Ahead of the start of the Democrat convention in Chicago we'll be looking at some of the lesser-known history of that toddlin' town.
From Vanity Fair, April 6, 1997:
One of the great hidden figures of 20th-century organized crime, attorney Sidney Korshak was thought by many to be the most powerful man in Hollywood for the last half-century. Until his death last year, he remained an impeccably dressed enigma whose power reached deep into the lives of Jimmy Hoffa, Frank Sinatra, Lew Wasserman, and Ronald Reagan
his is the story of a boy, a dream, a law degree, and a gun. It has no beginning and no end, but opens in the American desert on an October day in 1961, with a car emerging as a shimmer in the sun. In the car is Sidney Korshak.It happens to be the feast day of Saint Teresa, who tasted the great love of God with an open mouth, and Dion’s “Runaround Sue” is rising fast on the charts. This serendipity serves as an orchestral stirring as distinct as any I might devise for this tale, which reveals itself only in luminous flashes. Imagine a tale never meant to be told. Imagine a shimmering web of complexities dissolving ultimately into darkness.
Hollywood was largely the invention of Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their sons. Twentieth-century organized crime in America was a primarily Jewish-Italian coalition that shared the sensibilities but lacked the ethnic purity of the true Sicilian Mafia. In America, Unterwelt and Mafia were one, and it was in organized crime that the myth of the great American melting pot became reality. Organized crime in America was democracy in action.
Louis B. Mayer and Meyer Lansky both came from White Russia to the land of dreams, and both were pioneers in the business of the new land, each in his own way. Harry Cohn and Mickey Cohen were born to Russian Jews in New York, and both went young to California. One became the fearsome head of Columbia Pictures, the other the fearsome renegade of Hollywood crime.
Though Hollywood was far more segregated than organized crime, not everyone in the movie racket was a Jew. Frank Capra, the director whose work most reflected and influenced the romance of the American Dream, was from Palermo. He and Lucky Luciano, a habitual moviegoer, were born in Sicily in the same year, 1897. One peddled escape through flickering fable, the other through dope and booze and broads.
It was the Eastern European diaspora in America, and the embrace of Jew and Italian, that brought about the marriage of shadowland and dreamland, first in Hollywood, then, as Howard M. Sachar writes in A History of the Jews in America, in that “new and even more garish pleasure-capital in the nearby Nevada desert” developed by “still another confraternity of Jews.”
Sidney Korshak, the guy in the car that is the shimmer with which we began, was a son of that diaspora, and of that embrace. He spent most of his life at the shifting crossroads of shadowland and dreamland. He may have been the crossroads of it all.
Luciano was deported from America in 1946, the year of Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, the year of the opening in Las Vegas of Ben Siegel’s Flamingo, a lone fluorescent cactus blossom on a desolate stretch of Highway 91 known as the Strip.
Kay Kyser was in the air. The bandleader’s “Ole Buttermilk Sky” was No. 1 as Bugsy readied the Flamingo that December. Lew Wasserman, who had started out with Kyser, was a big deal in Hollywood now.
So was Korshak. But he remembered that ole buttermilk sky.
By ’61 the Strip had grown into the dreamed-of mecca of worldly delights, fast money and fast women, so alluringly revealed to the masses the previous year in the classic Rat Pack movie Ocean’s Eleven. Beneath the Technicolor fantasy lay truth, forbidden and forbidding. Every joint had its bloodstained secrets, its hidden cabals of sub-rosa ownership and looting. Korshak knew them all.
“We stand today on the edge of a new frontier,” John F. Kennedy had said accepting his party’s nomination in 1960. The smile of that first made-for-TV president hung over this promised land, where the New Frontier was no vapid metaphor but an already decaying carpet joint. Soon that hollow jack-o’lantern of a smile would be blown to hell, and Korshak would know something about that too.
His car moves fast on the three-lane northbound blacktop of the divided highway. Across the road, to the left, the Hacienda, the Strip’s southernmost joint, can barely be glimpsed. The bigger places loom ahead. To Korshak, the growth of this place is so familiar that he has long since ceased looking at it, long since ceased regarding it as anything more than limited testimony to the subtleties of his own dexterity. For him it is merely there now and seems especially flat in daylight, when the demons sleep.
At night there are few whom the city cannot bring to awe. At dusk the big jagged petals of the Tropicana’s monstrous tulip-shaped fountain light the sky with neon flashes of rose and aqua. The giant misbegotten fiberglass sultan astride the Dunes glows with arms akimbo. The reborn Flamingo, the Sands, the Desert Inn, come magically alive with lightning winks, serpentine undulations of pastel light. The ungodly expanse of neon, incandescent bulbs, Plexiglas, and sheet metal that is the façade of the Stardust, more than 200 feet across, will, as if by fiat lux of some Demiurge-in-Shades, become nothing less than its own dazzling, lurid galaxy. Beyond, the neon shrikes of the Thunderbird stir beneath the moon, and, south of the city limits, the Sahara tower looms ablaze. But Korshak is no longer enthralled.
His car pulls smoothly into the porte cochère of the Riviera, halting in the canopied shade. Built Miami-style with Miami money, the hotel is the first Strip high-rise, nine stories of coral-colored concrete that went up six years before, in 1955, the year that James R. Hoffa, vice president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, consolidated scores of small pension funds in 22 states into the Central States, Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund. Under Hoffa, who is now the president of the Teamsters, the Fund has become the Mob’s chest of gold in Vegas, with assets reckoned at a billion.
