My Remarkable Journey (13 page)

As you can imagine, Lou was thrilled when I told him about what had happened. He gave me documents and called me constantly
over the next month to see if I’d heard back from Mitchell. But when Mitchell did call me, the news was not good. Mitchell
said he’d have nothing to do with Wolfson.

This put me in a position of making a call I did not want to make. Lou was the type of guy who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
And I’ve always been the type of guy who has a hard time saying no. Looking back on it now, I can see how the situation played
right into one of my biggest weaknesses.

I did something I’d never do on the air.

I lied.

I told Lou that Mitchell was interested in his legal dilemma.

Now Lou was ecstatic. And he played right into another one of my weaknesses. He gave me thousands of dollars to forward to
Mitchell’s law firm to look over the case. Not only that, but he told me something that’s never come out until right now.
Lou said, “Here’s what I’ll do. Tell them that I’ll set up an organization called Democrats for Nixon. I’ll fund it at a million
a year for four years.”

This was getting out of control—but not as out of control as my own financial situation. I used the money Lou gave me to pay
off some debts. My game of financial musical chairs continued. And I waited for another opening to figure a way out of this
mess. You know me:
Somehow, I’ll get out of it.

The court was about to sentence Lou as Nixon’s inauguration approached. Nixon was in New York, staying at the Pierre Hotel.
I flew to New York, called the hotel, and asked to speak with the president-elect. I was put on hold. I held and held and
held. Knowing what I was about to do, a part of me was actually relieved that nobody was picking up.

“Hello, Larry.” Nixon’s voice was unmistakable. “What can I do for you?”

I told Nixon it was urgent that I see him. Nixon said that he was flying to Washington later that same evening, but that he
was going out for a short walk to pick up his wife. He invited me to join him.

I went to the Pierre. The lobby was filled with reporters, cameramen, and Secret Service agents. When Nixon came down, one
of his attendants saw me and brought me over to him. Little Larry Zeiger headed out with the president of the United States
inside a ring of Secret Service agents.

The night was cold, and as we began to walk, Nixon joked, “Whatever this is, it must be important for you to be here in this
weather when you could be in Miami.”

There are uh-oh moments in everybody’s life, and this was one of mine. I was about to present the president of the United
States with Lou’s four-million-dollar offer to create Democrats for Nixon. In a roundabout way, I was about to ask him to
pardon my friend.

“Well, Larry, what is it I can do for you?”

The words just wouldn’t come out of my mouth. If I’d made the offer, you wouldn’t be seeing me on TV today. Because I’m sure
that it would have come out in some form. And if it had come out, I would have been caught in a conspiracy to bribe the president.
I don’t even want to think of the consequences. The only thing I could think of that night was to tell Nixon it would be a
big thrill if he’d do my show after the inauguration.

“Why didn’t you just ask me on the phone?” he said.

“I just had to do it in person.”

The rest of our walk was a little awkward—but nowhere near as awkward as it was for me to walk through Lou Wolfson’s front
door when I returned to Florida. He was sure Nixon would take the money.

There was no escape from the situation. My mother couldn’t get me out of this one. Nor could Herbie the Negotiator. No banker
could come to the rescue. There was just no way out. I looked Lou in the eyes and told him the truth about everything that
had happened. He didn’t scream. He didn’t show any outward anger. But I could feel the rage burning inside him.

“Get out of my house,” were the last words Lou Wolfson ever said to me.

Lou was sentenced to a minimum-security prison. Before he was sent away, one of his associates set up a repayment schedule
for all the money I owed him. I tried to stick to the schedule, but it was hopeless.

I just wished the whole thing would go away. It was such a strange time. I was bigger than ever on the air now that I was
the color man for the Miami Dolphins radio broadcasts. I managed to keep my game of financial musical chairs going by constantly
borrowing money. But Wolfson always seemed to be in the air. In 1969, an article appeared in
Life
magazine detailing Wolfson’s payments to Justice Fortas. Those payments weren’t illegal. Fortas was a good and honorable
man. But it doesn’t look good when a Supreme Court justice accepts money from a felon. Fortas was forced to resign. The whole
thing just wouldn’t go away.

