City of Nets Read online

  Schenck went to Bioff’s room at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York with fifty thousand dollars in cash wrapped up in a paper bundle, Schenck testified at Bioff’s trial for racketeering in October of 1941. He laid the bundle of money on the bed. Bioff handed the bundle to George Browne, president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and a vice-president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and told him to count it. While Browne counted, Schenck stood by the window, smoking and looking thoughtfully out over Manhattan. As he stood and smoked, another visitor arrived, Sidney Kent, president of 20th Century–Fox. He, too, had a paper-wrapped bundle that he placed on the bed. Bioff told Browne to count that as well. Kent’s bundle also contained fifty thousand dollars.

  That was the way Willie Bioff did business in Hollywood. “I’ve found out that dickering with these picture producers goes about the same all the time,” he observed. “You get into a room with them, and they start yelling and hollering about how they’re being held up and robbed. That goes on and on. Me, I’m a busy man and don’t get too much sleep. After a while it dies down, and the quiet wakes me up, and I say, ‘All right, gentlemen, do we get the money?’ ”

  His real name was Morris Bioff, according to the testimony of his sister, two brothers, and a second cousin, who all said that not only Morris preferred to be called William but so did his older brother Peter, who joined the navy during World War I and was never heard from again. When the prosecutors cited to Bioff the 1916 naturalization papers of his father, Louis, born Lazar Bioffsky, they asked him to sort out the listed children, and he said, “Morris is me.”

  Brought from Russia at the age of five (“Don’t let nobody hand you the bunk that I wasn’t born in Chicago,” he told one reporter. “There’s been talk that I’m a foreigner”), Bioff quit school in the third grade and lived mainly on the streets of Chicago’s West Side. He was a newsboy. He worked in an icehouse. He ran errands for various local hoodlums. “I got wise to the trick of stealing hams from Swift’s warehouse back of the yards,” he said. “Some weeks I wouldn’t have nothing but hams to eat except maybe apples that I would sneeze from peddlers’ carts in South Halsted Street.”

  Bioff was arrested a few times, but only one charge counted. A prostitute named Bernice Thomas, working in a brothel on South Halsted Street, serviced thirteen men one day and gave Bioff twenty-nine dollars as his share of her earnings. He was convicted in 1922 on a charge of pandering, sentenced to six months in jail and a fine of three hundred dollars. He served eight days, then was released on an appeal, and the case somehow went into a kind of official limbo. “I made mistakes as a boy,” Bioff cried when the charges resurfaced two decades later. He blamed the new publicity on “plutocrats in Hollywood who are attacking me because I am fighting for the little fellows in the picture studios.”

  As an obscure noncom in the ragged armies trying to maintain the empire of the imprisoned Al Capone, Bioff was maneuvering unsuccessfully to organize the kosher butchers of Chicago when he happened to meet George Browne, the hard-drinking business agent for Local 2 of the Stagehands Union. (“Is it true,” a reporter later asked Bioff, “that Browne drank 100 bottles of beer a day?” Bioff pretended to be shocked.) Times were hard. Franklin D. Roosevelt had just been elected President on his promises of a new deal, but 250 members of Browne’s local were unemployed, and the rest had recently been forced to take a wage cut. The union was running a soup kitchen to keep its workers going. Bioff talked Browne into hiring him as an assistant at thirty dollars per week, then offered his new boss a proposal. Why not ask the candidates running in the next local elections to contribute to Browne’s soup kitchen in the hope of winning the union members’ votes? Bioff’s idea promptly earned some handsome donations for the soup kitchen. Then he had another idea. “Let’s put the clout on the Balabans,” he said to Browne.

  John and Barney Balaban (the latter was eventually to become president of Paramount) ran a chain of movie theaters in Chicago and had succeeded in forcing their employees to take a 20 percent wage cut. It was supposed to be temporary, until a specified date. When that date came and went without any changes, Browne demanded that the old pay scales be restored. The Balabans complained of hard times and offered Browne $150 a week for his soup kitchen if he would forget about any restoration of the old wages. Browne reported this offer to his friend Bioff, and Bioff thought he could strike a better bargain.

