Gimme Rewrite, Sweetheart

“Screw the competition.”

The Press Vs. The PD

Russ Musarra
General Assignment Reporter, Press



You learned your lessons the hard way. I learned how to cajole pictures from grieving wives and mothers. On the night shift, if somebody got killed in an automobile accident or a shooting or whatever, you’d want to get a picture. Michael Kelly was a reporter for the Plain Dealer. Well, Mike was a very nice person. He just couldn’t do enough for you. He and I went out to a grieving parent’s home one time to get pictures of somebody who had died. We got there at the same time and he said, “Let me do the talking.” We were talking and getting information. I’m writing as fast as I could. He said, “Do you have any pictures of little Johnny?” And so she brought out the pictures of him and he took them all. He said, “Thank you so much.” He’s leaving, and I said, “Do you have any more pictures?” She said, “Well, no. I gave them all to him.” I said, “Well, Mike.” He said, “Screw you.” If you got there first, take them all. Screw the competition.



Jim Dudas
Reporter, Press



The competition was so fierce that I once bribed a prisoner with a carton of Lucky Strikes if he promised that, after our interview, he would not talk with the reporter for the morning paper.



Mike Roberts
Reporter, Editor, Plain Dealer



The heyday for the Press was in the ’40s and ’50s. By the ’60s, television was beginning to impact the afternoon papers. Then the Plain Dealer was beginning to move against the Press. There were a lot of young guys at the PD. Everybody was aggressive as hell and there was as much competition in-house as there was against the Press. If you had a good story on your beat you’d look over and there’d be two or three of your own guys there because they’d leave their beats and come and try to get a piece of the story. And the rule was—we had a game we played—the game was nothing mattered unless it was Page 1 above the fold. And on that night if you got that, you’d wait for the paper to come out—the early edition—you’d sit at the Headliner and have a beer, and there was no better feeling. That was really the great time for reporting, when you could score a headline and it mattered. The times were great, because the stories were there in the civil rights era and we were writing about things we could see, the riots, the marches, Rev. Bruce Klunder getting run over by the bulldozer. These were significant, important stories—the emergence of the black leaders in town; Carl Stokes was beginning to make his political run. It was a very exciting time.



Whitey Watzman
Reporter, Plain Dealer



The atmosphere at the police station was always fraught with tension. It wasn’t just the deadlines; it was the competition. To be scooped by the police reporters of the Press or the News—this was a calamity that we all dreaded. Suppose there was a fire at 10:30 p.m., with several persons burned and arson suspected—and that we Plain Dealer guys were unaware of it. (Not every incident was reported in detail, if at all, on the police radio.) Suppose, then, that the Press greeted its readers the next day with that story in large headlines on Page 1. We’d gotten scooped. The fire had broken out “on our time,” which is to say in time for the morning Plain Dealer to report it first, but we’d missed it. The next day, we’d have to do a follow-up on a story that the morning paper should have already had. This was humiliating. We’d have to live with the self-satisfied smirk of the Press reporter. (Some, not all, acted that way.) Being scooped was dangerous too. Ben Tidyman would have to explain the failing to the city editor, who’d demand to know who among us had been on duty. Ben would stoutly defend us, but not always convincingly.



Dick Peery
Reporter, Plain Dealer



The competition kept the adrenaline going. There was a charge in getting something that the Press missed, and when they beat you, it just made you go back and try harder. One of my favorite memories is of waiting a long time for the Cleveland school board to come out of executive session and start the meeting. While the Press reporter sat looking at the ceiling, I used the time to thumb through the voluminous agenda and saw they were hiring a laborer who had the last name of a board member. The lead on my story the next day was something like “Schools vote to cut teaching positions and hire the son of a board member.” The Press reporter told me that I got him in big trouble because he had missed it.



Bill Barnard
Reporter, Editor, Plain Dealer



One day a call came in for a traffic fatality near University Circle. Then they were calling for homicide. Then a double homicide. The victim was a senior partner at Baker Hostetler who was having an affair with a woman attorney. The woman’s estranged husband was waiting for them, with a shotgun, when they came home. He shot the attorney first, who stumbled down the stairs, got into his car and died. Then the woman was shot. The wife of the victim was being taken upstairs at Central Station. Bob Tidyman walked on the elevator, interviewed her between floors and had the interview on Page 1 the next morning. It was interesting. We had a managing editor who decided it was bad style to run crime news on Page 1, so we had one column going down the right side, and inside the full story. The Press had a huge headline: “Give Up, Max, Father Urges,” and the whole front page on the murder case.



Helen Moise
Food, Press



We competed with the Plain Dealer. Get that strawberry shortcake recipe out. Get it out this week. Beat them to it. It was funny. We were competitive. We had to get our biscuits or whatever—we had to get our latkes in before they did, all those recipes that people wanted every year. They’re in season, because we only wrote about things in season, which a lot of them don’t do anymore. But that was how we competed—get that strawberry shortcake out.



