had been screwed by Korshak and were willing to talk about it.

  I had no idea how deeply the mob had penetrated society until one evening in the spring of 1976 when I got a call at home from John Van de Kamp, the Los Angeles County district attorney who was doing what he could to support our investigation. My wife was studying at med school, and I was making hamburgers for two grumpy children who wanted a better meal. Van de Kamp’s message was succinct: “Get to a pay phone now, and call me. It’s serious.” He gave me his personal number. I do not remember what I told the children, but they got the message and did not move until I returned. There was a pay phone at the local candy store that also doubled as a bookie joint, and I called John from there. He told me that he had learned that Korshak’s people had all of my travel and telephone records from inside the Times; this meant, he said, that any confidential sources I and Jeff had were compromised and could be in danger. I had been using Times credit cards for travel and a telephone whose monthly bill, with each call listed, was paid by the paper, which meant, if Van de Kamp was right, that everyone who had been talking to me and Jeff was screwed.

  We warned those who needed to know to protect themselves and learned, after a very cautious and quiet inquiry by the newspaper, that one of the clerks in the Times treasury office, where the reporters’ monthly expense account receipts were sorted and paid, was from Chicago and had a family connection to the mob. He was to be fired, but not immediately, so I was told, and I was given another method of getting my expenses reimbursed.

  As we worked our way around America, Korshak’s Los Angeles lawyers wrote a series of threatening letters to Abe Rosenthal while continuing to refuse our requests for an interview with the big guy. Rosenthal and the editors seemed to be behind our story all the way, although I knew the six months Jeff and I had been working together had been very costly. On our last trip to Los Angeles, a few weeks before our four-part series was to be published, I figured what the hell and once more dialed the telephone number we had for the Korshak house. Someone answered. I said who I was and asked to speak to Mr. Korshak. There was a pause, then Korshak, speaking softly and calling me Mr. Hersh, accused me of having slandered him “from one end of the country to the other.” “Mr. Hersh,” he said, “let me ask, why are you interested in me? You are a specialist in writing about mass murders, with blood filling ditches.” He talked for a few more minutes about blood, death, mayhem, slaughter; it did not take me nearly that long to get the drift. He had threatened me without doing it. I was rattled, and impressed.

  Our series was edited and reedited because of appropriate legal concerns—Korshak had never been indicted—as well as by ambitious deputy editors eager to show Abe that they could make a Hersh series sing. It was a problem I had not had while in Washington, and the constant fiddling with the series—invariably only with the first few paragraphs—led me one afternoon, amid great disgust at the editorial mischief, to toss my typewriter through the glass window in my office and go home early. I arrived the next day to find the window replaced, and my office cleaned of glass, and not one word about it was said to me. I never bothered to throw my typewriter again, but I did write Abe a note bitching about the process. I got a note back from him within an hour or so, and it made me laugh.

  It began,

  Speaking of memos: It should interest you to note that at this moment a good part of The New York Times has come to a standstill because the deputy managing editor, one assistant managing editor, one acting national editor and one assistant national editor are tied up as they have been all day, and for days past, in trying to get your series into printable form. It seems to me that if I were a reporter whose work needed that much attention, I would be slightly embarrassed and hugely grateful. Unlike you and me, the editors involved are polite and civilized individuals.

  “Unlike you and me.” Abe did have his moments.
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  The series finally was scheduled to be published on a Sunday in early June, and, sure enough, the Teamsters Union staged a wildcat strike the afternoon before, and half a million or so Sunday editions did not make it outside New York for days. It seemed clear that someone inside the Times was still in touch with the boys. Ironically, the edition did not have the first of the Korshak series in it; it had been pulled at the last moment for yet another look by Abe’s staff and the lawyers. It ran two weeks later, with no trouble from the Teamsters.

