by Gus Russo
Korshak's final resting place, Hillside Memorial Park (author photo)
At Hillside, Korshak's remains joined (or would soon be joined by) those of many of his closest associates: Eugene Wyman, Paul Ziffren, Lew Wasserman, Taft Schreiber, Harvey Silbert, Mickey Cohen, Stanley Mosk, and David Janssen. However, even in death, only Sid Korshak succeeded in maintaining his invisibility. When the Hillside office was asked in 2005 to locate his crypt, it discovered that his entry had been deleted from their four-inch-thick directory—virtually all its other luminary "residents," such as Jack Benny, Moe Howard, Milton Berle, Al Jolson, and Eddie Cantor, were easily located in the book, but not the Myth. "That's odd," said the cemetery manager. "Everyone else seems to be here." Finally a nine-year-old document was retrieved that indicated the location of the simple crypt, located not far from friends such as Dinah Shore and Max Factor.
The complex dichotomy that was Sidney Korshak can be seen in the variant summaries of his life from those who knew him and those who pursued him. "They were two of the greatest men I've ever known," reflected Marshall's daughter Margie Gerson about her father and Sidney. "I adored them both. They were very different brothers, but yet they adored each other."27 Paul Ziffren's son Kenneth said, "I knew Sidney well. Charming guy. You never felt fear around him."28 Cousin Leslie Korshak told the Los AngelesTimes, "He had a tremendous amount of power, and he understood the power of anonymity. He wore power the way the average guy wears a sweat suit. There's rich having money in the bank and there's rich knowing that you can get your hands on unlimited amounts of money just by asking, And he was both."29 Gianni Russo said wistfully, "He was a mentor to me—to all of them—to the day he died. People would call him at home for advice. I know that for sure. And he liked being in it."30 Paramount chief Frank Yablans said, "Sidney was in the mob, but the way a Jew was in the mob. They wanted him to handle Hollywood, the Teamsters, Las Vegas—but not to kill people in Hollywood."31 Producer-friend George Schlatter opined, "The boys needed a lawyer. Sidney was a lawyer. And he came in and he handled things as a lawyer. Sidney did what lawyers do. There was never any threat of Sidney being disbarred. Everybody wanted to know Sidney and nobody did. A lot of people thought they did. Sidney was a very loud man in a very quiet way. He was a legend, and the legend was bigger than the man. Sidney built a hell of a reputation because he was very effective and very successful. The mob didn't 'make' Sidney Korshak. How would they make him?"32 Nancy Czar concluded, "Everybody thought Sidney was backed up by the mob in Chicago, but it was a total illusion. He played it for all it was worth." Marty Bacow, a leading Teamster official in Hollywood, summed up Sidney Korshak's true power source, saying, "He couldn't make a move without getting permission [from the Chicago mob]. He was an order taker. And that was the end of it . . . Everybody thought he had power, so he had power."33
Among the many others who registered their opinions were:
• Jimmy "the Weasel" Fratianno, who described Korshak's life thus: "He made millions for Chicago . . . he's really burrowed in. He calls himself a labor relations expert, but he's really a fixer."
• Bob Evans: "He was known as the Myth, from the [Palm Springs] Racquet Club to the '21' Club in New York. Many said they knew [Korshak], but few actually did. One thing was for sure, he was one powerful motherfucker."
• A 1965 FBI informant: "He is one of the biggest guys in the country today who has a pipeline right to the government in Washington."
• United Artists executive Max Youngstein: "The few times I worked with Sidney Korshak, I knew what he was doing, I knew who he was doing it with, but somehow he carried it off with a kind of grace. He could never do anything in a straight line, but he could always handle the curves. He was like some fat guy who turns out to be the best dancer in the world."
Not surprisingly, Korshak's law enforcement and journalistic opponents had a different view:
• Network reporter Brian Ross takes Schlatter's point about Sidney's "legend" status, saying, "I think ninety-five percent of what organized crime does is based on their reputation. They don't have to reprove it every time. You would never know how much was a con and how much was real."
• Chicago FBI man Bill Roemer, who, over his thirty-year career, tried repeatedly to trip Korshak up, remembered Korshak as "the primary link between big business and organized crime."34
• G. Robert Blakey, who was a senior Justice Department Organized Crime attorney, said, "His life was one of living in a minefield and never stepping on anything."
