Tick... Tick... Tick... (12 page)

O'Keefe met with Medlin, who passed along some colorful details of meeting the Hoffa killer in prison not so long ago. Afterward O'Keefe quickly called Lapham and pitched the story. Normally considered an erudite intellectual with little taste for the sensational, Lapham liked the idea enough to advance O'Keefe $
700
to fly himself and Medlin to New York.

The next day, Lapham met Medlin in person and immediately realized the gangster would be better suited to Don Hewitt's show, so he called Hewitt to recommend that he meet with O'Keefe. Hewitt, of course, was thrilled—the prospect of breaking the Hoffa case was irresistible. Hewitt immediately gathered his senior staff—including Safer (who later claimed that it was his misfortune to have worked late that day) and producer Joe Wershba—in his office for a meeting with O'Keefe and Medlin to discuss the story, and the possibility of paying them for the biggest potential exclusive in
60 Minutes
history.

“How do you know where the body is?” Hewitt asked Medlin, according to a
1978
Rolling Stone
account. Medlin told the
60 Minutes
boss that he had shoved a .
38
down someone's throat and “got him to tell.”

A palpable sense of terror enveloped the room. “I have a beautiful .
357
Magnum underneath my bed,” Medlin told Hewitt and his nervous producers.

“What is it about you that makes people accept your warning that you'll do something to them?” Hewitt asked. Medlin immediately kicked his leg out, right near Hewitt's head. “Well, that's a good way to show your authority,” was Hewitt's response.

Medlin looked around the room at the assembled, trembling group. “I'd like a beer,” he snapped.

“I'd have to send out for it. We don't have it in the cafeteria,” a secretary whispered, according to a later
New York Times
report.

“Send out,” Hewitt said urgently. “Send out!”

Medlin explained to the group that he was a hired killer, and at various points he threatened to kill people who were irritating him. By the end of the meeting, Hewitt had agreed to pay O'Keefe $
10
,
000
in cash—a consultant's fee that would ensure his and Medlin's help in retrieving the missing body of Jimmy Hoffa.

After the meeting, Hewitt called Dick Salant to get his approval for the expenditure. Salant said okay, and Hewitt told Wershba to go to Salant's office to pick up the money.

When Wershba entered the office, the CBS News executive had $
10
,
000
in cash waiting on his desk.

“Are we doing the right thing?” Salant asked Wershba as he counted out the money.

“No, we don't know whether this guy is crazy,” Wershba replied. “We're not doing the right thing.”

But both men knew there was no refusing Hewitt. His show's ratings were finally starting to climb, and there was no doubt in anyone's mind that if Medlin somehow turned out to be right, it would be the scoop of the year, if not the decade.

Wershba brought the money back to the
60 Minutes
offices, where Medlin and O'Keefe were waiting. Before they left for Florida—to be joined shortly by Hewitt, Safer, and Wershba—Medlin agreed to sit down with Safer for an on-camera interview. During that conversation, Medlin matter-of-factly laid out the story of Hoffa's disappearance for the wide-eyed Safer and Hewitt.

 

S
AFER
: Where is Jimmy Hoffa?

M
EDLIN
: Key West.

S
AFER
: Where precisely?

M
EDLIN
: Smith Shoal Light . . . that's where Hoffa is. It's a rock pile.

S
AFER
: Dead?

M
EDLIN
: Dead. . . .

S
AFER
: Just lying there in the water?

M
EDLIN
: No, he's in cement. . . .

S
AFER
: How was he killed?

M
EDLIN
: He was stabbed on a goddamn boat. . . .

S
AFER
: Will you show us where Jimmy Hoffa is buried?

M
EDLIN
: I said I would. If I say I will, I will.

 

After the interview, Medlin convinced O'Keefe to let him hold the cash; the two men left together that night for Florida.

By the time Safer, Hewitt, and Wershba got to Florida, Medlin had gone missing, along with the $
10
,
000
.

