In late July 1965, a call came in to the Midtown Manhattan precinct of the NYPD from a Western Union office in Grand Central Station. A man who appeared to be impersonating a police officer had walked into the Western Union in the company of a 14-year-old runaway and had contacted the boy's father in Texas, asking him to wire $150 for plane fair to send the boy home. The father had grown suspicious after realizing the man was asking for nearly double the actual price of a plane ticket and decided to call police. The fake cop turned out to be a 34-year-old man named John Akin, a felon with a prior conviction for child sexual abuse, who claimed he was just trying to do the boy a favor. Realizing that he was likely facing prison time, Akin told police that he could provide them with information about a much bigger crime involving famous names and large sums of money, he told the detective, James MacDonald, about an extortion ring that had targeted closeted gay men throughout the US, many of whom were married with families, listing off names of victims that included prominent politicians and entertainers. Over the next year, the NYPD and the FBI would discover the true extent of the operation. A blackmail ring of at least 70 men had extorted at least $2M, about $20M in 2025 money, from thousands of victims over less than a decade with a list of victims that allegedly included: Admiral William Church, the brother of the Democratic Senator and famous CIA critic Frank Church, as well as the head of the American Medical Association; two generals; the Republican Congressman and House Foreign Affairs Committee member Peter Frelinghuysen, Malcolm Forbes from Forbes magazine, a professor from Princeton University; the Catholic cardinal of New York; Francis Spellman; famous rock musicians; a prominent surgeon; a prep school headmaster; multiple US senators; heads of business firms; several well-known politicians; actors; singers; and television personalities, including Liberace; and perhaps most importantly, J. Edgar Hoover and his partner Clyde Tulson.
The blackmail ring, which was centered in New York and Chicago, but operated all across the country, used several methods of extortion, but the most common ones involved sending attractive, often underage young men referred to as chickens into specific hotels frequented by older, wealthier homosexuals, intending to meet such men for purposes of prostitution, and then having members of the ring known as bulls intercede posing as corrupt vice squad detectives demanding bribes from the victim. In some cases, the chicken would lure the victim into a hotel room and then once he was in a compromising position, the bulls would bust into the room, display their fake police badges, and handcuff the victim. After explaining the penalties for violating sodomy laws or corrupting a minor, the bulls would either directly solicit a bribe or tell the victim that he could pay ''bail money'' upfront to prevent his arrest from going public. In other cases, the chicken would bring his victim into a hotel room and then rob him of his personal effects. The chickens would get to keep any money or valuables they stole, while the bulls kept the IDs and credit cards for themselves. Weeks later, after identifying the victim from his ID card, the bulls would contact him, posing as corrupt police officers and suggest that he'd been identified in relation to a gay prostitution ring. The fake cops would convince the victim he was facing possible arrest or subpoena as a witness, and when they felt he was sufficiently scared, offer to make it all go away for a fee. Prosecuting the extortionists proved difficult, primarily because no one involved wanted to testify: the victims were understandably scared of the effects that being publicly outed would have on their families and careers, and most decided it simply wasn't worth coming forward. The chickens were mostly runaways and transient hustlers who were hard to track down, and the ones police were able to find weren't exactly ideal witnesses. The strategy the prosecutors settled on was to try and flip as many of the blackmail ring's members as possible and have them testify against each other or take plea deals to minimize the number of victims who would have to testify in open court. The investigation would reveal that despite employing at least 70 bowls and dozens if not hundreds of male prostitutes. The ring was ultimately controlled by three men, John Pine, (((Sherman Kaminsky, and Ed Murphy.
Operating out of Chicago was Pine, a former Chicago cop who maintained a nationwide network of police department employees as informants. When he was arrested, police found in his possession dozens of police badges and arrest forms, warrants, and extradition forms from virtually every jurisdiction in the country.
Kaminsky, who used the alias Paul Vargo, was based out of New York, Baltimore, and Chicago, and is believed to have served in the Israeli army, although little else is known about his background.