• Los Angeles FBI agent Mike Wacks remembered, "The younger agents coming in and the people who worked OC viewed him as an old fossil or something that really didn't have any clout. But he did. He had clout all the way until his death. He was active until the day he died. He's an amazing character."35
• Connie Carlson, of the Attorney General's Office in California, concluded, "I subscribe to the theory that he was created by the mob. He may have done other things along the way, but he never escaped his relationship with the mob. He could settle in any kind of labor dispute. That's where you see the mob influence. And it wasn't L.A., it was the Beverly Hills crowd—movie people and lawyers—and Korshak was the king of the pen in Beverly Hills." Carlson, like so many of her peers, was ultimately frustrated that the Supermob could never be brought to justice. "I got as far away from L.A. as I could and not be in northern Mexico," she said recently. "Everyone who was involved in these investigations tried to get as far away as we could to forget about it."
• The famously terse Sy Hersh said, "He was the godfather. There's no question, he ordered people hit."36
Sidney Korshak said of himself during an FBI interview, most likely in reference to his infamous friends, "I won't back away from anyone or repudiate anybody."37
Whatever he was, most agree on one point: he could not exist today. Korshak came up at a unique moment in American history, when the Chicago Outfit held a stranglehold over a huge segment of U.S. labor. Donald Cressey, consultant to the President's Commission on Violence, summarized the era by saying, "The penetration of business and government by organized crime had been so complete that it was no longer possible to differentiate 'underworld' gangsters from 'upperworld' businessmen and government officials."38 Thus, Korshak was a necessary link for corporate sachems who wished to guarantee their stockholders' investments. "I don't think you could do that today," said former Los Angeles Times national editor Ed Guthman, "and I don't think anybody replaced him. If they tried, it didn't work."39 Screenwriter-friend Tom Mankiewicz agreed, saying, "With the changing of our culture, I'm not sure a guy like Sidney could exist today."40
As one might expect, Korshak's estate was hidden behind one of those impenetrable family trusts, preferred by many of the upper class, including the Supermob. Thus a tally of his full worth is impossible, but it is known that he had vast investments around the country, if not the world. His personal property alone (homes, artwork, cars, etc.) was assumed to be worth many millions. Korshak's elder son, Harry, a former producer for Paramount, is now an architect married to the half sister of Mrs. Conrad Hilton Jr., and living in Egypt and Palm Beach, Florida; Korshak's younger son, Stuart, is a successful California attorney, specializing in (what else) labor collective bargaining. One professional bio said of Stuart Korshak, "He specializes in creative and proactive labor management programs where he is generally successful in having the clients' unions work cooperatively with the client to resolve their mutual concerns instead of engaging in litigation or confrontation.* In 1999, Stuart Korshak negotiated a historic settlement between California liquor wholesalers and their twenty-two hundred Teamster employees and helped settle a major dispute between fourteen San Francisco hotels and the infamous Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union. Obviously, the acorn stayed near the tree.
There is no information in his father's FBI file as to whether the Bureau is investigating the allegations of Stuart's firm's alleged money laundering via West Germany.
One wee
k after Korshak's death, the Bistro Gardens announced its closing, coinciding with the retirement of Kurt Niklas.41 The era was fading fast, as Pat Brown died of a heart attack one month later, on February 16, 1996, in Beverly Hills. On June 26, 1996, eighty-seven-year-old Cubby Broccoli joined his friends in the afterlife. On May 14, 1998, "The Chairman" himself, Frank Sinatra, died in his Beverly Hills home. Holding vigil in the Sinatra home on Foothills Drive were Steve and Eydie Lawrence, George and Jolene Schlatter, and Bee Korshak.42
The Supermob's Chicago contingent was similarly unraveling. Burt Kanter, the man who had devised so many tax dodges for the Pritzkers and other cadre associates, died of cancer on October 31, 2001, while awaiting sentencing on a finding that he had defrauded the IRS.
