Sherman Skolnick's Report

WHO IS THE BLACKMAILER?
by Sherman H. Skolnick

Some persons, places, and entities would like a more simple world. Where everything about them is on one computer hard drive. And to start out fresh in the 21st Century, they could just click on "Delete" and have all their dirty laundry simply go to the "trash bin". Then they would have one last chance to decide if they want, for some reason, to keep this detrimental data. And then, after some head scratching they press "Delete" for the "trash bin" to be emptied and the bad stuff, once and for all, expunged from history.

George Orwell in his book on total dictatorship, "1984", must have had something like this in mind.

The city fathers of every big city would like to hit the "Delete" key about their history, often scandal-scarred. Something they would just like to permanently get lost. Some media empires are no exception. We have told you in our stories about reporters who appear to be tied to assassins. Those who after a political assassination, are rewarded for their complicity. Those who sometime after a political assassination that they played a part as a cover up, were rewarded by being propelled into big-paying choice media positions.

An example is Dealey Plaza, Dallas, November 22, 1963. At the time a not too well known reporter was Dan Rather. He was in the shadows of the triple underpass bridge. He later claimed he was just there holding a "grapefruit bag", media slang for a container for news film to be picked up by a courier. He was just a few feet away from where apparently some of the shots came from that were aimed point blank from the front at President John F. Kennedy's head. As the presidential motorcade approached the underpass, Dan Rather was the only one on the planet that could look right into the death car to confirm that JFK was mortally wounded by the cabal.

I gave the details to a populist newspaper that explored the area 25 years after the fact and found an apparently unmentioned sewer lid up on the embankment. Many circumstantial facts support the idea that some of the shots came from there and the sewer was used to escape. Dan Rather could not possibly have not seen what happened. He later became White House correspondent and then, network TV news anchor face, rewarded with millions of dollars per year.

Then relatively obscure Canadian journalist, Robert MacNeil, JUST HAPPENED to be in the building where Lee Harvey Oswald was at the time. And MacNeil's apparent complicity added to the fakery of Oswald as the "lone assassin". MacNeil was rewarded with co-ownership of the PBS program with Jim Lehrer, the News Hour. These are just a few examples.

There are presslords, such as in Chicago, who would like their own dirty laundry to disappear.About 1930, when the Chicago Tribune faced a strike by their workers, the Tribune hired a "labor consultant". Guess who? Why, Al Capone, who nowadays would have been tagged as a "terrorist". In 1986, when the Tribune likewise faced a strike, they brought in mafia goons with attack dogs to rip the workers off the machines. Few, if any, in the monopoly press said anything about this outrage used to break the union and open the way for scabs at half the wage rate.

The Tribune would also like to click "Delete" as to one of their prize reporters who was publicly executed about 1930, Jake Lingle. Their reporter was blackmailing various criminal business factions, reportedly with the connivance of the higher ups at the supposed "World's Greatest Newspaper", the slogan for their radio and TV stations in Chicago, WGN-TV and WGN Radio.

For years and years, Chicago, like other big cities, was and is racked by in-fighting between competing criminal enterprises. It is too simplistic to say it was just two warring "mafia" factions. In the early 1930s, Chicago had two competing gangs fighting over the distribution of illegal booze, just prior to the end of Prohibition. Mayor Anton Cermak, part of a third gang of booze distributors, got in the middle and was shot to death by an alleged "lone assassin" while Cermak was sitting in 1933 next to President-Elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Were the shots also intended to pressure Roosevelt to declare an Emergency Bank Holiday BEFORE rather than AFTER his Inauguration Day?)

Our work in the late 1960s and early 1970s sent Cermak's son-in-law, Otto Kerner, Jr., to prison for bribery. At the time, Kerner was former Illinois Governor and a sitting federal appeals judge in Chicago. Kerner went on all the local media, including the Chicago Tribune, and labeled me a "liar" to counter my public accusations. BUT, just as I had publicly fingered him, Kerner was sent to prison and died an ex-convict. [Kerner tried to stop me by getting his fellow crooked judges to try to jail me for "contempt of court" but he did succeed in getting the pressfakers to badmouth me as a "liar".]

In March, 2000, I put "on the air" a one-hour public access Cable TV Show entitled "Who is a Blackmailer?" with a political analyst as a guest. I fingered Chicago Tribune star reporter and columnist, John Kass, as an apparent blackmailer. Kass has been in the foreront of a Tribune campaign to scandalize, falsely I contend, the family of Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. On August 31, 1997, the Tribune front-paged in their large circulation Sunday edition, alleging that the father of Richie as he is called, namely Richard J. Daley, who was himself Mayor for 21 years, was a "communist-sympathizer".

