Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking

by Jessica Mitford

  They met on a street corner, and at O’Hara’s suggestion went for a quick cup of coffee for which Pesonen paid. “He’s a rugged-looking man with black hair, dressed in workmen’s corduroy pants and a quilted windbreaker. He said, ‘Excuse these,’ pointing to his clothes, ‘I change when I get home in the evening.’

  “His whole demeanor was nervous, distraught; he had a bead of sweat on his upper lip. Over coffee he kept repeating, ‘Please don’t get me involved, I’ve never done anything like this before, I’ve a wife and children to consider—but you wouldn’t believe what’s in this report.’ I gave him thirty-six dollars and fifty cents. We arranged to meet at 6 p.m. for him to turn over the document. I waited until 6:45, thinking of all sorts of reasons why he had been delayed—a machine breakdown? A traffic jam? He never showed.

  “The next morning there was no call from him. At noon, my secretary called P. G. & E.—they’d never heard of O’Hara. I called Dave Fechheimer, a private eye who used to work for Hal Lipset [the latter-day Sam Spade who played himself in The Conversation], and started telling the story. David said, ‘Don’t go any further! I know the rest of it. He’s done it to any number of lawyers, including Bob Treuhaft and Doris Walker.”’

  Now for a flashback. A smoggy October, 1973, morning at San Jose State University where I am working in the unlikely capacity of Distinguished Professor of Sociology—and am locked in battle with the university authorities because of my refusal to be fingerprinted. (That, of course, is another story; see my article “My Short and Happy Life as a Distinguished Professor,” Atlantic, October, 1974.) My husband, Bob Treuhaft, whose law firm is handling my case against the university, calls me, his voice edged with suppressed excitement. He’s just had a phone call from a printer in San Francisco who has been given a rush, confidential order by the state university trustees—some five hundred pages of scurrilous information about the subversive background of Jessica Mitford! The printer makes it clear he has no sympathy for J.M.’s political outlook, on the contrary; but he does feel the trustees are dealing from the bottom of the deck. He is willing to print an extra copy of the material on his own time, but would need to buy special paper, cost thirty-six dollars.

  Somebody from Hal Lipset’s office is meeting him at this very minute with the thirty-six dollars, Bob tells me exultantly; by evening, we shall have this extraordinary evidence of how low the trustees have sunk in their mad determination to remove me from the campus. By next morning, their dirty dealings will be front-page news in every paper in the state! ... But by next morning tails are between legs. The less said about this embarrassing lapse of judgment by lawyers and investigators the better, we all agree; particularly since it develops that Bob’s partner, Doris Walker, had been hoist by the selfsame petard in 1971, when she was counsel for Angela Davis in the celebrated kidnap-murder case. That time, the trap had been baited in Los Angeles with the usual promise to deliver a sensational report of illegally procured wiretap evidence.

  An understandable amnesia shrouds the details of these earlier cases; Doris Walker could not remember too much about her meeting with the printer, but she does remember making every effort to find him: “When he failed to appear, I called Hal Lipset and told him to look for the man, as it was crucial for the defense to get this wiretap report. Hal took all the information and checked with every print shop in the area—nobody had heard of O’Hara. If he had produced the document,” she added wistfully, “that would have been the end of the case—it would have tainted the whole prosecution, they’d have been forced to drop it.”

  My curiosity aroused by Pesonen’s recent experience, I called Hal Lipset’s erstwhile associate, Dave Fechheimer. Between them he and Lipset have been consulted about at least ten O’Hara jobs over the past several years, and have heard about others in casual conversations with lawyers. O’Hara’s operation is statewide; he turns up in Salinas, Los Angeles, Fresno, San Diego, the San Joaquin Valley, the Bay Area. “But he doesn’t confine his business to lawyers,” Fechheimer told me. “In just one weekend I got calls from the owners of three athletic leagues—North American Soccer, the roller derby, and a hockey league—each with the same story: O’Hara had confidential documentation that others in the league were plotting against the owner. He’d say, ‘I have wiretaps of your phone, showing they are trying to get evidence to push you out.’ He’s terribly well informed, a very shrewd guy.”

  Forward to Hal Lipset.

