grey_whiskers posted:
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-the-power-of-organized-crime/
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
WOW! THANKS FOR THE LINK, GREY WHISKERS!
From the end of this lengthy article which describes the thuggery on the part of those who are held in honor, is the following excerpt. The author has mentioned the organized crime operations/ methods, and some of its characters....The Pritzkers, and other Chicago figures, the moving in of the mob to California through and gaining power through the expedient of interning the Japanese Americans in WWII along with seizing their property....The lawyer who handled all of that and sold the Japanese American assets for cheap to his crooked friends was rewarded with a Judgeship....it even touches on the JFK assassination...there is a vignette of a possible hit planned on Desi Arnaz, which was called off.... and at the end of the article, he slid over into the the story of James Garner. He does some interesting dot connecting. Fascinating.
This article is long, and I confess I’ve only skimmed most of it as I was cutting and pasting, and I plan to go back and read all of it, but this last part about James Garner got my attention:
“...During the late 1970s my favorite show on television was The Rockford Files, in which James Garner played a wise-cracking private-eye in Los Angeles, and I was quite disappointed when the series was cancelled at the end of 1979. A foreign friend of mine in college noted that Garner’s very square jaw and bold demeanor made him look remarkably like a young Ronald Reagan, who had been lifted to enormous political heights by his usefulness to Lew Wasserman, whose MCA-Universal also happened to produce Garner’s show. But just a couple of years ago I happened to discover that the backstory to those events, and how the actor’s willingness to stand up for his rights may have led him to a sharply different fate.
Garner had agreed to relatively low fees for each Rockford episode in exchange for a substantial share of the overall profits, which seemed likely to be enormous once it went into syndication. But near the end of the fifth season, he accidentally discovered that under studio accounting the extremely popular show had accrued cumulative total losses of $9.5 million, and was unlikely to ever turn much of a profit. Garner had suffered a great deal of damage during his very physically-demanding series, doing nearly all of his own stunt-work and typically involved in two fist-fights or beatings in each episode.
Soon afterward, he stopped coming to the set based on his doctor’s recommendation that he seek immediate treatment for a bleeding ulcer, although MCA accused him of malingering, and NBC soon canceled the series. Although it was extremely rare back then for actors to undertake the huge expense of pursuing litigation against a studio, Garner was wealthy enough to do so, and he decided to sue MCA for $20 million over what he claimed was its fraudulent accounting, which had deprived him of his contractual share of the profits. Such successful action by a leading television star might obviously inspire all sorts of other Hollywood individuals to demand similar changes.
One week after the last Rockford Files episode aired on NBC, Garner was driving in slow, rush-hour traffic on Coldwater Canyon Drive when his car was bumped by another vehicle. After he stopped to get insurance information, he was immediately attacked and severely beaten by the driver, who turned out to be a young former Green Beret, resulting in three days of hospitalization for 51-year-old actor. By a rather strange coincidence, the personal chauffeur of MCA Chairman Lew Wasserman happened to be present as an observer at the scene. Despite his serious injuries, Garner eventually went ahead with his lawsuit, which was finally successfully settled after eight years of litigation. But perhaps the unusual incident led many other, less well-established actors to reflect upon the sudden misfortune that might enter their lives under the wrong circumstances.
Oddly enough, the brutal public beating of one of the biggest stars on television received much less attention than one would expect, or at least I never heard of it at the time, nor during the decades that followed, only learning of it from Moldea’s book on MCA’s dark history. Moreover, the attack seems to have been almost entirely scrubbed from the Internet, with my inadequate Google skills only locating the most obscure sources, such as a PDF copy of an AP wire story in the Tuscaloosa News of Alabama, though the details are provided in Garner’s 2011 memoirs, The Garner Files.
It’s quite possible that the incident was exactly what it purported to be, the sort of random, violent assault that can happen to any of us without cause or warning, even including leading television stars locked in bitter contract disputes with a major studio having deep Syndicate roots. But I do think the story would have fit perfectly into Russo’s narrative of early Chicago days of MCA in the 1930s, when its top executives worked closely with the thugs of Al Capone.”
I have tucked this story away in my “Justice/Court system” files.