That, of course, didn't deter Hewitt from hiring a boat and going to the location Medlin described, in search of Hoffa. They found nothing, of course. When they got back to the hotel, Hewitt suggested to Wershba that he tell the story of the rip-off to Martin Waldron, a reporter from the
New York Times
, who they'd noticed was staying at the same hotel. The next day, the debacle appeared on the front page of the
Times
under the headline, “Hoffa Tipster Gone; CBS Is Out $
10
,
000
.” It embarrassed most of those associated with the incident—but not Hewitt, of course, whose show business instincts told him that there's no such thing as bad publicity. To him, it was just a $
10
,
000
bet that hadn't paid off.

 

Back at the office,
60 Minutes
producer Paul Loewenwarter was placing calls to his sources at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington about a potential story. Lately, however, he'd been getting a rather odd response to such calls. Rather than answer his questions about a specific story he was working on, they'd ask him questions about ideas he had for future stories about the agency. Finally Loewenwarter asked his sources why they were so interested. “Well, you see,” one source confessed, “if you tell us now what you're going to be investigating next, that way we can go to our bosses and get some changes implemented by saying, ‘If we don't do something soon, then
60 Minutes
is going to do a piece.' It saves a lot of time in the long run, plus the embarrassment of being exposed on
60 Minutes
.”

At the time, Loewenwarter was working on Dan Rather's first real piece for
60 Minutes
, about workers at a small Allied Chemical plant in Virginia where pollution resulting from the manufacture of Kepone (a pesticide most commonly used overseas) was allegedly causing brain damage among workers. Rather and Loewenwarter had traveled to the town of Roswell, Virginia, with
60 Minutes
cameraman Billy Wagner to talk with plant workers. In some cases, their exposure to Kepone had reportedly caused tremors, twitches, and other uncontrollable movements resulting from brain damage caused by pesticide inhalation.

One worker, J. O. Rogers, had been hospitalized five times with nervous tremors. In Rather's conversation with Rogers, he'd found that one test to determine the extent of brain damage was for a subject to drive in a bolt with a screwdriver. With Rather and Loewenwarter looking on, Rogers tried to perform the test for the CBS camera.

Wagner, the cameraman, zoomed in on Rogers's hand as he took the screwdriver. For approximately
45
seconds—an eternity in television time—the camera focused on the trembling hand as the man tried, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, to insert the head of the screwdriver into the bolt. Finally, he gave up. It was a powerful visual image, stronger than any words Rather might have said, and vividly conveyed the damage done by this dangerous poison. Loewenwarter had done his research well, having found Rogers and numerous other victims, as well as a “smoking gun”—clear evidence that Allied Chemical scientists had ignored knowledge available to them that might have prevented the exposure. But he needed Rather, who knew as well as anyone how to deliver a knockout blow.

Rather went on to describe other victims—including one man who had, as Rather put it, “
37
,
000
times more Kepone in his liver than is permitted in a public sewer”—before moving on to Loewenwarter's evidence, presented in a direct confrontation on camera with the man Allied Chemical had represented as the nation's leading expert on the dangers of Kepone: William Moore, a chemist and chemical engineer and the director of research for Allied's agricultural division. Sitting opposite Moore, Rather turned on the heat as powerfully as he had done on Richard Nixon two years earlier:

 

R
ATHER
: My problem—and I want to be candid with you—is what we have here, in no small way, is a who-done-it. I want to ask you, Mr. Moore, whether you've seen any of these materials, which were put out by Allied Chemical, studies sponsored by Allied Chemical. We have three of these blue books. Right on the cover: “Kepone Compound
1189
, Allied Chemical, General Chemical Division.” Now, this was published in July
1961
. Are you familiar with these materials? This . . .

M
OORE
: No.

R
ATHER
: Never seen those?

M
OORE
: Never seen them.

