Manhunt. Volume 14, Number 2, April/May 1966

Scandal anyone? by Frank Gay

He had a pocketful of dynamite and he knew just where the blast would do the most good.

I walked down the aisle between rows of well-dressed listeners and made my way to the press table.

I was not sure why I had bothered to come. I was not going to report anything that the Honorable Marshall W. Taylor, Jr., mayor of this city of a million, said here today.

Nothing he could utter in his cultured tones to this respectable audience in the Parish Hall of this infinitly respectable church could match the story about him which I had in my pocket.

He might make better copy if he turned to Gino Rinauldi, his opponent beside him on the platform, drew a pistol and shot the guy point blank. But short of that, he was wasting his time.

I suppose I came because I wanted one last look at the faces of these people before I dropped my bomb.

I wanted to see collected together in one place at one time all the principals of the campaign, and I wanted to see them in the presence of this genteel, well-upholstered audience — so certain in its knowledge of right and wrong and so unshakable in its choice of a candidate.

Only from a seat in the midst of a gathering, like this could I anticipate the impact when my story blew everything to pieces.

The meeting marked the start of the final week of the campaign and was billed as a great debate under the auspices of the Citizens Housing Association. At the moment of my entry the Mayor was taking his turn at the microphone. He was tall and distinguished, more or less blonde, and very youthful for a man seeking his second four-year term to the city’s highest elective office.

He was an effective speaker. He was talking now about taxes and the difficulties of financing the operations of a big city.

I had heard this one a dozen times before, and I turned my ears off and looked about me. Joe Kelly, one of the television reporters at the press table, was reciting the Mayor’s speech from memory, staying about one sentence ahead of His Honor and convulsing the cameraman to his right.

Gino Rinauldi listened to the Mayor’s words with a heavy show of doubt. He was a round, flabby, balding little man who moved and spoke like a human whirlwind. He had ten years on the Mayor, displayed none of Taylor’s urbanity, and was blunt, direct and crude, but he could generate more excitement and inspiration in five minutes than the Mayor had created in four years in City Hall.

I was drawn to this little guy, but unlike my paper, the Banner, I didn’t claim he could save the world.

The Mayor’s wife, Martha, prominently seated in the first row, was a large blonde somewhat given to fat. She had seemed to withdraw and even fade during the Mayor’s time in office, and she was approaching the shape of the middle class society matron faster than her years required.

She was particularly unimpressive today because of the stunning brunette next to her. Pamela Fulton, wife of the Mayor’s press secretary, was beautiful in the manner of Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy, only more robust. She was one of those women who drew male stares from every corner upon entering a room. She sat there now with her intense black eyes glued upon Mayor Taylor.

The Mayor still talked taxes. The press might have been bored, but the audience wasn’t. He used the proposition that property taxes were already too high as the basis for a program of hold fast and undertake nothing new at City Hall.

Such a program could meet only with favor from the audience assembled in this church. Basically the well-to-do, they had little need for most municipal services beyond water, sewers, garbage collection, the Fire Department and the Police Department.

So long as you didn’t raise their taxes, or otherwise offend their sensibilities, they were apt to vote for you.

Rinauldi, on the other hand, was sure in his blunt way to call for even higher taxes. He usually started by admitting they were already too high, then insisted they would have to go higher so the city could initiate urgently needed programs.

Like I said, my paper was for Rinauldi all the way. It was not a matter of principle, you understand. My paper didn’t have principles. It was a matter of politics.

Under pressure from my managing editor, in the finest traditions of American journalism, I slanted story after story to point up Taylor’s failure to initiate a single new program or to expand or improve upon any of the going programs. His inactivity and indifference over four dull years were a scandal.

Or so I said. And said and said.

Personally, after 20 years of covering City Hall at $150 a week or less, I didn’t give much of a damn one way or the other. I’d stopped getting sucked in by campaign speeches a long time ago, and I’d reached the conclusion that I couldn’t tell if a guy was going to make a good mayor until he’d been in office about a year. And by then it was too late.

All I really knew for a fact was that the election appeared close, so close that a good solid shocker could throw it either way.

I removed a sealed envelope from my inside coat pocket and tapped the edge against the press table. It held just what the doctor ordered — the finest shocker I’d ever written.

I glanced first at the Mayor and secondly at the stunning brunette in the front row. Then I walked out of there, looking neither to the right nor the left, and headed back to the offices of the Banner, fingering the envelope all the way.

It was 3:30 P.M. when I got to my desk, and things were beginning to pick up in the City Room.

Wilson McCardell strode over and said, “I expect you have a couple of speeches for the Bulldog.”

“Wrong again,” I told him, “same old crap. Not a new line in either one of them.”

McCardell was irritated in his best Managing Editor manner. “I gotta have a story,” he said. “I don’t give a damn how tired it is, I can’t go without a political story a week before election.”