Jim Marino
Criminal Courts Reporter, Press



There was a Plain Dealer courthouse reporter who was my competition, a guy named Van Vliet. He just had such an obnoxious way about him that most of the judges didn’t like him. They would, right in front of him, say, “Van Vliet, we’ve got no stories for you today. Oh, Jim Marino, from the Press, come into my chambers.” They’d do it right in front of Van Vliet to tick him off. So here are my bosses back at the city desk thinking that I’m beating the pants off of the Plain Dealer because I’m so much a better reporter than the other guy, and the truth of the matter was that the judges just disliked him.



V. David Sartin
Reporter, Plain Dealer



I enjoyed the competition. Well, as a police beat reporter you knew the Press came out several times in the morning and they would sometimes, often, have the jump on a breaking story, a midnight murder, or a 2 a.m. murder. They would often have the jump on it, and then they had that edition that came out around 9 a.m. And then they ran several editions throughout the day, and you knew that this story you wanted for your first edition that night had to beat the pants off what the Press had done all day—and you wanted not just to take the next development, but to get the solid, better story to start with. The one they could not catch up to at 9 a.m. You wanted that one. I enjoyed that a lot. I faced the Press as a police reporter, a suburban reporter, as a rewrite guy and later as a beat reporter. When you had a beat where you went against a Press reporter, your heart would sink when they had a better story than you.

Stop the Presses!

[ The Big Stories ]

Jim Dudas
Reporter, Press



The year was 1971 or 1972. A federal grand jury had just handed down indictments of a number of Ohio National Guardsmen for the events on the afternoon of May 4, 1970, when the guardsmen fired upon a group of students protesting the United States’ bombing of Cambodia. The guardsmen were accused of violating the civil rights of the four slain students.



I was a relatively new reporter for the Cleveland Press. I had just been assigned the federal courts beat. And I was hungry and aggressive.



The morning after the indictments were handed down, and reported in the morning paper, the city editor came to my desk first thing upon my reporting for work and told me to go to Wooster, a small community about two hours south of Cleveland, and see if I could talk with one of the indicted guardsmen, Matthew McManus.



None of the indicted guardsmen were answering their phones or returning calls. I had McManus’ home address from the indictment. I found the home, left my car and rang the bell and rapped on the door. No answer. No surprise.



Not wanting to return empty-handed, I took a chance and found a phone booth (there were no cell phones then) and called the largest employer in town, Rubbermaid. The receptionist put me right through to McManus, a mid-level manager.



I remember to this day my exact words: “Hello, Mr. McManus, my name is Jim Dudas with the Cleveland Press, and I would like to get your side of the story about the indictments.” I did not say shootings because it would have implied that he actually shot and/or hit a student. He was not eager to talk, but he was too polite not to.



When it appeared he was willing to talk with me, I panicked. I didn’t expect the interview. I left my notebook in the car. But not wanting to slow him down or disturb him as he patiently and comprehensively answered my questions, I started writing on my hands, arms and, ultimately, my bare ankles, which, at the time, I could lift and rest on the small shelf in the booth. (Fortunately, I had only two days prior shaved my legs from the calves down in preparation for taping them for a marathon I was planning to run).



He was saying things no other guardsman had said before. He was scathing in his judgment of his commanding officers. I knew it was going to be a good story. I started running out of bare skin and he started running out of patience.



I asked if we might meet for lunch (it was then about 10 a.m.) to further explore some of his comments. “I will have to talk with my attorney,” he said. “Call me back in about an hour.” I knew there was not a snowball’s chance in hell that his attorney would let him talk to me while under federal indictment. Still, I hung around Wooster and, while waiting, transcribed my notes from my skin to my reporter’s notebook.



At precisely 11 a.m. I called McManus back. “Yes,” he said, “I did talk with my attorney and he does not think it a good idea for me to talk with you.” I thanked him for trying and hung up the phone. I did this hurriedly because I did not want him inquiring about what I might or might not do with the notes from our earlier conversation.



Not to be pejorative, but McManus was kind of unsophisticated, and I knew it almost immediately by the way he answered the questions. He was as unassuming and forthright as any subject I had talked with.



So here was my dilemma that I had two hours to think about as I drove back to the newspaper office. I had a great story, one we called a “one-er” (front page, above the fold). I also knew it was a national story. But I knew in my heart of hearts that McManus did not know talking to a reporter, without stipulating that it was an off-the-record conversation, could automatically be an on-the-record story.



My city editor was not expecting a story. No one else had one. McManus was not living at his home, so coming back empty-handed would not have hurt my career one bit. Only I knew I had a story. Only I knew I had a choice.



I did not want to hurt McManus. He was, after all, a fine young man, with a family, a bungalow and a comfortable existence in one of those storybook communities. And I knew a story like the one I had would cause him pain, embarrassment and, perhaps, impact the outcome of his trial.