R
ATHER
: Right in the summary, very top: “The characteristic effect of this compound is the development of DDT-like tremors, the severity of which depends upon dosage level and duration of exposure.” Quote, unquote—from the first sentence of the summary. You didn't know about this?

M
OORE
: No, no.

R
ATHER
: Mr. Moore, let me read you something that Allied Chemical gave to us this afternoon. Now, this is a direct quote from an Allied Chemical spokesman. We went to Allied Chemical, asked: Who is the nation's expert on Kepone? And the Allied Chemical spokesman said, quote, “The nation's expert in the manufacture of Kepone, totally knowledgeable about the hazards of the product and the safeguards necessary to produce it, is Mr. Moore.”

M
OORE
: Well, that's an interesting comment.

R
ATHER
: Is that true?

M
OORE
: Well, certainly not.

R
ATHER
: I'm a reporter, and this leaves me at a loss. Allied Chemical, which is a big outfit with a lot of experience in this, says you're the nation's leading expert.

M
OORE
(laughs)
: Well, I certainly know the chemistry of Kepone. I—

R
ATHER
: Totally knowledgeable about the hazards of the product and the safeguards necessary to produce it?

M
OORE
: I would say, no, I haven't seen those data.

 

When the piece, “Warning—May Be Fatal,” aired on December
14
,
1975
, it brought nationwide attention to the matter and helped lead to
153
indictments and a $
13
million fine against Allied Chemical. The story had appeared almost two weeks earlier as a page one exclusive in the
Wall Street Journal,
demonstrating to Hewitt yet again the power of television to adapt and dramatize a story for maximum impact. It was exactly the way he'd envisioned it more than a quarter of a century ago. TV was where Hildy Johnson belonged.

Chapter 9

The Thousand-Pound Pencil

Lucy Spiegel, a young researcher for
60 Minutes
, didn't consider that she might one day be viewed as a television news pioneer on the day in early
1976
when a CBS camera began following her around for what would become a classic Mike Wallace story on fake IDs. The idea was straightforward enough: demonstrate how easy it had become not only to fraudulently obtain passports, drivers' licenses, and voter registration cards but also to use them to commit felonies. In fact, the subject had been suggested to Wallace by Frances Knight, head of the U.S. Passport Office, who was increasingly alarmed by the number of identity-fraud scams.

What made Spiegel's journey historic was the storytelling technique involved. By filming her movements through the various layers of bureaucracy, then following up with question-and-answer confrontations by Wallace and producer Barry Lando,
60 Minutes
laid out the story with a new level of realism. Wallace and Lando—aided by Spiegel—conveyed how frighteningly easy it was to become someone else in America, no questions asked.

Speigel began her odyssey at the Municipal Building in Washington, D.C., where she applied for a replacement birth certificate—for a child who had died two decades earlier. Lando had supplied her with the name of the dead child, along with just enough facts to convince an unsuspecting clerk.

Lando had arranged for Wallace to interview the head of the office, John Crandall. The plan was to set up the camera in the front of the office, so that when Spiegel arrived to apply for her certificate, the CBS camera could zoom in on her without arousing suspicion that she was there undercover. After Spiegel went in, Wallace commenced to grill Crandall on what she was doing:

 

W
ALLACE
: I asked Mr. Crandall if it might not be possible that the woman in the checkered shirt, whom we were filming, was an imposter, applying for the certificate of a person who had actually died years ago.

J
OHN
C
RANDALL
: We would have no way of knowing. That's right. . . .

W
ALLACE
: So what you have here is a legal document that this woman can use—for whatever purposes.

C
RANDALL
: For whatever purpose. To claim estates, to inherit money, to get passports, to get unemployment. For almost anything.

W
ALLACE
: And if she were an imposter—I'm sure she's not, but if she were an imposter—she could use it for fraudulent purposes?

C
RANDALL
: Yes, she certainly could.

W
ALLACE
: To rip off whatever she wanted to rip off?

C
RANDALL
: I think I better ask her if she's going to.

