The Outfit (67 page)

According to White House tapes released in 2001, Nixon informed Henry Kissinger on December 8, 1971, “What we’re talking about, in the greatest of confidence, is we’re going to give Hoffa an amnesty,
but we’re going to do it for a reason.”
(Italics added.) Nixon then whispered about “some private things” Fitzsimmons had done for Nixon’s cause “that were very helpful.” In February 1973, fourteen months after Hoffa’s release by Nixon, and just as Nixon was frantic to raise “hush money” for the 1972 Watergate burglars, Accardo, Dorfman, and Fitzsimmons met at “the mob’s country club,” LaCosta, to make good on a promise to Nixon. It was fortuitous timing for the president, who would five weeks later be informed by aide John Dean that the Watergate burglars would require one million dollars to bite their collective tongues.

“You could get a million dollars,” Nixon replied. “You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten.” Many journalists, such as Hoffa chronicler Dan Moldea, author of
The Hoffa Wars,
believe Nixon was referring to the money that he had just been promised by the Teamster-Mob alliance.

In the period of Hoffa’s incarceration, the Outfit seems to have grown to like Frank Fitzsimmons (and partner Dorfman) more than Jimmy Hoffa, who only used the mob loans to help strengthen the Teamsters; he was never considered “one of ours” by the hoods. Hoffa was also known to have become a government informant against Fitzsimmons.

Before going away in 1967, Hoffa had said to his board about Dorfman, “When this man speaks, he speaks for me.” He made similar statements about Frank Fitzsimmons. Now the duo surpassed their iconic colleague in his appeasement of the underworld. Under Fitzsimmons and Dorfman, Moe Dalitz was loaned $27 million to expand LaCosta; Frank Ragano, Santo Trafficante’s lawyer, received $11 million in a Florida real estate deal; Irving Davidson, Carlos Marcello’s D.C. lobbyist, received $7 million for a California land purchase; and in addition to Caesars, the fund was tapped to construct the skim-friendly Landmark, Four Queens, Aladdin, Lodestar, Plaza Towers, and Circus Circus. All told, the pension fund, controlled by Curly Humphreys’ Chicago protege Allen Dorfman, had loaned over $500 million in Nevada, 63 percent of the Fund’s total assets, and most of it went to the hoods’ favored casinos. But, perhaps most important, Fitzsimmons had decentralized Teamster power, which benefited local mob bosses, who could now easily outmuscle small union fiefdoms without having to bargain with an all-powerful president.

Now at LaCosta, the conspirators, who included an FBI informant, devised a new scheme wherein California Teamsters would be mandated to funnel dues into a prepaid billion-dollar health plan, 3 percent of which would be kicked back to something called People’s Industrial Consultants, which was nothing more than Joe Accardo and what remained of the Outfit. For the scheme to work, Fitzsimmons had to remain at the top of the Teamsters. According to high-placed FBI sources, the purpose of the LaCosta meeting was to coordinate a delivery of one million dollars in Las Vegas skim to the besieged Nixon, who had released Hoffa with the stipulation that he not run for the Teamster presidency. It was also reported that the money would guarantee that Nixon-Mitchell would take it easy on investigations of pension-fund loans. According to a secret FBI report, one mobster who attended the LaCosta meetings stated that half of the payback, $500,000 in cash, “had been requested by White House aide Charles Colson, who handled the administration’s relations with the Teamsters.” When Colson was later asked about this by the Senate Watergate Committee, he pled the Fifth Amendment.

While the schemers met at LaCosta, Nixon was at his nearby San Clemente home, with aides John Dean and John Haldeman, both of whom drove to LaCosta where Accardo et al. were in the midst of their four-day meetings. Although no one can prove that the two camps met, it is known that Fitzsimmons flew back to Washington aboard Air Force One with Nixon. According to mob sources located by author William Balsamo, Fitzsimmons told Nixon on the flight, “We’re prepared to pay for the request I put on the table . . . You’ll never have to worry about where the next dollar will come from. We’re going to give you one million dollars up front, Mr. President . . . and there’ll be more that’ll follow to make sure you are never wanting.”

Soon after, John Mitchell indeed scuttled investigations into the Teamster loans and rescinded the taps on Accardo and friends.

