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India Legal-BEHIND THE
SCENES/arts&entertainment/american hustle
LIES
TRUTH AND SHOWMANSHIP
New Delhi's India Legal mag first person insider account by Jack Anderson's Indy Badhwar of how
the hollywood blockbuster has carved out self-serving, fairy tale fantasy from the reality of a horror story
By Inderjit Badhwar
More than 30 years after I wrote a
series of the most explosive stories I have ever done as an investigative
reporter, the subject and the characters who populated it have come alive
again—on the big screen, in halls all across India and the world. The
Hollywood box office runaway blockbuster is titled American
Hustle. Directed by David O. Russell, it stars, among others, Christian
Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, and Jennifer Lawrence. American Hustle was all set for about 10 Oscars.
The movie is based on a sting
operation conducted in 1979-1980 by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) that led to the conviction of a U.S. senator Pete Williams of New Jersey)
and six congressmen (members of the House of Representatives) on corruption
charges. It was dubbed “ABSCAM” for
“Arab Scam” because the FBI agents
involved created a fake corporation and posed as rich Arab investors who would
pay bribes to elected officials in order to get investment opportunities in
their states. The FBI’s star sting man – the middle man who lured the
unsuspecting politicians into the trap before hidden video cameras -- was a convicted conman and swindler Mel
Weinberg (the Irving Rosenfeld character played in the film by Bale).
There are troubling ethical issues
involved in this film. The FBI agents emerge as heroes. All the politicians as
crooks. Weinberg/Rosenfeld as an amiable, jovial trickster. And his wife
Rosalyn (Marie Weinberg in real life) as a drunken, brazen hussy. I am a sworn
enemy of censorship. And as an author I know that poetic license and cinematic
adaptations are legitimate creative activities. But what happens when a film like American Hustle which, by the admission of its makers, is based on
“facts”, distorts facts, glamorizes the actual wrongdoers including the FBI and
Weinberg (Rosenfeld), and shamelessly defames and slanders the character of
Marie (Rosalyn) who was one the most tragic victims of that scam? Lawrence's
performance as Marie/Rosalyn as an
over-the-top slut, which is now becoming clear is a selling point for the
movie. What if you knew that in real life,
Weinberg was on the take with the knowledge and connivance of the FBI, and his
wife committed “suicide” after she exposed the sham in public? Notwithstanding American Hustle’s cinematic virtues – would you support its
iconic status?
The real story behind Abscam, as I
know it and as I told it, is as dramatic as the film. But it is a sordid tale
of deception, treachery, criminality with the shoe on the other foot: the bad
guys are Rosenfeld (Weinberg) and the FBI agents. The heroine is Rosalyn
(Marie) who was one of America’s greatest whistleblowers and paid for her
courage with her life in 1982.
It was to me that she came first with
the real story.
I was then a senior investigative
reporter for the legendary Jack Anderson-- ABC TV, Parade Magazine, plus a
daily column that ran in 1000 papers worldwide. I was with Jack for about 8
years, replacing Brit Hume who had joined a broadcast company. Initially, the
transcripts of the secretly-videoed Abscam tapes showing congressmen accepting bribes were
leaked by the FBI to my colleague Gary Cohn , and the Jack Anderson Column
reproduced them (late 1980’s) in what was considered the scoop of the decade.
Pre-trial publicity had a lot to do with the speedy convictions. The FBI was
riding a wave of glory.
But when the judicial indictments started coming down and some of
the trials began, I convinced Jack that we do a reverse look at our scoop
because I had learned that some of the congressmen and senators may have been pre-selected for the sting operation because
they were actually pro-Teddy Kennedy Democrats who had been opposed to Jimmy
Carter: that the FBI Director William
Webster had approved the sting based on names and political standing rather
than on any investigation of ongoing criminality or even a predilection to
criminal behavior.
I viewed this as entrapment and ran a series
of stories, damning Abscam as a violation of America's system of Justice,
wrongful entrapment, and produced
memos showing that some of the district attorneys
and FBI agents did not approve of the methods and believed that Senator
Williams had been falsely implicated.