  “So O’Hara’s latest victim is Dave Pesonen, who met him on November 29th?” I asked.

  “You’re wrong!” said Lipset triumphantly. “He’s struck again. Just last week I got an urgent call from the secretary of a well-known lawyer; she sounded frantic—‘We’ve got to find this man!’ she exclaimed. ‘He’s printing up some immensely important secret documents about our client, I gave him the money for the paper....’ I said, ‘Wait a minute; did he happen to mention that he doesn’t like your client but the state is doing something wrong?’ She was completely flabbergasted—I was repeating his exact words.”

  The lawyer, Ephraim Margolin, is representing Dr. Josette Escamilla Mondanaro, former assistant director of the California Drug Abuse program, fired by Governor Brown ostensibly for using “an eleven-letter word” in a letter written on state stationery. “The governor concedes she is highly qualified,” said Margolin, “and that the real reason for her dismissal is her ‘sexual preferences.’ At the pretrial hearing in Sacramento on December 5th, I made a strong statement accusing the governor of discrimination and political maneuvering in his firing of Dr. Mondanaro, and said I was saving detailed substantiation of these charges for the trial. This was reported in the Sacramento newspapers and on local TV.

  “The next day, December 6th, I was in San Jose on another case and got a call from my secretary, Sondra Rosen, in San Francisco. She had a printer, O’Hara, on the other line; he was doing some work for the Central Committee of the Democratic Party. He had a two-hundred-and-eighty-eight-page report, much of which was censored out, leaving a hundred and thirty pages. The report dealt with Dr. Mondanaro’s case; it contained letters from Tony Kline, Bert Coffey, Jerry Brown—all discussing the possible impact of my client’s case on Brown’s re-election and future political career. O’Hara was instructed to make five copies of the censored report and destroy the plates. He would try to make us a copy of the unexpurgated version—he couldn’t guarantee anything, wanted no money, just enough to buy two reams of special paper at eighteen dollars and twenty-five cents a ream. He met Sondra that day for coffee—she paid for the coffee! They agreed to meet at the same place at 5:30 p.m....” Margolin added, his voice shot through with pain, “The high-to-low feeling O’Hara creates for a lawyer, from highest hopes to the eventual letdown, is unconscionable. I felt very downcast.”

  Over to Sondra Rosen: “I met O’Hara at 1:30 at the entrance to Chinatown Gate. He’s average height, stocky, fortyish, blue-collar type, dirty jagged fingernails, glasses, square face. He was wearing blue pants, a blue shirt with white piping, and a sports jacket. He said ‘Excuse my work clothes. I change when I get home’—and come to think of it, those are his work clothes! He had sounded fairly nervous on the phone and was very nervous when I met him. His upper lip was perspiring. I could almost feel him sweating profusely. When I gave him the thirty-six dollars and fifty cents, he said he’d forgotten to ask me for the sales tax, and that he would bill us for that later!”

  “Did he volunteer much information?” I asked Sondra Rosen.

  “Oh, yes, lots—he had so much inside information, he named names that he couldn’t have found in the newspapers. One name was not in any record, that’s what sold us for sure.”

  Armed now with a fairly comprehensive picture of both O’Hara’s modus operandi and his physical appearance, I started calling Bay Area investigators and lawyers whose cases had attracted widespread media attention. While some—including such luminaries as Melvin Belli, Sheldon Otis, Ed Merrill, and the Hallinan clan—disclaime
d any knowledge of the phantom printer, I did hit pay dirt with astonishing frequency.

  Lee Borden, an Oakland private eye with Central Investigations, knows of three East Bay O’Hara jobs in the past year, two pulled on lawyers and one involving a large developer. “I can’t give you any details because the people who’ve been had don’t want it known,” he said; but he did vouchsafe that O’Hara had told all three victims that “he is a family man, has two children, wants no publicity, would donate his time to printing up the material in the interests of justice if money for the paper was forthcoming.”

  Lawyer Y of San Francisco, defending in a highly publicized murder trial, told me he requires “complete anonymity.” But he was willing to confide his searing experience of December 13, 1977, when he met Jack O’Hara at 12:30 p.m. by the flower stand in front of Gump’s and gave him fifty dollars.

