("Quid coniuratio est?")
INTERVIEW WITH SHERMAN SKOLNICK -- MARCH 27, 1995
On March 27, 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:
Yeah well she's been their press agent. And, she's the cousin
of Marcinkus. She... Her family knocked off the last letter of
her name; her name is Topinkas. So she calls it "Topinka".
CONSPIRACY NATION:
All right, but she's now, she got elected, didn't she?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
In November, yeah! We had her on just prior to the election.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
And she's what, State Treasurer now?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah. She's very friendly and personable [laughs]. I don't know
what to say!
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah! She was.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
All through that interview, she wanted to lint-pick me on whether
she was the press agent or lobbyist for the American Medical
Association. She says... She picked some other title. She was
their lobbyist, press agent... whatever. Public Relations Chief
-- as well as for the bank. And the bank is now owned by Pinnacle
Banc Group, which is the alter ego of BCCI.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah. But as far as Judy Barr-Topinkas, I give her credit...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Topinka.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
-- Oh yeah, Topinka -- I give her credit for even goin' on your
show. Because, you know, if I had anything to hide, I think the
last place I would go would be on your show. Just because, you
know, you don't pull any punches, it seems to me. I mean, you're
nice and everything...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Well she's a friend of our moderator.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K. And so, she seemed like a nice person.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
No, I tell ya what, why they go on our show. They got this
cynical view of the world, that if they can survive the pushing
and shoving that we give 'em, that they could survive any
opponent and get elected. In other words, we're the ones that
make the punching bag out of 'em. And they know that we got a
very large viewership in the Chicago area -- like a half a
million? And so, they feel... And we're about the only one-hour
show where they can really spout off their view. We let 'em talk
for about ten, fifteen minutes, and then I, we start in after 'em
[laughs]. You know? [laughs]
We've asked most of the candidates that were on our show during '94, what are they gonna do about the CIA? None of 'em would answer. The second question I asked 'em was (every candidate that was on our show, all the way from the County Board President election up to the ones runnin' for Governor), what would they do about the problem, prevalent in the United States, where the ultra rich pay no taxes at all? Nobody ever answers.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
I noticed that, the one question that you seemed to keep asking
was, what are you gonna do about the CIA and the dope business?
And...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Well Roland Burris answered in a joke: he says, "I'm gonna arrest
one of those, and bring him to your house!"
CONSPIRACY NATION:
[laughs] Well, yeah. But I mean, in general they seemed like...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
The guy that was running for the County Board on the GOP
[Republican] ticket, Joe Morris? I turned to him and I says, "You
know, you were the general counsel of the CIA pension fund."
And he looks at me, and he scratches his head.
I says, "Well were you or weren't you!?"
He says, "Yeah. I guess I was."
I said, "Well how does that qualify you to run for the County Board President? What... Is that a CIA operation or somethin'!?"
CONSPIRACY NATION:
[laughs]
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
[laughs] You know. [laughs] Most of 'em said that they can't do
anything about the dope and the CIA because "they're a local
affair."
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Yeah! They did that. And I also noticed that some of 'em did the
thing like, "What!? Are you saying...!? I'm gonna have to look
into..." You know, they feigned innocence. They feigned...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Oh there's been so many books published: Michael Levine, the
latest book by um, uh...
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Professor Cory, or somethin' like that?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Uh Professor... Oh geez. The one that wrote the book in '72, The
Politics of Heroin... Alfred McCoy! And he wrote an updated
version of it.
There's been so much documented about the CIA.
And then, a year ago or so, the 60 Minutes program on CBS network showed that the CIA was bringin' in planeloads from Venezuela!
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay, I don't want to cut you off. Because some of the stuff we
covered already.
Goin' back to this thing of the 50-year pact between the Vatican and the West...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
There's never, to my knowledge, been a story ever published about
it.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay. Because as far as what you say about people not bein' aware
of how much power the Vatican has: there's a group called "A-
albionic" -- I don't know if you've heard of...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah, yeah. They wrote to me about, they want me to know... They
want to know what documents I have about this pact. None have
ever existed that have ever been, you know, published or... We're
the only ones, because we know people that got close up to the
problem, and talked to us.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay, but they would support what you say about the power of the
Vatican. The way...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah, they wrote to me a letter, recently. But they, you know,
they think we got pictures and documents or somethin'. Some of
these things are just from personal testimony of people that were
right at the problem, that talked to us, off-the-record. And I
never mention who they are, because they'd be in big trouble if I
started mentioning who-all I talk to.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay, because they had... People send me e-mail, askin' me to ask
you questions about certain things. And they had asked me also to
ask you.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
They wanted to know the documents of the 50-year pact. Uh... It's
a secret, a bigger secret than the atomic bomb secret used to be.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K.
One of your commentaries talked about the Tribune had sicced attack dogs on striking workers?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Oh yeah, that's been discussed. In the, what they call the
"Freedom Center". One night, when the shift was about to change,
they came in with hired "security guards" and attack dogs, and
got the workers removed from the machines.
That's... Why? Is that supposed to be unknown!?
CONSPIRACY NATION:
No, I just have that written down. I just... If you have anything
further on that.
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
They broke the union, and they've got -- so far as I know --
they've got people running their presses and all that at half the
wages that they were. They used to get $16-and-somethin' an hour.
And they brought in scabs from the South at $8.50 an hour.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay, that was just a minor point I wanted to touch on.
It seems to me you had mentioned that you had been looking into a company called Archer Daniels Midland?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Uh... I'm tryin' to think, in what terms I may have mentioned it.
I don't know if I did a story about them. I don't think so.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
O.K.
Okay, here's somethin' I wanted to just kind of enter into "the record" here. It's a bit of a delicate subject, all right? But it's...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Whatever.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay, this is my hypothesis, okay? Because the media is totally
ignoring you, okay? And my hypothesis...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Well one of the newspapers, for example, here... One of their
writers also wrote a book on a certain subject. And this writer
was gonna be on our television, our cable show. And they told
her... forbade her. In other words, she can go on somebody else's
show, but they forbade her to go on our show.
In other words, what you may be gettin' at is, although our show is out-polling other television shows on Monday night at nine o'clock, nobody that's a radio or TV critic, or a writer for any in the mass media, the print media, will mention a single word, that we exist at all.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay, but what I'm getting to is that, for now they're ignoring
you. And this is my hypothesis that I wanted to get "on the
record" here: is that, at some... You're what? 65 years old now?
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Yeah.
CONSPIRACY NATION:
Okay. Nobody lives forever. And at some point (my hypothesis is
that), you know, you're gonna pass on. And I think that, about
five minutes after they've got you buried -- all right? --
then the press will "discover" you. All right? And...
SHERMAN SKOLNICK:
Well, for example, several years ago there was a report of a fire
on my street. So suddenly, channel 2 calls me up and says, "Is
that your house burning?"
And I says, "Hey! None of your wishful, cynical thinking. No. I'm not on fire."
[...to be continued...]
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Coming to you from Illinois -- "The Land of Skolnick"