But I had this freedom of the press thing to deal with, as well. I had my professionalism. And, yes, I had my ambition. Those three things were part of the mix, and I found it impossible to separate them.



About halfway into the ride, I forced myself to stop thinking about it. I put a Bob Seeger tape in the car stereo (I think it was an eight-track) and decided I would make a decision at the front door of the Press. An hour never went so quickly. There I was, facing the front door and the biggest decision of my nascent career.



Let me add that I was raised by the Golden Rule. My parents instilled fair play into all of us. There were six kids in the family and, to a kid, we all found a way to befriend those on the playground who were otherwise friendless. It was not goodness, it was just expected.



I kept putting off the decision as I slowly climbed the stairs to the building. There were 10 of them. And I took my time with each. I kept putting off the decision and decided that once I grabbed the handle of the door, I would make up my mind.



I touched the door and said to myself: “I’m going to go with it.”



I ambled up to the city editor. “Bill,” I said, “I think I got a hell of a story. He talked to me.”



The city editor sprang into action so we could get it into that afternoon’s edition. He assigned the best rewrite man on the paper (some would say one of the best in the country) to sit down with me and take my notes. I read them to him. He asked me some questions. “Are you sure he said that?” he would ask. I would look at my leg or other note-sullied skin and read my notes and reply: “Positive.”



Each page was ripped from the rewrite man’s typewriter and rushed to the composing room, where they were already remaking Page 1. We got it in the first edition. It was a banner headline that used the most damning quote: “We were led like blind fools.” It referred to the officers.



I was the toast of the city room. That evening, gathering my stuff in preparation for going home, one of my buddies said: “You look bummed out, wanna go have a beer?” “Nah,” I said, “I think I just want to go home.”



That evening I got a call from Dan Rather, who, at the time was an ambitious reporter for CBS. He asked how he could contact McManus. My story had hummed across the wires and it was national news.



My feelings about McManus were swirling in my head. I knew that McManus would not likely talk to Rather. Still, I decided, in my own way, to protect the small-town kid who was suddenly thrust in the big-time spotlight.



“Dan,” I said, “I can’t give you that information. I have to protect my source.” He understood, and hung up. At least I had that to feel good about.



Mike Roberts
Reporter, Editor, Plain Dealer



One day a federal marshal took me aside and gave me a number on a piece of paper. He said, “Look at this case.” It was a case that dealt with mobster Shondor Birns. And he was getting out of jail. In those days, to get out of jail, you had to have a job. The job that he was coming into was a vice president of Forest City Enterprises. The guy who signed him up was Sam Miller. I didn’t know who Sam Miller was. I get in my car and I drive out to this office on Brookpark Road. I burst in, and the office was worse than this office—shit all over the place. I said, “Mr. Miller, Mike Roberts from the Plain Dealer. I want to know why you hired Shondor Birns.” Sam threw me out. By the time I got downtown, he must’ve made some calls because when I walked in, the city editor said to me, “The next time you get something like that, talk to me before you go out there.” He said, “I’ve been getting calls from the front office.” Fast forward 40 years later and I’m in Sam Miller’s office again, a much nicer office in the Terminal Tower, and I ask him about Shondor Birns and the job. “I ran numbers for him when I was a kid,” Miller says. “I had to give him a job.”



William F. Miller
Reporter, Plain Dealer



There was a diesel fire on the Roger Blough, which was one of the Great Lakes ore freighters. I was dispatched—everyone was—to the Lorain shipyards to cover it. June 1971. Four workers ultimately died in the disaster. The challenge confronting reporters was how to get access to the dock area. It was a huge area. The Roger Blough was getting ready to sail. There were reporters all over the place, but they had the tightest security and reporters couldn’t break it. I decided that wasn’t going to work so I went over to another building nearby and wondered if I could get in that way. So I went in and there was a woman answering phones there.



“I’d like to speak to the president of your organization,” I said.



“Well, sit there, because I’m really tied up,” she said.



So I sat down and two people came walking out, two office workers. Here the ship was on fire and they’re talking about going out for a nice lunch. I was thinking, “If these two idiots are abandoning their ship, I’m gonna get on that ship somehow.”



When the receptionist wasn’t looking, I just walked down the stairs. A door was open and inside a couple office workers were looking out the window at the fire. I got in back of them and stepped out on the property. I immediately started looking for a hard hat. I covered labor for years, and if you’re not wearing a hard hat, it’s like being with your pants off. I found one on the ground. I looked like one of the engineers, so I started finding my way to the ship. I kept my notebook hidden so I didn’t look like a reporter, and I was overweight enough to look like an engineer.



