Infamous Players

He was a tall, silver-haired man, square-jawed with a military bearing, always impeccably attired in a dark blue suit. It was only a few weeks into my Paramount job when I came to understand that Sidney Korshak would be part of my new corporate family, even though he did not work for Paramount. His visits were a daily occurrence, but he did not linger or chat with anyone other than Bob Evans, nor did anyone on staff ever refer to him or acknowledge his visits. Korshak was the ghost who was always there but never there.

Evans had talked earlier about him once or twice, always in a manner that betrayed not only respect but near-reverence. Sidney Korshak was not so much his personal attorney (he never paid him) or even his mentor as he was his consigliere. And when Korshak arrived for an Evans audience, all other plans would be set aside. Whoever happened to be in the reception room would have to wait until the big man had come and gone from Evans’s sanctum sanctorum. And this procedure was replicated by other power players at other offices in town, as I was to learn.

Sidney Korshak, it seemed to me, was the man who knew everything—the big corporate deals as well as the personal peccadilloes. It was some time before I also realized that Korshak was the man who knew too much.

It was Korshak’s role in life to dwell simultaneously in two separate and distinct worlds which, in his grand design, would remain hermetically sealed against each other. There was his celebrity world—he liked to drop names like Kirk Douglas or Dinah Shore or Debbie Reynolds, or to casually mention that he’d just had dinner with Sinatra in Las Vegas, or with Nancy and Ronnie Reagan in Beverly Hills.

Korshak’s life was built around a web of secrecy, and he was convinced that he would always be able to move effortlessly from one world to the next. It was only later in his life that he, too, found himself trapped. As the dangers in his nether life became more ominous, Korshak was unable to extricate himself from his underworld bonds. The celebrities would continue to decorate his life, like glitzy toys, but the bad boys would always be hovering out there with their furtive demands and threats.

Over the years my relationship with Korshak remained distanced but cordial. He never directly asked anything from me nor subjected me to his power games. When his son, Harry, began to produce movies at Paramount—I never figured out precisely how this deal came about—Korshak told me he would “appreciate it” if I were to “look out” for Harry and provide advice if he began to stray. But when young Harry’s career did not go well, Korshak was the first to inform his son that he would do well to pursue other career possibilities.

In observing Korshak’s superbly surreptitious maneuverings over time, I began to accept a reality none of us wanted to openly address. Sidney Korshak was a gangster, albeit a very civil and well-groomed gangster. The bad boys had achieved major clout in the entertainment industry, and Korshak, despite all his secrecy, represented the embodiment of that clout.

Ironically, while Korshak yearned for the trappings of “respectability,” his pals in Hollywood venerated him, not for his cool or his great wardrobe or even for his lawyering skills, but rather for his fabled underworld ties. Bob Evans, for one, had always romanticized the lore of the gangster—hence his lifelong ambition to make the movie about the mythic, mobster-owned Cotton Club, which ultimately came to haunt him. Charlie Bluhdorn had a long-standing flirtation with the shadow world of fringe financiers in Europe and ended up doing deals that resulted in prison sentences for his partners and almost for himself. Frank Yablans subscribed to mobster mythology to such a degree that he even agreed to play the role of an underworld thug in a movie titled Mikey and Nicky. He was in rehearsal on the film before an apoplectic Bluhdorn vetoed his participation (even the often reckless Bluhdorn realized the potential jeopardy to his corporate image).

The Bluhdorn-Korshak romance was shaken badly in the early seventies by two developments. First, Korshak went to the chairman’s office in New York to demand a substantial pay raise for Evans, telling Bluhdorn that he had not properly rewarded his production chief for his success (Evans’s base pay never exceeded $350,000). Bluhdorn summarily rejected these demands and all but threw Korshak out of his office. (Bluhdorn later thought better of it and submitted to Korshak’s pressure.)

