Dark Victory

by Moldea, Dan E. ; Miller, Mark Crispin;

  Television was the new rage, and box-office revenues began to drop dramatically. Instead of trying to jump into television in its infancy, most of the studios preferred to ignore it. One exception was Barney Balaban at Paramount, influenced by stockholder Jules Stein, who viewed television as a means of “advertising and promoting the Hollywood product.”

  In his Saturday Evening Post series on MCA, David Wittels had revealed that Jules Stein was the second-largest stockholder in Paramount Studios, with 20,000 shares. The reporter concluded that MCA “is the biggest and most powerful booking agency in the history of show business,” but that “MCA controls too many jobs with its intricate tie-ups throughout the entertainment industry, its package deals with its exclusive contracts with outlets for talent.”

  Regarding Jules Stein’s purchase of Paramount stock, a Justice Department document alleged that after the acquisition, MCA “began to feed its clients to Paramount. This was done partly in order to enhance the value of the stock.… Through the purchase of this stock, Paramount was made a captive market by MCA for its talent.”7

  Despite his newfound free-lance status, Reagan was still badly shaken after his divorce. According to the trade publications, he appeared to be devastated. Reagan moved into a small apartment and became a bachelor again, looking for a way out of his personal and professional problems. However, he did find time to help Nancy Davis, a twenty-eight-year-old actress whose name had appeared on Communist Party mailing lists.

  Nancy Davis was the daughter of stage actress Edith Luckett and the stepdaughter of Dr. Loyal Davis, a prosperous Chicago neurosurgeon who had adopted Nancy when she was very young. A 1943 graduate of Smith College, Nancy Davis had been deeply influenced politically by her stepfather, who was an ultraconservative anti-communist. After college, she came to Hollywood and in 1949 was cast in her first film, Shadow on the Wall, which starred Zachary Scott and Ann Sothern. She then made a brief appearance in The Doctor and the Girl, with Glenn Ford and Janet Leigh. Davis had gone to her producer at MGM, Mervyn LeRoy, a close friend of Sidney Korshak and later the president of the Hollywood Park Racing Association, who advised her to talk to the president of SAG about the Communist Party mailings she was receiving.

  “I told Mervyn how upset I was,” Davis remembered. “Mervyn made my problem his—he is that kind of man. He told me he knew the man who could fix this thing, the president of the Screen Actors Guild, and would speak to him about my problem: … Mervyn assured me that Ronnie was a nice young man and I was a nice young woman, and it might be nice if we met.”8

  LeRoy also recalled the incident, adding, “I called Ronnie and explained the problem. I said he ought to talk to the girl, because the whole thing had her so upset.

  “‘Besides,’ I said, ‘you’re single and she’s kind of cute and you should meet her.’

  “So Ronnie said, okay, send her down.… I always say that’s the one and only thing we can thank the communists for—if it hadn’t been for their propaganda material, Nancy and Ronnie Reagan might never have met.”9

  Later, it was determined that another Hollywood Nancy Davis had been politically active, and that the two were confused. MGM’s Nancy Davis was “cleared,” and she and Reagan started dating. Soon after, she was appointed to fill a vacant seat on the SAG board of directors—where she could be closer to her new boyfriend and help him with his work.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  As Reagan left Warner Brothers, so, too, did his producer, Bryan Foy, who had had a falling out with Jack Warner, the president. Foy was then appointed as executive producer at Eagle-Lion Studios, run by Arthur B. Krim, who later bought out United Artists. As one of his first acts in his new position, Foy named Chicago Mafia figure Johnny Roselli as an Eagle-Lion producer. The appointment came just as Roselli was released from Atlanta Penitentiary, where he had served less than half of his six-year sentence for his role in the Bioff-Browne-Schenck scandal.