After Wolfson got out of jail, my life became a theater of the absurd. I scraped up the five thousand dollars that I had taken
and sent it back to him. But Lou didn’t want it back. Lou wanted something else.

He filed a complaint against me through the office of state attorney
Dick Gerstein
. Think about that. He filed the complaint with the same guy who had taken money from me and passed it on to Garrison. And,
as it turned out, there had been several missed connections between Gerstein and Garrison. Gerstein himself had never gotten
one of Lou’s five-thousand-dollar installments to Garrison. He’d held on to the money for a year before sending it back to
Wolfson.

Gerstein certainly didn’t want to file charges against me. He was my friend. And, of course, he didn’t want his own involvement
to come out. Eventually, he was forced to recuse himself from the case. But it didn’t look good for him. There were calls
for him to resign.

On December 20, 1971, I was charged with grand larceny and had that mug shot snapped at the police station. As I drove to
do my evening radio show that night the lead item on my own station’s newscast was my arrest. The general manager met me as
I walked to the studio. He said it might be best for me not to go on the air that night. I was suspended, pending the outcome
of the charges. The television station where I worked followed suit. As did the newspaper that ran my column. I argued that
in America a man was innocent until proven guilty. But nobody would listen.

The trial was set for a Monday morning a month later. The night before, the presiding judge had a heart attack.
JUDGE COLLAPSES READING KING BRIEF
wasn’t exactly the newspaper headline I was counting on.

My lawyer thought we could beat the charges straight up. But there was a more direct strategy. The statute of limitations
had run out. A couple of months later, the same judge dismissed the case. I was ecstatic—but not vindicated. The general manager
at WIOD said there’d been too much notoriety surrounding the case, and that I couldn’t have my job back. The television station
and the newspaper had the same attitude.

The only times I’ve felt in control of my life have been when I was on the air. Now my life was in disarray, and I couldn’t
control a single second. My friends were sympathetic and a few newspaper writers came to my defense. But I was filled with
shame. It was painful even to visit my mother. My mother, who had once gotten the best lamb chops in the butcher shop because
she was going to cook them for
Larry King
, couldn’t even speak about what had happened. “What have they done to my poor son…” was all she could say.

I was thirty-seven years old. I had no job. I had a couple hundred thousand dollars in debts. And a four-year-old daughter.
I’d take Chaia to our secret park on our visiting days. That’s when the pain cut the deepest—looking at my daughter and knowing
I had no way to support her.

Things got bleaker and bleaker. I became a recluse. By late May, I was down to forty-two dollars. My rent was paid only until
the end of the month. I locked myself in my apartment wondering how bad things could possibly get. Pretty soon I wouldn’t
even be able to afford cigarettes. I remembered a night when I was a young man in New York, alone, cold, and without cigarettes
or the money to buy them—I had smashed open a vending machine to get a pack.

A friend called up and told me to start living like a human being again. He invited me to the track. I had nothing better
to do, and I figured it would be good therapy to get out and have lunch with a friend and watch the horses come down the stretch.

I’ll never forget that day. I put on a Pierre Cardin jeans outfit that had no pockets and drove to Calder Race Course. I can
still see the horses warming up before the third race. There was a horse called Lady Forli—a filly running against males.

Normally, female horses don’t beat males. We’re talking cheap horses. I scanned the board and saw that she was 70–1. But my
eyes really opened when I looked at the racing form. Racetrack people talk to each other. So I turned to the guy next to me
and said, “You know, this horse, three races back, won in more or less the same company. Why is she 70–1?”

“Well,” the guy said, “there’s a couple of new horses here.”

“Yeah, but she should be, like, 20–1. Not 70–1.”

Screw it. I bet ten dollars on the horse to win. But I kept looking at the horse. The more I looked at this horse, the more
I liked it. So I bet exactas. I bet Lady Forli on top of every other horse and below every other horse. Now I had what’s called
a wheel.

