Pre-Trump: Ethelbert Miller interviewed DEM about the Mafia, politics, and journalism. . . . The song remains the same
The GOP is "an emerging organized crime group." Fox News is a "criminal enterprise.”
In this penetrating interview on UDC-TV, author and poet Ethelbert Miller and I discussed, among other subjects, investigating the Mafia, political corruption, and advocacy journalism. . . . This is the most revealing television program I have ever done. And I still stand by everything I said. . . . For the full video (27.43), click: The Scholars, hosted by Ethelbert Miller, December 30, 2013 (REV transcription)
Ethelbert: Hello, I'm E. Ethelbert Miller. Welcome to The Scholars, a television interview series that explores contemporary scholarship. We hope to engage and challenge your thinking on a broad range of topics. You'll meet a diverse group of scholars who are investigating and thinking about our complex and changing world.
My guest scholar is Dan Moldea, who is one of the leading investigative journalists in the United States. He's the author of several books, including The Hoffa Wars: Teamsters, Rebels, Politicians, and The Mob; Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA. and the Mob; Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football. His most recent book is Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer. . . . Welcome, Dan.
Dan Moldea: Thank you, sir.
Ethelbert: Let's begin by talking about investigative journalism today. What's going on in the field? We know that newspapers and magazines are changing. What's happening to your field?
Dan: Well, there're a lot of great reporters out there. There's a group called Investigative Reporters and Editors, based in Missouri, which does a lot of very fine work encouraging people to do investigative reporting. There are a lot of people with great talents to do it. The problem is, there's not a lot of money for doing it. When you're talking about investigative reporting, you're talking about things that take some time, and people need to be paid for their time, and they also need to be paid for their travel and expenses. Because of the cutbacks in all the newsrooms, and the layoffs and everything else, investigative reporting has basically fallen short. You have the big media organizations like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and CBS and the television networks, and to some extent, some of the cable network news programs, still doing investigative journalism. To all intents and purposes, it has fallen on hard times.
Ethelbert: Now, you say on page 572 in your book that you also have to be looking at the impact of bloggers and techies. How have they changed investigative reporting?
Dan: Well, anyone who feels like they want a voice in the world, all they have to do is create a webpage and express that voice, however they choose to do it. I think that one of the biggest problems with reporting has become the blurring of the line between news and opinion. I think that a lot of reporting has been mischaracterized as opinion, and a lot of opinion has been mischaracterized as news. I think that's another problem that we're facing right now.
Ethelbert: I look at how, every now and then, a young person comes up to me, and they say, "I want to go into journalism," and I'm saying, "Okay, where are you going?" Because you look up, and it doesn't seem to be a secure profession.
Dan: I don't think it is. Look at the buyouts that have gone on at the Washington Post. They have them from time to time. A lot of these people wind up taking their money and either going out and writing a book with the publishing industry that is really troubled right now, or they wind up opening private investigative firms, consulting firms, or lobbying firms. A lot of journalists are leaving the world of journalism and going into the world of consulting and lobbying.
Ethelbert: Now, over the years, you've investigated organized crime. Is organized crime worse today than it was several years ago?
Dan: As long as you have professional football, you're going to have gambling. When I wrote Interference in 1989, the Mafia's second-biggest moneymaking activity after drug trafficking was gambling on NFL games. The NFL continues to attract a lot of gambling. Billions and billions of dollars are gambled each year, more than any other sport. If you go to any bar, really in any major city, every bar is going to have one or two bookmakers at the bar, taking action. I don't per se have that much problem with gambling. Bet what you can painlessly afford to lose with a friend, not with an illegal bookmaker, because when you bet with an illegal bookmaker, a piece of your losing bet is going to wind up in the pocket of some Mafia guy.
Ethelbert: Now, you made a controversial statement in your book. You said that the right-wing Republicans are the new organized crime.
Dan: I believe that. In fact, I've probably spent most of my time over the past ten years, I'd say, going after right-wing Republicans, whom I consider to be more dangerous, I think, to society as a whole right now.
Ethelbert: Now, where is their crime? What crimes are they committing?
Dan: I believe that the Tea Party, for example, I view them as an emerging organized crime group that's being manipulated by larger powers. These people with probably good intentions are again, being manipulated. I view Fox News as being a criminal enterprise.
Ethelbert: What laws are they breaking?
