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Generoso Pope, Sr. was the millionaire publisher of Il Progresso, an Italian-language New York City newspaper, and he was frequently accused of mob connections.
His son, Generoso Pope, Jr., was raised in wealth, and was a childhood friend of Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy's future assistant. After attending MIT, he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, where he later said his assignment involved psychological warfare, but the Agency's bureaucracy annoyed him and he soon quit.
He purchased The New York Enquirer in 1952, allegedly with financial backing from Mafia boss Frank Costello. In his first editorial, Pope promised readers that "the New York Examiner will fight for the rights of man, the rights of the individual, and will champion human decency and dignity, freedom and peace". As he settled in as publisher of the weekly newspaper, however, its previous focus on lurid crime evolved into a gore- and celebrity-driven round-up of exaggerated scoops. Renamed The National Enquirer in 1954, it was not the first tabloid to replace news with nonsense, but it was by far the most successful of its time, and a harbinger of the today's Access Hollywood and TMZ.
In the mid-1960s National Enquirer toned down its more outrageous headlines (e.g., "Mom uses son's face as ashtray") in order to gain access to supermarket check-out stands, where the paper became the dominant force in tabloid journalism for the next several decades. In 1979 Pope began publishing Weekly World News, a new weekly with deadpan reporting of the bizarre ("Bigfoot kept lumberjack as love slave," etc.). He died in 1988, and his publications were subsequently sold for more than $400 million.
His son, Generoso Pope, Jr., was raised in wealth, and was a childhood friend of Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy's future assistant. After attending MIT, he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, where he later said his assignment involved psychological warfare, but the Agency's bureaucracy annoyed him and he soon quit.
He purchased The New York Enquirer in 1952, allegedly with financial backing from Mafia boss Frank Costello. In his first editorial, Pope promised readers that "the New York Examiner will fight for the rights of man, the rights of the individual, and will champion human decency and dignity, freedom and peace". As he settled in as publisher of the weekly newspaper, however, its previous focus on lurid crime evolved into a gore- and celebrity-driven round-up of exaggerated scoops. Renamed The National Enquirer in 1954, it was not the first tabloid to replace news with nonsense, but it was by far the most successful of its time, and a harbinger of the today's Access Hollywood and TMZ.
In the mid-1960s National Enquirer toned down its more outrageous headlines (e.g., "Mom uses son's face as ashtray") in order to gain access to supermarket check-out stands, where the paper became the dominant force in tabloid journalism for the next several decades. In 1979 Pope began publishing Weekly World News, a new weekly with deadpan reporting of the bizarre ("Bigfoot kept lumberjack as love slave," etc.). He died in 1988, and his publications were subsequently sold for more than $400 million.