In 1994, after spending years unraveling the Kanter-Pritzker Prudential insurance kickback scheme, the IRS had finally brought the case to trial. It took the judge five years to rule, due to the complexity of the case, that the companies created under Prudential were merely tax-avoidance vehicles. Judge Couvillion concluded that Kanter and associates had devised a scheme of kickbacks to avoid paying taxes to the federal government.43 (By his own admission, Kanter had paid no taxes between 1979 and 1990, although he was audited for each of those years.)
In December 1999, the special trial judge for the U.S. Tax Court delivered a three-hundred-plus-page decision against Kanter, which stated in a section entitled "Kanter's Fraud," "In our view, what we have here, purely and simply, is a concerted effort by experienced tax lawyer . . . to defeat and evade the payment and to cover up their illegal acts so that the corporations, Prudential and Travelers, and the Federal Government would be unable to discover them . . . Kanter created a complex money laundering scheme made up of sham corporations and entities . . . to receive, distribute, and conceal his income, as well as [the other defendants'] income."
After more years of legal stalls, it appeared that Kanter was about to "go away," when the grim reaper intervened. Variety announced his passing with a blindly hagiographic obituary, calling the 71-year-old an "art patron, preeminent tax attorney and movie finance innovator." No mention was made of his mountain of legal woes stemming from his lifelong quest to evade taxes for himself and his clients through offshore dodges such as Castle Bank.*
As for the Pritzkers, over the last quarter century the family business had partnered with the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in developing Hyatt hotels in Saudi Arabia.44 BCCI, a Pakistani-based bank, was known for laundering drug-cartel money, providing financial havens for terrorist organizations, helping corporations dodge taxes through an impenetrable web of holding companies, and falsifying bank records to throw off regulators. BCCFs founder, Agha Abedi, once boldly informed a BCCI executive, "The only laws that are permanent are the laws of nature. Everything else is flexible. We can always work in and around the law."45 Former CIA director Robert Gates referred to BCCI as "the Bank of Crooks and Criminals."
By 2001, the Pritzker family's holdings would be worth over $15 billion and included not only the Hyatt chain of hotels but a share in Royal Caribbean Cruises, as well as a credit-reporting company, TransUnion, and numerous other lucrative enterprises. Over the years, hundreds of companies have been bought and sold by the dynasty.
On December 11, 2001, the Pritzkers agreed to pay the U.S. government a record fine of $460 million for the collapse of the Superior Bank of New York. It is widely believed that the cause of the bank failure was the fraudulent sales of junk bonds. The massive settlement allowed the Pritzkers to escape from having the actual charges aired publicly, and as the Pritzkers said, they hoped the agreement would also prevent their reputation from being further tarnished.46 Penny Pritzker dealt with the collapse of the bank, saying, "My family is not going to litigate with the federal government at a time like this," referring to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.47
In 2003, Abe Pritzker's granddaughter nineteen-year-old actress Liesel Pritzker (Air Force One) and her brother, Matthew, sued their father, Robert, for $6 billion for "looting" their trust fund. The siblings alleged that their father had wrongly emptied their funds, worth roughly $2 billion, in the mid-1990s when he was having postdivorce squabbles with their mother. In April 2004, the judge instructed the plaintiffs to refile after granting them access to the family's sealed financial records, a motion that unearthed a secret family deal cut after Liesel's uncle Jay Pritzker's death in 1999, a plan that would have broken up the fortune into eleven shares valued at $1.4 billion each. In early 2005, rather than expose the complicated Pritzker offshore shelters to the light of day, the Pritzker family put the final touches on a private settlement agreement that would pay the two youngest grandchildren of A. N. Pritzker in the neighborhood of $500 million each to drop all litigation against the Chicago clan. Now Liesel can afford to be a producer as well as an actress.
