Part 41, page 409

Transcript

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NEW WEST INTELLIGENCE

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Mystery Project: Scoop at CBS

A special investigative team from 60 Minutes has secretly finished work on what may be the program's biggest show ever. Mike Wallace and a CBS team have been working on what is dubbed "The Mystery Project" at network headquarters; they've reportedly developed new information in the case of missing skyjacker D.B.

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Missing link: D.B. Cooper.

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Cooper, and have linked Cooper to the Martin Luther King assassination.

Two reliable TV news sources—one close to the 60 Minutes producers—confirm that the story is completed and in the hands of attorneys and high-level officials at the network.

Details are sketchy on the big scoop, but it has been learned that the 60 Minutes crew has filmed interviews in Seattle,

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King killer: James Earl Ray.

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Hawaii and Los Angeles (recent Los Angeles interviews were filmed at the L.A. airport using a fictitious story as a cover). They have reportedly found people who knew the mysterious Cooper, who parachuted from a Northwest Orient 727 with a $200,000 ransom on November 24, 1971, and was never found. One TV journalist said the news story reports that Cooper survived the jump—and may be alive today.

It is unclear how Cooper has been tied to the King slaying (April 4, 1968), for which James Earl Ray is presently serving a 99-year prison sentence. None of the 60 Minutes people contacted was willing to talk about the Cooper-Ray connection.

A former CBS producer, Dirk Summers, now a freelance author and screenwriter in Los Angeles, has been working on the story for more than two years and has picked up "a five-figure" advance from a

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book publisher for a "docu-drama" on the subject. He brought 60 Minutes into the picture nine months ago, and is orchestrating public release of the blockbuster. Although he admitted he has spent "a lot of time in the mountains of the Northwest" and that the story involves a hijacking and murder—"one of the biggest crimes in the past century"—Summers refused to discuss specifics of the story. "We're not ready to break it for several months." Then he added: "The story reaches the highest offices of the government. It's the kind of story an investigative reporter waits a lifetime for." Summers said a top newsman at CBS has told him the piece "might be the story of the century."

Another TV journalist close to the story said if the CBS hierarchy decides to go with the program it will be aired on the first or second show of the new season. —Bruce Henderson

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Ex-Supe Scores Legal Funds

The honor of having your very own defense fund has usually been reserved for such radical superstars as Angela Davis and the Chicago Seven. But now a would-be President Carter appointee has hit the California defense-fund circuit with an appeal for financial help. While former San Francisco supervisor—and Carter's choice as assistant secretary of the interior—Robert Mendelsohn will spend most of this month in court fending off charges that he misrepresented campaign-fund sources, attorney William Coblentz, Democratic party bigwig and UC Board of Regents chairman, will act as the trustee of a Mendelsohn defense fund. Coblentz has been pursuing a select group of Mendelsohn loyalists by sending a form letter reminding them that defending attorneys "to date have not been paid for their services." —Randy Shilts

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Strong Brown Garners Long Green

Insiders estimate that Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr.'s reelection war chest will reach the $420,000 mark by income-tax day, April 15. The bulk of this, some $300,000, has been raised through a series of private cocktail parties and other small, exclusive gatherings—most of them held in the southern portion of the state, where the Field Poll reveals Brown is strongest.

More traditional fund-raising dinners will be held up and down the state, starting in the middle of this month, to produce an expected $400,000 more for Brown's coffers. By primary time, Brown is likely to have raised almost $1.2 million—much of which will be earmarked for the general election.

Not bad for a politician who had trouble paying off his 1976 presidential campaign debt. —Dan Blackburn

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CHARLES DENSON Ain't we got funds: Jerry fills his coffers for the campaign fray.

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Friends Hustle To Flynt Vigil

There was a lot of praying going on as three prominent men—an unlikely triumvirate—kept an all-night vigil at the bedside of Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, gunned down five days earlier by an unknown assailant.

Suffering from cardiac irregularity, pneumonia and various infections, Flynt was hovering near death after doctors at Atlanta's Emory University Hospital removed the 44-caliber slug from the base of his spine. A medical team member said "only a miracle" would get him through the next 36 hours. Praying, side by side, for that miracle were: activist/comedian Dick Gregory, Georgia State Senator Julian Bond and . . . Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, himself a sniper victim, who was secretly brought into the hospital through an underground garage when Flynt's condition looked most critical.

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8 NEW WEST/APRIL 24, 1978

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