I kept looking at the horse.
Wait a minute,
I told myself,
I’ve got four dollars left. I have a pack of cigarettes. I’ve gotta give the valet two bucks. That still leaves me with money
to bet a trifecta.

My birthday is November 19. Lady Forli was number 11. So I bet 11 to win, 1 to place, and 9 to show.

Now I had bets in for 11 on top, 11 on bottom, and 11 to win. And I had a trifecta—11-1-9.

When the race began, I had two dollars left to my name—and that was for the valet.

They broke out of the gate. The 1 broke on top, the 9 ran second, and the 11 came out third. The 11 passed the 9, passed the
1, and they ran in a straight line all around the track. There was no question about it. The 11 won by five lengths. The 1
was three lengths ahead of the 9. I had every winning ticket. I had it to win. I had the exacta. I had the trifecta. I collected
nearly eight thousand dollars.
Eight thousand dollars!

It had to be one of the happiest moments of my life—certainly the most exciting. But I had no pockets.

So I stuffed all the money in my jacket. It was bundled up. I didn’t know what to do with it. I ran out of the track. The
valet attendant came over and said, “You leaving so early?”

“Yeah.”

“Bad day, Mr. King?”

I tipped him fifty dollars. The guy nearly fainted.

I had to go somewhere, to stop and make sure it was real. I drove to a vacant lot, which is now called Dolphin Stadium. I
parked among the weeds and opened up my jacket. All the money spilled out. I counted out about seventy-nine hundred dollars.

I paid my child support for the next year. I paid my rent for a year. I bought twenty cartons of cigarettes and stacked them
up in my apartment, and I filled the refrigerator.

It’s so much easier to recall every detail of that wonderful day than it is to think about all the pain surrounding it. There
was still no job when I got home, and a mountain of debt. What I really needed was a fresh start. A friend was working at
a racetrack in Louisiana that needed a publicist, and I got the job.

There were nice people in Louisiana. The work enabled me to send child-support payments. The World Football League started,
and I became the color man for the Shreveport Steamers. The locals couldn’t believe it. Here was the Miami Dolphins announcer
doing
their
games. I’d tell Sinatra stories over dinner and people would look at me in disbelief. So there were mixed feelings. I felt
like a big man, but I also came to fully understand everything that I’d lost. I never spoke with Sinatra or anybody else I’d
interviewed back in Miami. I was ashamed.

I was in Louisiana for more than a year, and during this time, the Watergate scandal broke. Who was in the middle of it? That
bald, pudgy guy named John Mitchell, who had become the attorney general. I was off the air when the burglary was uncovered
and Nixon resigned. Part of me was dying inside. I wanted to participate. I wanted to be on the air. After you’ve been in
the action, the hardest part is being out of it.

The racetrack changed hands, and my job went with it. But I lined up another one announcing football games for the University
of California. I figured I’d start a new life out west. There were a few months before the season began, so I drove back to
Florida to see my mother, Chaia, and Andy.

By this time, my mother had kidney problems. I was helping her get to the bathroom one day when the phone rang. I answered
it and a secretary said, “Hold on for Joe Abernathy.”

Joe was the new general manager of WIOD.

“Hi,” Joe said, “What are you doing?”

I told him about my plans to start afresh in California.

“I’ve heard your work,” he said, “and I read what happened. I really don’t understand why WIOD let you go. Would you consider
coming back?”

I stood there flabbergasted.

“We can’t pay you much, but I’ll take care of you.”

My mother wept. I didn’t have to move across the country. I could be near her.

Soon I was watching the clock count down from the swivel chair in WIOD’s glassed-in studio. The engineer gave me a signal.
As usual, I had no idea what I was going to say. But as I leaned forward into the microphone, the first words that left my
lips told me I was at home and in control again.

“As I was saying…”

Looking back, I can be grateful for everything that happened. Sometimes you have to go down before you can go up.

When I got in trouble as a kid, I would be sent to my room. When I came out, we would be on to the next thing. My dad would
never hold a grudge. He would be very forgiving.