  The sense I had was that Abe and his senior staff did not think the series was worth the cost in money and time—mine and that of the editors assigned to bludgeon it. Gerth and I had done our job, and nearly all of the most significant allegations of political and financial corruption ended up in the series, but neither of us had heard a kind word since we began our work. The first compliment I got, on the Monday after the series began, came from a senior editor who had not, to my knowledge, been involved in the processing of the series. He called me into his office and told me, with both excitement and awe, that the high-end corporate players in his Sunday morning doubles game in suburban Connecticut were full of praise for the takedown of Korshak. One of the foursome was the chief executive officer of a major corporation that had a Hollywood division. The division had a film ready to go into production when there was a dispute and the Teamsters Union struck the set. The show did not go on. The CEO was asked if he could help. He made a few phone calls and learned that the guy to go to was Korshak, who was tracked down at a country club in Los Angeles. He told Korshak his problem; Korshak took down the data and said he would look into it. A few hours later the CEO’s men in Hollywood called with congratulations: He had worked a miracle; the union dropped its protest, and production was starting. The CEO called Korshak, who immediately waived off the question of a fee; not a problem, he said, adding that sometime in the future he would need a favor and the CEO would owe him. The matter rested there for a year or so, until Korshak telephoned the CEO and said he was in New York and wanted to stop by. He arrived with a well-known blond movie star on his arm. What can I do for you? asked the CEO. I’d like to be on your board of directors, Korshak said. The CEO of course knew who Korshak was and what he represented, and he also knew there was no way he could put him on the board. He was terror struck. Eventually, a cashier’s check for fifty or a hundred thousand dollars—the editor could not recall which—was delivered to Korshak’s hotel. And that was it, the editor told me. Great story, eh? I asked for the name of the CEO. The editor said it did not matter. I then told him that his tennis partner had violated a series of federal antiracketeering and antiunion laws and needed to be exposed for doing so. The editor’s resistance to naming names was why bums like Korshak could continue to prey on businessmen and the innocent. Corruption was corruption. It was a very bad moment and got worse when the editor angrily ordered me out of his office.

  I personally was thrilled with the Korshak series. It was about an ugly America that few knew about and even fewer wanted to do something about. I wasn’t going after a high-level intelligence operative buried deep inside official Washington who would not stop what he was doing after a critical story but find a better way to mask it. My target went beyond Korshak to the corporate wheeler-dealers who were his enablers and protectors. I also hoped the series would embarrass those newspapers in Los Angeles that chose not to tell it like it was; let them feel anxiety. The reporters who followed organized crime understood what I and Gerth had done. Sidney Zion, a New York journalist with a working knowledge of the seedy, wrote an essay in 1996 for the New York Daily News that depicted Korshak as an untouchable “man of mystery.” An FBI agent once cautioned him, Zion said, “never to bother to try to get him. ‘We had Bobby [Kennedy], the Justice Department, we had the newspapers, we had the Senate and we got zero. Sidney Korshak is immune, don’t waste your time.’ ” He described me, aided by Jeff, as “the first journalist to go after [him].” Zion then told of a party at Lew Wasserman’s home in Los Angeles that took place on the day the first of the Korshak series was published. The story, he wrote, had

  bloodied Korshak’s nose, exposing him as a major underworld and overworld figure in the universe of show business, labor, politics and finance….I got a call from a guy who was at [the] party….“Nobody wanted to talk about the Times story on Sidney,” my pal said….“But all they did was whisper about it. Then suddenly Sidney walked in the door. Silence. You could hear the proverbial pin drop. Then Lew Wasserman walked over to Sidney, threw his arms around him. Everybody breathed again, and the party went on.”

  The editors of the paper might have sniffed at what six months’ work and many tens of thousands of dollars had delivered, but the Times editorial page got it right, in my view: At the close of the series it noted, “A basic responsibility of the press is to lay out the evidence when it points to a serious threat to the public interest and when that evidence shows chronic problems and major weaknesses and deficiencies in national institutions. The series on Mr. Korshak does just that.”