The third ring leader was a WWII veteran and convicted felon named Ed Murphy, who, in addition to running the blackmail ring, worked as both a pimp and a bouncer for various gay bars in New York. Just months before his apprehension in the Chickens and the Bulls case, Murphy had been arrested in a separate blackmail ring operating out of the New York Hilton Hotel, which had extorted over $100K from wealthy gay men in much the same manner. Authorities announced the arrests as they happened, but press coverage was sporadic, and at the encouragement of the DA's office, the media refrained from identifying any of the victims or airing out any of the sorted sexual details. But there was another strange aspect to the media's treatment of the case. According to the book, Stonewall by David Carter, a particularly noteworthy feature about the contemporary news accounts of the story is that the initial newspaper stories listed Edward Murphy as one of the arrested extortionists, but afterward his name disappeared from the newspaper coverage. For example, in nine New York Times articles on the case published between February 18, 1966 and July 12th, 1967. Murphy was never mentioned again after the initial February 18, 1966 story. Yet, the initial news story made it clear that Murphy was one of the three ring leaders, if not the head of the entire operation. In March of 1968, the Mattachine Society of New York (MSNY) newsletter, published by the gay rights activist group the MSNY Society, asked why Murphy had not been sentenced for his role in the blackmail ring. The newsletter stated that not only had Murphy served several prior prison terms, but he also had recently plead guilty under a federal indictment to extortion charges and was under a number of indictments at the state level. After pleading guilty to the federal extortion charge, Murphy had merely been put on probation for 5 years. The newsletter reported that MSNY, had been informed that Murphy's sentence: ''had been so often postponed because he'd made a deal to turn state's evidence and the delays are to work out another deal to lighten his sentence. Murphy apparently did give evidence against the two other main figures in the ring. John J. Pyne, a Chicago police officer, and Sherman Chadwick Kaminsky, a Bronx native who also went by the name Paul Vargo. However, that Murphy, after having been to prison several times before, could get off with serving only part of a 5-year sentence, merely for giving evidence against his co-conspirators, despite shaking down approximately 1,000 men over almost 10 years, including a number of men of very eminent social rank, as detailed earlier, is astonishing. Moreover, while several names emerged in the newspaper accounts as key players in the scheme, word on the street said that the gang had one ring leader. The MSNY newsletter of March 1968 named Ed Murphy as that person. The theory of a single person at the head of the enterprise is bolstered by a letter from Richard Inman, a homophile activist battling police extortion of homosexuals in South Florida. Written to MSNY Washington co-founder Jack Nichols in 1965. In the letter, Inman stated that he knew via a friend inside the FBI that there was one boss man of the syndicate's homo shakeddown detail for the whole US. That Inman wrote the letter before the police uncovered the national ring adds to its credibility.''
Despite the DA's moratorium on naming the victims, the chicken and the bulls case did receive relatively substantial press coverage following the arrests and prosecutions of its ring leaders, even if it was largely treated as a local story compared to the cases covered thus far. The Chickens and the Bulls case was the only one which received contemporaneous press coverage, and more importantly, it actually went to trial and at least some aspects were proven in court. One fact that can't be discounted is the wild discrepancy in the sentences handed down to the different ring leaders. The ex- Chicago cop John Pyne got two consecutive 20-year sentences. Sherman Kaminsky agreed to plead guilty, but during plea negotiations, one of his victims committed suicide, and fearing the possibility of additional manslaughter charges, Kaminsky fled, becoming a fugitive for 11 years. Kaminsky was apprehended in 1978, long after any press attention or political pressure had subsided, and he struck a deal with prosecutors to testify in a different case. This time, against one of the central conspirators and the Orlando Latellier assassination in exchange for admission into the federal witness protection program; Orlando Latellier was a critic of the Augusto Pinochet regime of Chile who was assassinated with a car-bomb in Washington DC ostensibly by agents of the Chilean intelligence agency known as Dina. It's long been speculated that the CIA had at least tacitly approved, if not directly, participated in Latellier's assassination as part of Operation Condor, either through training, funding, or just looking the other way. Kaminsky's role was as a jailhouse informant, testifying in court that one of the plots's alleged ring leaders had divulged incriminating information to him. It seems notable that this ex-con fugitive, Kaminsky, almost immediately upon his arrest turned federal informant in a highly politically sensitive case, providing information that the government considered so valuable that it canceled out his years of blackmail. Was this a pre-existing relationship between Kaminsky and the feds? Had he been an informant all along and the prosecutors or case agents just planted him in the same jail as the assassins, knowing they could rely on him to elicit a confession or just concoct one? This became an issue in the Latellier case when the judge ultimately ruled that Kaminsky had been acting as an agent of the US government when he questioned the alleged assassins in jail.