In 1976, as the media was turning on Bluhdorn because of his freewheeling stock manipulations, the New York Times ran a multipart series on Korshak that exposed his underworld ties. Written by Seymour Hersh, the Times’ respected investigative reporter, the lengthy series analyzed how Korshak had bolstered the fortunes of his “respectable” corporate clients through his connections with shady figures in Las Vegas and with the labor unions, but the story failed to produce concrete evidence that would lead to an indictment.

The story also alleged that millions in Paramount’s corporate profits remained hidden from stockholders and that organized-crime figures were linked to Paramount and to its subsidiary, Madison Square Garden. Still later stories revealed that Joel Dolkart, Bluhdorn’s onetime corporate attorney, who now faced embezzlement charges, stood ready to document these allegations in order to avoid a long prison sentence.

Shocked by the negative publicity, Bluhdorn, like other Korshak clients, backed away from his relationship with all his “shady” friends—even “the fixer.” Korshak’s presence suddenly represented a threat, not a benefit. Korshak himself had too much to hide, and so did Bluhdorn.

The studio founders were themselves tough guys—immigrants from Eastern Europe who had to con and connive their way to money and power. Early on they gravitated toward businesses like exhibition and vaudeville, where a little cash and a lot of push could bring results and where they often interfaced with the mob. In the big cities local gangsters muscled into unions representing stagehands. Barney Balaban, who later ran Paramount, started paying off mob-run unions as early as the 1920s and kept raising the ante, covering even projectionists and ushers. Exhibitors had to pay Al Capone to keep their theaters operating, and by the 1930s a hood named Willie Bioff was even taking a “commission” for providing the studios with film stock.

As the union war chests kept building, the wannabe movie tycoons, having contributed to these funds, inevitably started tapping into them. A well-connected hood named Johnny Roselli arranged for a $500,000 loan to facilitate Harry Cohn’s takeover of Columbia Pictures. The link was a natural one: Cohn’s mannerisms mirrored those of the mobsters more than the bankers he also had to deal with. Louis B. Mayer, who was to become the mandarin of MGM, also had financial dealings with fringe figures from the mob like Frank Orsatti, and his inner circle of aides included some thuggish characters (the exception was Irving Thalberg, his studio chief, who displayed a self-conscious courtliness).

As the studios became big businesses, the mob’s cut of the action also expanded. The same hoods who shook down stagehands—Tommy Malloy and Frank Nitti were among the most aggressive—also moved in on the IATSE, representing blue-collar workers like grips and gaffers, demanding ever higher kickbacks from studios. By the mid-1920s, the studio chiefs, brought together by Nicholas Schenck, president of Loew’s, offered union leaders a onetime payoff of $150,000 if they agreed to a no-strike clause for a period of seven years. It was a good deal, but by the midthirties the payoff demands increased steeply to mollify representatives from the Chicago mob. Mobsters like Lucky Luciano and Sam Giancanna became regular visitors to the studios. In 1939 the emissaries from Chicago even made a bold bid to take over the Screen Actors Guild, but stars like Robert Montgomery and James Cagney went public in opposing the incursion.

Given its links to gangsters, it was inevitable that Hollywood would also develop a propensity for gangster movies. In 1930 Howard Hughes bought the rights to a novel called Scarface , which focused on two brothers, one a mobster and one a cop. He hired Howard Hawks to direct it and signed a former dancer named George Raft to play a character modeled after Al Capone’s enforcer.

As he emulated this performance throughout his career, Raft interfaced with the likes of Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Joe Adonis. (“They were like gods to me,” Raft later told his biographer.)

The ever-prissy Hays Office—the industry’s censorship enforcer—was disturbed by Hawks’s inclusive attitude and by the finished product, which it deemed excessively violent. To quell this anxiety, Hawks tacked on a subtitle, “The Shame of the Nation,” and even mandated a pedestrian “crime does not pay” speech near the end of the movie. The film nonetheless was a hit when it opened in 1932.