  We talk often in the newspaper business about stories having legs—that is, they generate more information, sometimes years later. It happened two times with the Korshak series. Jeff and I—and the FBI—could never pin a murder on Korshak, though it was widely believed, or known, that if Korshak gave a thumbs-down, someone lost his or her life. We had tried to get one of Korshak’s nieces to talk to us after learning that she was estranged from the family, and especially from Uncle Sidney. She gave us coffee but explained that she was just too frightened to talk.

  Some months after the series was published, I got a telephone call at home from the niece and was told a story that put to rest my question about what had happened in the fall of 1960 to a local politician, a reformer, whom I had written about while I was still editing the useless weekly. He had been murdered in a gangland slaying. The Korshak niece said she would give me a taste of her uncle’s hypocrisy and ruthlessness, but only if I promised not to write it, which I did. The incident took place twenty-five years before, when she was about twelve years old, and it was in the early fall—Rosh Hashanah seder time at the home of a Korshak relative in a suburb north of the city. She was picked up in a Cadillac driven by Uncle Sidney, the patriarch of the family who, she understood even then, was a man of menace. She was in the backseat with Sidney’s two sons, both roughly her age, and they were playing word games. She was singing a song that went, “Eenie, meenie, miney mo; catch a nigger by the toe.” With that word, Korshak slammed on the brakes, turned around, and slapped her hard on her cheek, saying, “We don’t want them talking about us that way, and we don’t talk that way about them.” She was terrified and wept hysterically. Later, as Uncle Sidney was leading the seder, there was a call and a family member brought the telephone to him, saying it was urgent. Korshak listened for a moment and then said, “Good. You got the goy.” The seder went on. The next day’s newspapers were filled with stories of a reformer in southwest Chicago who had been executed in what clearly was a gangland slaying. I wanted to believe—I did believe—that the goy was my man.

  Korshak’s name came up years later at a Washington lunch with a onetime fund-raiser for Democrats. He knew I wrote the Korshak series and told me the following story. Things were not going well in a crowded primary race for a presidential candidate he was supporting, he said, and money, lots of it, was an immediate necessity. The desperate fund-raiser was told to get in touch with someone named Lew Wasserman in Los Angeles. He could help. The fund-raiser had never heard of Wasserman but made the call. He was told to get in touch with someone named Korshak and given a phone number. He made that call and reached Korshak, who was in Las Vegas, and they arranged to meet the next day. The fund-raiser proposed 11:00 a.m.; a bemused Korshak told him that no one in Vegas meets that early. The fund-raiser arrived at 4:00 p.m. at the designated hotel on the Strip and was taken to a meeting room where Korshak was holding fort
h, surrounded by a collection of hard-looking men. You’re the guy from Washington? Korshak asked. Yes. Korshak pointed at two men and told them to take care of the fellow from Washington, and explained that he was going to stick around with the other guys and have a little party. The two thugs walked the fund-raiser into the casino, swarming with bettors, and shooed a group of gamblers away from a craps table. It was just the fund-raiser, a croupier, and the two thugs. “You ever play craps?” one asked. The fund-raiser said no. Just do what we tell you, he was told. The thug then told the croupier to put ten thousand dollars in chips on the table. She did. Roll the dice, he said to the fund-raiser. He did so. The dice came up with one dot and two dots. “Lucky you,” said the thug. “A seven.” A much larger chunk of chips was placed on the table. “Roll again.” The fund-raiser, knowing nothing about a winner-take-all pass line bet if a seven or eleven is rolled, was confused and hesitated. “Throw the fucking dice, you moron,” he was told. He did so. A three and a six came up. “Another seven,” said the thug, and the pile was overflowing. The fund-raiser was told to collect the chips, take them to the cashier, and go home. He did so, with enough cash to keep the campaign alive for many weeks. It was a terrific lesson in the working of democracy.