Hoffa’s conditional release was not the Outfit’s only behind-the-scenes power play in 1971. One of its unheralded successes simultaneously displayed how thorough had been the gang’s commandeering of the nation’s labor unions and also treated the world’s movie fans to what has been called “the best three hours one could spend in a movie theater.”

At the time, Las Vegas real estate millionaire Kerkor “Kirk” Kerkorian had just seized control of MGM Studios in Hollywood and thought to use the association with the MGM film
Grand Hotel
to construct another Las Vegas theme hotel, $106-million megalith to be called the MGM Grand Hotel, the largest hotel in the world. A millionaire many times over, having recently sold his Trans International Airlines for $100 million and having built the hugely successful International Hotel, Kerkorian could build anything he wanted. However, all of the money in the world could not overcome the stranglehold Accardo and Humphreys had placed on the nation’s labor force, and the Outfit wanted something in return for its cooperation: They wanted one of MGM’s contract actors for a production by another studio.

At the time, Paramount producer Robert Evans was attempting to package a film project based on Mario Puzo’s wildly successful novel
The Godfather,
for which Evans owned the movie rights. A problem arose when the director, the as yet unsuccessful wunderkind Francis Ford Coppolla, insisted on an unknown, diminutive actor named A! Pacino for the lead role of Mafia boss Michael Corleone. The fly in the ointment was Pacino’s unbreakable contract with Kerkorian’s MGM. Evans first called MGM’s president, Jim Aubrey. “With the emotion of an IRS investigator,” Evans wrote, “he turned me down.”

The way Bob Evans saw it, he had no choice but to call the Outfit’s Hollywood dealmaker, Sidney Roy Korshak. The producer had been a great friend of Korshak’s since the early fifties and claimed that the pair met every day until 1980, when they had a falling out. Like most upperworld achievers, Evans was well aware of the Outfit’s knack for getting things done - they were, after all, action men. Years later, Evans wrote of the power Sidney Korshak, and by proxy the Outfit, now wielded: “A nod from Korshak, and Santa Anita closes. A nod from Korshak, and Madison Square Garden stays open. A nod from Korshak, and Vegas shuts down. A nod from Korshak, and the Dodgers suddenly can play night baseball. Am I exaggerating? Quite the contrary. In the spirit of confidentiality, it’s an underplay.”

Among Korshak’s Tinseltown triumphs was the critical assistance he had given Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan in settling the 1966 actors’ strike. In 1971, the same year Evans faced his
Godfather
predicament, Korshak served as uncredited legal adviser for the Las Vegas-based James Bond film
Diamonds Are Forever.
Korshak had recommended his friend Jill St. John for the costarring role of “Plenty O’Toole.”

As recounted in his memoir,
The Kid Stays in the Picture,
Evans, who was in New York at the time, placed a call to Korshak at his New York office in the Carlyle Hotel:

“Sidney Korshak, please.”

“Yeah?”

“Sidney, it’s Bobby.”

“Yeah?”

“I need your help.”

“Yeah?”

“There’s an actor I want for the lead in
The Godfather.”

“Yeah?”

“I can’t get him.”

“Yeah?”

“If I lose him, Coppola’s gonna have my ass.”

“Yeah?”

Evans advised Korshak of his turndown by MGM’s Aubrey, a revelation that elicited a nonstop recitation of
yeahs
from Korshak.

“Is there anything you can do about it?”

“Yeah.”

“Really?”

“The actor, what’s his name?”

“Pacino . . . Al Pacino.”

“Who?”

“Al Pacino.”

“Hold it, will ya. Let me get a pencil. Spell it.”

“Capital A, little / - that’s his first name. Capital P, little
a, c-i-n-o.”

“Who the fuck is he?”

“Don’t rub it in, will ya, Sidney. That’s who the motherfucker wants.”

As Evans tells it, twenty minutes after the friends hung up, an enraged Jim Aubrey called Evans.

“You no-good motherfucker, cocksucker. I’ll get you for this,” Aubrey screamed.

“What are you talking about?”

“You know fuckin’ well what I’m talking about.”

“Honestly, I don’t.”

“The midget’s yours; you got him.”

That was Aubrey’s final statement before slamming the phone down on a befuddled Evans, who immediately called Sidney. The master fixer advised the producer that he had merely placed a call to Aubrey’s boss, Kirk Kerkorian, and made the request. When Kerkorian had balked, Korshak had introduced his Outfit connections into the negotiations.

