This 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.”

Dunne said that Sidney and Bee Korshak had “a terrific marriage. I mean, who knows? It had the look of a terrific marriage.” A friend of Bee’s saw a union that was not so terrific. Sidney, said the friend, was “just a bastard” who asked his mistresses to family parties. The friend interpreted this as proof that Korshak was not “owned by the Mob.” A perceptive and informed observation, but one that also brings up the possibility that Korshak, as many suspected, was not among the owned, but the owners—a man above the rules of decorum.

In the land of dreams, Sidney Korshak was a shadow among shadows, a wisp of smoke curling around the brighter lights. What the Eisners, Ovitzes, and Geffens are to all that glitters now, Sidney Korshak was to all that was dark. His legend beguiled the legendary. His was the hidden mystery at the heart of the furnace of illusion and delusion. To some, he was evil incarnate; to others, the nicest guy in the world.

He was a lawyer, yes, a serpent of the bar, and in many respects he may be regarded as an exemplar of the species at its most evolved, but that is too convenient a label by which to define or dismiss him, for his domain lay beyond the imaginings of most members of his profession. But how vast and forbidding was his domain? In truth, then, just who, or what, was Sidney Korshak?

When he died, on January 20, 1996, at his home in Beverly Hills, the truth remained largely unknown. SIDNEY KORSHAK, 88, DIES; FABLED FIXER FOR THE CHICAGO MOB. Thus the headline of his New York Times obituary. And thus the Times of Los Angeles: SIDNEY KORSHAK, ALLEGED MAFIA LIAISON TO HOLLYWOOD, DIES AT 88. As far as underworld figures go, as far as Hollywood potentates go, even as far as lawyers go, the name of Sidney Korshak meant little to the masses. But in the inner sanctums of the underworld, Hollywood, and the law, among those whose celebrated eyes and ears the masses know and revere, the name meant much. It invoked the myth and mystery of the man believed to have represented Mafia law west of Chicago, the man believed to have controlled the inner workings of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and God only knows what else.

Bill Roemer considered Korshak to have been nothing less than “the most important contact that the Mob had to legitimate business, labor, Hollywood, and Las Vegas.” Roemer was 24, a college boxing champion and Marine who joined the F.B.I., which under J. Edgar Hoover officially denied the existence of organized crime in America. In the fall of 1957, when the New York state police busted a conclave of 70 Mob leaders who had converged for a national conference at the country home of the Sicilian-born president of the Canada Dry Bottling Company, the ensuing headlines rendered Hoover’s position untenable. Thirteen days later, a directive from Hoover declared war against the gangsters. Bill Roemer, assigned to organized-crime investigations in Chicago, planted the first bug in F.B.I. history—in Celano’s Custom Tailors, at 620 North Michigan Avenue, the downtown headquarters of the Chicago Mob.

Roemer, who did not smoke, died of lung cancer last June, never revealing to friends that the end was near. When I reached him at his home in Tucson, he explained that he had the strength to talk only in the mornings, but he wanted to help me. In several conversations, he told me kindly and lucidly what he knew of Sidney Korshak.

Roemer remembered the exact date the bug was planted: July 29, 1959. “Jimmy Celano had a private office in which he had a bar and a sofa and a desk and a couple of easy chairs and a safe and so forth. This was the meeting place, mornings and afternoons, of the Chicago Mob.”

The device that Roemer and his men installed “was an old World War II—vintage microphone. Today they have microphones the size of your fingernail that don’t have to be wired. This one was the size of a pineapple, and it was hard to conceal. We put it behind the radiator, then had to wire it out of the building to a place where we could monitor, five miles away, at our office.” (The thought of five miles of covert wire gave me pause. A source explained, “We used the telephone lines. In other words, we wired it down to the mainframe, and the telephone company cooperated.”)

I asked Roemer if he had been scared going in. “Yeah. There was anxiety. We heard and we suspected there was a guard inside with a shotgun, and if he heard us he had every right, legally, to shoot us as we came in.”

The pineapple, nicknamed Little Al, worked for nearly six years, including the summer of 1965. Through it, the voices of Chicago’s shadowland potentates—Tony Accardo, Gus Alex, Murray Humphreys, Sam Giancana—helped to reveal for Roemer and the F.B.I, the inner workings of their familial enterprises, a world at whose center lurked the presence of Sidney Korshak.

But Korshak’s voice was not among those heard. “I think he was smart enough to know that sooner or later Celano’s was going to be identified as the Mob headquarters,” Roemer said. “I don’t think he wanted to be seen there, and I don’t think he wanted them seen at his law office at 134 North LaSalle. I think they met surreptitiously.”

There were, however, veiled references to Korshak, as well as equally cryptic telephone messages left at his office by callers from Celano’s. Roemer mentioned a code name, Mr. Lincoln, but was unsure as to whether it referred to Korshak or one of the callers—a man named Murray Humphreys. Known as the Camel, more often as the Hump, this British-born hood, who died in 1965, was regarded as an elder statesman of the Chicago Mob’s ruling elite. “I remember him [Humphreys] calling Korshak’s office and asking for Mr. Lincoln. Or no— excuse me—he told Korshak’s secretary that it was Mr. Lincoln who was calling.”

There was an F.B.I. control file kept on Korshak: No. 92-789. The prefix, 92, Roemer explained, designated racketeering; the number 789 was an identifying number assigned sequentially. “In other words, after we established the Chicago program in 1957, Korshak was the 789th file that we opened under that program. Sam Giancana, for instance, was 92-349.”

But “to my knowledge,” Roemer said, “we never went out and conducted any real investigation on Korshak.” The reason was that “we just never investigated lawyers in those days.” The bureau, of course, was itself made up predominantly of lawyers.

Korshak was already bigger than Chicago by the time Little Al was installed. Though he kept a place at 2970 Lake Shore Drive and his office at 134 North LaSalle Street, by 1959 he also maintained residences in Las Vegas, at the Essex House hotel in New York, and in Los Angeles, where there was a permanent suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel. There was also a summer home in Paris and a villa at the Ocotillo Lodge in Palm Springs. A house in Van Nuys, California, was held in the name of his wife. The Bel Air home became his in the spring of 1960.

In 1958, Bill Roemer was sent by the Senate rackets committee to serve a subpoena on the Chicago gangster Gus Alex, an associate of Korshak’s then in hiding. On July 14, 1958, Roemer called on Korshak, whom he found to be “a refined, finesse-type guy” who “dressed very, very well” and “had himself under control.” Korshak patiently told Roemer that, although he knew Gussie, it was only because their wives were friends. Roemer suggested that, if this were true, perhaps he should be talking to Korshak’s wife, Bernice.

“You leave my wife out of this,” Korshak said.

Roemer calmly told him that if Mr. Alex could be found in the next few days, there would be no need to bother Bernice.

When nothing happened, Roemer telephoned Korshak: “Well, Mr. Roemer,” the lawyer began, “I guess you will have to talk to Bernice then. I’ll tell you where you can reach her this evening. She will be at the Mocambo on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles having dinner with Peter Lawford and his wife.”

As Roemer knew, Lawford’s wife was Patricia Kennedy, one of Jack and Bobby Kennedy’s sisters. Jack was a member of the rackets committee, Bobby was its chief counsel.

Roemer called the bureau in Washington and told his supervisor where and with whom Bernice Korshak could be found that evening.

“Are you kidding, Roemer? They wouldn’t touch that with a 10-foot pole.”

Although Korshak moved secretly in the world of shadows, he moved openly in the world of dreams. He was “probably the most important man socially out here,” gushed Hollywood columnist Joyce Haber. “If you’re not invited to his Christmas party, it’s a disaster.”

His magic proved as potent in Los Angeles as in Chicago. Producer Robert Evans was a regular at Korshak’s parties. Nick Dunne said that ”Bob wasn’t such an asshole in those days.” He “was hot stuff, and Sidney adored him, absolutely adored him.”

When Charles Bluhdorn, the Austrian immigrant who transformed a small Michigan auto-bumper business into Gulf & Western, took over Paramount Pictures in 1966 and brought in Evans to run it for him, both were outsiders, mavericks. As a woman who wishes to be indentified only as a “Beverly Hills socialite and wife of a retired movie mogul” told me, Bluhdorn “bought Paramount to get laid. It was that simple.” Bluhdorn and Evans hit it big in 1970 with a piece of schmaltz called Love Story. By then Bluhdorn was involved with the infamous Sicilian financier Michele Sindona, who would die in prison under mysterious circumstances. (Bluhdorn’s own death, during an international flight in 1983, would be regarded by many as mysterious as well.) Korshak was no stranger to Bluhdorn. Evans brought them together in the days before Love Story.