 

Crandall then approached Spiegel and asked her, with the camera rolling—but without the
60 Minutes
crew disclosing its relationship with Spiegel—whether she was an imposter. She denied it; that settled that. Armed with her new birth certificate, Spiegel got a Maryland identification card (equivalent to a driver's license) as Wallace, Lando, and the camera followed in her wake. After that she proceeded to apply for an all-important Social Security number. Again, with the cameras rolling, under the guise of a general story about identification, they caught this piece of film:

 

S
OCIAL
S
ECURITY
C
LERK
: Do you have proof of age with you?

S
PIEGEL
: I have my birth certificate.

S
OCIAL
S
ECURITY
C
LERK
: May I see it, please? All right, thank you very much. You should be receiving this within six weeks.

 

The group left the Social Security office and headed for the state welfare office, where Spiegel applied for food stamps; in doing so under an assumed name, she was breaking the law—perhaps the first crime ever committed in front of a television camera by a representative of a major American news organization. Next, she went to get a driver's license, a crucial step in the building of a false identity; a license would permit her to cash checks. The learner's permit was easily obtainable by mail; the license would arrive a few days later. (The
60 Minutes
piece never quite explained how Spiegel got around the exams required for a driver's license, a shortcut that probably went unnoticed on television.)

Next came a passport, the toughest form of identification to get. Speigel simply went to her local post office in Bethesda (again with CBS cameras right behind); within two weeks, her passport came in the mail.

Now the fun began. Spiegel opened a checking account at a Maryland bank, then took her new checks to a Washington, D.C., camera shop, where she admired a camera in the window. Going inside, with Wallace, Lando, and the CBS camera in full view of the shop's employees, she told the merchant she wanted to buy it.

 

C
AMERA
S
HOP
M
ERCHANT
: The price is $
95
, and there's a $
4
.
75
tax.

S
PIEGEL
: Okay.

M
ERCHANT
: $
99
.
75
.

S
PIEGEL
: All right.

M
ERCHANT
: You pay by check, right?

L
UCY
: Right.

M
ERCHANT
: Okay.

When Spiegel had finished writing the phony check, Wallace stepped up to the counter to speak to the sales clerk.

W
ALLACE
: As far as you're concerned, this lady is okay?

M
ERCHANT
: Yes.

W
ALLACE
: You're sure?

M
ERCHANT
: I'm quite sure.

 

Speigel went on to fraudulently buy $
636
.
30
worth of camera merchandise, even though she had far less in her checking account than that. Next stop—the Eastern Airlines ticket office, where she bought a one-way ticket to Mexico City leaving that night. Once again, she emerged successful. Afterward, Mike Wallace stepped up to the counter, microphone in hand:

 

W
ALLACE
: I wonder if I can ask you some questions?

A
IRLINE
A
GENT
: Sure.

W
ALLACE
: First of all, forgive me, this young woman could simply go to Mexico and disappear from sight, and Eastern Airlines would be out
170
-odd dollars.

A
IRLINE
A
GENT
: That's right. Well, I'm quite satisfied that she is okay. I mean—

W
ALLACE
: Why?

A
IRLINE
A
GENT
: Well, I just have that feeling. After all, I have been in the business twenty-eight years. I should know a little about accepting checks.

 

The “Fake IDs” segment proved more than just how easy it was to forge an identity; it also demonstrated that
60 Minutes
wasn't reluctant to bend the rules of journalism to make its point. Surely it said in a rule book somewhere that CBS News reporters were expressly prohibited from committing felonies in pursuit of a story. But was there any other way, really, to make the point of this one? At the time Lando and Wallace didn't think so, although Lando recently expressed some regret about the techniques used on this piece. “We never really considered what the effect would be on a person's life, by putting them on national television and making them look foolish,” Lando says. “We probably cost some innocent people their jobs, who were just doing what they were supposed to do.” But back then, Lando embraced the latitude
60 Minutes
gave him to get the story, and Wallace—well, Wallace just loved the camera, and he knew precisely how to use it for maximum effect. His pointed post-scam interviews put his instincts as a showman on full display, and once the story aired, the response only fueled his desire to flaunt his on-air persona.

