by Gus Russo
"Good. Take your best shot, motherfucker," railed Evans. "One of us, pal, only one of us is going to come out in one piece."
Slamming down the phone, Evans called his go-to man, Father Sidney, who offered the solution. At Korshak's direction, Evans hired a particular attorney, who, within two weeks, compiled a dossier on McQueen that, according to Evans, was almost one foot thick. When the file was shown to McQueen and his attorney, they crumbled. Not only was McQueen prevented from renaming the child, he was forced to eat more crow when he agreed to only refer to Joshua's father as "Mister Evans.""'52
A final post-Godfather favor for Evans was not quite as successful. When his contract with Paramount was up for renegotiation, Evans told Korshak that, since he had elevated Paramount from ninth to first in studio profits, he felt he should make mogul money.
Bob Evans (left) with Mia Farrow and Roman Polanski, 1968 (Photofest)
"I'll take care of it and quick," Korshak told Evans. "You're gonna get gross." Bluhdorn, however, would hear none of it. The best Korshak could obtain for Evans was a one-film-per-year independent production deal that would see him share any profits fifty-fifty with Paramount. Evans took the deal and formed Robert Evans Productions, but later lamented, "Korshak was a negotiator, not an entertainment attorney."53
Evans went on to produce a number of successful films, such as Marathon Man (1976) and Urban Cowboy (1980). But perhaps his greatest post-Godfather triumph was a film laden with Supermob irony, Chinatown (1974). Directed by a brilliant Polish pederast named Roman Polanski, the same man who helmed Paramount's Rosemary's Baby, the film thinly fictionalizes William Mulholland's "Rape of Owens Valley" (see chapter 4). Since the savage murder of Polanski's pregnant actress wife Sharon Tate and four of her jet-set pals by Charles Manson's "family" on August 9, 1969, Polanski had begun indulging his predilection for having sex with children, thirteen- to fifteen-year-old girls preferably, as a way to assuage his grief. * The sickness would eventually bring him before Korshak's great friend Judge Laurence Rittenband. In the film Chinatown, which also included a Polanski nod to sexual perversion, the character Hollis Mulwray subbed for William Mulholland. It is not known if Evans was aware of the similarities between the California land and water grabs of Mulholland/Mulwray and those of Korshak's Supermob associates Greenberg/Ziffren/Bazelon.
Chinatown marked the high point of Evans's career, which was soon to succumb to a cocaine-fueled hedonism that was extreme even by Hollywood standards.
The Man with the Golden Touch
Korshak's casting prowess was again evidenced in the spring of 1971—just one month after The Godfather went into production—when Korshak's
great friend producer Cubby Broccoli was casting a new film, and Korshak had an idea as to who should get the lead.
Albert Romolo "Cubby" Broccoli was born in 1909, the son of immigrants from Calabria, Italy. The Broccolis were in the vegetable business, with one of Cubby's uncles actually having brought the first broccoli seeds into the United States in the 1870s. In 1933, after years of toiling in the vegetable business, Cubby visited his cousin (and ex-husband of blond movie goddess Thelma Todd) Pat DeCicco, a Hollywood agent and starlet gofer for Howard Hughes, and decided to get into the movie business.'1" "Pat had brass balls and was very charming," said friend Tom Mankiewicz, screenwriting son of director Joseph Mankiewicz. "He'd take guests to Hughes's island in the Bahamas—the island would always be filled with Pat and his people."54 Coincidentally, on his first flight to L.A., Broccoli sat next to Korshak pal Jake "the Barber"
Factor.55 After working on the Howard Hughes film The Outlaw (and becoming close to Hughes), Broccoli moved to England, where he entered into a producing partnership with Harry Saltzman, and in the late 1950s they bought the screen rights to the James Bond novels of MCA client Ian Fleming, producing the first Bond movie, Dr. No, for $1 million in 1962.i"'56
In the interim, Broccoli relocated to Beverly Hills, where he nourished his friendships with Sid Korshak, Lew Wasserman, Greg Bautzer, Mike Romanoff, and others in their circle.
"Cubby Broccoli and Sidney were like brothers," said a Korshak family friend. "They had lunch together at the Bistro all the time."57 Tom Mankiewicz recently said, "Cubby and Sidney's relationship was amazing."