It was an unpopular position to take because
the rest of the American press had already declared the undercover agents and
Weinberg as heroes who had brought down crooked politicians. My view was that
these politicians were not all crooked but were tempted mercilessly,
remorseless and tenaciously until they succumbed to temptation. It is not the
state’s business to convert otherwise honest people into criminals. Law
enforcement means catching and preventing crimes, not creating criminals.
This worried William Webster so much
that he requested a meeting with me and Jack Anderson at the FBI headquarters
in Washington to ask for a "truce." His agents had been tailing us
trying to discover the source of my leaked memos. We knew this. All of us, including
my partner Jack Mitchell (former chief investigator, Senate Committee on Aging)
caught them snooping brazenly from parked cars outside our Washington office.
Webster told me and Jack (Anderson) that he
had been informed that we had bugged his office through a rogue FBI agent by
the name of Ed Tickle! This was
hilarious. The deal he tried to offer was that we would lay off embarrassing
the FBI on ABSCAM for, maybe, some special scoops in return . Jack played the
good guy I played the toughie but nothing came of it. (This is well documented
by Jack in his great book: Peace, War and
Politics, published just before his death in 2005)
Then all hell began to break loose. Mel Weinberg's
(Irvin Rosenfeld in the film) wife Marie (Rosalyn in the film), was a frail, 50-year old bleach-dyed blonde
diabetic with a strong Brooklyn accent, who lived with her adopted son, J.R. in Tequesta Florida.(How
different she was from the over-the-top, conniving slut depicted as Rosalyn in
the Hollywood film). She had been following my reportage and called me out of the
blue, told me my hunches were correct, and that she really wanted to give me
some inside dope. She said her phone may be tapped.
I flew down, checked in at a motel,
then moved to another for the meeting and what she told me was stunning.
ABSCAM, she said, was a scam within a scam. It was bankrolled through
unaccounted funds placed in the Chase Manhattan Bank. Also Weinberg was doing a
double scam. He was actually not only pocketing some of the bribe money meant
for the targets (and giving kickbacks to his FBI handlers) but also extorting
the targets for "incentive
gifts" like colour TV sets, microwave ovens, VCR's , in order to expedite the deals. She also said he had
perjured himself during the trials and the FBI knew about it. The two FBI
collaborators involved were FBI agents John Good and Tony Amoroso (played by
Bradley Cooper in the film). I secretly taped her conversation with me in the motel room as well as while driving
around with her in a rented car the next day. To my surprise, within a couple
of weeks, snatches of this taped conversation would be played back to me and my
wife by anonymous callers to my home in Rockville, Maryland. Maybe that was the
FBI's way of letting me know they knew what I had been up to, and to lay off.
(I later shared this information with Senators Daniel Inoue of Hawaii and
Orrin Hatch of Utah who were on the Senate Ethics Committee that indicted one
of the ABSCAM targets Senator Pete Williams of New Jersey and forced him to
resign.)
Why did Marie blow the whistle on
her husband?
In the film, her character is
portrayed as a drunken adulteress, who has been described by those involved
with the production as "manipulative", "really sick" and
"crazy." However, the truth is something far different. The real
story had ended in tragedy.
By 1981, the Weinbergs were living in
central Florida, and Marie discovered that the 57 year-old Weinberg had a
longtime mistress, Evelyn Knight, 39,( Sydney Prosser, played by Amy Adams in
the film) who was eleven years her junior. He had set her up in a condo 15
miles away, and the name "Weinberg" had been posted out front.
She soon discovered that Knight had also legally changed her last
name to her own. Marie, who was raised in a foster home and suffered from
diabetes, had been devoted to Weinberg and her adoptive teenage son. I got
to know her as a kind, generous and friendly woman.
Weinberg immediately began to warn
her to remain quiet, because a movie deal was planned for John Belushi to
portray Weinberg as a hero. He also wanted her to remain silent about the
fact that he had extorted expensive gifts and pocketed bribe money during
Abscam, something that others were alleging, and the FBI then began to
harass her as well, both by phone and in person.
She immediately moved toward a
divorce, and fought back the only way she could: by going public. She turned to
investigative Jack Anderson and me. The
intimidation from Weinberg soon became both public and private.
After a number of explosive articles by Jack and myself, she appeared on ABC's
20/20 in January of 1982 in an interview arranged by me with Tom Jariell
through producer Gordon Freedman.