I started mingling with the workers, watching the fires, and they were talking about loading the ship with fuel while working on it. I didn’t say one word. I looked like an engineer with a white shirt and tie, and hard hat. Then a Salvation Army truck pulls up and a captain and a couple volunteers start taking coffee and doughnuts and loading them on the platform. Well, I started helping them. We had all these burly workers around, guys who could lift 400 pounds, and they weren’t even helping. So I helped. We put the stuff on a platform that would rise. Me, the Salvation Army captain and two volunteers. So I just got on.



He lifted us right over the flames in the front of the boat and put us down in the back of the boat. We started passing out coffee and doughnuts. I copied down names that were on the back of helmets for identification. What surprised me was virtually all of the guys were smokers—and were smoking—and lots of them asking me for a light. I found out who had died and why, plenty of information. I got back on the little platform and we went over the side and down to the ground. At that time, I got into one of the offices with a telephone to call the city desk and report what I had at that point. We got the story. On site. Written in detail for the next day. Also information about the first of four who had died. Quite frankly, a pretty exciting time.



Tom Skoch
General Assignment Reporter, Press



I started as an intern in June of 1969, right after school let out. The first thing that happened was the July 4, 1969, storm. It was a huge storm that devastated Northern Ohio. I was working police beat, and I remember looking out at the clouds and the terrible rain. As I’m doing police checks, first there was a death. A tree fell on somebody. Then another, and another. And pretty soon I had seven dead people and chaos outside. So I thought, “Uh-oh, time to call for the cavalry.” I called Bill Tanner at home. He called out the big guns. I went out with one of the photographers going around the Edgewater Yacht Club. There were boats tossed all over the place. It was terrible. A real scary experience. There were a bunch of trees that fell down in Lakewood Park and crushed people. I think the death toll across the whole lakefront area was seven, if I remember right.



Later that summer I was doing rounds and I called the fire department and said, “What’s going on?” And the dispatcher laughingly told me that the river caught on fire. I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “An oil slick going down the river or something like that and it caught a railroad trestle on fire.” So I wrote this little police brief thing and sent it in with the other stuff. When they read it at the city desk in the morning, holy shit! Betty Klaric was our environmental writer at the time—I think one of the first in the country. They realized what they had, and that became the burning Cuyahoga River story—“Shame of the Nation.” It all started with a police beat call. In later years when I worked with reporters as an editor, I’d tell them, “You never know what you’re going to get on this police round, so pay attention.”



Tony Natale
Investigative, General Assignment Reporter, Press



You know, it’s funny, but whenever I covered an emotional story, I was always—this was my approach to it—I was always totally neutral. I had no emotion. I had no feeling. I was looking for facts. Because looking back over the years, whenever I got emotionally involved with a story, I got in trouble. Afterwards, of course, I might feel emotional. But when I covered a riot or anything that was very dramatic, in order to survive the scene, I just had to forget me. That’s the best way I can describe it. So, what did I think about it? I thought it was natural. I thought this was just human beings being human beings. Afterward, I thought it was rotten, when I reflected on what they were doing and why. But I couldn’t get politically involved.



Tom Skoch
General Assignment Reporter, Press



There was a guy named Ashby Leach who took over the Chessie System offices in the top of the Terminal Tower and held about 12 people hostage over some grievance he had with the Chessie System. That was a big stir. Here it is, downtown Cleveland, a business day, and all of a sudden the police called and said, “There’s some guy holding a bunch of people with a shotgun in the top of the Terminal Tower, holding them hostage.” The editors sent me over there, and I arrived at the base of the Terminal Tower at the same time that the first cop got there. We just sort of looked at one another. A huge crowd had gathered, and all kinds of police reporters and reporters from everywhere. They wouldn’t let us up, obviously, but there was this one cop who was sort of like a Groucho Marx character, and he was trying to keep order. And he was so funny. I ended up writing a sidebar story just about him and how he kept everybody at bay, because everybody was trying to get up into the Tower and asking a million questions. At one point he said, “If God were to smack me off my horse and make me a lieutenant right now, I’d let you go up there, but I’m only a sergeant.”



Dick Feagler
Reporter, Columnist, Press



I nearly got blitzed in the cafeteria one day because of the Sam Sheppard case. I covered a little bit of the second trial. I didn’t get the juicy part. They’d send me over in the afternoon to cover it in the final edition. I remember going in the cafeteria one day and the subject of Sam came up. And I said—rather mildly, I thought—“Well, I’m not saying he didn’t do it, but I don’t think they ever had the evidence to pin it on him.” And whoa, they were going to throw me out of the building. The paper was so hot to trot on that story. But that, by the way, is still my opinion. I think he did it, but I don’t think they ever had the evidence to pin it on him. And I guess the second trial kind of backed me up on that one.



David Sartin
Reporter, Plain Dealer



Sam Sheppard? I don’t know. I met a large number of old timers, particularly cops, who believed he did it. A bit of irony: in my days in the ’60s, in journalism school, the Cleveland newspapers were held up as an example of what you did not do as a reporter in a crime story.



