Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's

by Noel Hynd

  “I’ll tell Hoover,” Winchell said.

  “Put it on the air,” the voice said. The caller hung up.

  On his network radio broadcast the next night, with Hoover sitting beside him, Winchell announced, “If a certain unidentified party is listening, a deal can be arranged.’”

  A few nights later, a hood stopped Winchell on Fifth Avenue. A surrender was arranged. Shortly after ten p.m. the next night, Buchalter quietly slid into Winchell’s car at a pre-arranged spot in midtown. Hoover was waiting alone in a government sedan at Fifth and 28th. Winchell drove his passenger to 28th Street. He made the transfer, and the next morning, national headlines.

  By the 1950's Winchell had become obsessed with Communism and embraced McCarthyism. He began savage attacks on the African-American singer Josephine Baker, the star of the fabulous topless cabarets of Paris in the 1920’s, who created front page headlines by claiming she had been snubbed at the Stork Club because she was black. A liberal radio talk-show host in New York named Barry Gray came to Baker’s defense. Thereafter in Winchell’s columns Barry Gray was “Borie Pink.”

  By the time Cooper joined The Mirror, Winchell’s power had ebbed. But he still had an audience. Cooper fell into a mentorship with Winchell, whom he called “Mr. Winchell.” Walter Winchell called Cooper, “Kid.” They would drink together sometimes at Jack Dempsey’s, P. J. Clarke’s or Toots Shor’s, where fortunately no one had ever fingered Cooper as the guy who had bashed the three Luciano hoods in 1952. Winchell introduced Cooper to many of his contacts and dispensed professional wisdom.

  There was one bit of advice that stood out above all others. “A reporter, a newsman, is always defined by his biggest story,” Winchell explained. “So never duck away when a big story comes your way. Seize it. Exploit it. Nurse it. Follow it as far as you can. You need at least one headliner to make your career.” Twice in 1956, when Cooper was new to his beat, he nearly bungled complicated stories. Winchell caught wind of the screw-ups and interceded with Jerry Klein, the city editor, who had Cooper’s name in capitals at the top of the Friday firing list.

  “Hey! Jerry! Screw that. The kid’s a tough-ass. He’s got chops,” Winchell told the city editor at the Mirror. “Don’t sack him. Let him run.”

  Klein balked. “I’m firing him, Walter,” Klein said. “Keep your snout out of this.”

  Winchell offered Klein eight tickets to My Fair Lady on Broadway starring Julie Andrews—plus backstage passes. Cooper kept his job. Winchell, thirty years older than Frank Cooper, kept a fatherly eye on him. Cooper watched his mentor’s back in return. It worked just fine until 1962 and 1963, when an assortment of labor unions called strikes and shut down every daily newspaper in New York City for one hundred fourteen days. The Daily Mirror had lousy advertising revenues. The paper closed on October 16, 1963. Winchell moved to the New York Journal-American. Frank Cooper landed at the New York Daily News.

  It was there where Cooper first made the acquaintance of Sam Rothman, who was a managing editor in the sports section. Cooper, however, drew a brassier assignment. “Find trouble in the city,” his new boss, a pot-bellied red-haired Son of Erin named Mike McGarrity, told him. “The street. The boardrooms. The gangs. The brothels. The bars. The political clubhouses. Rake some muck. Find trouble. Screw people up and write about it.”

  “Should I carry a gun?”

  "If you’re smart you will,” McGarrity said. Cooper went back to his old pal Winchell, who was still holding court at The Stork Club, though the venue was fading fast.

  “Congratulations, kidster,” Winchell said. “Now you’re a reporter! Be sure to make people so damned mad that they want to kill you.”

  “That shouldn’t be too tough.”

  “And remember what I said. One huge story makes a man’s career!”

  Uncle Shiv died at age seventy-two in 1962. Cooper went to Chicago to pay respects and attend the funeral. He was remembered in the will: five large. It was said that cousin Kevin had grown up and gone into the family business. He, too, could make people disappear.

  “’Frankie Fists,’” said cousin Kevin, embracing him. “Thanks for coming out from New York. The Bog Trotters still gotta stick together like Pop said, huh?” he said.

