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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
In 1994 Pottker began research on a book about the Mars family. Eringer, her dutiful "book packager," helped arrange for it to be published by Joel Joseph, the proprietor of National Press Books, a little-known entity in Bethesda. He told the circus that he would need $25,000 for Pottker's advance, according to his deposition.
Pottker had no idea, of course, that her book was secretly being funded by the circus. But the operation was right out of a CIA playbook. As George admitted in his deposition, the checks "came from ... a Ringling Bros. bank in Texas or Oklahoma or ... North Carolina or someplace," addressed to various mailboxes he and Eringer had rented. In espionage parlance, these are called an "accommodation address," as Eringer put it in his own deposition; they're used to obscure connections between spymasters and their agents. After depositing the money in accounts at the Chevy Chase Bank and Madison National Bank, they issued their own checks to National Press Books, which in turn made out its own checks to Pottker, according to the testimony of Eringer and George and evidence on file in the court.
Joel Joseph wasn't entirely witting about the operation, the agents assured Ken Feld in a memo. "The Washington publisher will never know the source of monies put up for Pottker's advance." He did, of course, know that he wasn't paying the advance -- Robert Eringer was.
Joseph denies knowing what George and Eringer were up to. "There may have been a conspiracy by the other defendants," Joseph wrote to the judge, "but ... National Press Books and Joel D. Joseph was not part of the conspiracy."
Feld's agents, meanwhile, had grudgingly come to admire Pottker's reporting, especially her "eye for detail," one memo reported. She had discovered, for example, that Mars had been lobbying the government to extend Daylight Savings Time one week, past Halloween, because it could mean an extra million dollars in candy sales. The two spooks also enjoyed her anecdote about how Mars once secretly funded a "research institute" in Princeton, N.J., that ginned up a study saying "chocolate is good for teeth." She was also working on an idea for a book about celebrity homes in Washington, they reported. Fine, Eringer told her: Let's do it together.
"When talk turned to the circus," they reported to Feld, "Pottker had very little to say. Why? She has no time to even think about Ringling Bros. Our projects have effectively diverted her from new investigations into Ringling Bros and from marketing her unpublished story on circus children."
Eventually, the Mars book was published. It got good reviews and a fair amount of attention, especially in Washington. But it was hard to find -- and it became much harder to find when National Press Books refused to honor a mere $300 invoice from a photographer who had supplied pictures for the book. Pottker begged them to pay it, and finally paid it herself, but it was too late: The photographer had gotten a court order to pull the books off the shelves. The publisher didn't fight it. The book was effectively killed.
A similar chain of events happened with Pottker's book "Celebrity Washington: Who They are, Where They Live and Why They're Famous." Eringer and Pottker launched the project as a "joint venture," according to court files. But as time went on, Pottker found Eringer's work unsatisfactory. She decided to drop him and publish the book on her own. "Eringer's apparent incompetence was in fact deliberate," her suit charges.
George and Eringer seemed ready to declare victory by the mid-1990s, having entangled Pottker in other ventures. But their next memo reported ominously that Pottker had "joined an organization called Investigative Reporters and Editors." The national organization of crusading journalists was founded in 1975 and gained recognition after the 1976 car-bombing murder of reporter Don Bolles by Arizona mobsters, but Feld's spies didn't know anything about it. "We will try to find out what that organization may be," they wrote. "Will keep you advised."
Then, there was more bad news, the spies reported: Pottker had a new idea for an article or book comparing Ringling Bros. to the Clyde Beatty circus, which she thought was a better-run outfit. More distressing: She had also been in contact with animal rights groups.