“There’s a report of a dead body . . .”

[ The Police Beat ]

Whitey Watzman
Reporter, Plain Dealer



It was perfectly natural to come clambering into the police station through that large rear window in the Plain Dealer pressroom. Lots of Damon Runyon-esque characters around town did that, including shysters acting as defense lawyers, prosecutors hungering for judgeships, bail bondsmen who dreaded that their clients might become fugitives, policemen and detectives hurrying to the roll call, and, now and then again, habitual defendants who knew their way around the building and were reporting again for a preliminary hearing. For them, the window was a shortcut that had them trampling over my desk, which I shared with another police reporter or two, depending on who among us five was working at that time. The desk was flush with the windowsill, so our visitors had no choice but to slam their heels on it.



Mike Roberts
Reporter, Editor, Plain Dealer



I worked for Bob Tidyman on the police beat for about six months. Nobody really trained you in those days. Either you got it or you didn’t. And if you didn’t, Tidyman would chew your ass out. And if he chewed your ass out constantly your career would be in the business department or the obituary desk. You learned how to just go and do it—go after stories. And of course on the police beat, you’re faced with all kinds of situations that as a human being you’ve never experienced. You’re not up for asking a woman who just lost her husband and two kids in an auto accident for their pictures or barging in on their home. So that became a really important aspect of developing as a reporter, because you had to abandon that sense of dignity in certain situations. And Tidyman was tough. There wasn’t any hand holding. You just had to get in there and do it.



Don Bean
Reporter, Plain Dealer



I have to tell you about Steve Landesman. He was a Greek scholar. He later went on to be a professor of Greek at Ohio State University, I do believe. But he’d work days so he could study. He’d take all the phones off the hook so he appeared to be busy as hell. When he started working nights, one night there was a big fire in the Flats. A huge fire down there, one of those warehouses. It was a very cold night. Landesman called Bob Tidyman, who was chief police reporter. Every time the phone rang, Tidyman would answer.



The first time Landesman called and said, “Bob, this is a huge fire down there. Can you send me some help?”



“How many fires do you have down there?” Tidyman asked



“One,” Landesman said.



“Well, you can cover it.”



Landesman called back and said, “Bob, it’s cold down here. Can you send down some coffee?”



“Oh, the Red Cross will be there pretty soon,” Tidyman said and hung up on him.



Then Landesman called again and he said, “Bob, I’ve got some boots in my car.”



He had driven the police beat car at the scene. “Will you send somebody down with my boots?”



“Why did you have the boots in the trunk of your car?” Tidyman said.



“Well, in case I had to cover a fire and get in the water,” Landesman replied.



“You should’ve taken them with you,” Tidyman said.



He didn’t care much for Landesman.



Fred McGunagle
Suburban Editor, General Assignment, Press



I hadn’t been working nights very long at all when there was a policeman killed on, I think, Washington Avenue and I remember going to Lutheran Hospital, and they put his body on a gurney with a sheet over it, but his shoes were sticking out and you could see the black shoes. And it made an impression on me, I guess, because I still remember it.



V. David Sartin
Reporter, Plain Dealer



Police reporter. I hated it. I did it about one year, and I did everything I could to get out of it because you were surrounding yourself with the grimmest aspects of life. I did it because I had to. But you learned stuff there. Don Bean was the chief police reporter, and he knew where the cold beer was and the good sandwiches. Another one was Harry Christiansen at the News. I told him the story about how I learned that you had to leave the house with a pocketful of dimes, and he told me when he was young he had to leave the house with a pocketful of nickels because that was streetcar fare. You would go up to the city desk and get an assignment and there would be a cigar box at the city desk full of nickels. You took a handful because you knew they were sending you somewhere.



Jim Marino
Criminal Courts Reporter, Press



I joined the Press through the college placement office at Bowling Green State University. That was in 1970. I majored in journalism. I was the editor of the college paper, the BG News. I was hired as a summer intern and then after I graduated, they started me on police beat working days until they thought they could trust me. Then they put me on the night shift. I learned so much on the police beat. I was one of these suburban, protected kids who didn’t know that much about life, and then all of a sudden, you’re thrust into the middle of a big major city with all kinds of crime and corruption and action that I only saw before on television. Here I was being thrown right into the middle of it and being asked to cover it. It was the first time I ever saw people drawing guns in anger, the first time I saw the results of traffic accidents up close and actually watched cops cover bodies with plastic cloths. I mean, all of that was new to me. I was 21 years old. What did I know?



Brent Larkin
Politics, Press



My first assignment was at the police beat for six months. I wasn’t there a month, maybe two, and I got a call. I worked the 3 to midnight shift and I got a call saying there’d been an explosion at the Shaker Heights police station. The building was gone by the time I got there. It was gone. Some nut had blown it up. Only a few people died, I think. Talk about baptism by fire.