  Three other convicted conspirators in the scandal were also released around the same time. In 1947, Tony Accardo, who had become the boss of the Chicago Mafia after Nitti’s suicide, visited Paul Ricca, Louis Campagna, and Charles Gioe at Fort Leavenworth Penitentiary. Accardo, who was accompanied by Chicago attorney Eugene Bernstein, had illegally assumed the name of another lawyer, Joseph Bulger.*

  Soon after, according to a government report, “the three mobsters were released on parole after serving a minimum period of imprisonment although they were known to be vicious gangsters.… A prominent member of the Missouri bar [Paul Dillon, who had been Harry Truman’s campaign manager in St. Louis in 1934] presented their parole applications to the parole board, which granted the parole against the recommendations of the prosecuting attorney and the judge who presided at their trial.… [T]his early release from imprisonment of three dangerous mobsters is a shocking abuse of parole power.”1

  The Chicago Crime Commission stated that “during the congressional hearings in September 1947, Harry Ash [director of the Illinois Crime Prevention Bureau] testified that in May 1947 he received a letter from a parole authority in the penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, inquiring as to whether he would be willing to serve as a parole adviser for Charles “Cherry Nose” Gioe. About the same time that the message was received, attorney Sidney R. Korshak, who had formerly represented Gioe, called Ash on the telephone and requested him to act as parole adviser for Gioe. Ash did write a letter, in which he stated that he had known Gioe since 1915 and considered him a satisfactory subject for parole.”2

  Ash had been Korshak’s law partner since December 1939.

  Johnny Roselli’s real name was Filippo Sacco. He was born in Esteria, Italy, on June 4, 1905, and came to the Boston area when he was six. Moving west as a teenager, he settled in Chicago and became a bootlegger and a gambler, working for the Capone gang.

  Roselli was sent to Los Angeles about 1930 and worked in the illegal gambling wire service operated by Moses Annenberg, the former circulation manager for the Hearst newspapers who also had supplied information to bookmakers across the country. Annenberg owned several publications, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Daily Racing Form, and two raunchy magazines, Baltimore Brevities and Click, which was banned by the Canadian government.

  Annenberg was indicted by a federal grand jury in August 1939 for income tax evasion, along with two associates and his son, Walter Annenberg, who was charged with aiding and abetting the income tax evasion of his father. The following year, the elder Annenberg plea-bargained, agreeing to admit his guilt if the charges against his associates and son were dismissed. The government agreed to Annenberg’s terms. He was required to pay $9.5 million in back taxes and penalties and sentenced to three years in Lewisburg Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. Two years later, while out on parole, Annenberg died, and Walter Annenberg took over his father’s publishing empire.

  When Annenberg’s wire service ended, Roselli was working for Pat Casey, MPPDA’s labor negotiator, and was officially on Casey’s payroll when he was indicted for extortion in 1943. Roselli once told his friend, Southern California Mafia leader James Fratianno, “The best years of my life were when I was a producer with Brynie Foy. I liked being with those people. I knew half the movie people in this town on a first-name basis. Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, Sam Goldwyn, Joe Schenck, Clark Gable, George Raft, Jean Harlow, Gary Cooper. Shit, I even knew Charlie Chaplin. I knew them all and enjoyed their company.”3

  But Roselli’s profile loomed too large for him to go back to his old ways. Even though no one complained about his reentry into Hollywood—not Ronald Reagan, Roy Brewer, the studio producers, or the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals—Roselli was no longer the Chicago Mafia’s eyes and ears in Hollywood.

  Also gone from the scene was Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, who had come a long way from his boyhood roots on New York’s Lower East Side, where he, Meyer Lansky, and Charles “Lucky” Luciano created the strongest criminal triumvirate in modern American history. While ope
rating in Hollywood, Siegel had been introduced to the local elite by George Raft. The mobster dined with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and lived in the same neighborhood as Humphrey Bogart, Judy Garland, and Bing Crosby. The stars seemed to enjoy having the friendship of a gangster; it was their version of a walk on the wild side. Jack Warner frequently boasted about his friendship with the mobster.

  Siegel, with the help of Del E. Webb Construction, had built the first big-time Nevada hotel/casino, the Flamingo, near two other establishments, the Last Frontier and the El Rancho Vegas, along Highway 91 in Las Vegas. The Flamingo quickly became a weekend resort on “The Strip” soon after it officially opened on March 27, 1947. Through the friends he made in Hollywood, Siegel always had top stars perform in his floor shows. However, Siegel lived too high and managed to get himself badly in debt. As a result, he skimmed perhaps as much as $3 million from the Flamingo’s treasury—and was caught.