Without Korshak, The Godfather, the crowning glory of the Bluhdorn-Evans reign at Paramount, would not have been what it was. Neither Francis Coppola, the film’s director, nor its star, Marlon Brando, could envision the picture without Al Pacino as Michael Corleone. But Pacino was bound by contract to do another movie at MGM, whose top brass refused to release him. Coincidentally, problems threatened the construction of the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. Korshak agreed to intercede on behalf of Paramount. Within 20 minutes, Pacino was free and MGM looked forward to a brighter tomorrow. Evans has described Korshak as “my consigliere,” as “my godfather.”

Indeed, it has long been believed that the character of the consigliere played by Robert Duvall in The Godfather—the lawyer who had that horse’s head put in the producer’s bed—was based on Korshak.

I asked Mario Puzo, who wrote the original novel, about this. He said that when he wrote The Godfather,“I had never heard of Sidney Korshak.” Like so much else in the novel and the movie, it was a fanciful and romantic figment that the imagination of America accepted as fact. “The word ‘godfather’ had never been used in a Mafia sense,” Puzo said. But after the book and the movie, “they even started calling themselves godfathers.” Puzo laughed his friendly laugh. “It’s a fairy tale.”

The author did, however, eventually come to know who Korshak was. “It was obvious,” he said, “that he was the lawyer for the guys in Chicago.”

In the fairy tale, things are simple, clear, and vivid: the horse’s bloody head is placed beneath the silken sheet without waking the producer. We do not question this—and that is that. In the real and far more incredible world of Sidney Korshak and his associates, things are more complex. Every move, every moment, is a nexus of further intricacies, each ultimately unraveling—infinitely, it seems—into darkness.

Korshak strides across the lobby of the Riviera on a hot autumn day and Jimmy Hoffa steps silently aside. Korshak picks up a telephone years later and *The Godfather’*s problems are solved. Simple enough, until one wonders how and why.

The Riviera was clandestinely controlled by a consortium. Moe Dalitz represented the Cleveland-based, predominantly Italian Mayfield Road Gang and its predominantly Jewish counterpart, the Cleveland Syndicate. (Dalitz, who once listed his religion as “preferably Jewish,” was a founding member of the latter.) Meyer Lansky spoke for himself and his New York associates. The guys from Chicago spoke for themselves and their friends at home. The union of this triumvirate, not only at the Riviera but also at the Stardust and Desert Inn, was established on January 5, 1961, when Dalitz met in Chicago with two of that town’s criminal lords, Tony Accardo and Sam Giancana.

“Korshak negotiated more as the lawyer and Wasserman negotiated as the party to the negotiations. If Lew didn’t get it done, Sidney would get called in.”

Before hitting Cleveland, Dalitz—born in Boston on Christmas Eve 1899—had been a member of Detroit’s Purple Gang. It was in Detroit that he came to know a young German-Irish kid named Jimmy Hoffa, who had moved there from Indiana with his widowed mother in 1925. Hoffa became president of Detroit Local 299, and in 1936 married a Polish girl. But despite his later puritanical leanings, Hoffa had a mistress named Sylvia Pagano. She brought him together with Dalitz, who gave him his first payoff. He was introduced by Paul “Red” Dorfman, a former Al Capone associate, to the guys in Chicago who eventually helped him gain the presidency of the Teamsters. The Teamster pension fund headquartered in Chicago was by the time of Hoffa’s rise “managed” by Dorfman. Lucrative contracts for the union’s insurance went to an agency set up by the Dorfman family, an agency in which Sidney Korshak was a key stockholder.

The hundreds of millions lent by the Fund to Vegas casinos and other Mob enterprises were arranged largely by Korshak, who collected a generous fee for every deal made. When Korshak entered the Riviera that day, it was not just as one of the forces who ruled it. He was also a representative of those who ruled Hoffa and the Fund. In a manner of speaking, he owned not only the joint, he owned Hoffa too.

As for the call that straightened out both MGM and The Godfather: Korshak’s friend Kirk Kerkorian, the former used-car salesman who had taken over MGM, has been involved in Vegas since the days of Bugsy Siegel. The land on which Kerkorian erected the MGM Grand was purchased from Moe Dalitz. When Kerkorian sold his Vegas interests, it would be to the Hilton organization, whose executive vice president of the casino-hotel division had ties to Lansky, Dalitz, and Red Dorfman’s stepson, Allen. The Hilton was one of the many corporations from which Korshak drew consultancy retainers.

The financing and building of the Grand involved a complicated real-estate and film-leasing deal between Kerkorian of MGM, Bluhdorn of Gulf & Western, and Lew Wasserman, by now the head of MCA. The deal would be mediated, in the fall of 1973, by their mutual friend Sidney Korshak. Wasserman’s rise had brought him in contact with the underworlds of both Cleveland and Chicago; MCA’s ascendance in Hollywood in the late 30s was simultaneous with the Chicago Mob’s infiltration, through union control, of the movie business, and with Sidney Korshak’s own move to the Coast. Wasserman was perhaps the most powerful and revered figure in Hollywood, and Sidney Korshak was perhaps his closest friend.

In the life of Sidney Korshak, these are mere moments, which offer a glimpse into the specter, shadow, and power of him. They are illuminating glimmers on a gossamer web of remarkable complexities, a pattern of associations which dissolve ultimately into darkness. From Gulf & Western to Hilton and Hyatt, Max Factor to Schenley, the Los Angeles Dodgers to the San Diego Chargers, Diners’ Club to the Madison Square Garden Corporation, Korshak represented more than a hundred corporate clients, whose affairs he sometimes spun inextricably and often imperceptibly with those of clients who dwelled in less public venues. One thing is clear: all roads lead back to the city of Chicago, where the web had originated.

Harry Korshak—a Jewish immigrant from Kiev, Russia—came to the West Side of Chicago late in the last century. There he married Rebecca Lashkovitz, also an immigrant, from Odessa. They had three sons. The eldest, Theodore, born in 1903, would not be publicly acknowledged in later years by his younger brothers, Sidney and Marshall. Ted’s first known arrest, for disorderly conduct, came in 1925. Under his rightful name and various aliases—Fred Korshak, Phillip Korshak, Phil Cohen, the list goes on—his rap sheet, mostly for narcotics violations, stretched over the next 30 years. Most of these run-ins ended with discharges. In January 1950, following a narcotics bust by a lieutenant of the Illinois state attorney’s office, he was sentenced to a year in the House of Correction. The last mention of him, in a Chicago Crime Commission memorandum of September 1955, states that Ted Korshak was believed to be living, off and on, at the Park Shore Hotel, 1765 East 55th Street. He was “alleged to be a narcotic addict and somewhat of a confidence man. When necessary, he got his daily bread from either his two brothers or his mother.” Ted died in Chicago in September 1971.

Sidney Roy Korshak was born on June 6, 1907. He attended Marshall High School, where he enjoyed something of a reputation as a basketball player, and the University of Wisconsin, where, like Bill Roemer at Notre Dame, he was a collegiate boxing champion. He graduated in 1930 from the law school of DePaul University in Chicago and followed in the footsteps of his Uncle Max, who had served as assistant corporation counsel for Chicago from 1911 to 1915. Sidney’s own career as a city lawyer, however, did not last long.

Our first public glimpse of Sidney Korshak, in May of 1931, is in a report of his arrest, with his brother Ted, following an early-morning brawl at a nightclub called the Show Boat, at Clark and Lake Streets in the Loop. According to one report, “Police who searched the brothers later at the detective bureau said they found a gun in Sidney’s pocket.” Booked on charges of carrying a concealed weapon and disorderly conduct, he was released, pending arraignment, on a bond of $2,400. Ted, previously scheduled to appear in felony court two days later on a charge of larceny, was released without bond. At Sidney’s arraignment, charges were dropped.

The earliest documentation of Korshak’s private practice appeared soon after his arrest: in two handwritten court reports, from September and October 1931, S. R. Korshak is listed as the defense counsel at the bench trial of a pair of young hoods charged in the matter of a stolen Chrysler. Korshak lost the case.