Tom Skoch
General Assignment Reporter, Press



There was an old lady who was killed in sort of a fleabag apartment on the near East Side, and I went there to cover it, being a police reporter. And I walked in the building and started walking up the steps toward where the apartment was, and Ralph Joyce, the homicide chief, was coming down the stairs. And I said, “Hi.” He said, “Hi” to me. I just kept on going, and partway up the stairs, another policeman tried to stop me.



And I thought to myself, “Well, Joyce didn’t tell me to get lost.” So I told the cop, “The lieutenant says it’s okay.”



I kept going and I went in the room with the detectives. The little old lady is lying dead on the floor there. I was walking around looking for clues. I think she had been smothered with a pillow and killed for her Social Security money or something like that. I thought she was a little old black lady. She was a little old white lady who’d been dead in this hot apartment for way too long and had turned sort of a coffee bean color.



Whitey Watzman
Reporter, Plain Dealer



I found a lulu one night under the unpromising heading of “Property Lost.” What caught my attention was the amount—$5,000 in cash. The terse report, skimpy on detail, identified the man reporting the loss and where he lost it—that’s all. It was at Hotel Cleveland on Public Square. It said no more. I called the hotel switchboard and asked whether that man was a registered guest. Then I asked to be connected to his room on the fifth floor. The phone rang there—no answer. I called the manager of the hotel, who said he knew nothing. Then I made a series of phone calls and finally reached the policeman who’d turned in the report.



“Sure,” he said. “Some screwy case!”



“What happened?” I asked.



“You won’t believe this. This here guy is a salesman from out of town, and he collects payments, I mean in cash, for what he’s sold on the installment plan. He carries this cash around with him. So when he checks into the Cleveland, he gets undressed and he empties his pockets. Where does he put this stuff? On the windowsill! He doesn’t take notice that the window’s half open. He goes to the bathroom. When he comes out, the first thing he sees is that his pile of cash has gotten smaller. He looks out the window, there’s a soft breeze blowing outside. Wafting through it is his cash. The bills are floating like butterflies, coming down gently on Public Square, and people walking by are amazed. The salesman is watching when one bill comes fluttering down right in front of the eyes of one pedestrian. It catches him on the bridge of his nose. The man looks like he can’t believe it. He looks at the bill, puts it in his pocket and hurries off. Meanwhile, everybody else is picking up bills off the ground and stuffing them in their pockets. It’s like pennies from heaven, but they aren’t pennies—they’re 10- and 20-dollar bills. So the guy calls the police. I figure it’s for his insurance.”



“Who is he? Do you know?”



“No, he’s got an out-of-town address. Maybe he’s a gambler or something like that—I don’t know. All I know is that he’s not guilty of anything on my beat. Too much to keep in a wallet, he tells me. So I ask him why not a money clip, and do you know what he says? He says that would make the wad heavier when he’s carrying it around.”



“Do you believe him?”



“Yeah, I figure he’s on the up and up, or else he wouldn’t be making a report to the police. Too bad you weren’t there with a photographer!”



I phoned in the story to a rewrite man, who wrote four sparkling paragraphs for the front page.



We couldn’t check out every report in the record room. Far too many of them! But we had to be alert. For example, what at first glance might seem like an ordinary case of vandalism could end up being portentous if we were sharp enough to note that it had occurred at the home of a politician. Or how about a ranking police officer? Was someone getting back at him and, if so, for what? You wouldn’t immediately know, of course, but even if it were a routine case, it could be of citywide interest if the victim was a prominent person. So you had to be familiar with such names.



For example, when I called the rounds one afternoon, a policeman in fashionable Shaker Heights said, with what sounded like a yawn, “All we’ve had is a couple of burglaries.”



I was about to say OK and hang up, but this thought crossed my mind: “Why’s he even bothering to mention it?”



So I asked: “Whose house?”



The policeman toyed with me. “Nobody you’d know,” he said. “Some guy named Story.”



“Frank Story?” I asked, uttering the name of Cleveland’s police chief.



“Yeah.”



“Whose was the other house?”



“Babe Triscaro’s.”



I knew that name, of course.



They both lived on Lomond Boulevard—the lawman and one of his occasional targets. The same burglar struck at both places, among others on the long street. No other connection between these two burglaries, but the irony of it made a nice little news story—both the hunter and the hunted had fallen to a third party.



Don Bean
Reporter, Plain Dealer



When things got slow at the police beat, it was a dangerous time for me. I got bored and kept wondering about “what if” stories.



In October of 1968, the marijuana craze was sweeping the country. So I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, a guy by the name of Johnny Pot, who went around the countryside planting marijuana seeds for his hippie friends? He’d leave them maps of his plantings and let them know when harvest was, and in exchange they’d give him a place to sleep and food and the drug of his choice. So I gave him a derby hat, a madras jacket, yellow sandals, and I wrote a story about federal agents chasing him from Maine to Texas.



