The Mafia Chronicles: Reporter Recalls Reputed Chicago Mob Fixer

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By Larry Henry

Investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh, the legendary “scoop artist” known for breaking one big story after another over the decades, especially in the military and political worlds, also helped expose a powerful lawyer with ties to organized crime.

In his 355-page memoir, “Reporter,” published in June, Hersh devotes several pages to his investigation into Sidney Korshak, a well-connected but low-profile lawyer who got started in Chicago during the Capone era and later served for years as a bridge between the underworld and legitimate businesses.

During the mid-1970s, Hersh, a former Associated Press reporter also from Chicago but working by then for The New York Times, began digging into the shadowy Korshak. Hersh already was a Pulitzer Prize winner for his work in the late 1960s, as a freelancer, in exposing the My Lai massacre by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam.

Hersh worked on the Korshak series, which ran in four parts during the summer of 1976, with reporter Jeff Gerth, a future Pulitzer Prize winner himself.

Korshak, who died in 1996 at age 88, was especially active in Hollywood and Las Vegas as a “fixer” smoothing over problems that movie studios, Nevada casinos and various businesses had with mobbed-up labor unions and others. Hersh notes that Korshak even saved Frank Sinatra’s career by ordering “he be cast for a major role” in the 1953 film “From Here to Eternity.”

In his memoir, Hersh recalls several interesting episodes from the six-month investigation into Korshak, including feeling threatened during a telephone conversation with Korshak, and another time when Hersh, disgusted at the paper’s editors for “fiddling” with the series, threw a typewriter through a glass window.

According to the 2013 biography “Seymour Hersh: Scoop Artist” by Robert Miraldi, author Gus Russo used the articles as building blocks in writing “Supermob,” a 2006 book on Korshak.

Hersh, now in his early 80s and operating again as an independent journalist, says in his memoir that the work he and Gerth did on Korshak inspired him to continue looking for these kind of stories.

“The Korshak series got me hooked on the interplay of organized crime, politics, and big business,” Hersh says in “Reporter.”

The author of 11 books, Hersh lives in Washington, D.C., and has continued to dig out big stories, including work on the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib prison during the war in Iraq.

“I’m still trying,” he notes in the memoir.

Larry Henry’s YouTube channel includes videos he shot of mob sites in Las Vegas, the apartment building in Santa Monica, California, where Whitey Bulger was arrested, and the remote Arkansas airport where Barry Seal transported drugs into the U.S for the Medellin Cartel. Subscribe HERE.

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