The Hollywood columnist James Bacon worked for the Associated Press in Chicago in the 1940s. During this era a crusading judge had started the practice of using vagrancy arrests to harass wealthy gangsters. “That’s when I first became aware of Korshak,” Bacon said. “They would arrest these guys on vagrancy. They might have 20 grand on them, but they would be arrested for vagrancy. Sidney was always the lawyer down there defending them. I remember there was one guy, Sam ‘Golf Bag’ Hunt, who always carried a machine gun in a golf bag instead of a violin case.”

Bacon, who would also know Korshak in his golden days in Los Angeles, said he was “very charming and soft-spoken,” a “very pleasant” man, “a very likable guy.” He certainly did not seem like a Mob figure. “If you’d known him, you’d have liked him,” Bacon told me. “He was that kind of guy.”

James Bacon figures that it was Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik who brought Korshak into the fold of the Mob. This echoes what Bill Roemer told me, that it was Guzik “who developed Korshak.” Guzik, Roemer said, was “the original leader of the connection guys. We called them the corruption squad. They called themselves the connection guys.” They were the ties between those in the shadows and those in the light.

Guzik’s deadly protégé, Gussie Alex, would later assume his mentor’s role as the Mob’s connection man. Alex, born in 1916 and now imprisoned, has been described as “the political fixer and power behind First Ward politicians” and as a “ruthless, vicious killer” whom Chicago police acknowledged as “one of the wiliest and slickest crooks” in the city.

In 1956, when Guzik died, Alex—according to Roemer—“took over the responsibility for Korshak in the Mob.” Roemer said that after Humphreys died in 1965 Alex became the top connection guy “right into the 90s, until he was convicted and went away to prison.” (Alex, now 80, a man with a long history of mental breakdowns, is scheduled to be released in the spring of 2006.)

When Alex applied to rent an apartment on exclusive Lake Shore Drive, in 1957, he submitted a letter from Korshak, who recommended Alex as a man of “excellent financial responsibility” who he was sure would be an “excellent tenant.”

A confidential report found in the files of the Chicago Crime Commission states that “documents relating to Marshall Korshak [the third Korshak brother] and Gus Alex were first discovered by John McShane of the Senate Rackets Committee and that Bob Kennedy was fully briefed on the contents.” However, “it had been Kennedy’s policy throughout the hearings to shy away from matters concerning possible political corruption.”

Jerry Gladden, the chief investigator for the Chicago Crime Commission, had been a sergeant in the intelligence unit of the Chicago police department. Shortly before his retirement last fall, he told me that Bobby Kennedy’s policy was Chicago’s policy. “We didn’t look at any political guys if we wanted to stay in the unit.”

In Guzik’s era, Gladden said, “everybody made money and nobody went to jail. In those days, it cost Guzik a hundred dollars to walk through the Loop. He made no bones about it. There were certain cops who used to walk the Loop, Michigan Avenue, Main Street, looking for him. . . . Bondsmen, to pay back favors, had parties once a month, and they had all the girls there, and the booze and what have you, and their favorite judges and lawyers and policemen would be at these things. Everything was for sale. They were selling murders for 10 grand.”

Korshak’s parties in these years were much remembered. A former Chicago judge has been quoted as saying, “Sidney always had contact with high-class girls. Not your fifty-dollar girl, but girls costing two hundred and fifty dollars or more.”

Capone was 21 when he arrived in Chicago from Brooklyn in early 1921, brought to town by his boyhood idol, Johnny Torrio, a former Brooklyn gang leader who had been imported in 1909 by Big Jim Colosimo, the profligate vice lord of the South Side badlands. Colosimo’s partner in crime was his wife, a slovenly madam named Victoria Moresco. According to Richard Lindberg, the author of Chicago by Gaslight, Jake Guzik and his brother Harry were already working for Colosimo as pimps and brothel keepers by 1910, the year that the lavish Colosimo’s Café opened on South Wabash.

Colosimo was murdered in the spring of 1920 at the age of 43, following his divorce from Victoria and remarriage to one of his café singers.

Torrio took control of Chicago through 1925, when, following an attempt on his life and a stretch in jail, he “retired” to New York, where he became the eminence grise, elder statesman, and adviser to a group of younger men that included Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano, and Meyer Lansky. Capone held Chicago from 1925 to 1931, when he was indicted, tried, and imprisoned for income-tax evasion. Through those years, Jake Guzik was his closest ally.

In a manner of speaking, Sidney Korshak owned not only the Riviera, he owned Jimmy Hoffa too.

Short and pudgy with sunken, bulging eyes, Guzik was violent neither in word nor in deed. Irving Cutler, the author of The Jews of Chicago, told me of Guzik’s storming into the office of the Jewish Daily Forward one day, raising hell about a piece implying that he was a gangster. The editor asked why Guzik was angry with the Forward when the Chicago Tribune printed far worse about him far more often. “Because my mother reads your paper,” he bellowed. Later, in 1928, when his mother died, Guzik, pulling up in a black limousine to the Orthodox synagogue at 30th and Wabash, paid the rabbi $500 to ensure that her soul would not be swindled out of a full 30 days of Kaddish.

Joe Kraus of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society believes that it was Guzik who brought in Sidney Korshak. But he also refers to the Korshak family’s political connections: Sidney’s uncle Max M. Korshak, whom Sidney used as a reference in his application for membership in the Chicago Bar Association, was a master in chancery of circuit court, and a cousin, Don Korshak, was an assistant state’s attorney. In a city where crime and politics were so inextricably entwined, it may have been through family that young Sidney entered the shadows. Perhaps the decisive connection was that of neighborhood, that of Magen David.

By the time of Capone’s reign, Guzik lived comfortably in a respectable suburb. But he had grown up, according to Richard Lindberg, “in a Jewish neighborhood right along Roosevelt Road, just a little bit west of Maxwell Street. This encompasses an area of Chicago called Douglas Park. It was an extension of the original ghetto on Maxwell Street that was inhabited by a number of Eastern European Jews coming over in the 1880’s and the 1890’s.”

This part of the West Side, known both as Douglas Park and Lawndale, was also where the Korshak family settled and lived. Evidence suggests that Sidney’s father and Uncle Max were in Chicago in the 1880s, and Max, born in 1884, may have been an American by birth. In any case, they were there before Guzik and were roughly Guzik’s age. They may have started out in the original Maxwell Street ghetto, and, as they prospered—Harry in the construction business, Max as a lawyer—moved to better quarters. The Korshak home, where Sidney and his brothers grew up, was at 3112 Douglas Park Boulevard, in a preferred part of the neighborhood.

Cicero, Capone’s headquarters, lay just west of Lawndale, and it has been rumored that, as a student, the young Sidney Korshak worked occasionally as Capone’s chauffeur. But it is unlikely that the two ever met. Capone was sentenced to 11 years on October 24, 1931, five days after Korshak’s first known clients were sentenced. Though Frank Nitti became the figurehead of the Chicago Mob when Capone went away, the true powers were Tony Accardo, Paul Ricca, Capone’s cousin Charlie Fischetti, and Guzik. These were the men who controlled Chicago for the next 20 years, and Sidney Korshak knew and worked with them all.

In those days, Korshak cut quite a figure. Tall and lean, he had deep hazel-brown eyes and black hair, groomed straight back in a lone full wave. Except for the telltale reminders of work beneath his eyes, he looked more a society playboy than an immigrant’s young attorney son.

It was with a splash of glamour that Chicago at large came to know him. Following New York’s precedent, breach-of-promise suits involving broken betrothals were outlawed in Illinois in June of 1935. On the morning of June 29, a rush of seven such suits were filed before the ban went into effect. One was brought by the stage and film starlet Dorothy Appleby against the Chicago furniture heir Sidney M. Spiegel Jr.

Appleby, 29, was described in a New York Review profile of 1930 as “one of our most prominent flappers.” In 1925 she had appeared to be married to Teddy Weinstein, a Broadway character who also went by the name of Teddy Hayes and who told people that he was Jack Dempsey’s trainer. He revealed their marriage as a sham during his courtship of Ruby Keeler (before her marriage to Al Jolson). In 1931, in what the New York Daily Mirror called “a romantic tantrum,” Appleby married Morgan Galloway, a Kentuckian. A week later, she attempted suicide in the lake in Central Park.