The Riviera, with its fleur-de-lis papered walls and Fontainebleau stylings, is packed with swarms of Hoffa’s men, conspicuous amid the swagger of Ban-Lon and slender iridescent ties, of kid mohair and sharkskin cut in the beltless, narrow-lapelled look of cool known as “Continental.” Hoffa’s men are a subduing presence in drab suits, button-downs, go-to-church haircuts. Not the usual Teamster crowd—they are attorneys gathered for the 10th annual meeting of the Teamster lawyers conference. Few party girls mingle. Hoffa, 180 pounds of muscle packed into less than five and a half feet, frowns beneath his crew cut at those who are entrapped by the snares of lust. He has been known to stalk out of a joint at the drumroll of a striptease and is now convinced that the government is using women to fleece his men of the union’s secrets.
Today, Hoffa occupies the Presidential Suite, the Riviera’s best. But indicted the week before for the alleged abuse of Teamster funds, he is not happy. Though he has stated publicly that the indictment will not concern the conference, there is a certain ominous gravity in the air.
The Riviera, promoted as “FUN around the clock!,” maintains its ambience of festivity—Juliet Prowse in the Versailles Room; the Vagabonds, the Personalities, the Tunesters in the Starlight Room. Yet the soul of Hoffa seeps through.
Everyone knows him. He has been on the covers of Time and Newsweek twice. His nemesis, Robert Kennedy, the punk attorney general, has described his power as second only to that of the president of the United States.
Practically no one, on the other hand, knows Korshak, who strides forth into the air-conditioned lobby of the Riviera on this hot autumn day. He is a tall man in his early 50s. The faces of some gain character with age, but his has not. Somewhat handsome in youth, he is big-eared and jowly now: a near-featureless head of wan clay. His ample snout, rather than distinguishing its unremarkable environs, seems simply the midden of further plainness.
He dresses well, in the manner of one who believes that in the big race it is ultimately the conservative who scores. The off-the-rack blues and blacks of the Teamster lawyers, these are not his taste: the fabric, weave, and texture of his socks are finer than those of the suits in which they’ll bury these guys. He is beyond cool, distinguished, self-assured, but—like his name, an ethnic blur—essentially nondescript. Sidney Korshak sounds no high notes.
Nothing about the man is obvious. Yet within moments of his unexpected arrival, Hoffa is moved hurriedly to humbler quarters, and Korshak rises—with escorts—to the Presidential Suite. Hoffa, who understands the dynamics of it all, complies. Hoffa, who keeps a battery of 150 legal experts, including Edward Bennett Williams, is well aware that the man who has claimed his quarters is a lawyer of a different kind.
To Hoffa, there was nothing nondescript about Korshak, whose aura was his, his alone. With Korshak, Hoffa well knew, the flesh played second to the fable, fantasy, and formidable fact of the man.
As it was in Vegas, so it was in Hollywood. Dominick Dunne, who moved west in 1957, remembers first encountering Sidney Korshak several years later at the home of Paul Ziffren, the entertainment lawyer and former assistant U.S. attorney who was once considered to be the most important force in the California Democratic Party. The Ziffrens, Dunne told me, “had this fantastic beach house, and they used to give these Sunday-night parties, and this one was, I think, being given for the writer Romain Gary, who was the French consul in L.A., and his wife, Jean Seberg— the actress, you know, who later had that terrible death.” (She committed suicide after years of F.B.I. harassment and the failure of her career.) “Sidney was there, and I remember Natalie Wood was there. I mean, it was a jazzy Sunday-night group.”
Dunne, who enjoyed taking social snapshots, was well known for bringing his Rollei camera to parties. “Not knowing that the man was never photographed,” Dunne casually snapped a picture of Korshak that night from across the room. “I could hear this collective gasp. I didn’t know what I had done, and then someone said, ‘Don’t take a picture of Sidney!’
“He was a presence in a room,” Dunne said. There were those whisperings about him. “Vegas. . . . Mafia. It always seemed kind of unreal to me. It just sort of added to the glamour of it. . . . There’s always that wonderful feeling of”—and here Dunne himself whispered—“knowing someone in the underworld. Especially in Hollywood.
“For some reason, which I never understood, he was always nice to me.” Dunne found himself invited to the Korshak home, at 10624 Chalón Road, in Bel Air, where Sidney and his wife, Bernice, usually called Bee, hosted an exclusive party every Christmas Eve. The Korshaks lived in luxury fabulous even by Bel Air standards. Chagalls and Renoirs adorned their walls. Their wine cellar was considered one of the finest in Los Angeles. But the compound was also a stronghold with a secret walk-in vault and a sophisticated and elaborate security system.
“That was the first house I ever went to in my life where there was a guard with a gun at the door,” Dunne said. “It gave me the creeps, if you want to know the truth. . . . I went to visit Phyllis McGuire once in Las Vegas—incredible woman. A guy with a machine gun answered her door. But it was at Sidney’s that I saw that first.”....
....MUCH MORE
Lew Wasserman was another who kept the secrets. More on him perhaps after the convention.
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From the Chicago Tribune, originally published September 24, 2006, updated August 21, 2021:
Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America’s Hidden Power Brokers
Your Quick 'Intentions of the Democratic Party' Cheat Sheet
If the powers-that-be, fronted by Barack Obama and James Clyburn representing the genteel wing of the Chicago mob, the Pritzkers and Crowns, put Michelle Obama forward as the party's nominee you'll know they are in it to win it.If not, whoever the party puts forward will be a stalking horse for 2028 and we will know a longer term plan is in play....The Pritzkers and Crowns as much as Obama himself put Barack in the U.S. Senate in 2004 and then in the White House in 2008.