  “Always, Kevin. God bless you, damn it, and God bless Shiv.”

  Kevin introduced him to his son, a sturdy boy named Francis X. Cooper O’Connor, so named after a good man who had once intervened on his behalf.

  “Nothing’s changed, Frankie,” said Kevin, “even with the old man gone. Anything you ever need, you call. Anyone ever fucks with you, you let me know.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Soon, at the Daily News as a news writer, Frank Cooper specialized at investigating subjects who didn't care to be investigated. He was by 1964 a down-the-middle, hard-news crime-and-corruption guy who went after the big stories. In doing so, he made enemies of everyone from the Mayor of New York to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Brooklyn to the State of Israel—when he named the Israeli Consulate as the biggest parking ticket scofflaw in the city. The British government soon hated him over some Irish stuff, as did fifteen banks, seven corrupt labor unions and one major film studio, each for their own good reasons, along with dozens of others. This went on for three years.

  Threats began. On one occasion, he ran a story exposing labor racketeering in one of the restaurant workers' unions. A week later, all four of the tires on his car were slashed. Two months later, when he continued on the same topic, he went to his car one morning and found bullet holes in its rear window. One night the following week, someone broke into his car with a chain saw, cut out the seats, and cut the wheel off the steering column. Cooper bought a junker of a Datsun and had a friend register it in Maine. The chainsaw men came back and cut it in half one night a week later.

  His wife was hysterical. On the surface, Cooper took things calmly, even though he was also concerned. His vehicle, he explained to her, was an excellent barometer of reader reaction. But then on April 16th, 1966, he came home and his wife had moved out. She left a note. She was filing for divorce. A week later, he learned she was seeing another man.

  He was now half crazy. He sat alone in the living room of his Upper West Side apartment, shades pulled, gun on his hip, watching the street. Some nights he bolted upright in bed but could never recall what he'd been dreaming. On other nights, sleepless, he'd arise from bed at a random moment and move sideways to the window. He'd peer out past a drawn curtain. If he saw a stationary figure, his heart would kick in his chest.

  His editors at the Daily News said he needed a rest: a stint on rewrite in the sports department, under Sam Rothman’s eye. From putting people in jail, he went to two paragraphs on football games he'd never seen, rewriting stuff sent in by stringers:

  SLIPPERY ROCK BEATS GETTYSBURG, 17-10.

  “Findlay, Pa.—Slippery Rock beat Gettysburg today 17-10 in a game played before a homecoming crowd of 2,356. Halfback Duane Taylor scored two touchdowns for Slippery Rock and kicked two extra points.”

  And so on. It was a humiliating move. His old enemies were having a big laugh. At this point in his life, most of his dreams were dead and Frank Cooper was a bitter man.

  One night he started home but ended up instead in the Old Dublin Bar on West 86th Street. Four beers usually made him feel better. After that, who knew? Three days later, he found himself in Beth Israel Hospital, drying out from a drinking binge coupled with a nervous breakdown. He had a black eye that he couldn't account for and his wallet was gone.

  His wife got a quickie divorce which he didn’t contest. She remarried. He became chippy at work. The Daily News fired him. He collected severance pay. There was talk of a new nonunion paper starting up, but Cooper didn't pay much attention. There were now hundreds of former newspaper employees on the street.

  While a decision on his future hung in a distant balance, Cooper took a cue from Sam Rothman, an incorrigible horseplayer. Cooper spent a few days at Aqueduct, reckle
ssly attempting to solve the mysteries of two-year-old maiden races and six-furlong claimers. As if by magic, he turned a $400 bankroll into $1,650 in five days. He reckoned that he was onto a new career. But the wizardry inexplicably vanished, and he found the $1,650 just as easily back down to $280 the following Tuesday. Worse, he was starting to spot some of his old adversaries, a bunch of overweight white guys with bad haircuts, milling around the $100-Win windows and muttering ominously to each other as they squinted at him. He started to hear stories about a top Aqueduct jockey who refused to fix a few races and was now so scared of the Brooklyn mob that he was moving to England. At first, Cooper wanted to go with the story. This was the big one. The one Winchell had urged on him.