We had documents showing the Tribune story was a fraud. On August 28, 1997, three days BEFORE the Tribune went to press with their phony story, a heavily-armed, government Gestapo-like team, WITHOUT A SEARCH WARRANT, stole our documents at gunpoint. [Part of the subject later of five different lawsuits against the perpetrators and their bosses.]

After our March, 2000 TV Show about blackmailers, by April, 2000 it was no longer much of a secret that the Tribune and John Kass were reportedly simply rotten extortionists. [If injured or damaged in any way by the Tribune, you cannot hope to ever successfully sue the Tribune. They keep voluminous unpublished files on many judges for the purpose of working a malign, if not corrupt, influence on state and federal judges.]

Kass and the Tribune were quite aware of us continuing to finger him. So, as if it were a joke, he sheepishly admitted that he was in some way linked to Edward R. Vrdolyak. [Chicago Tribune 4/19/2000]. Known as "Fast Eddie", Vrdolyak has a long history of reputed criminal enterprises.

So, insofar as there is any truth to Mayor Richard M. Daley and his family having "mob" links, Kass and his apparent crony "Fast Eddie" are an opposing gang. Fast Eddie was reportedly implicated with dope laundry criminals in the Taco business. And implicated reportedly with criminally-inclined car-grabbers among the corrupt police, getting hold of good cars seized for the city car "concentration camp" and reportedly later unlawfully sold. And reportedly implicated with a city government doctor, business partner of Fast Eddie, in making erronous medical reports for unwarranted sick leave for firemen and policemen, clients of Fast Eddie's law firm.

And Fast Eddie has been reportedly tied to the criminal element in the Chicago enclave of Cicero, long-headquarters for the underworld, called Al Capone Land by some. The area, with a relatively small population, has a bank with worldwide connections, First National Bank of Cicero. In later years, the bank was the alter ego of the supposedly but not actually defunct mysterious spy/assassination money laundry, Bank of Credit and Commerce International, BCCI. Long-dominated by Bishop Paul Marcinkus, originally from Cicero, and for many years he was head of the Vatican Bank, the Cicero bank has changed its name several time to try to work off the stink connected to its reputed criminal operations.

A few weeks after the airing of our TV show about blackmailers, reportedly John Kass and the Tribune, a strange event took place. "A gunman who shot at a south suburban newspaper owner last week fled the scene in a car owned by former Chicago Ald. Edward Vrdolyak. Journals newspapers executive Lee Anglin said Joseph Sallas, the man police suspect of the shooting, had warned him not to write unflattering article about Vrdolyak." [Chicago Sun-Times 4/18/2000.] The next day was the strange admission by John Kass as to Fast Eddie.

In the 1980s, following an unsuccessful campaign to be Chicago Mayor, Fast Eddie worked an apparently corrupt deal with the IRS bosses in Chicago and Washington, to avoid criminal prosecution for apparent massive tax evasion. About that time he publicly announced he is changing from a Democrat to a Republican.

With the Fast Eddie/John Kass matter circulating, a whispering campaign started, both at the Tribune Tower and in California. Reporters and other employees of the Los Angeles Times, in process of being merged with the Chicago Tribune, and expecting massive lay-offs, began circulating details that the Tribune had a reputed blackmailer, John Kass, reportedly tied to Fast Eddie and reputed criminal enterprises. One Tribune reporter confided, "I am working on John Kass' obituary" [which by policy is often written up in advance of ailing celebrities and such].

Is all this a replay of the public execution of Jake Lingle?

The Tribune Company has become a mammoth operation. Traditionally over the years, head of the parent firm has also been head of the conspiratorial Federal Reserve District Bank in Chicago. As shown by U.S. Postal Service mandatory annual financial disclosures, major owners of the Tribune are members of the Rockefeller Family and British interests directly tied to the Queen of England. Since the 19th Century, the Tribune got their Canadian pulp and newsprint by way of a charter issued to them by the King of England.

Cynics say, they would like to see Tribune hotshot John Kass joke his way out of this one.

Since 1958, Mr.Skolnick has been a court reformer. Since 1963, founder/chairman, Citizen's Committee to Clean Up the Courts, disclosing certain instances of judicial and other bribery and political murders. Since 1991 a regular panelist, and since 1995, moderator/producer, of one-hour,weekly public access Cable TV Show, "Broadsides", Cablecast on Channel 21, 9 p.m. each Monday in Chicago. For a heavy packet of printed stories, send $5.00 [U.S. funds] and a stamped, self-addressed business sized envelope [4-1/4 x 9-1/2 #10 size] WITH THREE STAMPS ON IT, to Citizen's Committee to Clean Up the Courts, Sherman H. Skolnick, Chairman, 9800 South Oglesby Ave., Chicago IL 60617-4870. Office, 7 days, 8 a.m. to midnight, (773) 375-5741 [PLEASE, no "just routine calls]. Before sending FAX, call.

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