An earlier version of this essay about Morty Matz was co-written a few years ago by Jerry Schmetterer, a 23-year veteran of the Daily News as a reporter, bureau chief and metropolitan editor, and his dear friend of more than 60 years, Matz, who you will soon learn about. Jerry died three years ago while Morty lives on.
I turn 100-years-old in two days, on July 23, and much of what I’ve accomplished during the 75 years I’ve worked in the media can be seen and heard every day as journalists, politicians, sports heroes, movie actors, crooks and creeps deliver their distinctive messages to their respective constituents. You’ve got to know where to look.
I’ve spent my career as “Zelig,” the anonymous figure who, off camera or in the background, had something to do with the important events of the day. I’m the guy a reporter calls at 4 a.m. when he learns a popular congressman is being arrested at 8. Or, after an unassuming technician gets himself arrested for killing a teenager on the subway, he calls his lawyer first. He calls me next.
I was right there when the public officials and civic leaders who sponsored an unremarkable race in Central Park in the 1970s were looking for a way to make it a world-class event. When I suggested to Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton that the course be expanded into all five boroughs, the New York Marathon was born.
When the real Godfather walked around Greenwich Village in a bathrobe feigning madness to avoid prosecution, it was me who reporters called to find out what that was all about.
You aren’t born to be Zelig. I graduated from Amherst College and served as a navigator on a B-29 during World War II. I rose to become picture assignment editor in my late 20s at the Daily News, New York’s Picture Newspaper, tasked with directing its photographers to the stories that framed New York.
I thrived as a quick thinking streetwise news guy. I developed a reputation as having that mysterious “nose for news.” I knew my city inside out. I knew which politicians were worth pursuing, who were full of crap and which would pose for any picture you needed so they could get on the Daily News pages.
I thrived on learning secrets and hidden strategies, then selectively sharing my knowledge. Journalists became my family, and I became an expert at influencing them to the benefit of my clients. These relationships were built on trust.
I loved my background role as the go-to guy who knew where the bodies were buried (my clients buried some of them) and parlayed that knowledge as currency to protect the image of help improve the image of the people I worked for by persuading reporters to give my clients the benefit of the doubt or, better yet in some cases, to disregard them altogether.
I was affectionately known to New York’s journalists, politicians, gazillionaire businessmen, gangsters, lawyers, actors, carney pitchmen, cops and short order cooks as Morty.
During my time as a picture assignment editor at The News, I got the opportunity to do public relations for WINS, one of New York’s radio stations, which was in the forefront of the rock ’n’ roll revolution with such legendary disc jockeys as Alan Freed and Murray the K.
I was earning $200 a week at The News and $250 for one day’s work at WINS, something that no one would ever be allowed by a news company to do today. My closest friends were pushing me to go full time in public relations. They said I would have more influence and make more money. Then the esteemed radio pioneer J. Elroy McCaw, who owned WINS and appreciated my work, made the decision easy for me.
He offered me a fully equipped office space at the station and said I could run my own business from there.
I eventually represented 10 radio stations and once had to explain how Murray the K’s mother got credit and royalties for writing Bobby Darin’s breakthrough hit “Splish Splash.”
My business grew quickly. I eventually was media advisor to the lawyer for Vinnie “the Chin” Gigante — the mobster in the bathrobe — as well as Gov. Mario Cuomo, Jimmy Carter, and Congressman Mario Biaggi, the most popular New York politician who ever went to jail.
The killer racehorse trainer Buddy Jacobson, the great Hollywood star Mary Pickford, the pin-up girl Bettie Page, the scandal-riddled Bronx Democratic Party, Brooklyn’s notorious political boss Meade Esposito and legendary District Attorney Charles “Joe” Hynes all came to me to either get their names in the papers or keep them out. Or, at the very least, to get their side of the story told.
Along the way I raised a family, two daughters and son and my former office assistant became a respected public relations pro in her own right. I became an expert on New York restaurants and the history of neighborhoods. My real estate work made me privy to the wheeling and dealings of the city’s real estate families.
I befriended and mentored many journalists: Jimmy Breslin, Jack Newfield, Sam Roberts, and Nick Pileggi were and are my close friends. Reporters knew they would get the truth from me, though of course with my spin attached, which they could take or leave.
I worked in the Yiddish theater, during its dying days in the 1960s with Molly Picon. The Coney Island Chamber of Commerce was a client when Coney was still a vital place, a paradise for the working New Yorker.
I worked much of the Coney beat with the wonderful pitchman Max Rosey. I also created The Loyal League of Yiddish Sons of Erin and it was a major news hit through the 1970s and ’80s. On slow news days reporters knew they could get something from me or Rosey out of Coney Island.
We “handled” Nathan’s legendary hot dog stand on Surf Ave. as a client and invented the July Fourth Hot Dog Eating Contest, which has now become the model for an entire league of food eating contests run by the Shea brothers who worked for me and now run a big firm specializing in real estate public relations.
I worked for 10 politician clients who were either indicted or convicted. I developed a reputation for helping them control their image in the media.
I represented the Bronx politician who got caught in the Parking Violations Bureau scandals, of the mid-80s.
That is when a piece of my advice became famous.
Stanley Friedman, the head of the Bronx Democratic Party, had to show up in court to hear the charges against him. The night before, I was a part of the strategy planning team. When our meeting ended Stanley asked me if there was any one piece of advice I could give him when he met the public as a criminal suspect. “Bring a raincoat,” I told him.
“A raincoat, are you a weatherman now too?” Friedman asked.
“No, nothing to do with the weather. Use the raincoat to cover the handcuffs when you are perp-walked out of court. Don’t let the cameramen see your handcuffs. Don’t let your constituents see you looking like a criminal.”
He followed my advice, as many others have done since and as Breslin later immortalized in a column.
I represented several municipal unions and was sometimes accused of making mountains out of molehills in order to bring attention to clients such as the Transit Police Benevolent Association.
But my method of leaking crime statistics and my tipping off police reporters to subway crimes in progress in the middle of the night is today acknowledged as bringing real problems into the public view, when city officials would rather have them stay hidden in the dark beneath the streets. The strategy also prompted the city to hire more police — and the union to increase its dues-paying membership.
The biggest case I ever worked on was the Bernhard Goetz trial through Goetz’s lawyer. I painted Goetz, the subway vigilante, as an eccentric loner who shot four kids on the subway who were trying to rob him at gunpoint, and as a normal, hard-working technician who was merely protecting himself in a life-threatening situation.
Doing my job also meant contacting Biaggi about a parent who complained about conditions at Willowbrook and Letchworth Village, state facilities for mentally disturbed children, and I was the guy who invited Geraldo Rivera to tour the institutions and, as they say, the rest is history.
These days I’m still working full-time and still in demand on political campaigns and real estate developments. I represented the New York State Court Officers Union for more than 40 years. To this date, after no fewer than 59 years, the Durst Organization is still a client.
I still demand big bucks when they seek my advice on many different projects and I continue to deliver by shaping news stories, spinning controversies in favor of my clients, and learning new tricks. And, at age 100, I have no plans to stop. You may not notice, but I am still around.