Let me begin this messy story by telling you that I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, in a lower middle class, racially mixed ward that also included the University of Chicago and a few upper middle class neighborhoods. It was controlled by an elected Democratic party leader named Marshall Korshak, an attorney whose brother was Sidney Korshak. As I would learn in high school, Sidney was the most powerful mob boss in Chicago. He oversaw drugs, prostitution, police payoffs and had ties to the corrupt International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Decades later, when I was at the New York Times, Jeff Gerth, an expert on the financing of organized crime, and I published, after months of interviews, a four-part series on the newspaper’s front pages focused on Sidney and his control of racketeering, prostitution, and vice in Chicago.
The date the first installment of our series was to appear was delayed at the last minute because of a sudden Teamsters strike that kept the Sunday New York Times and its Korshak revelations from being distributed around the country for days. The senior editors at The Times understood why the strike had taken place, but that fact was never published.
Our reporting involved two long background interviews with Roy Cohn, the prominent New York mob lawyer and fixer who had famously served as counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy when he was on the House Un-American Activities Committee during the postwar Red Scare and later as a mentor to New York businessman Donald Trump. Once assured we were speaking privately, Cohn provided a firsthand view of the link between politics and crime as well as the way certain prominent senators were kept supplied with pretty women.
So I knew the sort of man Jeffrey Epstein was when he first became known for providing airplanes for various politicians, including a former president, and later for running what seemed to me to be a series of a high-end whorehouses at no charge for prominent men, many high up in the world of American business and New York finance.
And so when I learned the story I’m about to tell, I wanted nothing to do with it.