  “Fifty dollars!” I exclaimed. “You were overcharged; thirty-six-fifty is the standard price.”

  “Well, actually he asked for forty-two dollars, but I didn’t have the change,” said Lawyer Y somewhat sheepishly.

  “Ah! So you gave him an eight-dollar tip?”

  Y, now belligerent: “Hell, no, it wasn’t a tip!”

  Beside the sweetly scented flower stand, O’Hara had unfolded his story. He said he was a retired Marine with a wife and two children, had worked for fifteen years in the Presidio. He was printing up a clandestine wiretap report on Y’s client for the Strike Force, the special Justice Department bureau that roams the country investigating organized crime.

  “If he’d produced what he said he had, it would have been extraordinary!” said Y ruefully. “The Strike Force has been interested in my client for years. O’Hara had information going back many years that he couldn’t have gotten from the newspapers, that’s why he was so completely plausible.”

  My random check turned up half a dozen more distinguished lawyers who had waited for O’Hara: a former counsel for ACLU in Los Angeles was promised a “dossier on ACLU compiled by Evelle Younger,” then district attorney; a San Francisco lawyer, under threat of disbarment, paid for a copy of “a lengthy and libelous undercover investigation of my background by the bar association”; a group of Southern California lawyers working for the California Rural Legal Assistance were offered “wiretap information about us and our cases to be printed for the Reagan administration.”

  While O’Hara changes employers with chameleon-like rapidity —now P. G. & E., now the Democratic Central Committee, now the bar association—his patter and demeanor remain amazingly constant. The steady type with wife and children, he has almost always worked in the same place for fifteen years. He doesn’t approve of the client, but ... He apologizes for his work clothes, is agitated and perspiring. The sweaty upper lip recurs in most descriptions of his appearance; does he, I wonder, hide a vial of glycerine about his person to produce the beads of sweat, much as Hollywood stars are said to use it to simulate real tears?

  Had any of the victims reported their misfortune to the prosecuting authorities? It seemed unlikely, but I thought I should check with the D.A.’s office. The San Francisco deputy with whom I spoke knew of no such reports, but he would ask around and phone me back. In short order I got a call from Chandler Visher, assistant D.A. in the Consumer Frauds Division, who was boiling over with angry frustration. “I wish I could get my hands on him!” he exclaimed. “He’s caused me untold grief. He pulled his routine in a case I’m involved in.” This time O’Hara had contacted the business agent of a labor union in connection with an antitrust suit being investigated by Visher last October. The business agent had handed over fifty dollars for Xeroxes of reports on the potential defendants—“statements made at meetings, undercover agreements, various illegal activities. Bilking the business agent out of fifty dollars wasn’t a big crime, but the reason I am chagrined is I wasted a lot of taxpayers’ money trying to lay hands on O’Hara’s supposedly hot information. Our people spent endless time and trouble looking for him. I sent a guy to stake out the secret meeting place where O’Hara was to turn over the documents. It’s a strange M.O.—for that kind of money.”

  Without exception, the O’Hara victims with whom I spoke betrayed an awed if grudging admiration for the man and his methods. “He has a genius for perceiving exactly what a lawyer would like to hear,” said Pesonen. “A parasite feeding on the most parasitic profession. He must research meticulously. One brilliant little touch was his mention of B. B. D. & O.—how did he know they handle the P. G. & E. account? And that we suspect P. G. & E. of trying to manipulate the media in this case through their public relations people? He’s not only a good strategist but a marvelous actor, completely believable.” So believable, in fact, that in almost every case the realization that he had been taken dawned exceedingly slowly in the victim’s mind; his first impulse, after being stood up, was to try to find the man, to track him down at any cost, by his own efforts or through private investigators, and retrieve the promised booty. Some even admitted to a fleeting fear that O’Hara might have met with foul play.

  Bob Treuhaft thinks he “uses the adversary system, developed to a high art, in his choice of subjects.” He plays on people who rightly or wrongly believe the other side is devious and corrupt—P. G. & E., the state university trustees, the Angela Davis prosecutors—and who are therefore predisposed to accept his story at face value. Treuhaft also surmised that, in view of his geographically widespread activities, O’Hara may be more than one person: “Perhaps he’s a franchise operation, like Colonel Sanders.”