  While staying at the Beverly Hills mansion of his lover, party-girl Virginia Hill, on June 20, 1947, Siegel was killed by Frankie Carbo, who emptied the nine-bullet clip of his .30-caliber army carbine through an open window in the house. The murder had been ordered by Siegel’s long-time friends Lansky and Luciano, who wanted to demonstrate what would happen to those who stole from the mob.4

  With Roselli overexposed and Siegel dead, the Mafia needed a new face to run its operations in Hollywood. The man selected for the job was Sidney Korshak, who had allegedly been involved in the battles between IATSE and CSU. He had the legal background, the necessary contacts in the film industry, and the full support of the Chicago Mafia.

  Consistent with a 1942 IRS report which stated that Korshak was “often delegated to represent the Chicago mob, usually in some secret capacity,” a law-enforcement official in Los Angeles said, “Korshak wasn’t the kind of guy who formally represented the Chicago mob. He was more valuable in the shadows, with plenty of insulation. They needed a face that wasn’t too familiar, and a name that wasn’t too notorious. They also wanted a guy without the overt connections, someone who could appear legitimate.”

  In fact, according to an FBI document based on wiretap information, Chicago mobster Leslie “The Killer” Kruse “had been instructed by the ‘outfit’ never to personally contact Sidney Korshak, hoodlum attorney.”5

  By January 1948, Korshak had taken a home at 1711 Coldwater Canyon, just outside Beverly Hills, and had another house at 17031 Magnolia in Encino, an exclusive area in greater Los Angeles, while keeping his residence and law practice in Chicago.6

  Labor lawyer Sidney Korshak, who had been operating in California since the early 1940s, had really arrived in Hollywood. A new, more ambitious and sophisticated era of the Mafia’s penetration of the film industry had begun.

  *Accardo and Bernstein were later indicted—as a result of Accardo’s use of a false name—but both were later acquitted. However, Campagna and Ricca had been told that their paroles would not be granted until their combined tax debt to the IRS, totaling nearly $470,000, was paid. Bernstein came to the rescue, settling the two mobsters’ accounts with the government by offering a $190,000 combined settlement. Bernstein said he received the money, in cash, from “persons unknown.” Soon after the payment was made, Campagna and Ricca were released.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce began its work in May 1950. Chaired by Senator Estes Kefauver, a lanky, homespun Democrat from Tennessee, and with Rudolph Halley as chief counsel, the five-member Kefauver Committee intended to travel from city to city and hold hearings, investigating the extent of the Mafia’s influence in the United States. In the process, Kefauver was walking on political eggshells, since most of the big-city mobs, at that time, were working with the local Democratic Party machines. His sidekick was Senator Charles W. Tobey, a Bible-thumping Republican who usually wore a copyreader’s visor during the hearings.

  Nearly twenty million people would view the live, televised coverage provided by NBC and CBS as some of America’s top underworld figures appeared before the Senate panel and network cameras. However, most of the mobsters called refused to answer even the simplest of questions, preferring instead to take the Fifth Amendment.

  New York mob boss Frank Costello insisted that his face not appear on television—so the cameras focused on his wringing hands throughout his testimony. A close friend of Jack Warner’s and George Wood’s (Wood was a vice-president of the William Morris Agency), Costello was among those who talked but didn’t say very much. He was well connected in Hollywood and had earlier helped Warner with some “labor problems.”1

  Philip D’Andrea, one of the Chicago Mafia members convicted in the Bioff-Browne-Schenck scandal and the former editor of a newspaper for Italian-Americans, was in California when he was subpoenaed to testify before the committee. When asked whether he had heard of the Mafia, he claimed that he really didn’t know much about it.

  “Would you say it would be unusual for any man of your age who was born in Sicily to say that he knew nothing about the Mafia?” asked George S. Robinson, the committee’s associate counsel.