Wallace may have been recognized as the show's most aggressive muckraker, but all three correspondents heatedly vied for airtime with pieces designed to use the show as an instrument for self-promotion and headline grabbing—a way of doing well by doing good. Wallace and Rather weren't the only ones changing laws and getting indictments; Safer's January
5
,
1975
, story about gun purchases made in South Carolina—“Have Gun, Will Travel”—resulted in a new handgun law.

In news accounts about
60 Minutes
Hewitt had taken to referring to his correspondents as his “tigers.” And, yes, there were news accounts at last; by
1976
the mainstream media coverage was steadily increasing, and the reviews were predominantly positive. But nothing mattered so much to Hewitt and his staff as having their exploits chronicled in the
New York Times
and, better yet, praised. They usually had the support of their hometown paper; but when they didn't, it hit them harder than any other critique imaginable.

 

In the fall of
1975
, consumer advocate Ralph Nader tipped off producer Harry Moses about a young, disillusioned project manager for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission named Robert Pollard. It had been Pollard's job to assess the safety of various power plants around the country, and he'd become convinced that some plants were unsafe—unsafe enough that his failure to get them shut down had made him deeply frustrated, and thus a potentially explosive central character for a
60 Minutes
piece. In Pollard, Moses sensed he'd found exactly the right person to dramatize a vitally important (but potentially dull) story. With Pollard's help, Moses studied nuclear power safety for three months, until one day he stumbled on the hook he needed.

Pollard had been rambling about not being able to convince his bosses of the meltdown threat at several nuclear power plants, including Indian Point Three power plant up the Hudson River from New York City. “I want to resign,” Pollard told Moses. “I want to make a big impact.”

“You want to make a big impact, Bob?” Moses responded. “Resign on the air!”

While he realized this might be hard to engineer for maximum effect on a show that wasn't broadcast live, Moses nevertheless believed it was the perfect way to deliver a devastating blow to the federal agency responsible for regulating nuclear power. He envisioned a dramatic sequence in which Pollard would tender his resignation, and his bosses—with Mike Wallace and camera close at hand—would scramble and no doubt lie to counter their righteous employee's explosive allegations. It would make great television.

But for the piece to work the way he wanted it to, they'd have to get the head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—William Anders, a former astronaut—to appear on camera with Wallace without knowing of Pollard's plan.

The delicate task of securing Anders's cooperation was assigned to Ellen Collyer, a
60 Minutes
associate producer, who placed a call to Anders's public relations consultant to arrange an interview. What Collyer didn't know was that her
45
-minute conversation with the consultant was tape-recorded. (This wasn't illegal in New York State.) A subsequent account of the conversation in the
New York Times
reported that “Anders would agree to come on the program to explain the agency's role in nuclear safety; however, he did not want to get involved in a debate, either direct or simulated through film-editing techniques.”

“Who the hell else is going to be on the program?” the Anders spokesman demanded, then backed off: “But you don't know either, do you?”

“At this moment, no,” Collyer said.

In fact, Collyer (along with Wallace and Moses) knew full well that Pollard would appear on the program. They fully intended the piece to be a debate over the safety issues raised by Pollard and had every intention of cross-examining Anders on his performance and that of his agency. It was going to be a classic Wallace “gotcha!”

The piece “How Safe Is Safe?” aired on February
8
,
1976
, three years before the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant; it served as one more example of the show's prescience. But it also demonstrated the ways in which television journalism can sometimes telegraph ideas in simplistic ways to make a point and offered a vivid glimpse into an essential difference between print and television reporting. For a
60 Minutes
producer, it was not only necessary to tell the story; it was also important to create drama, and quickly.