Indecent Exposure (9 page)

None of
Hirschfield
's feelings was stated or even hinted in Herbert's presence, however. While never best friends, Alan and Herbert always had had a close, comfortable relationship which continued in the summer of 1977.

After the regular monthly meeting of the Columbia board of directors in New York on Thursday, September 8, Alan
Hirschfield
showed David
Begelman
the galley proofs of the company's latest annual report to shareholders, which was scheduled to go to press by the end of the month. Lavishly illustrated with color photographs, and printed on the finest paper, the report was the most expensive document that Columbia Pictures Industries had ever produced. In his introductory letter to shareholders. Hirschfield noted that the motion-picture division continued to be the major contributor to the corporation's profits. "The results are a tribute to David Begelman as he continued to provide the leadership and keen insight so vital to the continued success of our motion-picture program," Hirschfield stated. Begelman's photograph appeared on the first page of the movie section of the report, along with scenes from
The Deep,
and
Murder by Death.
On the facing page was Muhammad Ali's photograph, without his name, just the caption "The Greatest," the title of a film which the boxer had made for Columbia.

Pointing to the Ali caption.
Hirschfield
remarked to Begelman and other bystanders that "The Greatest" should be moved across and placed under David's picture. Everyone chuckled. Well-timed flattery was one of
Hirschfield
's most endearing traits, and on that occasion he really meant it. Despite his belief that he. not
Begelman
,
was the center of the corporation's gravity and the wave of its future, and despite his eagerness to be perceived that way, Hirschfield fully recognized and appreciated Begelman's vital importance to the success of current movie and television operations.

Over lunch at La Cote Basque the next Monday, September 12 (the day Cliff Robertson briefed the FBI in Washington), Alan
Hirschfield
and Herbert Allen sketched the outlines of a new contract for David
Begelman
that would net him a million dollars in bonuses and stock options over the next four years. (It was understood, too, that when
Hirschfield
's contract came up for renegotiation in a few months, he would get a deal at least as good as Begelman's.)

Hirschfield
sp
ent Tuesday at home in Scarsdale
in observance of Rosh Hashanah. He stayed home Wednesday as well to deal wit
h an appraiser from the Parke-Be
rnet Galleries who came to estimate the value of Hirschfield's collection of Oklahoma Indian art. Arriving at Columbia's corporate headquarters at 711 Fifth Avenue just before noon, he took two routine telephone calls before having a leisurely lunch downstairs at La Cote Basque with Joe Fischer, the chief financial officer, and Victor Kaufman, the corporate general counsel.

When Hirschfield returned to his office, there was a m
essage to call a Detective Silve
y of the Beverly Hills Police Department. Had there been a lot of phone calls to return,
Hirschfield
might never have gotten back to the detective. But it was a slow day. the police call was the only one, and he was a bit curious. The first surprise was that Detective Silvey was female.

"Is this really Detective Silvey? This isn't a joke, is it?"

"No
, this is really Detective Silve
y. It's no joke."

"My friends in the picture business sometimes play jokes." Hirschfield said. "I thought maybe this was a Ray Stark special."

"I assure you it's no joke. It's a serious matter. We're investigating a possible case of check forgery involving Mr. David
Begelman
, the president of Columbia Pictures in Burbank. Are you authorized to speak for Columbia?"

"1 guess so. I'm the president and chief executive officer of the parent company, but I can't imagine what you're talking about."

"Are you responsible for financial matters at Columbia?"

"Yes. in a general sense, but we're a large company. We have people who handle that sort of thing specifically."

"Are you aware that Mr. Cliff Robertson has reported to the police that David Begelman forged his name on a check?"

"No. I'm totally unaware of any such thing."
Hirschfield
said.

"We
have reason to believe that Mr. Begelman took a Columbia Pictures check for ten thousand dollars payable to Cliff Robertson, endorsed it with Mr.
Robertson's name and cashed it,
and got ten thousand dollars in traveler's checks in return."

"Now that you mention it,
some of this is beginning to sound a little familiar. I'll t
ell you what 1 do know about it,
and this is all I know. Several months ago I was told that there was some problem with a check for Cliff Robertson. But I was assured tha
t it had all been taken care of,
and I've heard nothing about it since. You say Robertson reported it to the police?"

