A chilling first person insider account of how the hollywood blockbuster, American Hustle, has carved out a self-serving, fairy tale fantasy from the reality of a horror story.
More than 30 years after I wrote a series of the most explosive stories I have ever done as an investigative reporter, the subject and the characters who populated it have come alive again—on the big screen, in halls all across India and the world. The Hollywood box office runaway blockbuster is titled American Hustle. Directed by David O Russell, it stars, among others, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, and Jennifer Lawrence. American Hustle was all set for about 10 Oscars.
The movie is based on a sting operation conducted in 1979-1980 by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that led to the conviction of a US Senator Pete Williams of New Jersey and six congressmen (members of the house of representatives) on corruption charges. It was dubbed “ABSCAM” for “Arab Scam” because the FBI agents involved created a fake corporation and posed as rich Arab investors, who would pay bribes to elected officials to get investment opportunities in their states. The FBI’s star sting man – the middle man who lured the unsuspecting politicians into the trap before hidden video cameras — was a convicted conman Mel Weinberg (the Irving Rosenfeld character played in the film by Bale).
There are troubling ethical issues involved in this film. The FBI agents emerge as heroes. All the politicians as crooks. Weinberg/ Rosenfeld as an amiable, jovial trickster. And his wife Rosalyn (Marie Weinberg in real life) as a drunken, brazen hussy. I am a sworn enemy of censorship. And as an author I know that poetic license and cinematic adaptations are legitimate creative activities. But what happens when a film like American Hustle, which, by the admission of its makers, is based on “facts”, distorts facts, glamorizes the actual wrongdoers, including the FBI and Weinberg (Rosenfeld), and shamelessly defames and slanders the character of Marie (Rosalyn), who was one of the most tragic victims of that scam? Lawrence’s performance as Marie/Rosalyn as an over-the-top slut is a selling point for the movie. What if you knew that in real life, Weinberg was on the take with the knowledge and connivance of the FBI, and his wife committed “suicide” after she exposed the sham in public? Notwithstanding the movie’s cinematic virtues, would you support its iconic status?
The real story behind Abscam, as I know it and as I told it, is as dramatic as the film. But it is a sordid tale of deception, treachery and criminality with the shoe on the other foot: the bad guys are Rosenfeld (Weinberg) and the FBI agents. The heroine is Rosalyn (Marie), who was one of America’s greatest whistle-blowers and paid for her courage with her life in 1982. It was to me that she came first with the real story.
I was then a senior investigative reporter for the legendary Jack Anderson,the journalist associated with ABC TV and Parade Magazine, and who wrote a daily column that ran in 1,000 papers worldwide. I was with Jack for about eight years, replacing Brit Hume who had joined a broadcast company. Initially, the transcripts of the secretly-videoed Abscam tapes showing congressmen accepting bribes were leaked by the FBI to my colleague Gary Cohn, and the Jack Anderson column reproduced them (early 1980s) in what was considered the scoop of the decade. Pre-trial publicity had a lot to do with the speedy convictions. The FBI was riding a wave of glory.
But when the judicial indictments started coming down and some of the trials began, I convinced Jack that we do a reverse look at our scoop because I had learned that some of the congressmen and senators may have been preselected for the sting operation because they were actually pro-Teddy Kennedy Democrats who had been opposed to Jimmy Carter. The FBI Director William Webster had approved the sting based on names and political standing rather than on any investigation of ongoing criminality or even a predilection to criminal behavior. I viewed it as entrapment and ran a series of stories, damning Abscam as a violation of America’s system of justice, wrongful entrapment, and produced memos showing that some of the district attorneys and FBI agents didn’t approve of the methods and believed that Senator Williams had been falsely implicated.
It was an unpopular position to take because the rest of the American press had already declared the undercover agents and Weinberg as national heroes, who had brought down crooked politicians. My view was that these politicians were not all crooked but were tempted mercilessly, remorselessly and tenaciously until they succumbed to the temptation. It is, after all, not the state’s business to convert otherwise honest people into criminals. Law enforcement means catching and preventing crimes, not creating criminals.
This worried Webster so much that he requested a meeting with me and Jack Anderson at the FBI headquarters in Washington to ask for a “truce”. His agents had been tailing us trying to discover the source of my leaked memos. We knew this. All on us, including my partner Jack Mitchell (former chief investigator, Senate Committee on Aging) caught them snooping brazenly from parked cars outside our Washington office.
Webster told me and Jack that he had been informed that we had bugged his office through a rogue FBI agent by the name of Ed Tickle! This was hilarious. The deal he tried to offer was that we would lay off embarrassing the FBI on ABSCAM for, maybe, some special scoops in return. Jack played the good guy, I played the toughie but nothing came of it. (This is well documented by Jack in his great book: Peace, War and Politics, published just before his death in 2005).