  Then he went chicken and backed off.

  One night he pulled out the Smith & Wesson and loaded a single bullet. Then he drafted a suicide note. It was a fine bit of writing, his obituary. He pinned the note to his shirt. He cocked the gun and laid it back on the desk in front of him. He began to draw deep, even breaths in an attempt to summon up the courage to pull a trigger. After an hour of agonizing, he decided to hell with that, too. He threw away the note and went to bed.

  The next day Sam Rothman phoned. A new paper would start up by September 1967, Rothman explained. Sam, who was about to be canned at the New York Daily News, was waiting for an offer. “They're calling it the New York Eagle. It's going to be trashy fun,” Sam said.

  Silence, then suspiciously, Cooper asked, “Who's publishing it?”

  Rothman confessed. Kenneth Siegelman would publish. Siegelman was a millionaire from Arizona, famous for helium-headed scandal sheets and much-publicized contributions to right wing nut causes such as The John Birch Society. It was Siegelman's contention that many newspapers were unprofitable because they were not shrill or tasteless enough.

  Cooper snarled. “Another one of his rags?” Cooper asked. “It’ll be a cold day in hell when I work for that bastard.”

  Sam was undeterred. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “But what I have to know today is whether we can put your name on the list for staff writing positions when they get filled.”

  “Do whatever you want, Sam. Remember: Cold day in hell.”

  Cooper hung up. A month later, the nascent Eagle offered Sam a plum: the editorship of the sports page, plus a column and the best salary of his life. Curiously, Cooper was offered the unwanted job in obituaries: editor of the page and main writer, with two younger assistants as needed, the latter positions to rotate through the Eagle's staff and cover Cooper's duties on his days off. The offer came by certified mail from the Eagle’s business office.

  “The Irish comics?” Cooper asked Sam when he phoned. “You got to be kidding me!”

  Sam laughed. “Do it, pal. We’ll have fun again.”

  Writing obituaries was considered the worst job on almost any newspaper. An investigative reporter wasn't so much transferred to it as he was sentenced to it. But the cold day in Hell had arrived.

  Cooper soon decided that he liked writing obituaries. Daily he found human drama in the way ordinary people had lived the parts of their lives. Better, he met mostly good people and—for once in his life—made no enemies.

  It was a strange way to live, waking up each day wondering eagerly if anyone interesting had kicked the bucket overnight. But there he was, resurrected as a poor man's Plutarch. A fast format Boswell. A study in contradictions and complexities and life’s finalities.

  So by the late summer of 1968, Francis Xavier Cooper was the best writer in the worst job on a tacky newspaper that was so bad that it was good. It was a complicated equation that was just waiting for something unpleasant to happen.

  Chapter 12

  The next morning in his office, Cooper tried to focus on his more immediate tasks. Each day in New York hundreds of men and women died. Few were considered worthy of newspaper space. Today, Cooper had a music teacher, a labor lawyer, a former air traffic controller, and a former Top 40 AM-radio personality who'd been popular in the 1950s but had been touched by the payola scandals. He had been known by the name of "Rockin’ Jimmy" Arnold. Forty-eight, broke and jobless, he had committed suicide by hanging himself in a motel room.

  From farther afield, off the international wire services, Cooper pulled a poorly written account of a former East German Communist leader who had died in prison. He marked it for a more thorough rewrite. Cooper penciled in seven inches on the left side of the page.

  An acrobat from the Barnum & Bailey Circus had died of injuries after being hit by a car in Boston. Good for two columns wide and four inches long on the right side of the page. The wife of a local Rolls Royce dealer had succumbed after a long battle with leukemia. Cooper knew the woman's brother. He made a note to send a letter of condolence.

  Cooper visited the clippings morgue downstairs for an hour. Then, back in his office he made phone calls. The German's space expanded. So did space for the wife of the car dealer. She had wanted to be an actress when she was young. Her parents had been in the Yiddish theater. Cooper had never known. Thus, were the inner truths of lives revealed only in death. Today Cooper’s concentration was lousy, though. Stanley Rudawski was on his mind.

