Free Dish by Jeannette Walls

brothers initially denied the charges, but eventually pleaded guilty to five of the counts against them, and no contest to five more counts. They were fined $500,000 and began a slow fade from their prestigious public life.
    Generoso Pope Sr.’s dream of a political dynasty ruled by his sons foundered, just as Gene Pope Jr.’s publishing empire was taking off. The timing was not coincidental. The charges against Fortune and Anthony were gathered by Costello’s ally, Judge Sammy DeFalco. The source of much of the information used in the indictment, according to several members of the family, was Gene Pope. “He was bitter about being edged out of the family business,” said his son Paul.
    By 1966, Pope started phasing the gore out of the
Enquirer.
“I didn’t want to be with that crowd,” he said. “I wanted to put out a paper a woman, say, at the supermarket, would pick up and take home, expecting to find something in it that would mean something—that would be of some practical or educational value to her in this life of decency most of us are trying to live.” The real reason Pope cleaned up his act was that the market for gore was leveling off. Circulation hit 1 million and would go no further. “There are only so many libertines and neurotics,” Pope observed.
    Another reason for the
Enquirer’s
flat sales was that there was, at the time, a radical drop in the number of newsstands, which had been run out of business by newspaper strikes that had shutdown publications across the country. With so many newsstands closing down, Pope looked for a new sales rack and found it in the nation’s 50,000 supermarkets. Pope had to find a new place to peddle his ware; he was impressed with
Reader’s Digest’s
circulation of 17.9 million. One of its primary outlets was grocery stores, but there was no way that supermarkets would carry the
National Enquirer’s
mix of cheesecake and gore. Pope began to think about repositioning the paper yet again, this time focusing on celebrity gossip, real-life heroics, and self-help and medical stories. “I decided to clean up the
Enquirer
and turn it into a condensed version of
Reader’s Digest,”
Pope said in 1969.
    Around this time, Pope ran into his good friend Frank Costello. “Stay away from me,” the once powerful mobster cautioned him. “You must stay away now. Don’t be seen with me. You’ll get hurt. Stay away. Don’t come near me anymore. It won’t be good for you, my son.” The incident spooked Pope. Shortly afterward, he moved from New York City to Englewood, Cliffs, New Jersey. But he didn’t feel safe there either.
    In 1969, Pope was badly shaken by another event. The young publisher identified with Rupert Murdoch who, like him, was the son of a media magnate and was drawing the contempt of the media elite. That year, Murdoch and his wife went home to Australia for Christmas and left their Rolls Royce back in London for their executives to use. One day, the wife of one of Murdoch’s executives was kidnapped while she was driving the car. The kidnappers thought that she was Murdoch’s wife, Anna, and when they realized their mistake, killed the woman and fed her body to some pigs.
    The following year, another incident occurred that would forever close the door for Pope on New York and the world in which he had grown up. The delivery trucks that distributed the
Enquirer
were distributing fewer papers than he was sending out. Pope suspected that someone—possibly the Teamsters—was trying to cheat him. He called on an old contact named Angie La Pastornia, who had recently been released from prison. Angie agreed to ride on one of the trucks that Pope suspected was stealing from him. The next day, when the truck came back, Angie was inside, dead.A note attached to the knife that was stuck in his chest read simply, “Don’t fuck with us.”
    Pope packed up his house and his office and told his family and staff to meet him at the train station, where he