The Rise and Incredible Fall of a Vicious Extortion Ring That Preyed on Prominent Gay Men in the 1960s

History The Chickens and the Bulls July 11, 20125:00 AM A John lights a cigarette for a young male prostitute in August, 1965 in front of Astor Pharmacy in Times Square. IC Rapoport On a sleepy Sunday morning in late July 1965, Detective 3rd Grade James McDonnell received a call in the upstairs squad room of midtown Manhattan’s 17th Precinct. There was a man at the Western Union office in Grand Central Station who might be impersonating a police detective, he was told. The man was in the company of a 14-year-old runaway and had contacted the boy’s father in Texas to wire plane fare so the son could fly home. The father had grown suspicious when the man had asked for $150—twice the needed amount. McDonnell quickly drove the 10 blocks to Grand Central, parking his unmarked black sedan on Lexington Avenue and hurrying down to the terminal’s lower level. Criminal impersonation of a police officer was an E felony—a “good collar,” as cops like to say, and if the perp had a gun, even better. There’d also been chatter on the detective grapevine about a number of recent cases of phony policemen, so McDonnell was eager to see what was up. Inside the Western Union office, McDonnell saw a man who looked just like a New York detective—“calm, good looking, sharply dressed,” the now 89-year-old retired detective recalls. But when McDonnell flashed his gold shield to the “detective,” the man was slow to show his own, and was also reluctant to tell McDonnell what squad he was from, making McDonnell suspicious. McDonnell asked the man if he had filled out an incident report, or a “5” as it was known in detective parlance. When the “detective” asked what a “5” was, McDonnell knew something wasn’t right. “I told the clerk to lock the door so we could sort everything out,” and handed the clerk a slip of paper with the precinct phone number on it so he could call for backup. Meanwhile, McDonnell kept his eyes on the bogus detective’s hands, just in case he tried to pull a gun.

In a matter of minutes, four burly uniformed officers barged into the Western Union office, and McDonnell handcuffed the suspect without resistance. Once restrained, 34-year-old John Aitken got panicky. He’d been arrested before for child molestation, and if he was charged with corruption of a minor, as he might be now, he could be facing a serious prison sentence. Aitken told McDonnell he was trying to do the runaway a favor. He had used the kid in a robbery scheme but “the kid was too green.” He felt sorry for him and had just wanted his “cut” for doing a good deed by helping him get home. If McDonnell could make sure he wouldn’t do heavy time for the charge he was facing now, Aitken said, he could give information on something much bigger, something that involved big names and lots of money. As Aitken’s interrogation proceeded back at the 17th squad room, he confessed that he had knowledge of an extortion ring that had shaken down dozens of prominent closeted homosexual men across the country—most of them married and with families. “Nobody could believe the names he was naming, or the amount of dough they were being shaken down for,” McDonnell recalls. “Once he started talking, you couldn’t shut him up. I barely got home that night.” McDonnell’s squad commander gave him the time he asked for to investigate and confirm Aitken’s tale. Aitken’s tips led to a quick arrest of the security director of the New York Hilton, and indications that the operation was national in scope. “I couldn’t believe what I was looking at,” McDonnell says. “It just went on and on.” In early August, a couple of weeks after the Aitken collar, McDonnell received an order from the chief of detectives’ office to report down to the Manhattan district attorney’s rackets squad, with his notes. A chicken awaits potential clients in Times Square in August 1965. IC Rapoport In the year following the Western Union arrest, the NYPD and the FBI, working in parallel (and sometimes at odds), would uncover and break a massive gay extortion ring whose viciousness and criminal flair was without precedent.