Then all hell began to break loose. Mel Weinberg’s (Irvin Rosenfeld in the film) wife Marie (Rosalyn in the film), was a frail, 50-
year old bleach-dyed blonde diabetic with a strong Brooklyn accent, who lived with her adopted son, JR in Tequesta, Florida.
She had been following my reportage and called me out of the blue, told me my hunches were correct, and that she really wanted to give me some inside dope. She said her telephone may be tapped.
I flew down, checked in at a motel, then moved to another for the meeting and what she told me was stunning. ABSCAM, she said, was a scam within a scam. It was bankrolled through unaccounted funds placed in the Chase Manhattan Bank. Also, Weinberg was doing a double scam. He was actually not only pocketing some of the bribe money meant for the targets (and giving kickbacks to his FBI handlers) but also extorting the targets for “incentive gifts” like colour TV sets, microwave ovens, VCRs , in order to expedite the deals.
She also said he had perjured himself during the trials and the FBI knew about it. The two FBI collaborators involved were FBI agents John Good and Tony Amoroso (played by Bradley Cooper in the film). I secretly taped her conversation with me in the motel room as well as while driving around with her in a rented car the next day.
To my surprise, within a couple of weeks, snatches of this taped conversation would be played back to me and my wife by anonymous callers to my home in Rockville, Maryland. Maybe that was the FBI’s way of letting me know they knew what I had been up to, and to lay off. (I later shared this information with Senators Daniel Inoue of Hawaii and Orrin Hatch of Utah who were on the Senate Ethics Committee that indicted one of the Abscam targets Senator Pete Williams of New Jersey and forced him to resign.) Why did Marie blow the whistle on her husband?
In the film, her character is portrayed as a drunken adulteress, who has been described by those involved with the production as “manipulative”, “really sick” and “crazy”. However, the truth is something far different.
By 1981, the Weinbergs were living in central Florida, and Marie discovered that the 57-yearold Weinberg had a long-time mistress , Evelyn Knight, 39 ( Sydney Prosser, played by Amy Adams in the film), who was 11 years her junior. He had set her up in a condo 15 miles away, and the name ‘Weinberg’ had been posted out front. She soon discovered that Knight had also legally changed her last name.
Marie, who was raised in a foster home and suffered from diabetes, had been devoted to Weinberg and her adoptive teenage son. I got to know her as a kind, generous and friendly woman. Weinberg immediately began to warn her to remain quiet, because a movie deal was planned for John Belushi to portray Weinberg as a hero. He also wanted her to remain silent about the fact that he had pocketed bribe money during Abscam, something that others were alleging, and the FBI then began to harass her as well.
She immediately moved toward a divorce, and fought back the only way she could: by going public. She turned to investigative Jack Anderson and me. After a number of explosive articles by Jack and myself, she appeared on ABC’s 20/20 in January of 1982, in an interview arranged by me with Tom Jariell through producer Gordon Freedman.
At that point the intimidation intensified. Weinberg had promised that he would spread ugly stories about her, which he immediately did, in order to have their son taken from her. A pastor that she had turned to was worried she might attempt suicide, which she denied.
But five days after the broadcast, she apparently took her own life by hanging herself, and left a note behind blaming her husband, saying that she didn’t have the strength to fight him anymore.
Shortly before Marie was to appear before the senate, I received a call from her son, JR, from Florida, informing that Marie was missing and that it was quite unlike her not to return home by 9 pm latest.
The following day—it was January end, 1982—I was in Jack’s office on 14th St NW in Washington DC. JR called me to say Marie had been found dead in a vacant adjoining condominium in Jupiter, Florida. The police report filed almost immediately said it was a suicide.
Her hair was in perfect shape and well permed. She was wearing rouge, lipstick and eye shadow and had powdered her face. In the living room was a round table with a pen and a notepad on which she had apparently written a suicide note. I asked a New York based investigator/ lawyer, Michael Dennis to rush to Florida as Marie’s family representative. He met JR and got a copy of the ‘suicide note’.
The next day, Mel “buried” Marie in an empty casket while her body was still in the morgue. The pastor did not know this. He probably did this to avoid a formal inquest. The actual burial took place a day later.
But nothing else came of it. The world just went on. Marie was quickly forgotten. Nobody raised the issue or even discussed her sworn affidavit and accusations at the Senate hearing on Senator Pete Williams’ expulsion a month later. Later, Pete Williams went to jail. America buried another scandal.