In early 1971, Broccoli was prepping the seventh film in his Bond franchise, Diamonds Are Forever, a roman a clef parody of his friend Howard Hughes. By this time, Hughes was a debilitated billionaire hermit, recently relocated to the Bahamas after being holed up for two years in the Desert Inn, which he'd purchased from Moe Dalitz. Insiders knew that the white-collar tycoons would soon be squeezing the mob out of its own creation. In Broccoli's version, the Hughes character was named Willard Whyte, owner of the Whyte House casino, and a pawn in a nefarious scheme to build a massive superlaser out of thousands of smuggled diamonds. Assisting Bond in saving both Whyte and the planet Earth was a beautiful diamond smuggler (rehabilitated by Bond, of course) named Tiffany Case.
Cubby and Dana Broccoli, 1993 (private collection)
The film production would inevitably unite friends Broccoli and Korshak, since much of the story would be filmed in Korshak's Las Vegas dominion, with key scenes shot in his Riviera Casino. In the Encyclopedia ofFantastic Film and Television, buried way down the Diamonds Are Forever credits, is this entry: "Legal advisor (Las Vegas): Sidney Korshak (uncred-ited)." But Korshak did much more than guarantee the cooperation of Vegas Teamsters—it appears he once again assisted the casting department.
Journalist Peter Evans first broke the story of Korshak's intervention, writing, "In Los Angeles, attorney Sidney Korshak, who was helping Broccoli set up location deals in Las Vegas, asked whether a small role could be arranged for actress Jill St. John, a close friend of his. She had been up for various Bond heroines before but never with success."58 According to the film's then twenty-eight-year-old screenwriter, Tom Mankiewicz, Jill was given a small supporting role, with Natalie Wood's sister Lana set for the lead role of Tiffany Case. "At some point Jill was going to play Plenty O'Toole, a lot smaller part than Lana would have played," Mankiewicz recalled. "And then she was mysteriously bumped up." Wood recently remembered her casting, saying, "I was contacted by my agent, who said, 'They want you to be in the Bond film.' I was considered for the lead role. I don't know how
Jill St. John with Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever (Photofest)
things got flipped around. I know that Jill was being considered for Plenty O'Toole, but it was supposed to be the exact opposite."*'59
For the young Mankiewicz, the shoot was an eye-opener. "We were up at Sidney's 'house,' the Riviera, which Eddie Torres was running," he remembered. "It was one of the last mob-run hotels in Vegas. Korshak, Jill St.
John, Sean Connery, and others stayed at the Riviera, while the crew stayed at the Happy Times Motel."
Five years after the film's release, when Pat DeCicco suffered a stroke and fell into a coma in Cubby's Beverly Hills home, Cubby was frantic to get him to his New York doctor. When no planes were found on short notice, Broccoli called Korshak, who knew that pal Frank Sinatra had millionaire Faberge perfume-company chief—and airplane owner—George Barrie as a guest at his Palm Springs home. Korshak called Sinatra and obtained the Barrie jet, which whisked DeCicco off to New York, a rescue that revived him from his coma long enough to get his affairs in order.60
As the summer of 1972 wound down, Korshak's confidence was soaring.
According to a top FBI source, in August 1972, Korshak made a $22-per-share offer to purchase one hundred thousand shares of Kerkorian's MGM, a failed bid that would have given him controlling interest in the company.61
*Hoffa's wasn't the only release bought from Nixon by the mob. As president, Nixon pardoned Phil Levin's pal Angelo "Gyp" DeCarlo, described by the FBI as a "methodical gangland executioner." Supposedly terminally ill, DeCarlo was freed after serving less than two years of a twelve-year sentence for extortion. Soon afterward, Newsweek reported the mo
bster was not too ill to be "back at his old rackets, boasting that his connections with [singer Frank] Sinatra freed him."
In FBI files released after Sinatra's 1998 death, a memo of May 24, 1973, describes Sinatra as "a close friend of Angelo DeCarlo of long standing." It adds that in April 1972, DeCarlo asked singer Frankie Valli (when he was performing at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary) to contact Sinatra and have him intercede with Agnew for DeCarlo's release. Eventually, the memo continues, Sinatra "allegedly turned over $100,000 cash to [Nixon campaign finance chairman] Maurice Stans as an unrecorded contribution." Vice-presidential aide Peter Maletesta "allegedly contacted former Presidential Counsel John Dean and got him to make the necessary arrangements to forward the request [for a presidential pardon] to the Justice Department." Sinatra is said to have then made a $50,000 contribution to the president's campaign fund. And, the memo reports, "DeCarlo's release followed."
*Among them, Sam Sciortino, Peter H. Milano, and Joe Lamandri.