Dan: There're predicates for RICO. I don't say that lightly. There are predicates for RICO. I think if you look at Sean Hannity, for example, at Fox News, and his Freedom Concerts, which were for the purposes of giving the profits of these Freedom Concerts . . . to the sons and daughters of fallen heroes from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Watch where that money really went, to political activities, and to the people who are advancing a political agenda.
I would say that that would be something that should be looked at, if not a criminal RICO case, then certainly a civil RICO case. I think that's something that should be examined much further, something that I'm doing myself right now. I do consider the right wing of the Republican Party to be an emerging organized crime group, and once again, I consider Fox News to be a criminal enterprise.
Ethelbert: Well, you define yourself as a “guerrilla writer,” and I thought the term reminded me of Richard Boone, Paladin, in Have Gun-Will Travel, which was back on CBS in 1957.
Dan: The term was given to me; it was not a compliment. It was Stanhope Gould, when I was at NBC just as a kid. I was 25 years old. Jimmy Hoffa disappeared. I wound up with NBC News in Detroit right after Hoffa disappeared, because I had been working on the Teamsters for about eight months before he did disappear. I wound up with NBC.
I went to New York, where I got to meet all the big shots there, one of whom was the head of the investigative unit, Stanhope Gould. He said to me, "I've heard about you. You're the guerrilla writer."
What that meant was, that's a reporter who's taking sides, who becomes an advocate. I have to admit, during my investigation of the Teamsters Union, I aligned myself with the rank-and-file reform movement within the Teamsters.
I cooperated with a federal grand jury investigation, which was investigating a Teamster goon squad that was running around, shaking down trucking companies, the leader of which threatened my father. That's when I decided to get involved in it personally, and as a result, that's when the contract came out on me, for $1,500, as you recall. I was more upset about the price than I was about the contract itself. I make it known where my position is. During the Clinton impeachment process, I took sides, because I thought that this was a witch hunt. After I wrote a book about Vince Foster's suicide.
Ethelbert: Let me interrupt you. If everybody's taking sides, and I'm a teacher in a school of journalism, teaching young people in terms of how to uphold certain rights and principles in our country, this taking sides seems to compromise the media.
Dan: I agree with you. I agree with you, and I say, I think the last point I make in the epilogue of my book is that the world needs more journalists who are neutral than they do guerrilla writers. The problem, I think, is when you become subjective, and you don't declare it. During the Clinton impeachment process, you had a bunch of reporters who wanted Clinton's head on a stick, and they were serving as sources, confidential sources with Ken Starr's operation, the Office of the Independent Council, and they were receiving illegal leaks from Starr's office in return. They were not declaring themselves.
When I took sides, I went on national television, and I declared, "I think this is unfair, which is going on. I am taking sides." With me, you're getting transparency. What I object to are those journalists who hide under the guise of objectivity, and behind the First Amendment, when in fact, they are taking sides, and they do become shills for the sources who are feeding them information.
Ethelbert: I'm going to present you four names, and have you talk about them briefly. The first is Lincoln Steffens.
Dan: Lincoln Steffens was a great muckraker. He wrote The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens. My writing coach, Nancy Nolte, who was one of my college professors, gave me his autobiography as a gift when I first got into this business. He was one of the great people in my business. I frankly think that Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer rivals The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens. My girlfriend, Mimi, was a close friend of his [wife], and he's a great man. I certainly try to uphold the dignity of the profession that he created for those of us who are muckrakers.
Ethelbert: Okay. The second name is Jack Anderson.
Dan: Jack Anderson, a great man with a bad conflict of interest. There was an excellent book written about him by Mark Feldstein, who's a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland. It was about Jack Anderson and his dealings with Richard Nixon, who had targeted Anderson, [and] had placed him on his enemies list. The problem was that Jack Anderson had a connection with a conduit for a major Mafia figure, Carlos Marcello, down in New Orleans, and that was very problematic for Jack. I talked to him about this. I warned him about this, and it's dealt with in Professor Feldstein's book. Great man, bad conflict of interest.
Ethelbert: Seymour Hersh?
Dan: Seymour Hersh, Mr. Outside, where Bob Woodward is Mr. Inside. Seymour Hersh is one of the great reporters of our generation, one of my heroes. I disagree with him from time to time on things, but I keep quiet about it, just as I would with Bob Woodward. I will disagree with him from time to time, but I will keep quiet about it. To me, these guys are the gods of journalism, and I look up to these guys.
