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GALLAGHER: I got hold of these people [Bayonne Police] and there will be no further problem.

ZICARELLI: I hope so, because they’re ruining me.

GALLAGHER: They damn well better not.

ZICARELLI: They’re doing a job on me like was never done before.

GALLAGHER: I laced into them.

The Life exposé sparked prolonged public debate. To the astonishment of many, however, the Congressman was reelected that year with a healthy majority. He continued his campaign for privacy rights and for laws to limit the powers of the IRS and the Bureau of the Budget.

It was an IRS investigation in 1972 that brought the ruin the Life article had failed to achieve. Gallagher was charged with evading taxes and helping a local official to do the same. He pleaded guilty, following an impassioned speech to the House about his ordeal, and went to jail for seventeen months.4 Meanwhile, thanks to a redrawing of constituency boundaries, his congressional seat ceased to exist. Gallagher received messages of support and sympathy from Gerald Ford, then Vice President, former Secretary of State Dean Rusk and many others. Rusk has characterized Edgar as ‘a veiled blackmailer.’

The House Ethics Committee found no evidence that the Congressman had ever been involved with organized crime. Life had run its story about the supposed cadaver in Gallagher’s house in spite of the fact that its alleged source, Kayo Konigsberg, was in the Mental Center for Federal Prisoners at the time. He later said the Life account was ‘a phony’ and that the FBI had tried to persuade him to ‘frameup’ the Congressman.

There is no evidence that the damning ‘transcript’ of conversations between Gallagher and the Mafia boss Zicarelli ever existed in the files of any law enforcement agency. In 1968 the IRS, the CIA, the Narcotics Bureau, the Secret Service, the New York City Police, the Manhattan District Attorney and the New York Rackets Bureau all pleaded ignorance. As for the FBI, Attorney General Ramsey Clark said he was advised that ‘the FBI does not have and has not had any transcripts or logs that could be the basis for the quotations in the Life magazine story …’ Nor have any such transcripts turned up in the thousands of documents that have since been made public.5 A review of FBI files in Newark, New Jersey, has produced none, and agents who worked the Zicarelli case in the sixties said they knew of no such evidence.

Life reporter Sandy Smith, who obtained the ‘transcript’ in 1968, had made his name as an organized-crime specialist while working for the Chicago Tribune, a paper especially favored by the FBI. In 1965, when Playboy consulted Smith about an article by a former agent critical of the FBI, he recommended it be rejected and passed it on to the Bureau. Bureau documents describe Smith’s value to the FBI as ‘inestimable’ and say he was ‘utilized on many occasions.’6

While Smith refused to comment on that, former Life reporter Bill Lambert, who also worked on the Gallagher story, recalled that his colleague was so close to the FBI that he was ‘almost like an agent.’ It was possible, he agreed, that someone at the FBI might have fed him a phony transcript. Former Assistant Director DeLoach, for his part, admitted he knew Smith well in 1968, but had no comment on the Life story. ‘I do not,’ he claimed, ‘recall the Neil Gallagher matter.’

Another key figure in the story, however, did remember. In 1986, when Roy Cohn knew he was dying, he was told that Gallagher’s wife was still tormented by the allegation about O’Brien, the gambler who had supposedly died in her arms. Cohn then countersigned a formal letter stating that the O’Brien allegation had come from DeLoach. He quoted DeLoach as saying that if Congressman Gallagher ‘did not stop his hearings on evasion [sic] of privacy, he would make the information public.’ Cohn passed on the threat, he now confessed, just as Gallagher had claimed.

In 1992, still a popular figure in New Jersey, Gallagher turned seventy-one. A measure of his confidence in his innocence was that he agreed to give the author free rein