Three years after their 1932 divorce, she met Spiegel, who she said won her heart in a whirlwind Hollywood courtship. In her Chicago suit against him, which she entered fresh from a Maine drunken-driving bust, she sought a quarter of a million, claiming that he had promised to marry her aboard the Île de France. The suit was filed for her by Philip R. Davis, for whose law firm, at 188 West Randolph Street, Sidney Korshak then worked.

The suit, handled by Korshak, was settled out of court in September. Spiegel’s attorney maintained that the would-be bride netted under a grand, but the coverage that came with it was priceless for the actress. Korshak also parlayed that publicity into local celebrity.

DOROTHY TO WED HER LAWYER, proclaimed a Chicago headline of September 19, 1935. The story that followed mentioned what was likely Korshak’s first trip to Los Angeles: “Korshak was on his way home yesterday with Miss Appleby’s promise after visiting her in Hollywood.” Beneath a photo of Korshak, dapper and somewhat louche, was the italicized phrase Wins Client’s Hand. It was reported that “Miss Appleby, playing in Jean Harlow’s new picture, confirmed the engagement.”

The Harlow movie, Riffraff, was not notable. But the year of Korshak’s visit to Hollywood was. Harlow was the lover of Abner “Longie” Zwillman, an East Coast gangster tied to both Moe Dalitz and the Chicago outfit. In Hollywood, the man who kept an eye on her for Zwillman was Johnny Rosselli, a Capone man before he joined forces with Jack Dragna, L.A.’s pre-eminent criminal presence.

When the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) struck for better wages and conditions in 1933, the studio bosses called Rosselli in as “labor negotiator,” a role for which Sidney Korshak’s prowess was to become legendary. The alliance’s president, George Browne, had been one of the Chicago Mob’s second-rate local leaders. His assistant, Willie Bioff, was a pimp, thug, and shakedown man controlled by Capone’s heirs.

At a 1934 Chicago meeting (Browne and Bioff were not invited), Rosselli explained the profit structure of the movie industry, and a plan was laid for a wholesale extortion operation of the major studios through IATSE. Rosselli would operate as the puppet master of Browne and Bioff. With a new strike, against Paramount theaters, in the fall of 1935, IATSE dealt its first blow. Soon union members were hit as well—with a 2 percent levy on all pay, a shakedown that IATSE’S rulers designated as strike insurance. Within six months, the blackmailing was refined: the major studios would each contribute 50 grand a year to IATSE in return for labor peace.

Korshak’s engagement to Appleby was still in the news in Chicago as 1935 neared its end. “I am going to spend Christmas at Palm Springs, Cal., and New Year’s Day in Mexico with Miss Appleby,” said the lawyer. According to one report, he added that Mexico would be a “good place for a wedding ceremony.”

In the summer of 1938, when the Chicago Daily Times reported that an argument “about $150” had developed into a fistfight between Korshak and a bailiff outside police headquarters on South State Street, the attorney was described as “reportedly” still “engaged to movie actress Dorothy Appleby.” After that, there is no further mention of her in the life of Sidney Korshak.

The youngest Korshak brother, Marshall, born in 1910, had pursued a political career after graduation from John Marshall Law School in Chicago. His offices would include alderman and state senator (1950–62). “Marshall was an important legislator and politician,” Bill Roemer told me, “and, of course, we always felt that he was put in there because he was the younger brother of Sidney.”

Marshall was a rising figure in the city’s Democratic machine when, in February 1939, Sidney himself had a brief flirtation with political office, as a candidate in the 48th Ward. Tom Courtney, his endorser, was a state’s attorney whose reign on the West Side was maintained in close cahoots with Guzik and other underworld figures.

A week after a wedding that the Daily Mirror called “a romantic tantrum,” Dorothy Appleby attempted suicide in the lake in Central Park.

In December of 1939, Korshak formed a partnership with Harry A. Ash, a former Cook County inheritance-tax attorney and a former assistant attorney general of Illinois. Their offices were located at 100 North LaSalle, which was also the address of the First Ward Democratic headquarters, the front for the Mob’s connection guys—Guzik, Humphreys, Alex—and the political figureheads in their grasp.

Back in California, Bioff and Browne were headed for trouble. The locals had lost their autonomy, and union members who dared to protest ended up out of work and often beaten up. A Los Angeles attorney, Carey McWilliams, stirred an assembly committee of the California legislature to investigate IATSE. Two days before public hearings opened, in November 1937, Bioff paid a $5,000 “retainer” to one Colonel William Neblett, who was associated in the practice of law with William Mosley Jones, speaker of the California assembly. The investigation that ensued was a charade: halfhearted, short-lived, and inconclusive. Chicago’s stranglehold on Hollywood seemed invincible.

In 1938, however, a formal complaint against IATSE was filed with the National Labor Relations Board on behalf of the Motion Picture Technicians Committee.

The government was building its case.

Late in 1939, as Korshak and Ash opened their LaSalle Street practice, Bioff was extradited from Los Angeles to Chicago to face an outstanding 1922 pandering rap. Upon his return to Chicago, several men arrived at his room at the Bismarck Hotel, on Randolph Street, across from City Hall and around the corner from Korshak’s office. Among them was Charles “Cherry Nose” Gioe, a 35-year-old cohort of Tony Accardo, who had been involved in the original IATSE-takeover plans. Bespectacled, with a deep-dimpled chin, a receding hairline, and a not unpleasant grin, Gioe introduced Bioff to another relatively young man with a not unpleasant grin.

“Willie,” he said, “meet Sidney Korshak. He is our man. I want you to pay attention to Korshak. When he tells you something, he knows what he’s talking about. Any message he might deliver to you is a message from us.”

Bioff was remanded to the Bridewell prison to serve out the pandering sentence. Korshak visited him there in 1940. But the young attorney had problems of his own. George Scalise, a former pimp whom the Chicago outfit, in cahoots with New York, had placed as a shill union president, was under grand-jury investigation for looting the 70,000-member Building Service Employees International through fraudulent accounts set up by his order. Found among subpoenaed union records were canceled checks made out to Korshak. Called to criminal court to testify before the grand jury on May 13, 1940, Korshak said that he had been paid $8,750 by the union in March: $3,750 for drawing up new bylaws, and five grand for surrendering a contract that retained him at $15,000 a year to act as counsel for the union.

Though the press made no note of it, the state’s attorney questioning Korshak was Tom Courtney, the West Side power broker who had sponsored him in his political candidacy the year before. As he left the grand-jury room, Korshak told reporters that he had never met and did not know Scalise.

Willie Bioff, upon his release, returned to California. On May 23, 1941, a federal grand jury indicted him and Browne on charges of conspiracy, extortion, and racketeering. The trial of Bioff and Browne opened in federal district court in New York in October of 1941. Brought to the stand, the executives of the major studios explained elaborate methods of padded expense accounts and bogus vouchers used to conceal payoffs. Bioff laughed out loud in court as a Warner Bros, accountant testified that one such remittance was entered as entertainment for the picture Gold Diggers of 1937.

Throughout the trial Bioff did exactly as Korshak had advised him. He admitted openly that he had personally collected more than a million dollars from movie officials, but he denied that it was extortion money.

In November, when the verdict was delivered, after less than two hours of deliberation, Browne and Bioff were both found guilty of all charges and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison.

Two years later, government investigators in New York uncovered evidence of the greater conspiracy that had operated behind Bioff and Browne. Confronted with this evidence, Bioff, who had previously followed Korshak’s counsel and taken the rap for the Mob, decided to tell something of the truth.

In March 1943, grand-jury indictments for violations of federal racketeering statutes were returned against Frank Nitti, Paul Ricca, Johnny Rosselli, Cherry Nose Gioe, and several others. One of them, Nick Circella, alias Nick Dean, had fled when he had originally been indicted with Bioff and Browne. After being apprehended, he had pleaded guilty but refused to talk, and was sentenced in 1942 to eight years.

Rightly perceived by the Chicago outfit as a weak link, Circella had already begun to cooperate with the prosecution. In February, his girlfriend, Estelle Carey, was visited by friends of the innocent. She was gagged and tied to a chair; gasoline was poured over her, an ice pick was plunged into her vagina, a match was lit, and she was left to die aflame.