Ethelbert: The fourth name is not a journalist, but a person I know you respect, and that's Robert Kennedy.
Dan: Bobby Kennedy, the greatest crime fighter this country's ever had, bar none. He was eating mobsters for breakfast when he was chief counsel of the Senate Rackets Committee, and when he became Attorney General, he started eating them for lunch and dinner, too. He was a person who went after the Mafia with everything he had. I believe that his brother was murdered as a result of Bob Kennedy's pursuit of the mob.
I think that the murder of John Kennedy, which had started out as a plot to kill Robert Kennedy, a plot by Jimmy Hoffa, the former President of the Teamsters Union, which evolved then, springing out of the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro, into a plot to kill the President.
I think the murder of the President was arranged and executed by Jimmy Hoffa, a New Orleans Mafia figure named Carlos Marcello, and a Tampa Mafia boss named Santo Trafficante.
Ethelbert: When we look at the attorney general position, since Robert Kennedy, has anyone else decided to really pursue the examination of organized crime?
Dan: William Webster, I thought, he was a very respected Republican judge from St. Louis. When he was FBI director, appointed by Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, in midterm, he did a great job at creating these sting operations which really went after organized crime. ABSCAM, which the movie American Hustle, this new movie that everyone's talking about, is really based on. BRILAB, PENDORF, STRAWMAN, MIPORN, there were a number of sting operations that were going on.
A lot of civil libertarians were objecting to this, but I have found in my experience that if I want to interview a Mafia guy, I don't go up to him and say, "Hey, Rico, I want to talk to you about how you knocked off Rocco." I go up to him and I say, "I want to talk to you about how the government has been violating your civil rights." I've never met a Mafia guy who's not against wiretapping. I've never met a Mafia guy who's not in favor of strong personal privacy laws, and I've been bored for hours by mob guys whining about the alleged impingements upon their rights and freedoms by the FBI and the IRS.
Ethelbert: Well, I want to get into how you conduct your research. Are you on the phone interviewing people? Are you spending time in libraries? Are you doing online searches? Are you simply meeting people in dark alleys?
Dan: The online thing is just such a blessing. In the old days, I wrote my first book on a manual typewriter, which was published in 1978, the Hoffa book, I grew into an IBM Selectric for my second book, and then for my third book, a Kaypro 64K, one of these things where you had to put disks in, and everything else. This thing, with the internet and everything else, is such a blessing.
It's important to clear the public record, that's the number one thing about investigative journalism. We've talked about this before.
You clear the public record, and after you clear the public record, and get everything you can about a subject.
You then go to friendly sources. You talk to friendly sources, people you know, people you trust, people who are going to tell you the truth. You collect their information.
Then you go to the neutral sources. People, you don't know exactly where they are, they may hurt you, they may help you. There's a risk involved with that.
Step four, you go to the dangerous people. People you know are going to sabotage you, people who could hurt you, people even who could hurt you physically, and see where they can help you with your investigation, if they can. Sometimes they surprise you and help you a lot.
Finally, the fifth level, you go to the targets of your investigations, allow them the opportunity to respond to the charges that you have laid out for them, to see how they respond. Sometimes you can turn them around.
I interviewed Jimmy Hoffa's alleged killers, the Briguglio brothers, the Andrettas, and the only person to have interviewed those guys. During the three-and-a-half-hour taped interview, I would ask them, on the half-hour, where they were when Jimmy Hoffa disappeared. During that three and a half hours, they gave me seven different answers.
I interviewed Sirhan Sirhan, as you know, three times, for a total of about fourteen to sixteen hours. I came into the interview thinking this guy was innocent, and I came out of it completely convinced at the third and final interview that this guy had done it, and he had done it alone.
Ethelbert: Now, have you ever worked with teams of journalists, or have an assistant in terms of getting through all of these things, someone you can bounce ideas off of?
Dan: I'm more of a lone wolf than a team player, let's say. I'm loyal to friends, that's for sure, but I prefer to do these things on my own. During the impeachment process, I made this life-altering decision to work for Larry Flynt.
Ethelbert: The impeachment of Bill Clinton.