But even Kaminsky's seemingly incredible good luck doesn't match the leniency shown to the actual ring leader, Ed Murphy. Despite having been charged in a separate blackmail operation just months before his arrest in the chickens and the bulls case, being under state level indictments for blackmail in multiple states and already having a long rap sheet, Murphy came out with a sentence of just 5 years probation with no prison time. And even more incredibly, the evidence suggests that Ed Murphy continued or even expanded his blackmail operation after being put on federal probation. According to David Carter's book, Stonewall, information uncovered in researching this history suggests that having the goods on Hoover, Ed Murphy continued to blackmail homosexual men using the Stonewall Inn as a prime local for this new extortion operation. There, he targeted professional gay men, especially those working on Wall Street. According to the same 1968 New MSNY newsletter that asked why Ed Murphy had not been sentenced for his role in the national blackmail ring, Murphy had an interest in several gay bars in New York, including the Stonewall Inn, the only club identified in the article, and these clubs membership lists had been used for blackmail: ''The MSNY has also been informed that Murphy has an interest in the Stonewall, a club on Christopher Street and several other gay clubs in New York. Our source claims that the membership lists of some of these clubs are used to further extortion and shakedown schemes.'' Stronger evidence of Murphy using the Stonewall Inn for blackmail comes from a 1969 publication that quoted the Madison Society of New York. In the 1960s, it was not easy to find gay bars. And so, as a service, the Madison Society of New York began compiling lists of these bars. Eventually, a local guide was published by a small business venture as the Gay Scene Guide. and the publishers on friendly terms with MSNY quoted material from that organization's newsletter. Still, the bar lists remain just that, lists of gay bars, but with one exception. In the 1969 gay scene guide after the entry for the Stonewall in, there was a long quote from the MSNY newsletter inserted in the midst of the brief descriptions of gay bars. The following news item was reported in the March, 1968 MSNY newsletter and is presented here in condensed form: ''The MSNY was instrumental in aiding DA Frank Hogan's office with information that led to the arrests of a number of blackmailers. Edward F.P. Murphy, an ex-convict who is alleged to have been the head of the National Ring, which recently was active in extorting money from homosexuals, has served prison terms for larceny and for carrying deadly weapons and was arrested for impersonating an officer and for extortion under federal indictment on extortion charges, permitted to plead guilty and received a 5-year probation. On a number of indictments in the state courts, Murphy pleaded guilty on May 16, 1966. Sentencing has been postponed six times. He could get up to 15 years in prison as a second offender on the robbery charge alone. MSNY has also been informed that Murphy has an interest in the Stonewall, a club on Christopher Street, and several other gay clubs in New York. We caution our readers never to use your real name when cruising. Never give your address to a questionable bar or club. And remember, that trick or hustler you've just picked up may be working for the management. We urge you, if you've been intimidated or blackmailed in the past, to report it to the DA's office or to the MSNY.''
That a local guide book took the unusual step of inserting a warning against giving out information to employees of the Stonewall Inn in the middle of a bar listing is more than suggestive. Indeed, several years later, Dick Leitisch was quite forceful about Murphy's role at the Stonewall Inn, writing that he seemed to be the manager of the place. The homosexual handbook reported that the burly at the door of the Stonewall Inn keeps boxes that hold or are rumored to hold thousands of cards, upon which are printed the particulars of the many thousands of customers which echo some of the ideas found in the MSNY newsletter article and may explain part of how the blackmail routine operated. Did some customers naively believe that they were really being screened for membership in a private club and that the screening would protect them by both excluding police officers and helping to establish the identity of the place they patronized as a legitimate private club? Beyond Murphy's involvement in the Stonewall Inn and in blackmailing gay men, he was deeply involved in male prostitution. Chuck Shaheen, who had a very high regard for Murphy, told Marty Duberman: "I knew Eddie Murphy for a long time. He was into young boys, most definitely and was very, very involved with procurement of young boys." Danny Garvin recalls how he would: ''always see these hustlers hanging out with [Murphy]. He had connections and these hustler kids would hang out with him.'' Bob Kohler, who hated Murphy passionately, cited, as evidence of Murphy's lonesomeness, that he paid the youths he pimped with counterfeit money. Research on this book uncovered a couple of elusive references to a prostitution ring that was run on the second floor above the Stonewall Inn. When one looks at all the available evidence today, there is little doubt that such a ring operated out of the floor above the Stonewall Inn, although few know it existed. But by Murphy's own account: ''upstairs, the mafia retained a room.''
In the late 1970s, a friend of Murphy's told Morty Manford that Ed Murphy said that he had been informing on the mob to the FBI. Murphy's friend went on to explain that because the mob had discovered that Murphy was an informer, Murphy had decided to come out, stop working with the mob, and quit informing. Manford reacted skeptically to Murphy's claim of being an FBI informer by saying: "I've heard that he was involved in a ring that was blackmailing homosexual men down at Wall Street." So, does Carter's evidence here stand up to scrutiny? Much of his information came from gay rights organizations like the MSNY Society in the context of explicit warnings to other gay men about Murphy's blackmail operations. It seems unlikely that activists like this would intentionally lie or report unsubstantiated rumors about a matter of such significance to their community; and the existence of contemporaneous documentary evidence like the MSNY Society newsletters as opposed to just decades old anecdotes like in other cases certainly lends the allegations some credibility. The quote where Murphy allegedly admitted to being an FBI informant came from an interview conducted by the International Gay Information Center with a famous gay rights activist named Morty Manford. But Manford was reporting secondhand information, something he'd allegedly heard from a friend of Murphy's. But even the most skeptical reading still has to explain Murphy's incredible ability to avoid arrest and incarceration, despite having been perhaps the most prolific gay blackmailer of his era with a reputation for extortion that was so well established that gay rights organizations were printing warnings about him in their newsletters.
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By: Psych History Show
Raped by: Otto Heckel
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