Frank Nitti’s reaction to the indictments came six hours after they were handed down. Waving a .32-caliber pistol as he staggered along the Illinois Central Railroad tracks, he raised the gun to the side of his brown fedora and blew himself to hell.

Harlow’s watchdog, Johnny Rosselli, sensing the coming storm, had enlisted in the wartime army. His regiment was destined for Normandy, but the grand jury got to Rosselli first. He became the last witness to be called before the grand jury, yet remained a stand-up guy When the indictments came down, a separate charge of perjury was announced against him. Arraigned in uniform, he was moved from the Waldorf-Astoria to the Tombs.

The trial got under way on October 5, 1943. Willie Bioff, the government’s star witness, was asked about IATSE’S alleged five-year plan to take over 20 percent of Hollywood’s profits and a long-term plan to gain a 50 percent interest in the studios themselves.

“If we’d lasted that long, we would have,” Bioff answered wistfully.

His character was brought into question, and he admitted that he had once organized the kosher butchers of Chicago to prevent price-cutting, which kept the poor from getting meat.

“Too much meat is bad for poor people,” he rejoined. “Anyway, Jewish people are subject to high blood pressure and diabetes.”

By way of self-explanation, he reflected, “I was just an uncouth person, a low-type sort of man. People of my caliber don’t do nice things.”

Then, in Chicago, the headlines hit: CHICAGO LAWYER “OUR MAN,” SAYS BIOFF AT MOVIE TRIAL, declared the Sun; BIOFF NAMES SID KORSHAK AS MOB AID, declared the Herald-American.

At the time, Korshak was out of town, serving in the army as a military instructor at Camp Lee, Virginia. In Los Angeles in 1941—the year he counseled Bioff at the Ambassador Hotel—he had met a former model, dancer, and ice-skater named Bernice Stewart. In August 1943, when Korshak was on leave, they had been married at the Ambassador Hotel in Manhattan by a city magistrate. Upon his discharge, his address would no longer be that of his mother, 5050 Sheridan Road. He and Bernice would move into the Seneca, at 200 East Chestnut Street, a 16-story luxury property owned by the Mob financier Alex Louis Greenberg, who would be slain in 1956, two years after a confidential source advised the F.B.I. that Korshak was a hidden owner with Greenberg of the Seneca.

The verdict for Rosselli and his friends came down a few days after Christmas of 1943, and in April of 1944 they were sent to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. Their 10-year terms were cut to a third, thanks to Korshak, who brought about their parole, in August 1947, with a letter written for him by the Illinois state superintendent of crime prevention, his former partner Harry Ash. The parole was a scandal, resulting in a congressional-committee investigation and the resignation of Ash. It was also a work of wizardry, resulting in the everlasting awe and esteem of the underworld for Sidney R. Korshak, attorney-at-law.

Bioff and Browne were released from prison early, too, freed by an appreciative government late in 1944, soon after Rosselli and the others had begun serving their time. Assuming a false identity, Bioff lived for a decade in Phoenix, where he became a friend and adviser of Senator Barry Goldwater, who knew him only by his assumed name of William Nelson. It was under the name of Nelson that Bioff, with the boldness of a fool, took a job in 1955 as an entertainment consultant for the Riviera. In November of that year, back home in Phoenix, he turned the ignition key in his pickup truck and was blown asunder.

Throughout the 30s and 40s, whatever notoriety befell Sidney Korshak was local, confined to a Chicago public that seemed to either shrug for-bearingly or smile understandingly. Except for Variety, the national media had ignored Bioff’s testimony about him. All that changed with a feature story in the September 30, 1950, Collier’s. “The Capone Gang Muscles into Big-Time Politics,” by Lester Velie, was point-blank: “Legal advisor to some of the mob is Sidney Korshak.” In addition to his underworld connections, Velie exposed Korshak’s ties to political leaders such as Jacob Arvey, the chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party.

Visiting Korshak at his plush offices on North LaSalle, Velie had noted frequent telephone calls from intriguing characters, including Jake Arvey’s connection man, Artie Elrod; Joe Grabiner, identified as Chicago’s biggest layoff bookie; and Tom Courtney’s cohort police captain Tubbo Gilbert, described as “the richest policeman in the world.”

At a luncheon interview with another source, Velie mentioned these callers. “The next day an amazing change came over Korshak’s office. Suddenly, over the switchboard, all callers lost their identity and became Mr. Black, Mr. White, Mr. Green. Callers in person also took security measures.” Velie tried to interview Jake Guzik, whom he found in the company of Gus Alex.

“I don’t give no interviews,” Guzik said.

“How do you make a living?” the reporter asked.

“I play the horses.”

Soon after the Collier’s article appeared, investigators for Senator Estes Kefauver’s organized-crime committee arrived in Chicago. Among those interrogated was the paroled Cherry Nose Gioe, who was Korshak’s neighbor at the exclusive Seneca.

Korshak himself was subpoenaed by the Kefauver committee on September 1, 1950. Curiously, however, he was never called as a witness. Curiously again, on October 26 he ostensibly took it upon himself to come forward, telling reporters, in the words of the Tribune, that he “appeared voluntarily before the investigators to clarify allegations which appeared in a recent article,” and that he “told George S. Robinson, committee investigator, that Velie’s magazine story was a ‘series of diabolical lies’ and that Velie was a ‘journalistic faker and unmitigated liar.’”

It is curious yet again that no record or transcript of Korshak’s meeting with the Kefauver committee exists among the voluminous documents relating to its Chicago investigations. This may have been because, as he claimed, he “appeared voluntarily” and thus, by conditional agreement, his words were to be treated as wholly off the record. Then again, it may be true, as has been asserted, that the real purpose of Korshak’s meeting was blackmail. As reported many years later by Seymour Hersh of The New York Times, “One trusted Korshak friend and business associate recalled in an interview that shortly after the committee’s visit Mr. Korshak had shown him infrared photographs of Senator Kefauver in an obviously compromising position with a young woman.” According to Hersh’s source, “A woman had been supplied by the Chicago underworld and a camera had been planted in the Senator’s room at the Drake Hotel to photograph her with Mr. Kefauver.”

Korshak’s words to the reporters that autumn day were, in effect, his farewell to them. For the rest of his life, he shunned all publicity, and for more than a quarter of a century his name and image all but vanished from public awareness. He became not only the most potent but also the most invisible of powers.

Los Angeles, where nothing was real, was a good place to pretend to be an illusion. When Korshak was mentioned in an Associated Press dispatch from Hollywood in the summer of 1952, it was as an innocent. The item reported the ejection of the actor Gary Merrill from an affair at the Mocambo. Merrill, the husband of Bette Davis, had disrupted a speech by Danny Thomas with drunken heckling. The party had been given by Harry Karl, the wealthy head of a chain of shoe stores, in honor of a visiting Democratic national committeeman from Illinois, Korshak’s old friend Jacob Arvey, who had just triumphantly put across his protégé, Adlai Stevenson, at the Democratic National Convention. Present with Karl, his wife—Marie “the Body” McDonald—and the Arveys were Sidney and Bee Korshak.

The Chicago Tribune was given pause. An editorial remarked:

Attorney Korshak’s status as joint guest of honor with Col. Arvey is interesting. . . . The friendship between Korshak and the man who made Stevenson governor and had more to do than any other man with making him the Democratic nominee for President is worth a moment’s reflection. Senator Kefauver paid a chilly little social call on Stevenson last week. We wonder if he referred to the friend of Stevenson’s friend whom he had met professionally. And we wonder about Stevenson’s boast in his Governor’s day oration that he was happy to be a captive of the city bosses.

Arvey is a city boss. How much of a piece of Stevenson does he own, and, by extension, how much of a piece of the candidate does Korshak own? And, if they have a piece, how much of that piece can the mobs call theirs?

Gradually more strands of the web are visible; every moment a nexus. Harry Karl, the shoe king, would divorce Marie McDonald. Some said that upon the death of Harry Cohn, the former head of Columbia Pictures, Korshak brought Karl together with the widow, Joan. They were married in the Korshaks’ Chicago apartment, at 2970 Lake Shore Drive, on September 1, 1959. A few weeks later, in Los Angeles, Joan filed for divorce from Karl.