I left the story, and that night when I laid my head to pillow, I thought, “They could fire me.” That kept me up for about 10 seconds. Russ Kane was city editor then and he called me the next day and said, “This story sounds like a three-martini lunch.”



I said it wasn’t, and it ran—not only here, but in papers across the country. I don’t usually make up stories, but this was a good one. The agent in charge of drug enforcement called me and said, “Where did you get your information?” and I said, “I don’t have to reveal my sources.



“You’re damn right you don’t have to reveal your sources,” he said. “You don’t have any sources.”



The great goddess of journalism has a sense of humor, and two days later there was a big marijuana bust at the airport and I covered it. They had bales and bales of marijuana. I walked up to the agent in charge and he said, “So you’re Bean. If you’d been here yesterday, I would have shot you.”



He said he got all kinds of calls, including one from a Hollywood agent who wanted the rap sheets on Johnny Pot because he wanted to make a movie about it. I said, “You’re going to have to give me credit and a share of the profits because I made it all up.”



The following April 1, I wrote another story. I said a Medina farmer, Loo Flirpa (which was April Fool spelled backward), spotted Johnny Pot planting and he called the police, and they were hot on his trail. The AP started to move on it, but someone called and said, “You’d better be careful. Bean is known to make up stories.” So that one didn’t get in the paper.



Jim Naughton
Reporter, Plain Dealer



Don Bean became my mentor on the police beat, especially in the conduct of pranks. One night we were sitting there without much to do between calling rounds, and I asked Bean what we could do on such a slow night. We concocted a scheme to call the Cleveland Press reporter who was in the old Central Police Station in an office near ours. I think it was John Hernandes, but don’t trust my memory. We found an address on Kirby Avenue in the Bratenahl area, from which we imagined you could see the Shoreway. Bean got on the phone to a household on that street. I called through the PD switchboard to the Press switchboard and down to Hernandes and pretended to be the guy Bean was keeping occupied on the phone.



I told Hernandes that I had just seen a plane land on Memorial Shoreway. What kind, he asked, and I said I wasn’t sure but it looked like a four-engine job. He hung up. We knew he would saunter into our room to see if we were onto the story. This was in the era when Dick Conway was a copy kid and hung around the cop shop with his camera hoping for the big story. So when Hernandes came into our room Bean was still on the phone, I was pretending to be talking with Bratenahl police and Conway was excitedly getting his gear all set up.



Then Conway jumped out our window onto the parking ramp and got in the PD police beat car and revved it. Hernandes jumped into his car and tore off toward the scene. Well, Conway came back in and we had figured we’d let Hernandes get partway there and then phone him on the newfangled phone in his Press car and tell him we’d found out it was a hoax.



It turned out he was so eager to beat us there he did not take the time to use the key that unlocked the phone—which by then was dangling with the other keys from his car’s ignition—so we couldn’t reach him. As time elapsed, we figured he’d cruise around and come back. Then we heard a call on police radio that, as I recall, was like this: “This is car 596. We’ve got a Press reporter who says there’s a plane down on the Shoreway.”



All hell broke loose. Sirens everywhere. Coast Guard checking the Lake Erie shore. Police driving over Bratenahl golf course. We lived in fear for months that we’d be found out, but so far as I know neither the authorities nor Hernandes ever traced it to Bean and Conway and me.



Don Bean
Reporter, Plain Dealer



Judy Sammon was a beautiful blond woman. She was the first woman assigned to the police beat. I was the chief police reporter, and I had day fantasies and night fantasies and daydreams and night dreams about her and me working together. She had a rich boyfriend who would come down and wait for her to get off work at 11 p.m. He always wanted to go out on a big story with her.



One night she went to the Minute Chef for dinner and I called her and said, “The mother of the unknown soldier is going to put flowers on her son’s grave at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument.”



“Do we cover this every year?” she asked.



“No, we haven’t covered this story in a long time,” I said.



Her boyfriend was ecstatic. Off they went to Public Square and asked a cop, “Where’s the tomb of the unknown soldier?”



He said, “Beats the hell out of me.”



Then they asked a cabbie, who told them it was in Washington, D.C. She called and said, “Don, how long do I have to wait for this woman?”



“How long must you wait for the mother of the unknown soldier?”



Pause.



“Oh, you bastard, Bean! You bastard!”



I had to recount this reportorial adventure in the city room and when she walked in the next day, she got a standing ovation.



Steve Esrati
Copy Editor, Columnist, Plain Dealer



On a hot summer night in 1965, a bunch of children stood on a corner of Superior Avenue. A convertible drove past and a man in the car shot a pistol at the children. The bullet he fired went into the scrotum of a young boy.



The boy was black; the man was white.