The studios kept revisiting the gangster genre with profitable results through the days of The Godfather in 1972, Bugsy in 1991, and Public Enemies in 2009. All the while, various mob kingpins maintained their ties to Hollywood luminaries. Mickey Cohen professed to hang with Robert Mitchum and Errol Flynn. Sam Giancanna had links to Judy Campbell, who was John F. Kennedy’s occasional “date.” Mobsters liked to hover around the fabled Rat Pack, led by Frank Sinatra, especially in the “secure” environs of Las Vegas. The tabloids for months lived off the murder of Johnny Stompanato by Lana Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane—Stompanato had worked for Mickey Cohen, but, under the name of John Steele, had been a fringe player at the studios and had dated Turner.

A great body of folklore flowed from these random relationships. Did Frank Sinatra get his role as Private Maggio in From Here to Eternity because of the clout of his friend Johnny Roselli? Roselli supposedly reminded Harry Cohn that Columbia still owed money to the mob. Did Frank Costello mandate the murder of Sammy Davis Jr. because of his affair with Kim Novak?

To a degree, much of the mythology was propagated by the Kefauver hearings of 1950. Led by the geeky Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, the televised hearings promised to reveal the links of organized crime to top figures in politics and entertainment. The committee let it be known that it had obtained photographs showing Sinatra conferring with Luciano and would offer other presumably sexy evidence. The testimony of Sidney Korshak, it was promised, would be a high point of the probe.

The publicity-shy Korshak, however, had no intention of blowing his cover. Arranging a private meeting with Kefauver at a Chicago hotel before his scheduled appearance, Korshak produced photographs showing the senator in a hotel room in the company of two underage girls. Upon glancing at the photos, Kefauver canceled Korshak’s appearance.

Kefauver’s probe didn’t succeed in turning up the evidence it had advertised. Had it taken place twenty years later, its findings would have been more rewarding. The release of Deep Throat in 1972 would come to represent the most significant incursion of mob-owned product into the entertainment marketplace. Gerard Damiano Productions, which made the movie, allegedly included members of the Colombo crime family.

Given the appropriate calculations and adjustments, Deep Throat represented, by all estimates, the highest-grossing movie in the history of the industry. And given its success, the bad boys were encouraged to pump funding into other movies. Lou Peraino, one of Deep Throat’s producers, established his own distribution company, Bryanston, in 1973, and his releases included The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and a Bruce Lee film, Enter the Dragon. Under pressure from a cadre of investigators, Bryanston proved to be a short-lived venture.

But Charlie Bluhdorn’s decision in 1970 to sell a 50 percent interest in the Paramount lot to a shady group of European financiers soon focused attention yet again on possible ties to “funny money.” The deal had been engineered by Michele Sindona, a money launderer with close ties to the Gambino family as well as the Vatican bank. By 1980 Sindona had been convicted on sixty-five counts of fraud and perjury: he was shortly extradited to Italy and died in his jail cell from cyanide poisoning, a favorite mob medicine.

In the same period, the copresident of Warner Communications, Jay Emmett, became a major stockholder in an illstarred venture in Westchester County called the Westchester Premier Theater. Again, the government alleged that “respectable” industry money had been mixed with Mafia seed money and that the Warner executives were in effect laundering the Gambino family’s investment. Several indictments ensued.

To Sidney Korshak, the idea that “respectable” corporate money could end up being directly traced to a Mafia front was sloppy and unthinkable. In his world the two domains remained separate and distinct. He had been imbued with this modus operandi since his childhood in Chicago when he and his brother Marshall observed that two regimes ruled the city, existing side by side, separate but equal. There was the official government of Chicago, which ultimately became the province of the Daley dynasty, and then there was the “organization” run by Jake Arvey, a shrewd political operator whose reign was propped up by the Chicago mob.

Upon graduating from law school, Korshak was informed that Jews were not allowed to take the state bar exam and that his best career path resided in servicing the “shadow government.” As it turned out, the Pritzker family, the emerging powers in the hotel industry, needed a young attorney who could negotiate with the powerful mob-infiltrated Chicago labor unions, and Korshak seemed to be that man. Meanwhile, the power players from the mob like Murray “The Hump” Humphreys and Tony Accardo needed to mobilize legal minds to ward off the increasingly aggressive “Feds.” The murder of Alex Greenberg, a Jewish accountant who was the main financial strategist for the Chicago mob, dramatized not only the brain drain that the mob was facing, but also the perils of the job.