It is believed that Cohn, who left Joan an estate of $4 million, had been fronting for underworld Chicago investors at Columbia. The story goes that when his estate went into probate, Korshak connived the marriage of Cohn’s widow as a scheme through which the true investors in Columbia could regain title to their holdings without disclosure in public records.

Several months later, on June 4, 1960, Korshak acquired his Bel Air home, at 10624 Chalon Road. The grantor-grantee records of Los Angeles County show that the property was granted to Korshak by deed from Karl’s Shoe Stores, Limited. Karl was also a husband of Debbie Reynolds, whom Korshak helped to make a wealthy woman, reportedly negotiating a million-dollar deal for her Las Vegas debut. (A 1963 F.B.I. dispatch, grasping for details of the activities of the ever more elusive Korshak, reports that he was “present at the opening performance of the Debbie Reynolds show at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, in January, 1963.”)

The veteran director George Sidney’s wife, Corinne, grew up in Brentwood as the daughter of a prominent criminal-trial attorney, Carl S. Kegley. “When I was a little girl,” she told me, “my sister and I had these little identical pleated red skirts and red Dutch hats. My father took us to see the Kefauver committee hearings. We watched them question this man, Frank Costello, from the Copacabana supposedly. And I thought, Why are they being so mean to this man? Mean. Asking mean questions, being mean and rude.” It was a childhood memory that evanesced. Corinne grew up, studied journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, became a model with 29 national-magazine cover credits, was the first full-face Playboy cover girl, in May 1958, became an actress in film and television, and ended up as a Vegas showgirl. In 1968 she married Jack Entratter, a former front man of Frank Costello’s, the man whom she had seen interrogated. Entratter, at that time the president of the Dunes, for many years had run the Sands, the headquarters of the Rat Pack during the golden years of Vegas. The marriage soon ended in divorce, but the couple remarried in 1969. “I spent most of my time in the powder room,” she told me. “Sometimes I tell people that’s why I’m still alive.” In Vegas, “I had bodyguards around me at all times. I never went for a walk with the dog that I didn’t have two guys either watching or following me.”

It was in Vegas, before her marriage, that Corinne had met Korshak. “I think it was the Gourmet Room, about ’67, ’68. It was an era, if you can imagine, when, in Vegas, we dressed up. Beads, real jewelry. There wasn’t a woman sitting there without a 10-carat diamond or a suite. We all looked the same. We all had the same hairdresser. We all had the same jewels. We all had the same collections of Impressionist paintings. We wore sable and chinchilla. We dressed to go to dinner in Vegas.”

For Corinne, there was no Korshak aura. “Sidney was a suit, as they say. That was my impression.” Korshak’s wife, she said, “wanted to be Cyd Charisse. Cyd told me that.”

As Corinne speaks, her three poodles yap incessantly. There is no great wooden door in the Sidney home heavy or thick enough to baffle the frenzy of their high-pitched, piercing yelps. As they cry out for death at my hands, theirs become the prominent voices on my tape.

‘He was deified by himself and hated by others.” Irv Kupcinet, the best-known newspaperman in Chicago, was a close friend and ally of Sidney Korshak’s. It was in Kupcinet’s Sun-Times “Kup’s Column” that the Korshak-engineered takeover of RKO from Howard Hughes was revealed in September 1952. When The Wall Street Journal reported the takeover the following month, it described Korshak as “a sort of catalytic agent” who “is excluded from the group which purchased Hughes’ stock.”

This group included Ralph Stolkin, the Chicago businessman who built an empire “upon the foundation of a yokel gambling device—the punchboard.” Stolkin’s father-in-law, Abe Koolish, who had been indicted in 1948 for running a mail-order-insurance racket, and Ray Ryan, an oilman who had been a business associate of Frank Costello’s, were also included. Arnold Grant, like Korshak, was not a purchaser of record but was named the new, $2,000-a-week chairman of RKO. He had been a member of the Hollywood law firm of Bautzer, Grant, Youngman and Silbert. Greg Bautzer of the firm was also a Korshak associate. Bautzer was the lawyer who had worked for Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, setting up the corporation from which the Flamingo was born. He was an attorney who never tired of telling his tale of deflowering Lana Turner. (“I didn’t enjoy it at all” was Turner’s less told side of the story.)

Korshak was retained—or, perhaps more precisely, retained himself—as RKO’s labor-relations consultant. It was a role he did not long keep, for when the government and press began looking into their backgrounds, he and Koolish resigned.

The screenwriter Edward Anhalt remembers a night in Dave’s Blue Room in 1946. Bugsy Siegel was there. Ray Ryan was there. The producer Cubby Broccoli, later known as a close friend of Korshak’s, was there. Some years later, Tony Curtis wanted to do a movie about Bugsy. “Tony just loved Ben Siegel,” Anhalt said. “So we went to Howard Koch, and Paramount decided that I would do the script and Tony would be Ben Siegel. In the process, someone told me to call Korshak, who had represented Ben Siegel.

“So I had lunch with him a couple of times, and we talked about Siegel’s murder. He said, ‘You know all that bullshit about Ben being killed because he spent too much money? Absolute fiction.’” He was killed, according to what Korshak told Anhalt, because he was beating up on Virginia Hill, and her first lover, “the guy from Detroit,” in Anhalt’s words, “the guy from the Purple Gang,” who was very fond of her, “was very offended by it.” “He warned Siegel, and Siegel paid no attention to the warning, and they whacked him.” The guy from Detroit would seem to have been Moe Dalitz.

Korshak, Anhalt said, “was very mellow,” with none of the airs of a gangster. In this respect he reminded Anhalt of Frank Costello, whom Anhalt also met: “Neither did Costello have any image like that. If you didn’t know who he was, you’d think he was a pants manufacturer or something.”

Irv Kupcinet, whose first column appeared in 1943, told me last summer over lunch in Chicago that he knew Korshak for “about 50 years.” As a friend, the attorney was a man “who could turn more tricks with a telephone call than anyone I knew.” Professionally, “he was not beyond using his labor negotiations to strike up deals. He could call off a strike with a phone call, which he did any number of times. He was very close to Jimmy Hoffa, and Hoffa respected him.” After the Mob moved in on the Teamsters, Kupcinet says, “Sidney was very important in getting loans through Jimmy Hoffa.”

When Hoffa disappeared, there was speculation, Kupcinet told me, that “Sidney had lost his main man. But it didn’t turn out that way. He still had plenty of clout with the people that succeeded Hoffa.”

F. C. Duke Zeller, the author of the recent Devil’s Pact: Inside the World of the Teamsters Union, told me that Korshak continued to work closely with Frank Fitzsimmons, who took over the Teamsters in 1971, while Hoffa was imprisoned. Zeller, who worked for 14 years as a government liaison and personal adviser to four Teamster presidents, told me that “virtually every Teamster leader on the West Coast, in the Western Conference, answered to Sidney Korshak.”

I asked Kupcinet about Hoffa’s disappearance. “Hoffa,” he said, “made one of the few mistakes of his life when he got into that car and sat in the front seat. Ordinarily, Jimmy Hoffa would never sit in the front seat. He would never sit in the front seat. And they put the thing around his neck and strangled him and knocked him off. A lot of people who knew Hoffa couldn’t imagine why he did that.” Kupcinet said that it was “hinted that it was his adopted son,” Chuckie O’Brien, who set him up, a charge also made by the late Teamster president Jackie Presser in the book Mobbed Up, written by James Neff. In Duke Zeller’s book, O’Brien reiterates his long-standing denial.

The great bonds of Sidney Korshak’s later life had been forged in Chicago in the 30s. Twenty-three-year-old Lew Wasserman had arrived in town from Cleveland at the end of 1936 to work for the Music Corporation of America (MCA), an agency that had been founded in Chicago by Jules Stein, an Indiana-born graduate of the medical school of the University of Chicago. Stein and his partner, Billy Goodheart, started out promoting bands in the clubs of Capone’s South Side. MCA found its first big act, Guy Lombardo, in 1928, and by the mid-30s had Harry James, Tommy Dorsey, and Artie Shaw.

“Lew’s last job in Cleveland,” said Dennis McDougal, who is working on a biography of Wasserman, “was as acting general manager of the Mayfair Casino, which was basically a very high-class, high-roller Mob casino. The hidden owners were Moe Dalitz and his partners, the Silent Syndicate who founded the Desert Inn and went on to become the hidden owners of the Riviera and then ultimately La Costa.” Wasserman’s rise at MCA in Chicago was meteoric. Within a year he went “from just another shipping clerk,” said McDougal, “to what he later described as the national director of publicity.”