"Yes. he did,
and I'm having trouble getting a straight answer from anybody at Columbia in Burbank."

"The man you should talk to is Mr. Fischer. Joe Fischer. He's our financial vice president here in New York. I'll have him call you right away."

Hirschfield,
agitated and apprehensive, strode next door to Fischer's office.

"I've just had a very peculiar phone call. A detective from the Beverly Hills Police
Department. A woman named Silve
y. Something about an investigation of check forgery.
Begelman
forging Cliff Robertson's name. Do you have any idea what the hell this could be about?"

Fischer paled. "Oh, Jesus! Remember me telling you when we were out there for the foreign-managers meeting that something about a Cliff Robertson check had come up?"

"Vaguely," Hirschfield said.

"Johnson and Phillips had a complaint from Cliff Robertson's people about a ten-ninety-nine form for some money that Robertson never got. David said he'd take care
of it. He mentioned it at Chase
n's that night."

"Well, apparently Robertson has gone to the police. You better call this lady back and find out what the hell's going on. Then come and see me."

Detective Silvey briefed Joe Fischer and asked what Columbia intended to do. He said he was sure that the entire matter had resulted from a mistake of some sort but that he would fly to Los Angeles the next day and discuss it with her in person.

In
Hirschfield
's office seconds later. Fischer said: "Evidently, somebody signed the back of the check. Forged Robertson's name. The money was used to buy traveler's checks and evidently David got the traveler's checks."

"Did you know any of this?" Hirschfield asked.

"Christ, no! Absolutely not! This is the story I get from the detective."

"Jesus Christ! Call David! See what's going on."

"I think I better go out," Fischer suggested.

"I think you better go out, too. Get on the next plane. Jesus, this is unbelievable! It's like dynamite! Is she actually saying David forged a check?"

"I'm afraid that's exactly what she's saying."

SEVEN

The radical singularity of Beverly Hills, California, is evident not so much in its famous residents and lavish homes as in certain of its statistics. With an area of less than 6 square miles and a population barely exceedin
g 30,000—only 20,000 of whom are
old enough to vote—Beverly Hills supports 35 banks, 20 savings and loan associations, 711 lawyers, 299 beauty salons, 651 medical doctors and psychoanalysts, and 761 gardeners. The banks and savings and loans hold deposits of more than $7 billion.

With wealth of that magnitude—the densest concentration of wealth of any self-contained residential-commercial community of its size anywhere—Beverly Hills naturally attracts multitudes of people
from all over the world who are
bent on learning how all that money got to Beverly Hills in the first place, why it stays there, and how they might get some of it for themselves. There are shopping-center tycoons who want to invest in the movies. There are Arab oil magnates who want to buy real estate. There
are
European bankers who want to open local branches of their banks. There are busloads of tourists who merely gawk. There are international socialites who can function satisfactorily in any number of places but who find Beverly Hills to be unusually congenial not only financially but psychologically as well.

Whether these people stay for brief periods, long periods, or settle permanently, their number inevitably includes a sizable contingent whose principal occupation is theft. These aren't street thugs who snatch purses on Rodeo Drive (such a thing is almost unheard of) but much more genteel thieves who steal much larger amounts of money— stock swindlers, tax manipulators, commodity-options scammers, securities counterfeiters, art forgers. Some of these people
are
members of organized crime, but most
are
not. Some of them live in

Beverly Hills, but most do not. Some swindle the local residents, and some use Beverly Hills as an address from which to swindle elsewhere. But they all make Beverly Hills their headquarters not only because of the presence of so much money but also because of the resonance of the city's name. Thus, they have made it one of the half dozen or so most important centers of "paper" crime in the world.

A burgeoning group of law-enforcement bureaucracies have been grappling with these criminals for years and, for the most part, losing. There is so much crime that the enforcement has to be extremely selective. At the top of the hierarchy
are
the local offices of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Internal Revenue Service, who do what they can to combat the most sophisticated of the swindlers. One step down is the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which concentrates on more straightforward crimes such as bank embezzlements and international traffic in stolen securities. And at the bottom of the hierarchy, outmanned and overworked, is the bunco squad of the Beverly Hills Police Department, which deals with local and relatively petty activity such as stolen credit cards and forged property deeds. Even the local crimes can be very complex; a single scheme can involve several teams of con artists and a bewildering maze of stolen credit cards and forged documents.