In addition to his Chicago clients, Korshak picked up a client who seemed, on the surface, to be a perfect match. Howard Hughes, like Korshak, was pathologically secretive and was eager to rid himself of RKO Studios, which generated more publicity than profits. Korshak managed to piece together a syndicate of Chicago operatives, some of whom had dicey reputations, but Hughes became squeamish when he examined the cast of characters. At the last moment, he torpedoed the deal.

Korshak was devastated: he had imagined himself running RKO and thus escaping the control of his Chicago mentors. Seeking new pastures, Korshak decided to focus on the casino business in Las Vegas. His initial mission was to build an alliance between the Chicago and the Cleveland families who were competing for control of the Riviera and the Desert Inn. A key ally was to become Jimmy Hoffa, who by now had pieced together some twenty-two separate pension funds into one mighty Teamsters Central States Pension Fund. Together Korshak and Hoffa constructed a “family ownership” scheme that ran a cooperative skim operation at the key Vegas casinos. To be sure, members of rival families resented Hoffa’s growing financial power, but that only strengthened Korshak’s hand, given his link to the Teamsters’ boss.

In Vegas and Chicago, Korshak was both respected and denigrated as “Mr. Silk Stockings” because of his celebrity contacts and fastidious attire. His blue-collar mob friends remained suspicious of him. They felt that his overriding ambition was to penetrate the inner circle of Hollywood.

Their intuition was valid. Korshak’s principal entrée to Hollywood power was Lew Wasserman, the boss of MCA and Universal. The two had met before World War II when Wasserman was still an aspiring young agent. Having represented music acts playing the mob-controlled club circuit, young Wasserman respected Korshak’s cool in dealing with the bad boys. Soon Korshak was meeting other Hollywood players who needed to capitalize on his Chicago pedigree. When Columbia’s Harry Cohn died, in 1958, his investors from the mob were alarmed about possible public disclosure. Conveniently, Cohn’s widow, Joan, hired Korshak to circumvent probate and negotiate a furtive resolution. A year later, Joan Cohn was remarried at a ceremony in Korshak’s house.

Wasserman was later to seek Korshak’s help in structuring a health and pension fund for members of the Screen Actors Guild—one containing a sweetheart deal for Wasserman’s company. Wasserman knew that actors ultimately would demand residuals from their TV shows and surely would win their case. Under the Korshak-Wasserman strategy, Universal-MCA would agree to help endow a pension fund provided the guild would drop its demand for any pre-1960 residuals. Subsequently, when the actors went on strike over the issue (a sixweek stoppage) Wasserman’s company was conveniently exempt from the labor action.

The SAG president, the actor Ronald Reagan, was accused by some of his colleagues of being complicit with Wasserman—many SAG members for years labeled it “the great giveaway.” The acting fraternity knew it was Korshak, not Wasserman, who had the true bond with Reagan.

By the early 1960s, Korshak was presiding over his shadow empire from his corner table at the Bistro restaurant in Beverly Hills, holding court for friends and allies at this citadel of celebrity power. He was influential in paving the way for the Dodgers to move to Los Angeles and averted an opening day disaster by resolving a strike at the parking concession. And, of course, he was regularly visiting with Bob Evans both in his office and at Evans’s home, which was to become the ultimate Hollywood playpen.

A film titled Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York appeared on the studio production charts one day. Since it was my job to tee up our new studio projects, I was supposed to know about every new film and thus asked Evans about Sheila’s origins.

Ultimately Harry called for an appointment. A slender, self-effacing young man in his late twenties, he was as scrupulously polite as his father, but made no effort to emulate his aura of power. He said he wanted to learn about producing—about scripts and budgets—but was by no means committed to it as a career. Indeed, I had the feeling that his father had urged him to try his hand at the movie business and that he himself remained unconvinced.