“Oh, I asked him if he wanted to finish building his hotel,” Korshak told Evans. “He didn’t answer . . . He never heard of the schmuck either. He got a pencil, asked me to spell it - ’Capital
A,
punk l, capital
P,
punk
a, c-i-n-o.’
Then he says, ’Who the fuck is he?’ ’How the fuck do I know? All I know, Bobby wants him.’”

The rest, as they say, is history. Not only did
The Godfather
redefine the cinema, but Al Pacino became a star, and Kirk Kerkorian completed his MGM Grand, earning him the moniker Father of the Mega-Resort.

When the film was screened for a party of Hollywood insiders at a Malibu estate, antimob crusader Steve Allen somehow made the guest list. “There was the usual crowd there,” Allen said in 1997, “but there were also a few swarthy Vegas boys who had ’organized crime’ written all over them. After the movie, my wife, Jayne, made a remark about gangsters that caused one producer, who was friendly with the mob, to get in her face. ’You have no idea what you’re talking about, lady,’ this character told her.”

Allen says he intervened before the face-off got ugly, and soon thereafter, he and Jayne made their exit.

“The next morning, while I’m just waking up,” Allen said, “our housekeeper came banging on our bedroom door.”

“Mr. Allen! Mr. Allen!” called the frantic woman. The entertainer rushed out and followed his housekeeper to the front porch, where, in a scene reminiscent of the movie he had just seen, he found an enormous severed leg and shoulder of a horse. Allen knew the name of the producer who had had the set-to with Jayne and, in a show of defiance, had the carcass delivered to his home. (The producer, whom Allen identified for the author, was a close friend of Johnny Rosselli’s, whom Allen believed also attended the screening.)

Sidney Korshak’s behind-the-scenes role in the making of
The Godfather
was merely one illustration of many such maneuverings. Korshak also facilitated the production of another Paramount box-office success, the 1976 remake of
King Kong.
In 1975, according to the film’s chronicler Bruce Bahrenburg, “Paramount was looking for another ’big’ picture in the same league as their recent blockbusters,
The Godfather
and
The Great Gatsby.”
When the project was announced in the trades that year, Universal Pictures sued the new film’s producer, Dino De Laurentiis for $25 million, claiming it alone held the rights to the remake of the original 1933 RKO production. Universal simultaneously filed suit against RKO, which had sold the rights to De Laurentiis, after it had supposedly already done the same to Universal.

De Laurentiis countersued for $90 million, as the legal morass became more entangled with each successive day. “The legal issues surrounding the copyright to Kong,” Bahrenburg wrote, “are as puzzling as a maze in a formal British garden.” With the lawsuits casting a shadow on the film, Paramount nonetheless went ahead in early January 1976 with principal photography, and it now became imperative that the legal issues be resolved. Although the courts had failed to bring about a deal, there was, of course, one man who was famous for just that, and he already had a track record with Paramount and Universal, whose parent company, MCA, was run by his close friends Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg. The master negotiator was, again, Sid Korshak.

According to a source close to the film, a luncheon was arranged at Korshak’s Beverly Hills home between executives of Paramount and Universal (MCA). “Sidney was the court,” says the source. “In a couple hours, a deal was arrived at that made everybody happy. Sidney had done more over his lunch hour than dozens of high-priced attorneys had done in eight months.” The source, a producer at Universal, adds that Korshak was paid a $30,000 fee for his 120-minute business lunch.

Variety
later reported that Universal agreed to allow Paramount to make the film with Universal maintaining the rights to a future sequel. “I am very pleased,” De Laurentiis told the press, “and would like to thank MCA’s Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg for their understanding and generosity in making such accommodations possible.” Per custom, Sid Korshak’s name never surfaced in connection with the resolution.

Back on their home turf, Accardo and Ricca periodically surfaced to pass judgments on various individuals who threatened the Outfit’s common good. They were particularly hard on soldiers who broke the cardinal rule that forbade trafficking in narcotics. It is believed that ten drug dealers were slain in one week on Accardo’s orders; others who received the ultimate sanction included “street tax” scofflaws, who refused to pay the mandated tithe to the men who made it all possible.