MCA, according to McDougal, was involved with the Chicago Mob “up to their eyeballs,” working closely not only with Chez Paree, the outfit’s premier club, but also with Ralph Capone’s places on the South Side. As Irv Kupcinet told me, “When you worked in nightclubs in that era, you had to know the underworld, because they dominated the field, and if you wanted to work, you had to be with them.”

Joe Glaser was a fight promoter and fight fixer for the Capone Mob. His family owned several Chicago nightclubs, including the Sunset Café, which he managed. Louis Armstrong, who in 1935 aligned himself with Glaser (who would be the performer’s manager for the rest of his life), played there in 1927. Armstrong later moved to New York, returning to Chicago in 1931 to play the Show Boat, the same year and joint in which Sidney and Ted Korshak had been arrested for brawling.

Glaser worked briefly as an MCA agent in the early 30s, and when he later incorporated his own agency, the Associated Booking Corporation, in 1940, it was with a loan from Jules Stein. According to Dan Moldea, the author of Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob, it was Glaser who introduced Stein to Korshak. It seems likely that it was Stein who then introduced Wasserman to Korshak.

Paul Ziffren, an Iowa boy, attended law school at Northwestern University in Chicago and became a member of the Illinois bar in 1938, beginning his practice in Chicago, where he became a partner in the firm of Gottlieb & Schwartz in 1942.

Ziffren moved to Los Angeles in 1946, becoming a partner in Swartz, Tannenbaum & Ziffren, then, with his brother, establishing his own firm, Ziffren & Ziffren, in 1950. By 1950 Ziffren and his friends were all in L.A., as were guys like Rosselli. Wasserman moved to the new, West Coast office of MCA in 1939. Joe Glaser eventually moved west as well, establishing the Beverly Hills office of Associated Booking three blocks from that of MCA.

Korshak controlled Associated Booking, however invisibly. Though he was the most legendary lawyer in Hollywood, he never opened a law office in Los Angeles or bothered with a license to practice in the state of California.

“It was casting, in a sense,” George Sidney told me, of the days he ran Columbia for Harry Cohn, the days when they would call in Korshak to take care of things. “You would cast an actor, you would cast a lawyer.”

Frank Rothman, the venerable Los Angeles attorney and former head of MGM, was a friend of Korshak’s for more than 30 years. “He was not an admitted California lawyer,” Rothman said, “and he referred a considerable amount of legal business to me.” Rothman found Korshak to have a stern exterior but to be “very warm, very gracious, very thoughtful. You had to know Sidney to see all these great qualities.” He was “a meticulous dresser. He was a gentleman, an absolute gentleman. You never heard any profanity out of Sidney. You didn’t hear any forceful statements out of him. He was never threatening or anything of that kind. He was just a real elegant man.”

Sidney Korshak and Lew Wasserman, Rothman said, “were two of a kind, but Sidney negotiated more as the lawyer and Lew negotiated as the party to the negotiations. The way it would work was, if Lew didn’t get it done, Sidney would get called in.” Korshak “would always have lawyers with him. He was always very careful hot to practice law in California. That’s why I was in the picture. I was the lawyer.”

Korshak, Rothman said, “was at the Bistro almost every day.” He owned a piece of it and was known to conduct much of his business there, at a corner table equipped with two telephones. When he operated out of an office at all in Los Angeles, it was at Associated Booking. While Glaser handled a roster of black acts that, besides Armstrong, included at times Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker, Korshak cultivated his own small circle of entertainers: Tony Martin, whom he knew from Chicago, and Tony’s wife, Cyd Charisse; Dinah Shore; Debbie Reynolds; and Jill St. John.

Tony Martin, older than Lew Wasserman but as open and radiant as a flower in the sun, speaks fondly of Korshak. “I first met him in 1933 in Chicago at the World’s Fair, and we buddied around,” he told me. “I was a singer, he was a lawyer, that’s the way it was.” Martin, at the time, was traveling with Tom Gerun’s orchestra. Korshak “recommended me to play the Chez Paree when I was out on my own and already in movies.” He remembered Korshak and their lifelong friendship fondly. “He loved good food, and he used to take me to these wonderful restaurants in Chicago, the fun places. And then he moved out here, and my friends were his.” He mentioned several names, among them Harry Karl, the late shoe king, and David Janssen, the late actor. “Most all the gang is gone now.”

I asked Martin if Korshak was a fun-loving guy

“Oh, yes. He was at the ball games all the time. We had a box together. He was a Dodger fan, so was I. We used to go to all the ball games at night.”

It was Korshak whom Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers’ president, had called in to prevent an opening-day strike by Teamsters parking-lot attendants at the new Dodger Stadium in 1962. Korshak not only prevented the strike but had the parking concession awarded by O’Malley to a new outfit, Affiliated Parking, connected with a different Teamsters local. The 1962 Nevada charter of Affiliated Parking showed Korshak to be an owner of record. In 1960, Korshak had been similarly called in to resolve labor difficulties that threatened the start of the Santa Anita racing season.

Was there ever an air of danger about him?

“Oh, no, no, my goodness, no. He was like a little baby. He always tried to help people. I’ll say that, he always tried to help people. He’d help anybody. He loved his family. His two sons were his treasures.”

Martin never saw him “be a heavy in any way, never. Of course, I don’t know his business. Whatever he did, he must have been successful, that’s all I know. I found him to be a gentleman all the time. His language was perfect. He was not a drinking man, and he didn’t smoke. He was a robust, tall good dresser. He loved to get his clothes at Pucci’s in Chicago. In fact, he bought me my first good suit from Pucci’s.”

Soon after Chicago gained control of the Riviera, Gaming Control Board records showed Tony Martin as a licensee with a 2 percent share of the Riviera listed in his name.

The trio of Korshak, Wasserman, and Ziffren were a portrait of refinement, elegance, and respectability. Together, they were the triumvirate of absolute power in Hollywood. When they moved in concert, there was not a candidate that could not be elected or ruined, not a problem that could not be caused or solved, not a deal that could not be made or killed.

Today they are all dead except for Wasserman, who is now in his 85th year and has declined my request for an interview regarding Sidney Korshak. He has also declined to speak with Dennis McDougal, his biographer. I asked Dan Moldea if Wasserman responded to Dark Victory.

“Yeah. God. I was told by a person who was at a meeting with him—a good, credible guy, a fringe Mob guy in L.A.—that Wasserman slammed his fist down on the table and said, ‘I want Moldea destroyed.’ He didn’t want me killed or anything like that. He just wanted me destroyed. And I’m still here.”

Silence on the subject of Sidney Korshak among those who knew him is pervasive. Tony Martin assured me that speaking to Sidney’s son Stuart would “be no problem.” Stuart, Martin told me, “went to Yale, you know, and studied law. He’s a nice boy, a real fine boy.” Unfortunately, a message left for him at Korshak, Kracoff, Kong & Sugano, his law firm, remained unanswered, as did a letter I sent to Korshak’s widow, Bernice.

Korshak’s other son, Harry, produced a couple pictures for Paramount during the Bluhdorn-Evans years—Hit! and Shelia Levine Is Dead and Living in New York—and one, Gable and Lombard, for Wasserman’s Universal. I heard that he had since devoted himself to painting and was living in London. The producer Sid Beckerman, a great guy to those who know him, a tough-guy legend to those who tell tales of him, said that he remembered meeting Harry at Paramount. Harry, he said, was “also a lawyer, although he’s never practiced law.” Beckerman recalled him as “a nice kid.”

Reached in London, Harry Korshak did indeed seem like a nice man. But there was nothing he wished to say.

“I really have no interest in contributing anything,” he said, in a manner that seemed not cold but sadly sincere. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said.

Dani Janssen, the widow of David Janssen, said, “Sidney was my late husband’s surrogate father practically. Very, very, very close. I’m so close to Bee that I wouldn’t do anything without her authorizing it. I can’t, in other words. I hope you understand the position I’m in.”

Dani is a charming woman, and we continued to talk awhile. She asked me why I was writing about Sidney Korshak.

“They asked me to.” It was the simple truth. The thought had never occurred to me. Later, after eight months’ digging, I would wish it had never occurred to them either.

