Free The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America by Leonard A. Cole Page A

paper’s rebirth began a 10-year period that journalist Jonathan Mahler calls the “gore era.” Typical headlines read: “Violent Criminal Kills Pal and Eats Pieces of His Flesh,” and “I Cut out Her Heart and Stomped on It.” The new incarnation drew a national readership of 1 million. But by the end of the 1960s, circulation was flat, and Pope began searching for a formula with broader appeal. In the mid-1970s he found one: celebrities—their dirty laundry, their successes, their secrets, their joys, their embarrassments. And whatever the written words, nothing would beat the choice, sometimes lurid, photograph.
    Soon after Pope’s 1970s epiphany, he moved the National Enquirer’s offices from New York to a one-story building in Lantana. Working 7 days a week, he nourished his new focus on celebrity foibles, and before long circulation mushroomed to 6 million. The driving aim was to get the scoop, and the Enquirer would do whatever was necessary to get it. In 1982, for example, $15,000 bought an exclusive from a gardener who had been within earshot of Princess Grace’s last words after her fatal car accident in Monaco. For $60,000 the Enquirer obtained the photograph that derailed Gary Hart’s 1988 presidential candidacy. After Hart denied he was having an extra-marital affair, the paper printed the famous shot of Donna Rice sitting on his lap aboard a yacht named “Monkey Business.” Despite the paper’s flamboyance and sensationalism and its payments to people for interviews, its stories essentially were built on facts.
    In 1989, the year after Pope died, his family sold the Enquirer for $418 million. Circulation, which had begun to decline before his death, continued to fall. But several exclusives in the mid-1990s helped bring stability to the tabloid. It was the staff of the Enquirer who found pictures of O. J. Simpson wearing the Bruno Magli shoes he denied owning during his 1995 murder trial. It was on the cover of the Enquire r that viewers may have first seen the picture of President Clinton greeting Monica Lewinsky in a crowd. The paper had purchased the rights from Time (yes, Time ) magazine to publish the picture. The picture also appeared on the cover of Time . The mainstream media were now covering subjects that previously had been left to the tabloids. But some tabloids had also changed. Stories in the Enquirer , if gossipy, were no longer just fanciful.
    Loyalty among AMI employees is widespread. “We take our journalism very seriously,” Ed Sigall has said. Now a senior editor, he joined the Enquirer s taff in 1974 as an assistant editor. “We don’t write about ‘Elvis,’ or things like that.” Similarly, Martha Moffett, who retired in early 2002, believes that people who think poorly of the tabloid press are misguided. “It’s interesting that within publishing the reputation is fine. The reputation is of a successful particular brand of publishing that is not outside the pale of the publishing industry.”
    Over the years other tabloids, such as the Globe and the Star, gained substantial readerships in their own right. But in 1999, David Pecker and Evercore Capital Partners brought them all under one management. For $835 million they acquired American Media, Inc., which already was publishing the Enquirer and the Star and now added Globe Communications, which owned the Globe , the Sun , and the National Examiner . The new owners also decided to move the company’s headquarters from Lantana to the Globe building in Boca Raton. In January 2001, after a $12 million renovation, the spanking new insides were ready for occupancy. The refurbished three-story building, with 67,000 square feet of floor space, had become tabloid heaven. Displayed in the lobby were the current issues of virtually every tabloid weekly published in America. Ten months later, because of anthrax, the building was sealed shut; but by using other facilities, the papers were able to remain in print, and AMI could