McCardell and I had come to the paper about the same time. Only now he was Managing Editor, and I was still a reporter.

The difference was large a matter of blood. His was blue, which didn’t hurt any with that snoot of a publisher, and mine had alcohol in it. I hadn’t had a drop in over three years, but I was still considered an ex-lush who might go off at any time.

“So my Managing Editor needs a political story a week before election,” I said more harshly than McCardell deserved.

I drew the envelope out of my pocket and handed it to him. “OK,” I told him, “here’s the best story you’ve had the whole time you’ve been editor.”

I took a photo-sized envelope from my desk drawer and gave him this too. “It’s got pictures, affadavits, photostats, the works. All you gotta do is put a decent head on it and figure out how to play it right. And don’t forget my byline.”

I put my hat on and headed for the door, calling back over my shoulder, “I’ll be at my flat if you need me.”

I knew damned well they’d need me before this night was over. But they didn’t wait until they needed me. The phone was jumping up and down when I walked in my door.

It was McCardell. He was afraid of the story. “Are you sure?” he kept asking me.

“Have you ever had to eat a story of mine?” I asked him. “Besides, you’ve got pictures, affadavits, photostats. What the hell more do you want?” It took some doing, but he finally settled down.

Half an hour before deadline, the publisher himself called and put me through the same “Are you sure?” routine.

I had but rarely been honored with a call from the great Henry F. Purnelle — owner of a big city daily, man of wealth and substance in the community, leader whose opinion was respected and whose favor was sought, son of the man who had the brains and guts to build the business, and publisher who paid his best reporters $150 a week.

He too was shaky, but I convinced him the story would stand up under the counterattack that was sure to come.

It would, I told him, blow the election wide open. It would catapault the eminently respectable Mayor right out of City Hall. It was the shocker the campaign needed.

When the Bulldog Edition hit the street at 8:45 P.M., I was there to catch it on the first bounce. McCardell had played the story beautifully. He had a double-line streamer across the front page and a three-line, two-column bank head, with the body of the story set two columns all the way down the right side and jumped inside.

He had five pictures splashed over the page with cutlines meaty enough to give the gist of things to the town’s laziest semi-literates.

He had played it for what it was — the juciest, messiest local stink ever to hit our front page:

The story continued for another column and a half, replete with additional political speculation and the details of the charges.

So there it was, all laid out for the city to see — the biggest, best-documented, most persuasive newspaper bomb I had ever dropped.

I folded the paper into a fly swatter, turned away from the direction of my apartment and walked six blocks to the Algonquin Heights Hotel. The fat man at the desk grunted to his feet and rode me to the fourth floor in the world’s smelliest elevator.

My room was at the end of the hall. I set my alarm for 1 A.M., turned back the sheets, hunted without luck for bedbugs, and slept.

When the alarm sounded, I washed my face and dressed again. I went back to the street carrying a small suitcase, bought a second edition of the Banner, and took it to a slezy cafeteria to read.

It was everything I expected — an absolute surrender!

The Banner made a complete retraction of the charges in my story, which it said were libelous and false, and offered an unqualified apology to Mayor Taylor.

In a front-page story which carried a two-line streamer and which was played as big as the original story, the Banner also reported these facts:

1) The picture of the Mayor and Mrs. Fulton was a composite photograph, shown by laboratory examination to consist of one shot of their heads and another of the partially undressed bodies of persons who could not be identified.

2) The two Denver bellhops had completely repudiated all statements and affadavits attributed to them.

3) The expense voucher was a phony, the Mayor’s signature on it was a forgery, and a bad one at that, and there was no record that the Mayor had ever charged any part of the Denver trip to the city.

4) Hotel and airline records showed clearly that four persons, including the Mayor’s wife and his press secretary, had taken the trip.

5) The reporter who had written the story, one Tom Ballard, could not be located.

6) The Banner was paying the Mayor and Mrs. Fulton $50,000 in cash in settlement of damages, and, in view of the “untenable position” in which the story had placed it, was withdrawing from all further comment on the election.

I had seen papers eat crow before, but never like this. But then I had never seen a paper so completely wrong before. The money settlement easily could have been larger, but the Mayor had apparently bargained away money in return for the withdrawal of the paper’s opposition to his reelection.

I was tempted to slip into a phone booth and call either McCardell or Purnelle or both and tell them that the story was my way of saying thanks. But I restrained myself.

I walked instead two blocks to an all-night parking lot and bailed out my tin can. I slid behind the wheel and drove past dark piers and warehouses to the intersection of Hull and President Streets, a waterfront area which bustled in day and died at night.

I turned right into President Street and parked behind the only car in sight. I left my engine running, got out and went up to the driver, who looked carefully at my face in the night light before haning me a bundle.

“How much is here?” I asked.

“Fifty thousand, like we agreed.”

I said, “Thank you, Mr. Mayor.”

Then we both got the hell out of there.