Saturday, March 15, 2008

The Answer To 49 Market Street

From 1984:
Geraldine Ferraro's free ride from Big Media crunched to a halt in mid-August after she revealed on August 12 that husband John Zaccaro would not be releasing his tax returns. Rep. Ferraro had issued a statement on July 24 promising that Zaccaro's returns as well as her own would be released. That statement said: "I plan to include my husband's financial holdings in that disclosure because my husband and I believe that it is in the public interest to do so and because the office of vice president is one of high public trust."
Ferraro first revealed her withdrawal of that promise on August 10 when she met with the Texas congressional delegation in Washington. It was reported in one sentence in the third paragraph of a story on Page A7 in the Washington Post the next day. Neither the reporter nor the editors realized that Ferraro had dropped a bombshell. They illustrated the story with a photo of Ferraro with this caption: "Rep. Geraldine Ferraro ... plans to release her tax forms." .......
The Naive Landlord
ABC gave John Zaccaro high marks as a landlord, putting on a city official who thought he was a model for others. But it was noted that he had "at least one very embarrassing tenant," Star Distributors. Ltd.. described as "a major supplier of pornographic: magazines and linked with organized crime." It said: "There's no evidence that Zaccaro has had any connection with anyone at Star, other than as a landlord renting storage space. Still, it's an uncomfortable association, and Zaccaro is trying to see what can be done to remove Star from his building."
While this statement was being made by correspondent Steve Shepard, the camera showed packages of porno- graphic magazines sitting on the sidewalk in front of the building within sight of the Zaccaro real estate office. The packages were labeled with such titles as Kink. Bondage Times, Fetish Times, Screw, and Swing Contacts. ABC did not report that Zaccaro had said that he did not know the "exact use" this tenant was making of the space he was renting. (An AP story published August 20 went further saying, "Mrs. Ferraro said her husband did not know the firm was in the pornography business until news accounts of it appeared"}.ABC said Zaccaro was looking into the possibility of evicting the tenant but said that might be difficult legally.
On August 13, Reed Irvine had discussed this at length with George Watson, an ABC News vice president.
Watson thought it reasonable that Zaccaro might not know what was going on in his building until he was told that Zaccaro's own office was only 40 yards away and that the pornographic material was loaded and unloaded on the sidewalk in easy view of any passerby. Irvine had also told Mr. Watson of the gambling den in the Zaccaro building at 68 Mott Street and of the New York Tribune's as yet unpublished discovery that a building at 49 Market Street that had been in the Zaccaro family since 1946 was reported by police to be a hangout for the Bonanno mob.

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