*Kerkorian continued to expand at an astounding pace. In 1986, he sold the MGM lot to Adelson's Lorimar Productions. In 2000, he masterminded a $6.4 billion buyout of Wynn's Mirage Resorts, at the time the biggest merger in gaming industry history; on September 13, 2004, Kerkorian sold his film division, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., to
Footnote cont'd
Sony for $2.9 billion, netting him more than $1.7 billion. Variety's Peter Bart wrote that Kerkorian was not only a victim of bad luck, but that he was "out of place in Hollywood . . . He had no real passion for the business . . . [and] never really understood the potential of the ancillary markets" (Variety, 4-25-05). In February 2005, with his Sony deal in hand, Kerkorian laid out $8.7 billion for the purchase of Mandalay Inc., creating a twenty-eight-casino company that will employ more than seventy-five thousand, include seventy-four thousand rooms on the Strip, and control about 40 percent of its slots and about 44 percent of its table games. Among other properties, the merger gave Kerkorian control of the (new) MGM Grand, New York-New York, Bellagio, Mirage, Treasure Island, Monte Carlo, Mandalay Bay, Luxor, Excalibur, and Circus Circus.
Although a career of buying and selling companies in the entertainment and leisure industries has made Kerkorian a billionaire, he remains unaffected in person. Longtime friend General Alexander M. Haig Jr. said, "For a billionaire, he's almost meek . . . I've never heard him raise his voice. It seems like he would just as soon have his actions speak for him."
*Others suggest that Korshak was honored by the inclusion of the Godfather movie character "Tom Hagen," the non-Italian consigliere to the Corleones. In the film, Hagen, much like the rumored Korshak intervention for Sinatra with Columbia's Harry Cohn, met with the president of "Woltz International Pictures" to get an up-and-coming Italian entertainer named "Johnny Fontaine" a role in an upcoming career-making war movie. The famous horse-head scene that followed was supposedly inspired by Korshak's alleged tactic. In the film, the threat was successful for the Corleones—Fontaine landed the part he wanted and became a big star, just as Sinatra had succeeded with Prom Here toEternity.
Also like Korshak, Hagen was offered the vice presidency of a Vegas casino, when toward the end of the second film Michael tells Hagen he can take his "wife, family, and mistress and move them all to Las Vegas." Lastly, just as Korshak briefly ran afoul of his Chicago bosses with the booking of Dinah Shore into the competition's Vegas lounge, Hagen was similarly reprimanded for misplacing his loyalties, with Michael Corleone once warning Hagen that he was "not a wartime consigliere." Neither the fictitious Hagen nor Korshak was ever so careless again.
*On December 20, 1990, The Godfather Part HI premiered in Beverly Hills, and the Immobiliare reference was not lost on insiders such as Peter Bart, who noted that Charlie Bluhdorn had tried numerous times over the years to persuade Francis Coppola to direct a second sequel of The Godfather. Bart wrote that Bluhdorn unfortunately never once
Footnote cont'd
sat down with Coppola to discuss his knowledge of Sindona, the assassination of Pope John Paul I, and other shadowy figures that he had met. Bart believed that if Bluhdorn had taken these steps, this might have prompted an earlier start to the production of TheGodfather III, avoiding the sixteen-year gap between parts II and III. (Bart, Who KilledHollywood', 112-21)
*The man DeLaurentiis set up was Dino Conte, an alleged associate of Alo's and also the Lucchese and Colombo crime families, who went on to produce 48 HRS, Another 48HRS, and Conan the Barbarian. (Wall Street Journal, 7-13-90)
*MacGraw and McQueen divorced in 1978.
*One Polanski friend said, "He told me that after his wife and baby were killed, he changed. He started having sex with young people because he couldn't bear to be with regular women. Regular women wanted commitment from him, and he felt he would be betraying Sharon if he got involved with another woman. So he went after these young girls. That way there was no commitment." (Kiernan, Roman Polanski Story, 229)
*DeCicco was married for a time to millionaire fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt, later the mother of CNN's Anderson Cooper. Among others DeCicco brought to Hughes was Elizabeth Taylor. (Deitrich and Thomas, Howard, 27S)
†The seventeen Bond films Broccoli was associated with were reported to have earned $1 billion worldwide by the time of his death in 1996.
*Other interesting casting included singer/actor Jimmy Dean as Whyte/Hughes, an ironic choice given that Dean was at the time performing in Hughes's Desert Inn. And when Sean Connery initially passed on reprising the Bond role, the part was given to Korshak friend John Gavin, who was forced to withdraw when Connery signed on after having been given a record-breaking $1.25 million fee, all of which he donated to his charity.