“Ah, that’s a good answer.”

Like Tony Martin, she had only the fondest memories of Korshak. “He was such a great, human friend,” she told me. “Without Sidney I may not have lived through the losing of David. He was extraordinary—that’s all I can say.”

Then she told me what I knew, and what I was coming to know better every day. “Actually,” she said, “Sidney was an enigma.”

Enigma. The Englishing of a Latin rendering of a Greek word, ultimately from ainos, Ionic and poetical, for “fable.”

So where does the fable of Sidney Korshak end? Where does the truth begin? Where—between the “little baby” who “always tried to help people” and the man who was “the most important contact that the Mob had to legitimate business, labor, Hollywood, and Las Vegas”—does the real Sidney Korshak lurk? Or are they one and the same, a Janus of good and evil?

During our mutual musing one evening, Joe Kraus of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society wondered aloud if the mystery could ever be solved.

“One thing you can be sure of,” I said, “is that he was brilliant. He was invaluable.” All his life, I said, all around him, they went down in their own blood. Gioe was murdered by his own in 1954. Bioff was blown up in 1955. Alex Greenberg was hit in 1956. Gus Greenbaum, the manager of the Riviera, was murdered in his bed, his throat cut from ear to ear, in 1958. Giancana in June of 1975, Hoffa in July. Even Rosselli, what was left of him, his legs and torso sawed apart, found in an oil drum floating in Dumbfoundling Bay in the summer of ’76. Ray Ryan, blown to hell in 1977. Dorfman, slain in 1983.

Sidney Korshak, who moved among these men, who knew the secrets that they knew—not only the secrets of the forbidden anatomies of Vegas and Hollywood, of politics and the Mob, but also the vaster secrets, of the fates of the Kennedys and such, that Giancana knew and Hoffa knew and Rosselli knew—and more, the secrets of the fates of those men themselves. Sidney Korshak, who lived unseen in the unseen heart of the beast, and who at the same time “entertained beautifully in Bel Air.” Sidney Korshak escaped—no, prevailed, prospered, in blessed fortune—without so much as a scratch.

The relative anonymity and subdued respectability that Korshak had cultivated since 1950 was jeopardized in the summer of 1976 when a four-part front-page series by Seymour Hersh and Jeff Gerth appeared in The New York Times. Though, like the forces of the government for so many years, the series could not conclusively indict him on anything, it did have its effect. Korshak, escaping the glare, entered Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, where he remained for the duration of the series, “suffering,” it was reported, “from diverticulitis”—in this case, a linguistically interesting ailment, it and “diversion” sharing the same root.

Nat Hentoff, writing in The Village Voice, came to the defense of Korshak, “a citizen whom the government has not been able to nail and so now is delighted to try in the press. Sy Hersh is protected by the First Amendment. Even a Sidney Korshak should be protected by some of the others.”

Jeff Gerth told me that, in the researching of the story, there appeared to be a leak from the accounting department of the Times back to Chicago, where his movements seemed to be closely monitored through the paper trail of his expense reports. And perhaps it is no more than mere coincidence, but all the documentation gathered by Hersh and Gerth was subsequently lost during a transfer from one Times office to another.

In a 1978 report, California state attorney general Evelle Younger included Korshak in a well-publicized list of organized-crime figures with ties to California. In the spring of 1979, during a statewide racetrack strike, Korshak was asked to step down as a labor negotiator, “only because of the press of his other business.” That summer, the Justice Department began an investigation of the Riviera, reportedly focusing on Korshak.

In 1980, when columnists wrote about Korshak’s attendance at Frank Sinatra’s birthday party, it was later reported that Korshak’s name was not supposed to have appeared on the version of the guest list supplied to the media by Sinatra’s public-relations retainers.

Soon, Korshak appeared no longer to exist, except by implication and in rumor. Like Leverkühn in Mann’s Doctor Faustus, he seemed merely to fade away to stillness.

In 1981, Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno ratted him out while testifying before a pension-fraud committee in Washington, telling that a Chicago crime boss had once warned him to keep away from Korshak lest his ties to the Mob be revealed.

In 1982 the New Jersey Casino Control Commission denied Playboy Enterprises a casino license after raising questions about Korshak’s involvement with the company. In 1985 the same commission rejected the Hilton corporation’s application primarily because Hilton had kept Korshak on the payroll for 13 years. Nobody at Hilton seemed to know what, if anything, Korshak had done for them in those 13 years. During the commission’s inquiry, the counsel for Hilton asked Korshak to supply his files concerning his work for Hilton.

“Sue me,” Korshak told him.

He moved from Bel Air to Beverly Hills, to 808 North Hillcrest Road. It was flatter there, and he wanted to go for walks. One day in 1994, Dave Robb of The Hollywood Reporter waited outside his house with a camera. When Korshak emerged, Robb followed him to a mailbox, where old Sidney stopped to mail a letter. “I walked up to him and took a couple of pictures. I said, ‘Are you Sid Korshak?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And I’m sure he thought I was the hit that he’d been waiting for for 50 years. I said, ‘I’d like to take a few pictures of you.’ He stood there very nice, and I took some pictures.”

When Dominick Dunne saw him last, he was no longer walking. “Years had passed, and I had become a different person. My life changed. My daughter was murdered, and I started this new career writing, and a whole new life opened up to me, and I became known and successful. So I went back, and I was at a party at Chasen’s in a private room. All the great old-timers were out for this party, all in wonderful glittering dresses, and Billy Wilder and George Burns and that whole era of the 90-year-olds. I was back in Hollywood. The waiter comes over to me and says, ‘Mr. Dunne, Mr. Korshak would like to see you.’ It was the first I realized he was there. And he was over in the corner, and he was in a wheelchair, like this”—head down, off to the side, stricken—“and I said, ‘Sidney, I’m just so thrilled you remembered me,’ and I took his hand, and he said to me, I’ll never forget, he said, ‘I just wanted to tell ya I’m really proud of what you’ve done with your life. I read everything you write.’ Well, I mean, it was nice. It was fuckin’ nice, and I wanted to hug him.”

Marshall Korshak died in Chicago on January 19, 1996. The next day, at his home in Beverly Hills, Sidney Korshak’s heart went dead.

The funeral service was private, its whereabouts unknown to the media. It was at Hillside Memorial Park. Besides Bee and the kids and Stuart’s wife and daughter, there were about 150 others. Among them were Barbara Sinatra, Robert Evans, Dani Janssen, Niki Bautzer, Tony Martin and Cyd Charisse, Angie Dickinson, Suzanne Pleshette, Rona Barrett, and Sidney’s longtime physician and friend, Rex Kennamer.

By midsummer some of the women around Bee were indulging in gossip, almost certainly unfounded, about Sidney Korshak’s having left his wife with nothing. Even in Beverly Hills terms, it seemed inconceivable that Korshak had not left behind wealth untold. A search of Los Angeles County public records revealed that there was no probate, no visible assets except for the Beverly Hills home, which was part of a family trust. It sounded strangely familiar. Frank Costello’s widow, Meyer Lansky’s widow. They, too, it was said, had been left with nothing. Then, toward year’s end, Bee took some work as an interior decorator. One project was the Sinatra home on Foothill. Around this time she anonymously auctioned off some jewelry through Christie’s in New York. In February of 1997, reached for comment, Bee said simply that everything had been left in the family trust. Yes, she said, she had redone the Sinatra home, but this was nothing new: she had worked as a designer for 25 years, and had done all the Sinatra homes since Frank’s marriage to Barbara. And, yes, she had in fact anonymously auctioned her jewelry, but not everything, only pieces she no longer wore.

And, so, Sidney Korshak. Good or evil. All-powerful or legal automaton controlled by others. The few whom death has not silenced—Lew Wasserman in his tower of ivory, Gussie Alex in his cell, a gentleman in Florida whose peace I would not disturb by naming—have silenced themselves, and, besides, I’m sure, know merely parts of a story that only Korshak himself could have told.

A dark breeze in Chicago becomes an evening chill in L.A., a shimmering in the desert becomes a hearse beneath the winter sky, and the uroboros of a tale with no beginning and no end, a tale never meant to be told. Time rolls on: other breezes, other chills, other shimmerings, other hearses.

The only true secrets are those that remain hidden. The only true mysteries, those that can never be solved.