I was working the late shift on the copy desk and was told to write a four-column, 36-point headline for Page 1 about the incident. It would have been for the Sunday paper, but the story was ordered off the front page by a senior editor, Dave Rimmel, and eventually ended up at the back of the paper, near the obituaries.



Judged only on the basis of news value, that story belonged on the front page. Had it occurred in Bombay, nobody would have thought twice about running it there. But it happened in Cleveland and there wasn’t any point in upsetting people, was there? You may want to know why stories often seem to be “buried” near the obituaries. Editors have no way of knowing who will die and so leave space for late obituaries. Late-breaking stories often go into that space. It is not an editorial judgment.



The incident led to the Hough riot a few weeks later. The shooting was something that upset people. The follow-up was also upsetting. A man showed up at a police station and handed the cops a gun, saying he was doing so because he understood that he was a suspect in the shooting of the boy and wanted the gun tested. The cops duly tested the gun, not knowing if it was the man’s only gun, and reported that this absolved the man from suspicion because the volunteered gun did not match the gun that had shot the boy. No charges were ever laid in the case though there had been witnesses, a description of the car, a description of the man. It should not have come as a surprise to Cleveland that when the Hough riot took place, this man’s considerable properties were fire-bombed.



Jim Marino
Criminal Courts Reporter, Press



The most memorable story I ever covered was probably the Danny Greene/Cleveland Mafia continuing saga, how these two gangs—the Irish gang and the Italian gang—were battling it out on the East Side for control of the numbers business, and how that led to a number of deaths, including Shondor Birns, who was Cleveland’s number one racketeer for decades. It led to Danny Greene’s death; it led to Jack Licavoli’s conviction for Greene’s death. He was known on the street as Jack White, but his real name was Licavoli, and he was allegedly the “don” or the “capo” of Cleveland’s Mafia family, which was known in FBI circles as the “gang that couldn’t shoot straight.”



Jack was in his 60s when he was convicted, and lived into his 70s in prison before he died. And his top lieutenant was Angelo Lonardo, and the Lonardo family goes back decades in Cleveland. It’s difficult sometimes to sort out who’s a cousin, who’s a nephew, who’s an uncle. But the old Cleveland Press morgue, where all the clips are just yellowed with age and if you’d touch them, they’d break into a million pieces, had clippings of the Lonardo family going back to, like, 1919, including one incident where a guy named Black Sam Todaro allegedly killed Little Angelo Lonardo’s father, and he was going to get even with him by taking out Sam Todaro. He knew the barbershop where Sam had his office in the back, and with his mother’s permission—imagine the mother giving her son permission to kill somebody—as the story is told, he just walked into the barbershop and killed Sam and then went out and drove home with his mother. Well, this is the same Angelo Lonardo that gets roped in with Licavoli in the Danny Greene trial.



This is an interesting story—I was trying to get on the defendants’ good side at court, because I was sitting in the first seat back from the trial rail, and there’s this whole table full of Mafia defendants and all their lawyers and everything, and every time they’d look at the media, they’d growl at you because they really didn’t like the coverage.



So I was trying to get these guys to warm up to me because if I ever need to interview one of them, maybe they’d give me some words instead of spit at me. So I went over to the old morgue and I pulled out some old pictures of these guys when they were 20 years old. I actually stole them from the morgue and I gave them to them at the trial. And during the recess I said, “Hey, this is you when you were, like, 25 years old,” and they looked at the pictures and they laughed out loud. From then on, Jack Licavoli used to bring candy for me because I gave him an old picture of himself.



The Danny Greene case just had so many peculiar angles to it. I took over the organized crime beat from a guy named Tony Tucci, and Tony was the one that tells me that whenever you get a phone call from a Mr. Patrick, that was Danny Greene’s code name; that means he wants to talk to you about something. Danny Greene would send his two gunmen over, pick me up in a green stretch limo and we’d go to a restaurant, sometimes Pat Joyce’s, and then Danny would walk out from nowhere and sit down and say, “Do you know who killed who? Well, let me tell you what’s going on, but you can’t quote me.” And then, “Say hi to Tony for me.” So I was being driven around town by Danny’s gunmen for various meets with Danny throughout the year. And that was the start of my organized crime writing experience.



But everybody in Cleveland was getting blown up with car bombs back then, and the reason they called the Cleveland Mafia the “gang that couldn’t shoot straight”—I can’t remember who their target was, but a couple of Licavoli’s boys were at the Cleveland airport one time and they had a bomb rigged to a guy’s car in the airport parking lot, and they had their remote-control device in the hotel that looked down on the parking lot, and when the guy got in the car, they pressed the button and it didn’t work. They go, “Shit, maybe we’re too far away; maybe it’s the distance.” So they go running down the stairs as the car’s slowly backing out of its parking space, and they’re pressing the button again and it doesn’t work. Then the car starts to drive away and they’re running after the car, pressing the button and never got it to explode. It’s almost like something you’d see on a comedy on TV.