The issue that was never raised in our early talks was the one that most obsessed other producers—whether Sheila would get a green light to move forward into production. Though other projects got stalled along the way because of cost or cast, there was never a question about Sheila Levine—it was definitely going to happen. Sidney, however, was never going to mention it to me or refer to it even obliquely. Sheila was a fait accompli. Shortly, another Harry project, ironically titled Hit, also appeared on Paramount’s schedule and marched forward with equal dispatch.

Finally I sat down with Evans to relate my discomfort with the Korshak connection. “You and I are essentially responsible for movies made and released by Paramount, and I’m troubled by the idea of contracting out some of these projects to the Korshak family,” I explained.

Evans seemed unfazed: Harry Korshak’s productions were subject to the same rules and constraints as other projects, he said calmly. I pressed onward: “As far as I can tell, Harry and his father can produce whatever they want on whatever budgets they want.”

“Harry seems like a perfectly responsible young guy,” I said. “But folks in our community are beginning to notice the Korshak connection at the studio. I know you’re friendly with Sidney, but we’re talking about a guy who once represented Al Capone.”

Evans gave me a blank look and took a call. “I’ve got a doctor’s appointment,” he said, terminating our discussion. Not long thereafter, I learned that Harry had decided to set aside his interest in filmmaking and that he was moving to London to focus on a new passion—painting.

Sidney Korshak’s own Hollywood activities would not be curtailed, however. In October 1973, Bluhdorn, Lew Wasserman, and Kirk Kerkorian held a secret meeting in Evans’s projection room to hatch a new venture that was at once collusive and creative. Presiding over the meeting was Sidney Korshak.

The purpose of the meeting was to instantly create an important new player in the international film industry. The new entity, Cinema International Corp., a joint venture of MCA and Gulf & Western, would buy MGM’s major circuit of theaters overseas as well as acquiring rights to its library of films and TV shows.

It had taken a lot of patient perseverance on Korshak’s part to bring the three titans together, but the negotiations on the $100 million deal were still not proceeding smoothly. Kerkorian distrusted both Wasserman and Bluhdorn; he was a loner who was accustomed to crafting his own deals. But he also was experiencing a financial pinch at MGM, which meant that the CIC deal was important to him.

On two crucial occasions during the projection room discussions, Kerkorian simply got to his feet and marched out of the room. It was Korshak who followed him and persuaded him to keep talking. Late in the evening the deal was closed.

Korshak’s fee for his evening’s work was $250,000. When a bill for Bluhdorn’s share of the fee arrived on his desk, the Gulf & Western chairman called Wasserman to question him in indignation. “There’s no detail on the bill—no hourly fees, no explanation, nothing,” Bluhdorn protested.

To Wasserman, keeping Korshak happy was important for two key reasons. Not only did Korshak play a key role in deals like CIC but his savvy also helped keep Charlie Bluhdorn out of trouble with federal regulators—that is, if Bluhdorn could be persuaded to listen to him. The Universal boss was worried that if Bluhdorn drew intense scrutiny from the Feds, then that scrutiny would spread to other studios.

Not only did Bluhdorn’s Dominican dealings make Wasserman uncomfortable, but so did his practice of “liquidating” troubled assets from the Gulf & Western books. Wasserman and Korshak both were keenly aware of Bluhdorns’s tactic in assuming a $12 million stake in an obscure shell company called Commonwealth United, and then donating to that company the rights to its Julie Andrews clunker Darling Lili. In return for this largesse, Commonwealth United delivered stock and warrants with a face value of $30 million. When Bluhdorn sold off his Commonwealth United holdings, the value of which quickly disintegrated, the SEC was left with the untenable task of figuring out the tax implications. Meanwhile, Paramount’s books were clean of the Darling Lili stigma. The loss had disappeared, just as losses on Paint Your Wagon would also disappear.

