The Fight for the Future of Philadelphia’s Newspapers

What Marimow means to Philadelphia is difficult to quantify. But longtime political operative Tom Massaro tells a story that gives a sense of his importance: In the early ’80s, Massaro arrived to run the housing department for then-mayor Bill Green and conferred with some of the city’s leading African-Americans.

“I need to know how a young white guy can gain the support of the people in the neighborhoods, who are mostly black,” Massaro said. “If I’m going to do any good, I’m going to need their help and their trust.”

“Talk to Bill Marimow,” they told him.

Massaro, new to town, could only ask: “Who’s Bill Marimow?”

Congressman William Gray answered: “Every day,” he said, “Bill Marimow is the guy who keeps hundreds of black boots out of thousands of black asses.”

Marimow, himself a young white guy, had gained the trust of dozens and dozens of neighborhood sources by exposing a litany of civil rights abuses by the city police, from beatings to dogs loosed on innocent citizens. He shook the city’s bones, dropped a dose of justice into its DNA, and delivered a master class on doing journalism in the process. “Bill would call his sources back,” says longtime Marimow colleague Vernon Loeb, now with the Houston Chronicle, “including the people we might consider his ‘targets,’ and say, ‘This is what I am planning to write,’ point by point, and give them another chance to respond.”

Marimow was tenacious about getting the truth out. “Sometimes,” says Loeb, “if he didn’t have all the sourcing or information, he would encourage sources to come forward or just make his point by writing a story in which he articulated the remaining questions.”

Writing about the 1985 MOVE tragedy, in which then-mayor Wilson Goode ordered a bomb dropped on a house occupied by black activists, Marimow questioned the official story that five of the 11 victims actually emerged from the fiery house only to retreat back inside, of their own accord, to die.

“If [the officers] are accurate in saying that either four or five people escaped from the MOVE house,” wrote Marimow, “their accounts raise questions about exactly what transpired in the back alley. … Did [Conrad Africa] choose to retreat into the flaming garage, where he died in the fire? If not, how did his body end up back in the house?”

The reputation Marimow forged, for toughness and integrity, gave him a unique allure in later years, particularly to owners with entrenched political and business interests. His old boss, Brian Tierney, saw him that way, even after leaving the papers. “Bringing [Marimow] on board will immediately and powerfully answer the concerns of editorial independence and integrity,” he wrote to new owners in an email later leaked to the media. “It makes the issue go away.”

Katz, too, felt that Marimow’s innate ability to quell people’s suspicions just by being there was a primary part of his value. Hiring Marimow, he’d later say in court testimony, meant landing an editor who’d “remove the stigma” from his ownership group. For a guy who earned his reputation asking questions, being known as the man who eliminates them is an odd niche to occupy. But as the deal moved closer, Katz and Phillips arranged for Norcross to meet with them and Marimow at Rembrandt’s restaurant in Fairmount.

Norcross’s spokesman claims Norcross didn’t know that Katz was engaged in a search for a new editor in chief for the Inquirer—or that he was involved romantically in a long-term relationship with an Inquirer reporter—until a couple weeks before closing the deal. Katz’s spokesman says Norcross knew “of the search for an editor long before” the meeting at Rembrandt’s.

The stress of being responsible for managing the deal wore on Norcross: six partners, $55 million in play, hedge funds to be satisfied. Because the media already questioned the group’s fitness to own a media company, they were working on a pledge to assure their non-interference in editorial “either directly or indirectly.” They also needed to define their own corporate governance.

In the end, the new company, Interstate General Media, included in its decision-
making process a six-man board consisting of all of its investors. But major business decisions would require the approval of both participants in a two-member management committee: Katz and Norcross.

All of these pieces were still coming together as the foursome sat down at Rembrandt’s. Katz left after the introductions. But Norcross went ahead and stuck around for about an hour.

The image is compelling: George Norcross, one of the most investigated men in the region, sitting across from Bill Marimow, the legendary investigator. Norcross has done a lot to change his image in recent years, plowing time and effort into Camden, opening a new charter school and guiding an ongoing expansion of Cooper Hospital. But he remains the all-powerful political boss of South Jersey. And anyone who does business with Norcross would be advised to listen to the Palmyra tapes, a series of 13-year-old recordings, captured by law enforcement, in which he can be heard seeking political retribution on all who dare oppose him and popping off angry fucks like gunshots. Norcross faced no legal trouble from the investigation, but the tapes comprise an unalloyed look into his thinking at the time. They also suggest not just a willingness to fight, and hurt, but a thirst. And the most memorable part of Norcross’s conversation with Marimow that day at Rembrandt’s suggests he never lost the taste.

“Don’t try to be friends with me,” Norcross cautioned Marimow. “I don’t become friends with the people that I work with. The white hat isn’t me. I’m the black hat.”