CHAPTER 18
From Dutch Sandwiches to Dutch Reagan
As KORSHAK APPROACHED what is retirement age for most Americans, he continued brokering labor peace at his regular pace. Slowly, however, his financial success became a point of criticism among those who regularly paid his exorbitant fees in exchange for little more than a few phone calls. "Sidney was not cheap on his fees," remembered friend and colleague Leo Geffner. "My tongue used to hang out, seeing him make in five minutes what I made in an hour. Most lawyers charged by the hour, but his flat fee: 'Fifty thousand.' It may take just one or two short lunches at the Bistro. And he never carried a yellow pad like most lawyers. He wrote everything down on an envelope, if you can believe that."1
Where Were They When Cap one Needed Them?
In 1973, soon after attending the February 9 funeral of Ralph Stolkin in Palm Springs with Tony Accardo,2 Korshak was paid $300,000 for his minor role in facilitating an offshore tax dodge for the Supermob's Charlie Bluhdorn and Lew Wasserman. Three years earlier, Paramount's Bluhdorn had persuaded Wasserman and MCA-Universal to enter into a foreign partnership, Cinema International Corporation (CIC), an unethical masterstroke that allowed the companies to avoid both U.S. antitrust laws and U.S. taxes. Universal and Paramount would later form a distribution partnership called Universal International Pictures (UIP), referred to by Edward Epstein as "a highly profitable off-the-books foreign-based corporation."3
The concept, a mirror of the Pritzkers' Castle Bank arrangement in the Bahamas, allowed the merger to pool overseas resources for film distribution, hide its profits in an Amsterdam bank, then use complex "flow-through" subsidiaries to bring the untaxed lucre back into its own U.S. banks. Nicknamed a Dutch Sandwich since the client's money was hidden between a sham corporation based in Amsterdam and a sham trust in Curacao (Dutch Antilles), the scheme allowed the customers' income to be brought into the United States disguised as untaxable "loans" from the Caribbean bank. One banker working for Curacao's Credit Lyonais Nederland Bank admitted to Time magazine that he had no qualms about helping U.S. companies and individuals dodge taxes. "Many of your largest corporations, many of your movie stars, do much the same thing here," the banker said. "We wouldn't want to handle criminal money, of course. But if it's just a matter of taxes, that is
of no concern to us."4 The banker might have had a hard time convincing Al Capone's family that tax evasion and criminality were not the same thing.
MCA executive George Smith openly admitted that vast profits accrued from the setup. "I would say that, on the average, one hundred to two hundred million tax dollars were deferred every year," Smith said. "Generally, we put it in a bank and got interest." Paramount's new COO, Frank Yablans, stated frankly, "It was a brilliant tax dodge."5 The intricate construct became a template for Hollywood conglomerates that would outlive its creators.* It would also herald a new era, one where tax lawyers eclipsed all others in importance in the film business. These facilitators favored creative accounting measures such as EBIDTA (earnings before interest, depreciation, taxes, and amortization), which, by allowing the studios to postpone the reporting of losses, gave a false impression of earnings to potential investors.
Soon, numerous high-rises appeared on the West Hollywood skyline, housing the lawyers that run the town to this day. The towers themselves were often financed using the Dutch Sandwich.
Assisting Hollywood's assault on the IRS were the likes of Senator Thomas Kuchel, the minority whip on the Appropriations Committee (and a partner at Wyman, Bautzer), who introduced legislation that would allow producers to understate their taxable gross income by 20 percent—the legislation was also lobbied for hard by the likes of Governor Ronald Reagan. Lew Wasserman, with his extensive ties in Washington, worked overtime to see the enactment of the 1971 Revenue Act, which allowed the film and television industry to define their product (films and television programs) as equipment and machinery, thus becoming eligible for a traditional 7 percent tax write-off for industry that had begun in 1962. The March 1972 issue of Variety reported that "97% of [MCA's] profit increase last year is directly attributable to the new tax rules." Universal and the other studios quickly joined Disney in a suit aimed at recovering back credits dating to 1962, a successful effort that saw them receive another windfall totaling almost $400 million.6 The credit was then raised to 10 percent, and the benefits multiplied. In addition, one clause in the legislation allowed movie investors to reap an astounding 100 percent indefinite tax deferment on half of all profits from exported films.7