Very little of this crime attracts much attention in Beverly Hills. Equity Funding, the largest insurance scandal in history, and Home-Stake Oil, the most spectacular celebrity tax-shelter swindle in history, were exceptions. The attitude of most Beverly Hills residents is cynical; they have so much money that they hardly notice if relatively small amounts of it
are
stolen. Most of the criminals
are
well-dressed and most of the crimes
are
carried out in silence, or the soft tones of subdued voices and the light scratch of pen on paper. The law enforcers
are
unobtrusive if not invisible. There is no sizable federal building in Beverly Hills; the SEC. IRS, and FBI cover the town from offices a few miles out
Wilshire
Boulevard in Westwood, or from downtown Los Angeles. The Beverly Hills Police Department is tucked away in the basement of City Hall, which—with its churrigueresque architecture; mosaic tile dome; and landscaping of palm, olive, and pepper trees—looks more like a college library somewhere in Spain than an American scat of local government. The entrance to the police department itself, were it not for a discreet sign, could easily be mistaken for the rare-books entrance to the Spanish library.

In such a milieu, the forgery of a solitary $10,000 check normally would command negligible interest in the public at large—if indeed it knew of the forgery—and would receive no more than perfunctory attention in law-enforcement circles. These nuances certainly were not lost on David Begelman, who lives on Linden Drive in Beverly Hills and forged Cliff Robertson's name rather casually. Joe Lipshcr, Begelman's friendly banker at the Wells Fargo a few blocks away on Camden Drive, cashed the check rather casually. And the Beverly Hills police bunco squad, just a few blocks up Santa Monica Boulevard on Crescent Drive, received the referral from the LAPD downtown rather casually. The detective to whom the case was assigned was within a month of retirement, and his investigation was less than vigorous.

Nevertheless, in much the way that he was unlucky when he chose the name of Cliff Robertson to forge instead of someone more tolerant,
Begelman
was unlucky again when the forgery file finally came to rest, in early August of 1977, on the desk of Detective Joyce Silvey.

Perhaps it was Silvey's newness to the job and eagerness to prove herself; she had been made a detective only a year earlier after ten years as the police department's supervisor of records. Perhaps it was her upbringing in Oklahoma, where stealing is viewed perhaps a bit less cynically than it is in Beverly Hills. Perhaps it was her serious, intense personality, which made it difficult psychologically for her to let any case—no matter how trivial—lie dormant for long. Perhaps it was the extra streak of thin-lipped toughness that she had developed in the course of functioning as a female detective in a world of mostly male crooks and mostly male cops. Perhaps it was a combination of those traits. Whatever the explanation. Joyce Silvey made more progress on the Robertson case in August and early September than cither her retiring colleague or her counterpart across the hills in Burbank. Detective Bob Elias. had made since the LAPD had forwarded the case to both police departments in late June. In the midst of handling approximately three dozen other cases—the normal load for the Beverly Hills bunco squad—Silvey had managed to obtain an affidavit of forgery from Cliff Robertson and to
interview attorney Seth Hufste
dler extensively. She had interrogated Joe Lipsher at the bank. She had talked with John Veitch. the senior vice president of the Columbia studio, whom Detective Elias had visited a month earlier. While the forgery certainly wasn't the crime of the century, it was clear to Silvey that it was in fact
a forgery,
defined as a form of felony grand theft by the Penal Code of the State of California, and she refused to ignore it. She refused to take "yes" for an answer ("Yes, we're familiar with it"; "Yes, it was just a misunderstanding"; "Yes, we have rectified the error in the accounting department"). She placed one or two calls to David Begelman himself but they were not returned. So she was surprised wh
en Alan Hirschfield not only return
ed her call on Wednesday, September 14, but sent the second-ranking officer of the corporation, Joe Fischer, to visit her personally and immediately.