("Quid coniuratio est?")
INTERVIEW WITH SHERMAN SKOLNICK -- MARCH 15, 1995
On March 15, 1995, I interviewed Mr. Sherman Skolnick of the Citizens' Committee to Clean-up the Courts [CCCC] by telephone. The following is my transcription of that interview. Note that in this interview I neither necessarily agree nor disagree with either all or some of the statements of Mr. Skolnick.
-- Brian Francis Redman, Editor-in-chief, Conspiracy Nation
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[...continued...]
SHERMAN SKOLNICK [continues]:
O.K.? And we were the only ones, so far as I know, that got that
["ZR Rifle"] on the air in the United States. We did. On our
program.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
I, you know, maybe if you re-run it I'll get a chance to see it.
Like I say, I've been fortunate enough to have seen... I like the
one on the Helen Brach story, where you had that lady on [who]
was talkin' about the...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah, right. They talk about the horse rackets as if it's minor
matters, when it's a very broad, what we call in our thing,
"horse mafia".
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
We try to tell the truth. But you know somethin'? That doesn't
make us out to be popular with the popular press. Here in
Chicago, it's almost forbidden for anybody on other television
stations, or in the print media, to utter a single word about the
existence of our program, even though we have over a half a
million viewers on Monday night. We're invisible as far as the
press is concerned. They're forbidden to say a single word, even
for us or against us. How do ya like that?
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Well, you know, having read The Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian
and Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky, I'm not that
surprised. They seem to do this routinely.
Regarding, say, the other panelists on the show: all of 'em seem very knowledgeable people -- Marc Sato, Jim Reis...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Well Jim Reis is an unusual stockbroker who risks his career, on
our program as well as his own program called "Wall Street Lies".
He tells about the frauds of Wall Street. And, he's on twice a
week, on his program.
And our moderator, Cliff Kelley, was formerly a Chicago alderman, who was framed and sent to jail in order to undermine the power of the first black Mayor in Chicago, Harold Washington -- who, because of our investigations, we believe that Harold Washington was murdered in 1987.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
That was gonna be one of my questions. Because in your
commentaries you've said that Harold Washington was murdered with
a poisoned cup of coffee.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Oh yeah! Well I interviewed everybody that pertains to the thing.
I've got, even the doctors from the hospital on tape. But I
promised them that during my lifetime -- or their lifetime --
that the tape will not be released, even if those in the media
call me a liar.
But the doctors... Northwestern Memorial Hospital is a half a block away from channel 2 television [CBS affiliate] in Chicago, WBBM-TV. And the doctors that worked on -- well, they worked on Harold's dead body, just to appease the public. He was already dead when he hit the floor in his office, O.K.?
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
They [the doctors] walked over to the television station and
talked to the higher-ups, that the Mayor's been poisoned! What
shall we do? And they invoked "national security". Having worked
at a radio broadcast school, I know certain things about
"national security" and broadcasters that are generally not
discussed. They have an unwritten rule that if a well-known
black dies, under odd circumstances, they are to, that evening,
quietly go on the air and say, "Such and such person died of a
heart attack."
So if Dr. King was "blown away" on a balcony today, tonight, they would quietly say, "He died of a heart attack in the hospital." Why? Because of the riots in 103 cities in April of 1968 when King was assassinated. That is when the broadcast policy was quietly invoked.
And so they invoked that policy against going on the air. I got the story, about Harold [Washington] being poisoned, on the air, on a, on two, black radio stations in Chicago. And the news director of one called me up after three days running the story and says, "We can't go any further, Mr. Skolnick."
I said, "Have you shown that the story is false?"
She says, "No. No."
But the major broadcasters, like WGN radio, which is tied in with the Tribune company, have got a very great influence here and they called the stations and said, "If you run Skolnick's story, you are gonna lose your license." Why? Because they've got the power with the FCC, that's why.
And so, that is what happened.
A network newswoman that I know told me that she verified that Harold was, Harold Washington was poisoned. And she verified it from her own medical sources and took it up with her editor in Washington. And the story never ran.
I'm the only one that went with the story. It ran with the major Japanese newswire service, JIJI Press Agency. It ran in the second largest newspaper in Australia, and elsewhere. But, in Chicago and elsewhere, if they mention me at all, they call me a liar -- and I don't care! I mean, I know I told the truth. I interviewed everybody; I did everything what a good journalist.