  Bioff began grandly. He demanded fifty thousand dollars. The Balabans pleaded poverty, misery, the ruin of their business. That evening, all the Balaban theaters began to be plagued by a series of accidents in the projection rooms. The projectors ran film upside down, or showed the pictures out of sync with the sound, or put different parts of the film in the wrong order. Customers began demanding their money back. The Balabans, richly aware that Browne’s union controlled what was shown in all their theaters, agreed to pay Bioff twenty thousand dollars.

  Bioff was triumphant. He and Browne went to an expensive nightclub and ordered champagne. The operator of this nightclub, Nick Circella, naturally wondered how two such unimpressive characters had managed to acquire such impressive amounts of cash. Circella told some of his friends about Browne’s mysterious riches, and the friends took Browne for a ride in one of their cars. When they returned from the ride, they knew all they needed to know. Browne and Bioff were thereupon summoned to the home of Frank Nitti, one of Al Capone’s chief lieutenants and heirs, known as “The Enforcer.” Also in attendance was a visitor from new York, Louis Lepke Buchalter, the head of an organization later known as Murder Inc. The end of prohibition meant that the underworld had to find new ways of making money. Buchalter, too, had begun investigating the possibilities of profit in the film projectionists’ power over the movie theaters.

  Nitti saw opportunities on a grand scale. In June of 1934, in Louisville, Kentucky, IATSE would hold its national convention. Fat, amiable, alcoholic George Browne had foolishly put himself forward for president in 1932 and been defeated. “Well, you’ll run again and you’ll win,” Nitti supposedly told him now. “Louis [Buchalter] here will talk to Lucky [Luciano] and the eastern outfits will vote for you.” And of all the money that could be made from all this, Nitti told Browne, Nitti and his associates would take half (a little later, Nitti raised his share to two thirds). Nick Circella, the sometime restaurateur, would join Browne’s staff to keep watch on all the accounts.

  So it was that George Browne was elected head of the labor union known as IATSE. And so it was that Willie Bioff, newly appointed as Browne’s international representative, summoned the Chicago Exhibitors Association and told its representatives that they would henceforth need two union projectionists in each theater.

  “My God! That will close up all my shows,” said Jack Miller, labor representative for the theater owners.

  “If that will kill grandma, then grandma must die,” said Bioff, according to his subsequent testimony. “Miller said that two men in each booth would cost about $500,000 a year. So I said, ‘Well, why don’t you make a deal?’ And we finally agreed on $60,000.”

  There were more such deals to be made in both New York and Hollywood, so Browne and Bioff began traveling. In New York, they quickly won $150,000 from the theater owners. In Hollywood, where IATSE had been crippled by a strike in 1932, Browne and Bioff coolly announced to the badly divided locals that they, Browne and Bioff, were now in charge of the twelve thousand assorted members, and that they would soon get all these members a 10 percent raise. Then back to New York, where Bioff first made his demand for two million dollars then took Schenck aside and told him, “Maybe two million is a little too much. I’ve decided I’ll take a million.” After what Bioff called “yelling and screaming,” they all agreed that the four major studios (M-G-M, Warners, Fox, and Paramount) would each pay $50,000, and the minor studios $25,000. Then back to Hollywood, where Bioff told his members that they would have to pay the union 2 percent of their wages for a war fund, in
case of strikes. Of that war fund, which totaled about $1.5 million per year, two thirds apparently went to Nitti and his friends in Chicago, the rest to Browne and Bioff. There were a few stirrings of protest, but Browne and Bioff sent some burly assistants to deal with them. Besides, times were hard and jobs scarce.

