the Los Angeles Herald Express. One of Rushmore's most prolific discoveries was United Press columnist Aline Mosby. Despite his high salary, Rushmore was repelled by the informants and Harrison. Rushmore considered his employer a "pornographer," though Rushmore himself was a collector of erotica. Harrison communicated with his West Coast network by telegram and phone. But in the rising face of legal threats from the film industry, Harrison would make his boldest move yet. Hollywood Research Inc. Hollywood Research Inc. was the new intelligence-gathering front of Confidential, run by Marjorie Meade, Robert Harrison's now 26-year-old niece. Despite her youth and red-headed beauty, she was one of the most feared persons in Hollywood after her arrival in January 1955. John Mitchum, the younger brother of Robert Mitchum, tried to infiltrate Hollywood Research under the guidance of attorney Jerry Giesler. John, pretending to have scandalous information on his brother, described a visit to Fred Otash, where he was taken to "a ground floor apartment in a luxury apartment building in Beverley Hills, the offices, it turned out, of Hollywood Research Inc., command central for Confidentials fact-gathering and surveillance agents. The place was filled with big, tough looking guys, and some of them looked like they were packing heat. There were desks around the apartment topped with phones and recording and listening devices and files and photographs. John was taken to the head tough guy and recognized him—it was Fred Otash, a notorious ex-Los Angeles policeman turned private eye, Hollywood fixer, problem solver, leg breaker, a big mean Lebanese, looked like Joe McCarthy with muscle." The Harrison enterprise had evolved into a "quasi-blackmail operation." Once a proposed story was assembled, it could be published outright. Or more typically, either Meade or an agent would visit the subject and present a copy as a "buy-back" proposal, or the story be held back for in exchange for information on other celebrities. But instead of paying the magazine not to publish an article about themselves or implicating others, two actors, Lizabeth Scott and Robert Mitchum, sued. Their attorney was Jerry Giesler, who also represented tobacco heiress Doris Duke. Two hoaxes On July 8, 1955, Rushmore appeared on The Tom Duggan Show in Chicago. He claimed on air that he was on a secret mission to uncover the communist assassins of former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. Rushmore told the viewers that the leader of the "Chicago Communist