  “Yes, I would think so,” D’Andrea replied. “If he was born in Sicily, I would think so, because, as I say, years ago it was a byword in every family. People were scared to death of having a little home, for fear somebody would come over and blow it up, or for fear that they would get a letter. That was the condition here about twenty years ago, that I recall.”

  “What would you say were some of the other concepts or principles of the Mafia that you recall from your childhood, having heard talked about in the family?”

  “One of the concepts was that it would be a good idea to keep your mouth closed.”2

  Also testifying was former MPPDA “investigator” Johnny Roselli, who said that he had been employed by Eagle-Lion Studios, under Bryan Foy and Robert T. Cain Productions. He also said that he had financed and produced two movies, but that he was then unemployed because Foy had gone back to Warner Brothers. Counsel Halley replied, “Mr. Foy hasn’t dumped you, He phoned me in a very nice way. He asked for no favors, but he told me he wanted me to know that in his opinion you were going straight, that you have had a lot of unnecessary trouble. He asked for nothing, but he felt he ought to give you that character backing.”

  Roselli had also been instrumental in the war between Harry Cohn and his brother, Jack, in 1932, when the two men were battling for control of Columbia Pictures. When a third partner offered to sell his shares to the highest bidder, Harry Cohn turned to Roselli, who obtained the money from New Jersey crime boss Abner “Longy” Zwillman. At one time, Cohn, a former New York pool hustler, reportedly had gambling debts as high as $400,000 while with Columbia. And, again, Roselli helped bail him out. As a gesture of their friendship, Cohn proudly wore a star sapphire ring Roselli had given him as a gift. With Roselli around, Cohn felt protected when Bioff and IATSE threatened Columbia with a strike.

  Before the Senate committee, Roselli was then asked how he first became involved with Bioff and the studios.

  “I represented, we might say, the picture industry. I worked for Pat Casey, who was a labor conciliator for the industry. I was with him for several years, and along about 1941 or 1942 I was indicted with the rest of them. I met Browne and Bioff along [sic] fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen years ago. In their negotiations out on the West Coast, Mr. Bioff was running the industry to his own liking, with others. I would discuss this with Pat Casey, and there were wild and woolly rumors about this man [Bioff] getting money. I was very friendly with Harry Cohn, on whom Bioff called a one-day strike. I was successful in getting the strike called off.”

  “How did you do that?” asked Halley.

  “At this time Mr. Cohn was at Palm Springs. He called me on the telephone and told me about the strike being called in the studio. He knew that I had known Browne and Bioff. How he knew it was either through—Mr. Cohn and I used to go to the races, and one da
y Browne and Bioff stopped by Mr. Cohn’s box and knew him and me. We talked and walked away. So he [Cohn] said, ‘I know you know this fellow [Bioff]. Would you like—’ he knew that I was around Pat Casey, doing some work for him. ‘Would you try to make a contact with Bioff to find out what this thing is?’ I said, ‘Why don’t you have Mendel Silverberg, who was the attorney, or Mr. Casey do it?’ He said, ‘Well, no one seems to find them here this morning.’

  “I said, ‘You mean you want me to go represent you?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ So I talked it over I think that day with Pat Casey. I asked him if he knew what violations there were at this studio. He said that he didn’t think there were any. I asked him if he tried to get hold of Bioff that day, and he said he couldn’t find him. I went to the telephone. I stopped and had lunch—this was around eleven-thirty or twelve o’clock—at the Vendome on Sunset Boulevard and tried to get Bioff on the telephone. He told me he wasn’t around, that he wasn’t available. I knew I had this thing to do for Mr. Cohn, who was my friend. Of course, I didn’t think it was the right thing. I didn’t think there was any violations there. I went to his [Bioff’s] office. The girl tried to stop me and I stepped over the railing. There was a low railing there. I went back to his office. He was sitting behind his desk I think with his hat on. He may have had a topcoat. I remember the picture very well. He had a gun on his desk. I said, ‘I just called you up. What is the idea of your not answering the telephone?’

  “Who is this you were calling on?” asked Kefauver.