Weinberg continued to attack Marie and at the same time blamed others for her demise, including Jack and myself. Little more than a month after Marie’s death, Weinberg married his mistress Evelyn.
The movie did not materialize then, but after several attempts over the years it now finally has, with the Weinberg character once again as the likable conman. But thanks to the internet and social media, several websites now mention the real story, including Slate, Time magazine, The Daily Beast, History vs. Hollywood, New York magazine (through Vulture.com), The American Thinker and NBC news.com.
As one blogger noted: “I understand that changes can, will, and in general must be made to turn life into film. But I think we should examine those changes, especially when they stifle the characterization of a woman who has only ever been characterized by her husband. Especially when it’s another way that the living Mel Weinberg gets to keep his voice, while his dead ex-wife loses hers. And especially when we’ve turned her into fodder for comedy, laughing at her unhappiness, social anxiety, and depression. David O Russell did a disservice to Marie Weinberg and to Jennifer Lawrence….”
Badhwar’s exclusive interview with the real Marie Weinberg ( Rosenfeld in the movie )
Post Script:
Weinberg, now 90 years old, admits being paid a quarter million dollars for the film, and continues to attack his late wife, telling Newsday she was a “wacky broad”.
Shortly after I wrote about Marie’s tragedy, Mel, through a common source, threatened to break both my legs if I ever stepped into Florida. The following year, United Features Syndicate, which syndicated our column Washington Merry-go-Round, nominated me for the Pulitzer for the series of columns and reporting on Abscam. I’m sure the Pulitzer Committee, even though I am an alumnus of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, must have considered that as some kind of a perverted joke, considering that most American editors at the time regarded Weinberg as some kind of national hero for nailing a bunch of crooked politicians.
American Hustle promotes this myth-making, which took a heavy toll of human beings and the American system of justice.
The EXCLUSIVE EARLY 1982 INTERVIEW WITH THE REAL MARIE WEINBERG
| HUSTLE AND BUSTLE | THE ART OF ENTRAPMENT |
| Following our press accounts about the ABSCAM investigation, the US Congress held a series of hearings to examine FBI undercover operations.The House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights concluded with a report in April 1984. Among the concerns expressed during the hearings were the undercover agents’ involvement in illegal activity, the possibility of entrapping individuals, the prospect of damaging the reputations of innocent civilians, and the opportunity to undermine legitimate rights to privacy. It held that undercover techniques should be very carefully monitored as they “create serious risks to citizens’ property, privacy, and civil liberties, and may compromise law enforcement itself.” |
In US criminal law, a person is ‘entrapped’ when he is induced or persuaded by law enforcement officers or their agents to commit a crime that he had no previous intent to commit. A defendant who is subject to entrapment may not be convicted as a matter of public policy.However, there is no entrapment where a person is ready and willing to break the law and the government agents merely provide what appears to be a favorable opportunity for the person to commit the crime. In order to be found to be a victim of entrapment, the person must have been willing to commit the crime prior to the alleged entrapment. The mere providing of an opportunity to commit a crime is not entrapment. In order to find entrapment, there must be persuasion to commit a crime by the entrapping party.Entrapment is an affirmative defense, in which the defendant has the burden of proof. It excuses a criminal defendant from liability for crimes proved to have been induced by certain governmental persuasion or deceit. To claim inducement, a defendant must demonstrate that the governmentconduct created a situation in which an otherwise law-abiding citizen would commit an offense. The defendant must show that he or she was unduly persuaded, threatened, coerced, harassed or offered pleas based on sympathy orfriendship by police. |
| HUNG BY WORDS |
 MARIE’S SUICIDE NOTE“My sin was wanting to be loved”26 Jan 1982The only one who can forgive me is God.I cannot live with the knowledge of the lies and deceit perpetrated by one person – the lives of the people affected by the deceit. I cannot justify why all of these things were done – I leave that to a higher power.My sin was wanting to love and be loved, nothing more – but the campaign is being made by Mel to discredit me–I haven’t the strength to fight him any more – so by the act it will add credence to anything he says – so be it–Everything that I have attested to has been the truth – the affidavit and conversations with Gordon Friedman–Indy Badhwar – Richard Lee Bast & Michal F. Dennis as God is my witness.Mel has threatened me with taking my son from me – he will declare me an unfit mother – this was his crowning achievement – the one thing I could never bear. I can live with 14 years of deceit from Mel – but not the loss of my son – the only beautiful thing in my life.What I am about to do is cowardly – call it what you will – but may be if I had done something– spoke up earlier it may have changed things – The guilt is too much–forgive me. |
— with Ron Kolb, a Texas-based investigative reporter, in Florida, USA