In April of '91 we did a show on our television about it, and a week later, the FBI planted a story at the Sun-Times that there had been plots to assassinate Harold Washington, but that the FBI was too busy to go into it and turned it over to the Secret Service, that didn't pursue it.
So they knew that there were plots against Harold Washington.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Who would ya think would be behind that?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Well, three or four forces, generally:
The New York bankers, the Rockefellers and others. Harold did an odd thing for a Mayor: he said, as a black man, that he was gonna give an equal chance to yellow-skinned bankers that wanted the city's business. Like Mitsubishi Bank. And the Rockefeller bankers, the Anglo-Saxon types, took great offense to that.
Further, he was going to take over the steam-generating plants of Commonwealth Edison, one of the largest nuclear energy electric companies in the United States. And he says their steam- generating plant within the city limits had been paid for, or fully amortized, and that he could bring electricity to Chicago as a municipal electric company -- instead of Edison, because their franchise was about to expire in 1989, two years after Harold was elected.
But he was gonna bring electricity to Chicago for as little as $10 a month for a household. It so happens that Commonwealth Edison -- among the largest stockholders (according to government documents) is the Pope, O.K.? An "absentee owner". He doesn't care how high the electric rates are in Chicago.
So those are two, uh...
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Motives.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
...two motives for "knocking him off". And they used the
traditional dark ages, medieval method of the Catholic hierarchy:
the poisoned cup of coffee. The Borgias and the Medicis, the
poisoned cup of... You know what I mean.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
That's different than blowing out his brains in an open car like
they did with Kennedy. You see what I'm saying? And I know a lot
about it; I can go on for hours relating all the details that we
compiled from 1987 until now, proving without a shadow of a
doubt that our first black Mayor was assassinated.
Who was involved? One of those that came often to Chicago was Major General Secord, whose name came up in the Iran-Contra thing.
The press did not mention that when his body hit the floor there was a national alert in 14 states, centered on Chicago, with the national guard. Not a word in the press. When his body hit the floor, a military helicopter appeared over the City Hall. And things of that sort. None of that ever got into the press.
His body was removed from the city that night. I interviewed the morticians that were involved; they wanted his body out of the legal jurisdiction here, until the funeral. That, and thousands of other details, would, would convince...
Also! I interviewed, on tape, the top honchos of ABC's local station, WLS-TV, channel 7 in Chicago. And they admitted, and I have... that they admitted that four doctors from the hospital called them and said that Skolnick's story is correct! O.K.? And, but they never put it on the air. I played that tape on two of the black radio stations in Chicago, O.K.? So at least the black community has heard that tape. It's one of the top honchos of channel 7 admitting that my story is correct, O.K.?
I've done everything as a good journalist. I, the popular press, they've gone along with all these things about "Oswald did it alone," "Harold Washington died of a heart attack" -- all those frauds upon the people. It's uh... And then they carry it over into their textbooks, also. You know.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K. There was this guy by the name of Nelson Algren, O.K.? He
wrote, he was a Chicago...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
The Man With The Golden Arm. [CN -- also, A Walk On The Wild
Side]
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah, yeah.
You kind of bring me to mind of that. Because, the way I understand it, Nelson Algren's books were very popular internationally. And yet, from what I've heard, you would go into a Chicago library and you couldn't find it.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
That's true.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah. So I mean, it...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
He was a persona non grata in Chicago.
And until I got on the television show in '91, the only way I could come before the public was my 5-minute recorded message, which we have been running since 1971.
I started the recorded message because they blanked me out. In the late '60s and early '70s, I was a news media hero as long as I was involved only in attacking Democrat judges and voting cases, O.K.? The minute I went after other, you know, on a non- partisan basis, both corrupt Democrat and Republican judges in the court, I got into trouble. Then I started, with my associates, an investigation of the CIA and FBI "assets" in the media -- former CIA people sitting as anchor people in Chicago -- I named them. I got "on the outs" with the media and they blanked me out. By 1971, it's as if I disappeared from the world.
[...to be continued...]
I encourage distribution of "Conspiracy Nation."
Coming to you from Illinois -- "The Land of Skolnick"