They verified Marie's allegations (as
government investigators would later), and at that point the intimidation
intensified. Weinberg had promised that he would spread ugly stories about her,
which he immediately did, in order to have their son taken from her. A pastor
that she had turned to was worried she might attempt suicide, which she
denied.
But five days after the broadcast, and
after nearly three months of both public and private intimidation and
harassment, she apparently took her own life by hanging herself, and
left a note behind blaming her husband, saying that she didn't have the
strength to fight him anymore. (see box)
Shortly before Marie was to appear
before the Senate, I received a call from her son, J.R from Florida, saying
Marie was missing and that it was
unlike her not to return home by 9 pm latest.
The following day --it was January
end, 1982 - I was in Jack's office on 14th St NW in Washington DC. J.R. called
me to say Marie was found dead in a vacant adjoining condominium in Jupiter,
Florida. The police report filed almost immediately said it was a
suicide. She had apparently tied a rope to a rung in the top most banister of a
wooden staircase leading to the second floor, tied a noose around her neck,
climbed down as far as she could until the noose tightened and then bobbed her
head up and down und strangulated herself. Her hair was in perfect shape and
well permed. She was wearing rouge and lipstick and eye shadow and had powdered
her face. In the living room was a round table, a vase with a single rose in
it, a pen and a notepad on which she had apparently written a suicide note.
I asked a New York
investigator/lawyer, Michael Dennis to rush to Florida as Marie's family
representative. He met J.R. and got a copy of the "suicide note". He
then told me that there was no inquest. The next day, Mel "buried"
Marie in an empty casket while her body was still in the morgue. The pastor did
not know this. He probably did this to avoid a formal inquest. The actual
burial took place a day later.
But
nothing else came of it. The world just went on. Marie was quickly forgotten.
Although she was found hanged at the end of January 1982 nobody raised the
issue or even discussed her sworn affidavit and accusations at the Senate
hearing on Senator Pete Williams’s expulsion a month later. Later, Pete
Williams went to jail. America buried another scandal.
Afterward, Weinberg continued to attack
Marie and blamed others for her tragic demise, including Jack and myself.
Little more than a month after Marie's death, Weinberg married his mistress
Evelyn Knight.
The movie did not materialize then, but
after several attempts over the years it now finally has, with the
Weinberg character once again as the likable conman. But thanks to the internet
and social media several websites now
mention the real story, including Slate, Time magazine, The Daily Beast,
History vs. Hollywood, New York magazine (through Vulture.com), Yahoo movies,
The American Thinker and NBC news.com.
As one blogger noted: “I understand that changes can, will, and in general
must be made to turn life into film. But I think we should examine those
changes, especially when they stifle the characterization of a woman who has
only ever been characterized by her husband. Especially when it’s another way
that the living Mel Weinberg gets to keep his voice, while his dead ex-wife
loses hers. And especially when we’ve turned her into fodder for comedy,
laughing at her unhappiness, social anxiety, and depression. David O. Russell
did a disservice to Marie Weinberg and to Jennifer Lawrence. He further
gaslighted a woman who’d been gaslighted…”Post Script:
And Weinberg, now 90 years old, admits being paid a quarter million dollars
for the film, and even now continues to attack his late wife, telling
Newsday that she was a "wacky broad." To celebrate and promote Weinberg at this point would not only boost
the ego of a corrupt and amoral man, but would further demean a
woman who was one of history's most tragic victims.
Shortly after I wrote about Marie’s
tragedy, 1982, Mel, through a common source, threatened to
break both my legs if I ever stepped into Florida. The following year,
United Features Syndicate, which
syndicated our column “Washington Merry-go-Round” nominated me for the Pulitzer
for the series of columns and reporting on Abscam. I’m sure the Pulitzer
Committee, even though I am an alumnus of Columbia’s Graduate School of
Journalism, must have considered
that as some kind a perverted joke considering that most American editors
at the time regarded Weinberg as some kind of national hero for nailing a bunch
of crooked politicians.
American Hustle promotes this mythmaking which took
a heavy toll of a human beings and the American system of justice.
--with Ron Kolb
in Florida, USA
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