  There actually was one short strike in the spring of 1937, called not by Bioff but by a loose coalition of painters, plumbers, grips, draftsmen, and others who had named themselves the Federated Motion Picture Crafts. Bioff did not approve of such independent maneuvers. “There was disorder, fisticuffing, free-for-all fights,” reported Florabel Muir of the New York Daily News. “At the height of the trouble a group of strange outlanders arrived in town. Some of these men told around that they came from Chicago. Bioff . . . testified under oath . . . a few months later that all stories of the importation of Chicago gunmen to smash the F.M.P.C. strike were lies. My testimony on this point is not hearsay. I saw these fellows in action. They all drove Lincoln-Zephyr cars and obtained gun permits from the Los Angeles police. The F.M.P.C. people heard of their arrival and immediately sent to the port of San Pedro for C.I.O. longshoremen to protect them. The longies, tough mugs all, came trooping up to Hollywood eager for battle, scorning guns, brandishing only gnarled fists. . . . Four of the Lincoln-Zephyrs filled with gunmen were attacked and rolled over bottom-side up. I saw one major engagement between the longies and the invaders near the Pico Boulevard gate of the Twentieth Century–Fox studio in which fists proved a far more potent weapon than guns. . . .”

  Willie Bioff, however, had a still more powerful weapon: the IATSE union card that he issued to anyone who wanted to walk through the picket lines. He issued thousands of them, and in about ten days the strike fizzled out. A few days after that, Bioff received a check for $100,000 from Joseph Schenck, who happened to be not only the chairman of 20th Century–Fox but also the president of the Motion Picture Producers Association. Why Schenck paid this $100,000 to Bioff has never really been explained, though there have been many explanations. Schenck first claimed that it was just a friendly loan, but when the matter ended in court, he declared that Bioff had extorted the money from him as the price of labor peace. Others claimed it was a bribe by the producers to keep the union docile. Schenck’s charge of extortion played well in the newspapers, which savored the image of union racketeers preying on respectable businessmen. But bribery and extortion can turn out to be much the same thing. Money is paid in exchange for a service; both sides agree on the price and the service; the only question is who is corrupting whom; perhaps both, perhaps neither.

  The antithesis of union racketeers versus respectable businessmen also depends on antithetical images of personality and class. Bioff and Schenck were not exactly opposites. Schenck, too, was an impoverished immigrant from Russia, where his father had sold vodka to riverboats plying the Volga. As boys in New York, he and his younger brother, Nick, had gone to work in a drugstore, a good sort of place for a wide variety of deals. They soon bought the store, then invested in a dance hall across the Hudson, then added a Ferris wheel, then bought all of Palisades Park. Their partner in that last maneuver was a nickelodeon operator named Marcus Loew, who urged them to join in buying some theaters in Hoboken. From there to the presidency of Fox was just another series of deals.

  Bioff may not have been the Schencks’ third brother, but his version of the $100,000 check made it sound as though they were all members of some sort of family. Bioff actually provided two versions, both fantastically complicated. One story, quite implausible, was that he wanted to invest some of his money in an alfalfa farm, and feared that a large cash payment might look suspicious, and thought that if Schenck loaned him the money, which he would soon repay . . . and so on. Bioff’s other story, which sounded a little better but was never publicly investigated, claimed that the studios were raising a fund to lobby for their interests, and that Nick Schenck had asked Bioff to act as a conduit to carry money to his brother Joe. “The motion picture industry is being sandbagged in different parts of the country through legislation,” Bioff quoted Nick Schenck as telling him.

  The charge that it was all bribery came from a gaunt C.I.O. organizer named Jeff Kibre, who officially represented an organization called the Motion Picture Technicians Committee and who was subsequently accused of being a Communist. Kibre filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board charging that Schenck’s $100,000 had been paid “to balk collective bargaining.” Kibre’s complaint said that Bioff, “while purporting to act as an official representative of the head of the union,” was actually in the pay of the producers. This charge was later endorsed by a Chicago tax court, where Judge John W. Kern found that the studios “knowingly and willingly paid over the funds and in a sense lent encouragement and participated with full knowledge of the facts in the activities of Browne and Bioff.” Dealing with Browne and Bioff, according to one affidavit, saved the studios an estimated fifteen million dollars. The NLRB duly ordered an election to see who should represent the studio workers. Schenck and Bioff held a strategy meeting, according to subsequent testimony by a IATSE official, and Bioff said IATSE must win the election, and Schenck said, “You’re damned right it must. You’ve got to win.”