Dan: To work for Larry Flynt. He put up a million-dollar reward for people who had evidence of hypocrisy among those in the Republican Party who were charging the President with behavior that they themselves were involved in. I found that people have conflicting standards for private behavior by public officials, one for those they like and another for those they don't like. I was responsible for nailing the Speaker of the House designate at that time, Bob Livingston, and force his resignation.
Ethelbert: That's in your book, Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer.
Dan: The details of it are in the book. I was responsible for [U.S. Senator] David Vitter years later when I was working on a book with the DC Madam.
Ethelbert: I want to ask you, before you go ahead, which of your books was the most difficult to write?
Dan: The most difficult to write? Well, the first book was daunting, because I didn't know how it was done, my book on Hoffa. My second book was about a contract killing in Ohio, where there were eleven people between the killer.
Ethelbert: The Killing of Cain, right?
Dan: The Hunting of Cain, where the brother put a contract out on his brother, put eleven people between him and the killer. I had the complete and total cooperation of the police on that one. With Dark Victory, it was a little harder because I was going after Ronald Reagan right in the middle of his second term. The book came out in the middle of his second term. The Mafia guys with whom I was alleging that he had associated, a specific guy named Sid Korshak, out of Chicago, working out of Los Angeles; Lew Wasserman, who was the chairman of the board of MCA, these guys were in power, and so no one, very few people would talk to me.
My book on pro football and the mob was difficult because I wound up fighting the sports media, which I consider to be the whorehouse of American journalism. These guys, in order to gain access to the sources with the teams, they've got to play by the rules. They have to show them their goodwill, and in this particular case, they had to wipe me out, which they tried to do.
Ethelbert: Let me ask you that. That was back in the eighties, and you were looking at the corruption. Today, former football players don't trust the NFL in regards to issues of health and safety. Is there a connection here, in terms of just the whole thing?
Dan: That's a good question. I really haven't looked at this in a long time. I wanted to go after the NFL, and to fight the NFL. I was relishing that fight. What I ended up doing was, a sports writer for the New York Times wound up giving me a review that was a lying review, a review where he claimed that I said things I never said, claimed that I didn't say things that were right there in black and white in the book. I went through a whole process trying to get them to correct it. I finally just asked them to print my letter to the editor. They refused, so I sued them.
Ethelbert: It would seem that a person with your background, or even someone who is listening to our show and wants become like you-
Dan: I'm not going to recommend it. I'm like a boxer, recommending, "Hey, don't do what I've done."
Ethelbert: There might be somebody who wants to get in the ring. You look around these issues of health, it seems like there's a cover-up. A lot of people's lives are at stake, and it seems that this needs to be an investigation.
Dan: I agree, but what you're going to find is, especially in the law enforcement community, each professional sport has its own private police force. The National Football League, its NFL Security. These guys are manned by former Justice Department people, and they have people all around the country. Their job is not to root out corruption and to expose it. Their job is to root out corruption and tamp it down, to protect the multi-billion dollar investments of the NFL team owners. I view the league as nothing more than their money laundering operation.
Ethelbert: Today, many people talk about the television series Scandal. Back in [1998], you did a book about Foster and his death. Is DC a place where bodies are being found all the time, and people are doing bad things, or is this just a television episode? You did have the thing with Jeane Palfrey, and the D.C. Madam.
Dan: The contract that was out on me, I had it on tape that these guys were doing this. I went to my good friends at the FBI, and the Strike Force Against Organized Crime, and I said, "Listen to this." I played the tape of them, this conversation where these guys are plotting to kill me.
I said, "What do you think of that?"
They said, "What are you going to do?"
I said, "What do you mean, what am I going to do?"
They said, "What are you going to do?"
"What are you going to do?"
"They said, "Well, what can we do? No crime has been committed?"
I said, "In order for a crime to be committed, I've got to be dead. That's how come I've come to you."
They said, "All we can do is advise you to move to a neutral city."
I said, "What's a neutral city?"
Ethelbert: Akron, Ohio?
Dan: A neutral city is a city in which no Mafia family controls the town, like Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, New York. What's a neutral city? They said Las Vegas; Miami, Florida; and Washington, DC. I came to Washington because it was essentially a neutral city. Everybody is here in this town, and one way or another, everyone is represented, either on K Street, through a consulting firm, or through any number of political figures.
During the ABSCAM operation, there was a guy from Philadelphia, a congressman from Philadelphia who says, "If you want to deal with the Mafia, you come to me." This was a congressman who was on videotape saying this, and was eventually convicted and sent to jail.