Impersonating corrupt vice-squad detectives, members of this ring, known in police parlance as bulls, had used young, often underage men known as chickens to successfully blackmail closeted pillars of the establishment, among them a navy admiral, two generals, a U.S. congressman, a prominent surgeon, an Ivy League professor, a prep school headmaster, and several well-known actors, singers, and television personalities. The ring had operated for almost a decade, had victimized thousands, and had taken in at least $2 million. When he announced in 1966 that the ring had been broken up, Manhattan DA Frank Hogan said the victims had all been shaken down “on the threat that their homosexual proclivities would be exposed unless they paid for silence.” Though now almost forgotten, the case of “the Chickens and the Bulls” as the NYPD called it (or “Operation Homex,” to the FBI), still stands as the most far-flung, most organized, and most brazen example of homosexual extortion in the nation’s history. And while the Stonewall riot in June 1969 is considered by many to be the pivotal moment in gay civil rights, this case represents an important crux too, marking the first time that the law enforcement establishment actually worked on behalf of victimized gay men, instead of locking them up or shrugging. By the summer of 1965, Frank Hogan had been Manhattan district attorney for almost 25 years, earning the nickname Mr. Integrity. The NYPD detectives who worked in the office’s various investigative bureaus were considered “the pick of the force,” as The New Yorker’s Richard Rovere put it. They wore sharp suits, crisp shirts, silk ties and Old Spice after-shave. The Rackets Squad, which investigated unlawful doings in the garment, construction and trucking industries as well as labor union corruption and some organized crime activity, was particularly favored by Hogan, who had once been its senior prosecutor before becoming DA. The squad’s commander, Inspector Paul Vitrano, enjoyed Hogan’s confidence for the work the squad had performed on numerous, highly publicized cases. Jim McDonnell had 15 years as a detective and shared the working-class, Irish Catholic background of most of the of Rackets Squad members, but he still felt like an outsider when he arrived to brief them on the information he’d developed.

At the time McDonnell was assigned to Rackets, the DA’s office had been “looking at” a couple of police impersonation cases and had received a couple of letters, most of them anonymous, alerting them to homosexual blackmail incidents. An earlier discovery of an NYPD arrest warrant and a knock-off of an NYPD detective’s shield, on an Eastern Airlines flight between New York and Miami, had raised suspicions that something outside the usual parameters of a police impersonation case was in play. The information McDonnell came in with connected the dots, allowing the office to see that the cases were not isolated and that an extortion operation of significant size was at work. A policeman in tight pants poses as a chicken in Hollywood in 1964, waiting to be solicited by male customers cruising by in cars. It was actual law enforcement takedowns of homosexual activity, like this, which enabled imposter police. Bill Eppridge. McDonnell was only on temporary assignment to the rackets squad, but he insisted on “running” the principal informant he had developed. That informant was Edward Murphy, the Hilton hotel security director who he had arrested shortly after the Western Union incident. Although the Manhattan DA’s office got into the case first, the FBI was not far behind. Around the same time as the Western Union incident in New York, a renowned paleontologist and professor emeritus from Princeton walked into a New Jersey FBI field office and explained that two men claiming to be federal agents had confronted him about a homosexual assignation with a male prostitute in Washington, D.C. The “agents,” he said, had told him the prostitute was underage but that they could process the matter through back channels if the professor gave the agents $11,000 in “bail money.” After waiting for his money to be returned, as the agents stipulated they would in their “arrangement,” the professor now suspected he’d been had, and wanted the FBI to help him get the money back. This federal involvement was led by Robert Morgenthau, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District in New York. (Morgenthau would later succeed Frank Hogan as Manhattan DA, holding that office for 35 years.)

Morgenthau’s deputy was Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Maloney, who would later become the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District (Brooklyn) under Ronald Reagan, where he convicted John Gotti. The lead FBI agent in New York was Special Agent Paul Brana, who went on to become director of security for the New York Times. This photo first appeared in Life’s 1964 issue about homosexuality. Barney Anthony put up a sign warning homosexuals to stay out of his Hollywood bar. “I don’t like him,” he said. “There’s no excuse. They’ll approach any nice-looking guy. Anybody does any recruiting, I say shoot him. Who cares?” Bill Eppridge That a gay extortion ring existed in the mid-1960s was hardly a surprise. Broad societal homophobia set the stage for extortion, offering blackmailers lots of leverage. Closeted gay men, if exposed, could expect their careers wrecked, marriages ruined and friendships destroyed. Scandal sheets like Confidential magazine took exceptional delight in outing the prominent, publishing cruel, mocking exposes littered with snide references to “tearoom arrests,” “lavender stripes,” “double-gaitedness,” and “forbidden satisfactions.” Even more-respectable precincts of the press could be disdainful. In its review of Basil Dearden’s 1961 British blackmail thriller, Victim, which was instrumental in the repeal of anti-sodomy laws in the U.K., Time magazine scorned the film’s “implicit approval of homosexuality as a practice.”* A 1963 New York Times report, headlined “Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern,” cited the general belief “that strict enforcement of the law against seduction of minors is important to protect borderline cases from adult influences that could swing them toward homosexual orientation when heterosexual adjustment was still possible.” Law enforcement was especially homophobic. In most states, homosexuality (sodomy) was a punishable offense. In many cities, the police engaged in entrapment campaigns, sending uncover officers into public restrooms, bathhouses, or gay bars to be propositioned or to offer sex before making an arrest, often fabricating evidence.