My war with the New York Times over the Eskenazi review was well known. However, very little was known about my battle with the Washington Post over the review by Sandy Smith, then an investigative reporter for Time whom I had openly accused of being a shill and informant for the FBI.
Here was part of what I wrote about Smith in a memorandum to my attorney, Roger Simmons, who was handling the New York Times case.
On October 29, 1989, Sandy Smith published a review of my book, Interference, in the Washington Post Book World. The major point of contention between Smith and me was which federal agency had conducted the investigation of Detroit bookmaker Donald Dawson. I had claimed in my book that it was the IRS and that, according to federal sources quoted in my book, the FBI had refused to cooperate. Smith claimed that it was the FBI.
Along with my letter to the editor, I gave Book World an IRS surveillance report on Dawson, challenging Smith to support his claims about the FBI. I even asked Book World's editors to publish an "Editor's Note" to determine, once and for all, who was telling the truth: the author or the reviewer.
On November 26, 1989, Book World published my response to Smith's review. However, Book World refused to intervene as a third party to resolve the dispute, even though its editors were in possession of my evidence that Smith was wrong about the question of which federal agency had conducted the investigation.
Consequently, to the readers of Book World, it was my word against his. And he had the first word with his review and last word in his response, which immediately followed my published letter.
Completely frustrated by the Post's refusal to correct the record, I wondered: (a) where did Smith receive his false information about the FBI's investigation of Dawson; and (b) what his association with the FBI really was.
While trying to find the answers to these questions, I found two interesting sources about Smith's relationship with the FBI:
* In Sanford J. Ungar's 1976 book, FBI, a critical examination of the bureau, the author wrote:
As chief spokesman for the Bureau, [Cartha] DeLoach kept a stable of trusted journalists well supplied with information—people such as Hoover's close friend Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune, labor columnist Victor Riesel, Jeremiah O'Leary of the Washington Evening Star, Sandy Smith of Time and Life magazines. . . . Like many other government agencies in Washington, the Bureau profited from selectively leaking material to its friends that it wanted to see in print or on the air.[1] [Emphasis added.]
* In former FBI Special Agent William F. Roemer's 1990 book, Roemer: Man Against The Mob, the author added:
[T]here was one guy in Chicago who was in a position to help us a lot. His name was Sandy Smith, the ace of the investigative reporters in Chicago. Sandy had been with the Chicago Tribune for a decade or so. . . . In general, Sandy's help was invaluable. Whenever we possessed information that we could not use to make a case or to assist in gathering further intelligence, we fed info to Sandy for publication in the Tribune and later, when he left the Trib, in the Sun‑Times. (Sandy later left the Sun‑Times for Life magazine and eventually Time, where he cemented his reputation as the top crime reporter in the country.)[2] [Emphasis added.]
Furthermore, at the time of his review of Interference, Sandy Smith was in the midst of a litigation against Little, Brown, the publisher of his recently canceled book about organized crime. Smith and his co‑author were represented by Washington attorney William Hundley, the former chief of the U.S. Justice Department's Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, who had been retained by the two authors in June 1989.
What was the significance of Hundley's representation of Smith at the time of his review of my book about the NFL? After Hundley left the government in 1966, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle selected him as the director of NFL Security.
In Chapter 18 of Interference, entitled "Bill Hundley and NFL Security," I was extremely critical of Hundley's role as NFL Security chief, providing specific details of his alleged participation in the suppression and/or killing of official probes, including several investigations of game fixing.[3]
However, when I reported Smith's brazen and well‑documented conflicts of interest, the Washington Post still decided to do nothing—thus, allowing Smith’s biased and unfair review of my book to stand without an official challenge from the newspaper.
I knew then that I was now in a perpetual penalty phase for my case against the New York Times, and that I had received a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
ENDNOTES
[1] Sanford J. Ungar, FBI (Atlantic Monthly Press; Little, Brown and Company, 1976), pp. 284-285.
[2] William F. Roemer Jr., Roemer: Man Against The Mob (Donald I. Fine, 1989), pp. 46-49.
[3] In Chapter 51 of Interference, pages 415-417, I discussed Hundley's role in the killing of a recent federal investigation of MCA, which he represented as a private attorney. I concluded this section about Hundley—which was also based on my book, Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob, as well as a June 1988 article, "MCA and the Mob," in Regardie's—charging:
“The evidence is clear that there has been a cabal among some past and present officials of the Justice Department's Organized Crime and Racketeering Section and some of its Strike Force offices. And the NFL, through its long-term sweetheart relationship with a variety of law-enforcement agencies, particularly the OCRS has been a direct beneficiary of this situation—which raises serious questions about possible conflicts of interest, as well as activities that border on sheer political corruption.”
Hundley, whom I had interviewed twice, denied my charges about the MCA case, which have since been corroborated by, among other publications, the Los Angeles Times and the Sacramento Bee, as well as the American Lawyer. In addition, Hundley directly attacked me in the June 4, 1988, issue of Billboard, over a year before his client, Sandy Smith, reviewed my book.
Hundley died on June 11, 2006.