The Investigator by Terry Lenzner

Author:Terry Lenzner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-09-07T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

WHERE THERE’S A WILL, THERE’S A WAY

I continued working at my law firm, sometimes on cases requiring investigation that helped hone my skills, but they were relatively straightforward and kept me close to home. But soon enough, three cases came along that took me beyond Washington for weeks at a time. The first was a case requiring good old-fashioned shoe leather—and in this case, I mean that quite literally.

In June 1975, I received a phone call from David Mugar, whom I had met through a friend now working in the Boston Police Department. David was the son of a prominent Armenian-American businessman in Boston who had founded the Star Market grocery chain and owned several other properties.

From the outside, Mugar’s Boston office looked like many of the red-brick buildings that dotted the New England city. But inside, it looked as though it had been designed for the next century. The modern office had all kinds of gadgets, and David seemed to use every single one of them. Certainly, his office proved that he was unique. He also was generous, thoughtful, and smart.

When we sat down, David told me he wanted to branch out into television; he wanted to own one of Boston’s network affiliates. He had his eye on Channel 7, which was owned by RKO General, a subsidiary of General Tire and Rubber Company. The Ohio-based company had purchased RKO Radio Pictures from, of all people, Howard Hughes in 1955.

In Mugar’s view, Channel 7 was airing pretty dull programming and failing to produce intelligent, challenging entertainment. Unfortunately the station wasn’t for sale, but it was time for it to seek renewal of its license with the Federal Communications Commission. The Mugars filed a bid with the FCC to challenge reissuance of the license.

The Mugar family claimed that they should be given precedence over RKO for the license because they would broadcast higher-quality programming, which was in the greater public interest. It was a weak argument, and they knew it. As a general rule, the FCC did not strip licenses away from one company because their programming was inferior. One guy’s Masterpiece Theatre is another person’s Jerry Springer Show. Not surprisingly, the commissioners denied the Mugar challenge.

Mugar’s lawyer had advised that the only way the family had a chance to win the station was to find something “blockbuster” about RKO or its parent company that would change the commissioners’ minds. I had no idea how to approach this, but figured that there might be something significant hidden in RKO or General Tire’s operations. No one expected me to have much luck, but David really wanted me to try. The Mugar family did not make a fortune in America by giving up whenever they encountered an obstacle.

Clearly, the case required more than good lawyering. It required another critical quality for an investigative firm: good instincts. The first thing I did was pull together all the business records and reports I could find on RKO and General Tire and Rubber. We

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