  At a few minutes past noon, Cooper disappeared downstairs again into the clippings morgue. He had two more names in his thoughts: Popov and Goleniewski. He returned three-quarters of an hour later, the light on his phone flashing with seven messages.

  “Good morning,” came a voice from his doorway.

  Startled, Cooper looked up and saw Sam Rothman.

  “Anyone important croak today?” Sam asked.

  “Everyone’s life is important to someone,” Cooper said. He leaned back in his chair. “What have you got, Sam?”

  Sam came in and sat down, gripping a sheet of his pages. Sam's sports column appeared three times a week. Today was one of those days. “Nothing much. Same old, same old.”

  “You should have seen this old guy I spent last night with,” Cooper said.

  “The woman who called yesterday?”

  “Yeah,” Cooper said. “She took me to see her father. A man in his sixties. Stanley Rudawski. Unlucky bastard. Looked like he was dying of six different diseases at once.”

  “You used to call that 'campaigning for a good obit.’”

  “Yeah. I know. But hey, Margot's a friend. And anyway, this guy was mixed up in some spy stuff a few years back. He told me a story. Must have been the most exciting thing that ever happened to him, even though he doesn't know what it was.”

  “He wants it mentioned in his obit, huh?”

  “Guess so.” Cooper shrugged. “Sam, let me ask you something? What do you think is the biggest secret of the 1960s?”

  Sam pursed his lips. “In what field?”

  “Spies. Espionage, International politics. Rudawski says he was face to face with some would-be Soviet defector back in 1965 in Paris. The Russian was promising to put the other defectors in their proper perspective. Rudawski says there was something vital that never got to the west.”

  “Why didn't this guy just come out and tell you?”

  “Because his Russian never got around to talking.” Cooper ran through a shortened version of the dying man's story for Sam’s benefit.

  Cooper's telephone rang. He answered it. He gave Sam a wave to indicate that he would be on the line for a while. Sam nodded and took off.

  The caller was a man named William Arnetti, the brother of "Rockin’ Jimmy" Arnold. Cooper talked and typed at the same time. With two follow-up calls, he had the deceased in focus. Eight inches. One column. Right-hand side. If today's page had a lead, this was it: the obit with most interest: a man whose star had shown very brightly for a dozen years, but never at any other time in his life. He had been unable to live with obscurity. Twice divorced, no children.

  In mid-afternoon, Marty Friedkin plopped down in Cooper’s office. The bosses on the Sixth Floor had flown him back for “a consultation.” It was actually a cheek-to-jowl screaming match
with S.W. Murphy. Murphy did the screaming and Friedkin did the listening. Murphy warned Friedkin to “go easy with Wallace or else” since the Alabaman was popular with legions of their sorehead blue collar readers. Friedkin sat down with Cooper and was trying to decide how much easier to go, if at all. Sam wandered in and joined them.

  “Who’s financing Wallace?” Cooper asked out of the blue.

  “What do you mean?” Marty asked.

  “How does he run his campaign?” Cooper asked. “He’s got staff. Travel. Auditorium rentals. Where the hell does Wallace get the money to run for President?”

  Marty paused for a minute. “I’m guessing a lot of small donations,” he said. “Probably the same fools who send their dough to the fake TV evangelists. Would it surprise you?”

  “Nope. But are there that many of them?”

  “Maybe,” said Friedkin. “I’m hearing stories now that Wallace wants to rent Madison Square Garden for a rally in New York City right before the election. Who the hell would go to a Wallace rally in New York?”

  “Is there still a local Bund?” Sam asked. “Any latter-day Nazis would go. They’d love it. Lederhosen, bratwurst and Confederate flags. Can’t miss.”

  “The Garden costs big time money, Marty,” said Cooper.

  “He gets it somewhere,” Friedkin said.

  “Okay, so from where?”

  There was no answer from Friedkin. Just a disturbed look.

  “I understand why Murphy is irate. We’re slightly to the right of the Chicago Tribune, Francisco Franco and Robespierre,” Cooper said. “Were you forgetting that?”

  “I saw what I saw, and I filed what I filed. If that Wallace guy ever got elected here, it’d be the coming of the jackboot and the Swastika.”