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[272] Final Judgment 333
York City's Tammany Hall political machine which was itself inextricably
tied to the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate.
The Pope family were longtime contributors—through the Generoso
Pope Foundation—to pro-Israel causes. The foundation was also widely
suspected of being a secret conduit for CIA funds.
Generoso Pope, Jr. owned the National Enquirer. Pope, Jr. had worked for
the CIA during the Korean war and was himself famously friendly with Lansky's
longtime partner, Frank Costello. In fact, Costello helped finance the
Enquirer in its infancy. 735
Pearson had given highly favorable publicity to Generoso Pope, Sr. as
the first "prominent Italian American" to oppose Mussolini. In return, Pope
promptly gave Pearson a contract to write a weekly column for his El
Progresso, the leading Italian language newspaper in the country. The $150-aweek
contract was more than any other newspaper paid for just one weekly
column.
In the mid-1960's Pearson and Fortune Pope, along with Lyndon
Johnson's TV-and-radio advisor, Leonard Marks, went into partnership and
acquired the Bell-McClure Syndicate and the North American Newspaper
Alliance. (Marks was later appointed head of the U.S. Information Agency
by Johnson.) 736
Pearson's biographer dismisses the relationship between Pearson and
the controversial Pope family as "puzzling." 737 This relationship, however,
further cements Pearson's ties to the Israeli lobby and its allies in the CIA.
THE JOE TRENTO CONNECTION
It is of more than passing interest to note that for a period, Generoso
Pope's Washington bureau chief was journalist Joe Trento, who emerged as
an authority on the intelligence community.
It was Trento, as we saw in Chapter 16, who co-wrote a controversial
article alleging that former CIA man E. Howard Hunt may have been in
Dallas on the day JFK was shot.
Trento, as noted, had excellent CIA connections—James Jesus
Angleton, in particular, and we know for a fact that Trento was being used
as a media conduit by Angleton for whatever insidious purposes of his own.
This, of course, we discussed in some detail in Chapter 16.
JACK ANDERSON'S CONNECTIONS
Drew Pearson's partner and protégé, Jack Anderson, himself had notable
ties to not only the Israeli lobby, but also the Lansky Organized Crime
Syndicate. Not only did Anderson once share his offices with at least one
registered lobbyist for Israel, who was also close to Lansky's protégé,
Carlos Marcello,
738 but he also maintained a close working relationship
with Herman (Hank) Greenspun, a longtime Lansky syndicate associate and
arms-smuggler for Israel.