Ethelbert: Looking back over your career, and what you've written, how much has it affected public policy, when you can look back and say, "I, Dan Moldea, did this, and I'm happy I did this? I may not have gotten the credit, but it did make people more aware of certain principles that we have to uphold."
Dan: Well, that's the $64,000 question, which I address. The book starts at Kent State, in 1970. I was there that weekend before. I was there the day of the shootings, the morning of the shootings, with my girlfriend. We left about three hours before the shooting started. She was a student at Kent. I was a student at the University of Akron, about 12 miles southwest. After the shootings, that had a tremendous impact on my life, and I went from a fraternity guy-
Ethelbert: Drinking beer.
Dan: To a guy who really wanted to lead what Martin Luther King called “a committed life,” and that's what I tried to do. I tried to become a man who was society-serving rather than a person who was self-serving.
As an independent journalist, battling as I have, whether it's the media or the Mafia, I have found myself throughout my career fighting for my survival as an independent man.
I have succeeded at becoming the independent man, but I have failed so far at becoming the society-serving person I really wanted to be. Because of these constant battles, I kept fighting for my personal survival, which by definition, made me the self-serving person I had always dreaded. Mimi keeps on pointing out that I'm at the beginning of the fourth quarter, and I still have the entire final quarter to go. I'd like to have a nickel for how many games have been won in the fourth quarter. I plan to have a happy ending on this story.
Ethelbert: Let me ask you this. I'm not a priest or anything, but are there any confessions that are not in the book that you would like to mention today?
Dan: Well, it's a memoir, it's not a suicide note. There are one or two things that I probably left out of there. I didn't talk about how I got a friend of mine out of jail, who was an innocent man. There may be one or two other things that I might've left on the cutting room floor on that one. This thing started out as a 2,200-page book, and I cut two-thirds out of it.
Ethelbert: Well, having written two memoirs-
Dan: Excellent memoirs, in fact.
Ethelbert: If I critique this, I said, "I know Dan Moldea, and I'm looking at parts of this book, where I'm getting one or two sentences as opposed to maybe a chapter." For example, your relationship with your father.
Dan: My dad?
Ethelbert: Talk about your father.
Dan: My dad was great. My dad was a great guy, I really looked up to him. His portrait continues to hang in the Pentagon. He was the “Typical Officer Candidate” in World War II. He was a football star at Ohio State. ESPN has a book about college football where they describe one of the wildest finishes in the history of college football was a play that involved my dad.
Ethelbert: Let me ask you the question, this is getting back to the confession. Go to a moment in your life, we're running out of time, but a moment in your life that you really cherish, just you and your dad. Is there a memory that comes back?
Dan: I've got to tell you, it's when my dad was with his friends. My dad had this collection of friends, truck drivers, pro football players, business executives, a guy who owned a pizzeria, friends from the military. He had an assortment of friends where I almost enjoyed spending as much time with his friends as I did with people my own age, because it was always interesting to hear these guys talk. It wasn't so much that they were talking about the old days as they were talking about things that were happening now.
My dad was a military guy, tough guy, sports guy, but when the Kent State shootings came down, he came out against the Vietnam War. He said to me, "If you don't want to go to this war, I'm going to back you up in any way you want me to do it."
Ethelbert: Do you know what you just said? You've probably just explained why you have your little poker group. It seems as if you've tried to create-
Dan: I think you might be right. He had his poker group, too. We had a poker group for 34 years, I think it was, and my dad had his poker group for almost as long. I think friendship is important. Good sportsmanship, sticking by your friends, trying to do well in life, have a good purpose, “Doing for others is doing for yourself.” I think that's what life is all about.
Ethelbert: Did you ever think about the fact that this is Dan Moldea, and he's not a father?
Dan: I don't think I would've been very good at the father thing. I know your children, wonderful children, and I see wonderful children like this, like Jasmine and Nyere, and I say, "This is the product of great parenting." I don't think I would've been a very good parent, I really don't think I would have. I think that my daughters would've been hookers, and my sons would've been drug dealers. (laughing)
Ethelbert (laughing): This sounds like a confession, Dan. Dan, thanks for joining me on The Scholars.
Dan: Thank you, Ethelbert.
Ethelbert: And thank you for watching. I'm E. Ethelbert Miller.