  Estimates on O’Hara’s weekly take vary wildly. Dave Fechheimer believes he makes a very good thing out of it, possibly as much as $50,000 a year. “Let’s say he does five a day, that’s about a hundred and ninety dollars at his going rate. Roughly nine hundred and fifty dollars for a five-day week. How many people do you know who take home nine hundred and fifty dollars tax-free, with no overhead?” Hal Lipset takes the opposite view, thinks he “does it for jollies.” I’m with Lipset; being something of an investigator myself, I cannot conceive of anybody, even a researcher of O’Hara’s stature, being able to track down and absorb the kind of detailed information needed for his line of work at the rate of five jobs a day—aside from the fact that he would soon run out of pigeons. One a week is more like it—yet so far my own superficial search has turned up Chandler Visher in October, 1977; Pesonen, November 29th; Margolin, December 6th; Lawyer Y, December 13th—were there others waiting for O’Hara during that time span?

  Why have the lawyers failed to notify law enforcement authorities or at least to spread a word of warning throughout the legal fraternity? First, I suppose, because nobody (least of all a lawyer) likes to appear naive and easily gulled. Thus Doris Walker, possibly wishing to avoid an unmerciful ribbing, neglected to inform her own partner of the episode. Second, nobody likes to admit to the universal weaknesses that all con men prey on: the larceny that lurks in every heart, a hankering after forbidden fruit, the hope of getting something for nothing. Third, there is the nagging matter of bar association ethics: “This is a serious question for the victim, and perhaps a reason he doesn’t report it to police,” said Margolin. “Is the lawyer’s effort to get a copy of O’Hara’s material ethical? Or is the promised document stolen property? I don’t know; I’ve done a lot of lecturing to law students on this very subject....”

  Mr. O’Hara—Jack, if I may be so bold?—I feel we know each other so well, though we’ve never met. As you gulp down this issue of New West along with your usual quick cup of coffee, do not think harshly of me, for in fact you are the hero of this story. I hate to blow your cover. Yet somewhere, on the back burner of my mind, there simmers the recollection of soaring hopes and thudding downfall when you promised to deliver the trustees of San Jose State into my waiting hands—and failed me.

  Dave Fechheimer says he would like to catch you at it one day, but not for the purpose of turning you over to the police. A more fitting end to your extraordinary career
, he feels, would be a testimonial dinner to be tendered to you by your victims—at $36.50 a plate. Bring the wife and kids; it should be a star-studded occasion, marred only by the presence of Chandler Visher, who vows he will show up with an arrest warrant.

  COMMENT

  The O’Hara saga first came my way via lawyers’ corridor gossip. Dave Pesonen, a partner in Charles Garry’s renowned law firm, ran into my husband in court one day and related his crushing experience at O’Hara’s hands. “You’ve joined the club!” said Bob, and told him what had happened in the San Jose fingerprint case. It just might make a jolly little piece for a magazine, I thought, if only I could find a few other O’Hara pigeons. There was delicious irony to be milked from the fact that these super-sophisticated, high-powered lawyers, whose own livelihoods depend on the myriad devious tricks of their trade, were as a class the victims selected to be tricked by O’Hara—a turning of the tables that might appeal to the reader’s sense of rough and ready Western justice.

  Starting with the two San Francisco private eyes, Fechheimer and Lipset, I began to accumulate case histories—but no names; private investigators are, of course, obliged to preserve the confidentiality of their clients’ affairs. And, as Lipset pointed out, although lawyers are generally avid for publicity it was unlikely that they would want this ego-bruising story splashed in the public prints.

  Bob and Doris, whose egos had long since been calloused by the vicissitudes of their law practice and whose O’Hara-connected cases had been fought through to victorious conclusions, were not averse to being featured in the article. Pesonen was uncertain; he was loath, while his suit against P. G. & E. was pending, to publicly concede his lusting after the illicit documents, which might be construed by the opposition as a sign of weakness. While it might be possible to write the piece giving only two names, referring to the others as Lawyer A, B, C, and so on, this would soften the impact and might even cause the reader to wonder whether the whole story was a fabrication.