Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [116]
Gallagher’s secretary, Elizabeth May, recalled the incident vividly. ‘Roy Cohn,’ she said, ‘had dictated the letter to me on the telephone. He indicated that he was following FBI instructions. I typed up the letter and left it for the Congressman with the rest of his mail. I thought he must know about it. When Mr Gallagher asked me what it was, and I told him, he was really wild. He called Cohn right away.’
At a new meeting with the Congressman, Cohn told Gallagher the letter was ‘another chance’ for him to cooperate, and urged him to send it. When Gallagher refused, Cohn told him: ‘You’re gonna be sorry …’ The Congressman ignored the threat and pressed on with his privacy hearings.
At Easter 1967, there was a mysterious burglary at Gallagher’s house by raiders apparently interested only in documents. Police contacts told the Congressman it was ‘an FBI job.’ ‘Then,’ Gallagher recalled, ‘a top guy I knew at Bell Telephone told me the FBI was bugging our phone.’
The real body blow, however, was an article that fall in Life magazine. It focused on ‘the Fix,’ the blackmail and bribery that guarantees the Mob the blind eye, or the active assistance, of police and elected officials. Specifically, Life named the mobster ‘Bayonne Joe’ Zicarelli, and claimed he was ‘on the best of terms with the widely respected Democratic representative from Hudson County, Congressman Cornelius E. Gallagher …’ The politician and the mafioso, said the magazine, had regular ‘get-togethers,’ sometimes for Sunday brunch, at a suburban inn.
Gallagher strenuously denied the relationship, but complained to Life executives in vain. When he considered suing for libel, lawyers warned the case would generate more adverse publicity and that public officials rarely win libel cases. Then, in July 1968, three Life reporters interviewed the Congressman at his office. He readily admitted two innocent encounters with Zicarelli, who was a prominent figure in the area, but again denied compromising contacts.
That same month, Gallagher’s attorney, Lawrence Weisman, asked him to fly to an urgent meeting at Newark Airport. What they had to discuss, he said, could not be discussed on the telephone. At Newark, Weisman explained that he had spent part of the day at Roy Cohn’s office. At Cohn’s suggestion, he had listened in on an extension as Cohn talked on the telephone with Cartha DeLoach of the FBI.
DeLoach allegedly claimed the Bureau had ‘incontestable’ proof that a missing New Jersey gambler, Barney O’Brien, had died of a heart attack in the Congressman’s house ‘while lying next to Gallagher’s wife.’ The body had supposedly been removed by Kayo Konigsberg, a gangster linked to Zicarelli. According to Gallagher and his attorney, DeLoach made it clear he had recently been in touch with Life. ‘If you still know that guy,’ DeLoach was quoted as saying, ‘you had better get word to him to resign from Congress. He’s not going to last more than a week after the story hits.’
The story hit on August 8, 1968, and it was one of the most savage attacks on a public figure in the history of twentieth-century journalism. THE CONGRESSMAN AND THE HOODLUM, shouted the headline. Gallagher was described as ‘a man who time and again has served as the tool and collaborator of a Cosa Nostra gang lord.’
At the core of the story was what appeared to be a journalistic scoop, drawing on transcripts of an eight-year-old wiretap on Mafia boss Zicarelli. According to Life, they showed that the mob boss had reached out to the congressman to get the police