  Bioff did win. After all the threats and shouts, his IATSE received 4,460 votes in that 1939 election while the CIO’s United Studio Technicians Guild got 1,967. But like any tragic hero, Bioff appeared unaware of the forces gathering to ruin him. He began planning still greater triumphs. Why should the union limit itself to mere stagehands and electricians? Why not take over the actors, collect a share of the fortunes paid to the stars, become a friend and protector to the pretty girls? Bioff saw his opportunity when a quarrel broke out between the Associated Actors and Artists of America and some officials of its subsidiary, the American Federation of Actors. Bioff’s IATSE immediately took in the dissidents by granting the AFA a union charter and promising all of IATSE’s muscular support. “We had about 20 percent of Hollywood when we got in trouble,” Bioff later said. “If we hadn’t got loused up, we’d have had 50 percent. I had Hollywood dancing to my tune.”

  Many of the actors were rather tempted by Bioff’s overtures. Although a few big stars made big money, the vast majority of actors got very little. Their median income in 1939 was $4,700, and many of them were unemployed. Bioff’s success in getting the stagehands a 10 percent raise sounded impressive in those Depression days (those who were impressed didn’t realize that Bioff’s contract also reduced overtime pay and thus saved the studios a lot of money). Bioff encountered strong resistance, however, from the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Robert Montgomery, who asked the union’s board for $5,000 to hire a detective agency to investigate Bioff’s background. If the board didn’t provide the money, Montgomery declared, he would pay it out of his own salary. The detectives hired by the Guild soon discovered—and the Guild publicized—two embarrassing facts. One was Bioff’s failure to serve his sentence for pandering; the other was the charge that he had taken a $100,000 bribe from Joe Schenck.

  The Internal Revenue Service was already investigating Schenck, and Schenck urged Bioff to “be out of the way.” In fact, according to Bioff’s later testimony, Schenck paid for Bioff to take his wife, Laurie, on the S.S. Normandie on a cruise to Rio de Janeiro and then to spend two months touring London, Paris, and the Low Countries. Bioff’s extended vacation served no real purpose. When he returned, he was indicted in January of 1940 for evading nearly $85,000 in taxes in 1936 and 1937. Schenck was indicted the following June for tax frauds of more than $400,000, and for perjury in his explanations of why he had paid $100,000 to Bioff.

  Only after Bioff was indicted did the Illinois authorities bestir themselves and ask that he be shipped home to finish serving the eighteen-year-old sentence for pandering. Bioff resisted extradition. “I would call my plight persecution,” he said. “Maybe I have been doing too much for the working man. The money interests want to see me out of the picture.
So do the CIO and the Communists.” None of these writhings saved Bioff from being shipped back to Chicago to serve out his term in Bridewell prison from April to September of 1940. Released then, and departing in a rented car to return to Hollywood, he handed reporters a typewritten statement declaring: “I have paid my pound of flesh to society.”

  The federal prosecutors artfully brought Schenck to trial first, in March of 1941. The producer tried to defend himself by marshaling an array of character witnesses—Charlie Chaplin, Chico and Harpo Marx, Irving Berlin—but he declined to testify himself. He was duly convicted and sentenced to three years in prison. A few weeks later, after contemplating the various possibilities, Schenck said to his prosecutors: “I’ll talk, gentlemen. I don’t want to spend three years in jail.”

  So then Bioff was brought to trial in October, not only for tax evasion but also for racketeering and conspiracy. He was charged with extorting $550,000 from the four big studios. With characteristic élan, he admitted to having taken more than twice that much, but always at the producers’ request. The testimony was rich and colorful. “Now look, I’ll tell you why I’m here,” Bioff had said, according to Nick Schenck. “I want you to know that I’m the boss—I elected Mr. Browne.” Schenck said he protested against Bioff’s financial demands, but Bioff told him, “Stop this nonsense. It will cost you a lot more if you don’t do it.” Schenck said the meeting was “terrifying.” He further testified that Bioff blamed Louis B. Mayer for the official investigation of his affairs, and he threatened revenge. “There is not room for both of us in this world, and I will be the one who stays here,” Schenck quoted Bioff as warning. “Mr. Mayer was terribly scared,” Schenck added.