Like so many of the Supermob who increased their wealth with offshore tax dodges, the Pritzkers attempted to balance their reputation with philanthropy, the clique's way of saying that they'd rather choose where their money goes than allowing the IRS to do it. To that end, the Pritzkers have donated more than $500 million to institutions and charities, not only in Chicago but around the country. On June 5, 2002, they donated $30 million to the University of Chicago to celebrate the anniversary of the 1902 founding of the law firm by Nicholas Pritzker.48 But the philanthropy failed to mute the long-overdue reappraisals of the clan. "The Pritzkers have had a pristine and exceptionally respected reputation in Chicago and throughout the nation and the world," said Craig Aronoff, cofounder and principal of the Family Business Consulting Group. "All that's gone on has presented the family in a different light, one that is not as flattering."49
On June 3, 2002, weeks after suffering a stroke, Lew Wasserman died at his Beverly Hills home at age eighty-nine, THE HOLLYWOOD MOGUL AND KINGMAKER DIES AT 89 ran the Los Angeles Times headline the next day. Former president Bill Clinton, whose candidacy had been aided by Wasserman's fund-raising efforts, remarked at Wasserman's memorial tribute six weeks later, "He was one of the smartest men I ever met, and in more than intellectual ways. He just came across as someone who understood what life was all about and was pulling for people to have good lives." Recalling the Clinton fund-raisers at the Wasserman home, he added, "Lew helped me become president, and he helped me stay president. He helped me become a better president, and he never asked for anything."* Steven Spielberg, whose career wras nurtured by Wasserman, said, "For decades he was the chief justice of the film industry—fair, tough-minded, and innovative. I feel that all of us have lost our benevolent godfather."^50
As a philanthropist, Wasserman had donated much to the $40 million Edie and Lew Wasserman Eye Research Center, part of the Jules Stein Eye Institute complex at UCLA.
When documentary filmmaker Barry Avrich began work in 2004 on a profile of Wasserman,** Universal Pictures refused to cooperate, and Lew's grandson Casey Wasserman confirmed that the family had asked Universal not to assist the filmmaker. "It is a family policy to turn down all requests regarding my grandfather without exception," young Wasserman said. "We have not or will not participate in any historical portrayal of his life in any form."51 Casey Wasserman, who runs the Wasserman Media Group, which spans five firms working in production, management, music, and marketing as well as owning the Los Angeles Avengers of the Arena Football League, had recently married Ken Ziffren's daughter Laura, the senior VP of Fox Music.
In recent years, Lew Wasserman had overseen the November 1989 selling of MCA/Universal to the Japanese version of Gulf & Western, Matsushita Electric, for $6.13 billion. It was the beginning of an era of massive corporate takeovers and conglomerate-building, and the initial players in the feeding frenzy were the Japanese, whose strong yen was facilitating massive U.S. buyouts, such as Sony's $4.7 billion purchase of Columbia Pictures two months earlier. It later came out that Wasserman had obtained a secret $350 million fee—tax-free—from Matsushita for his MCA shares, an
arrangement that saved him $100 million.52 When the Japanese economy experienced its own "correction" in the nineties, Matsushita sold MCA/Universal to Seagram heir Edgar Bronfman in April 1995 for $5.7 billion; the Canadian Ashkenazic Bronfmans made their fortune during Prohibition by illegally shipping their whiskey across the U.S. border (by truck and underground pipelines) into the organizations of Abner "Longy" Zwillman and Frank Costello.53
Five years later, the company would change hands yet again, this time coming under the umbrella of the French multinational Vivendi. Most recently, in April 2004, Vivendi merged with NBC's parent company, GE, to form NBC-Universal. The resulting media giant now boasts television networks NBC, Telemundo, USA Network, Sci-Fi Channel, Bravo, Trio, CNBC, and MSNBC (jointly owned with Microsoft); film studio Universal Pictures; television production studios Universal Television and NBC Studios; a stations group comprising twenty-nine NBC and Telemundo television stations; and interests in five theme parks including Universal Studios Hollywood and Universal Orlando. NBC was a fitting home for the company that it had sought to protect from the probings of Brian Ross and Ira Silverman in 1978.
Like Korshak, Wasserman is universally perceived as a man unique to his era, a time when a patriarchal movie studio system made possible the ascent of the solitary visionary. With today's multinational studios run by stock-conscious boards, the emergence of another Lew is highly unlikely. "There won't be anyone like Lew Wasserman again because these companies are too big," Robert Daly, former head of Warner Brothers, said in 2002. "It was an industry town and totally controlled by the studios and the networks. He was the number one guy at the networks and the number one guy in Washington for the industry." Haim Saban, owner of the Power Rangers franchise, added, "We are no longer led by patriarchs. One father figure could have more influence than the whole of [media conglomerate] AOL Time Warner in the Hollywood of Wasserman.54