A year later Bluhdorn once again acquired debentures in Commonwealth United in an even more bizarre deal involving the aforementioned Italian financier Michele Sindona. The debentures were then delivered to Sindona in partial payment for some 15 million shares in Société Générale Immobilière, a construction and real estate company in which Sindona was a major shareholder. Immobilière then turned around and purchased a 50 percent interest in Paramount’s back lot in Hollywood and some of its surrounding acreage. The transaction effectively doubled the value of the lot—Paramount had carried it on its books for half the amount Sindona had advanced. (Commonwealth United debentures also figured in a later Bluhdorn real estate purchase in Florida.)

The Immobilière deal sent a shock wave through Hollywood. Deputations of Italians were soon wandering the lot arguing about the disposition of the property. Sindona, it seemed, had not been aware of the severe zoning restrictions that would sharply inhibit development and rule out high-rise structures. Further, many of the soundstages were not in use—a problem Sindona resolved by leasing stages to a producer of porn movies.

The SEC, meanwhile, found itself saddled with so many Bluhdorn investigations that its limited staff was having a difficult time deciding priorities. The Sindona connection conveniently came off its books when Italian authorities arrested the financier on charges that he had embezzled $225 million from an Italian bank. The case drew wide attention in Italy because Sindona was also linked to yet another important financial institution—the Vatican bank.

Except for a small inner circle, Bluhdorn’s key executives knew nothing of the Sindona negotiations. Sidney Korshak, who keenly understood the dealings, and their dangers, shrewdly kept Bob Evans distanced from them. Korshak knew the price of dealing with those “on the dark side,” and felt that someone in Bluhdorn’s exposed position should be more discriminating in choosing business partners.

Knowing Bluhdorn’s proclivities, Korshak had also avoided involvement in The Godfather, and its intrigues. He’d been approached by major producer-stars like Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas who had hoped that Korshak could pressure Bluhdorn into selling the rights, but he knew this was never going to happen. Korshak knew also that Evans was getting battered in the casting controversies over The Godfather—Bluhdorn had told him Brando was a terrible idea and Al Pacino was too young to play Michael.

Given all this, Korshak was shocked by a message from Evans urgently soliciting help on the Pacino issue. The studio had finally caved to Coppola—Pacino would get the role. The problem was that the arguments over casting had consumed so much time that Pacino had now accepted a role in another film, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, which was about to start production at MGM. Evans pleaded with his consigliere to carry a persuasive message to Kirk Kerkorian, who owned MGM—release Pacino from his commitment so he could star in The Godfather.

When I ran into Korshak as he was leaving Evans’s office, the big man seemed genuinely surprised. As he described his new mission, he flashed a pained smile—a memorable sighting in view of the fact that I had never seen Korshak smile. “No one in town even knows who this kid is,” he said, referring to Pacino. “Suddenly two studios are fighting over a nobody.”

Korshak knew he had leverage with Kerkorian. The tough Armenian was trying to complete construction of the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. He was stretched thin and could not abide any delays from his unions, and he knew Korshak could do some mischief.

Insiders in town were fascinated at the Korshak power play, but one Korshak friend, Frank Sinatra, was not amused. Sinatra resented The Godfather because he felt that the character of Johnny Fontane represented a nasty caricature of him. Ever since Rosemary’s Baby, Sinatra had hated Bob Evans and me as well. That film, in his mind, had fractured his marriage to Mia Farrow. Now Paramount was inflicting still further wounds.

One evening at Chasen’s restaurant, Sinatra’s antagonism surfaced abruptly. I was dining with a producer, and Sinatra was three or four tables away with some friends. Suddenly Mario Puzo loomed over my table. The bulky writer had had a few drinks and was enjoying his first moments of celebrity. Puzo told me that he was going over to Sinatra’s table to introduce himself.

But Puzo was feeling no pain. He went off to introduce himself to the star and, even before he’d reached the table, I could see that my warning had been valid. “You miserable son of a bitch, get out of my fucking sight,” Sinatra was yelling, as soon as he saw Puzo.