Dillinger in Chicago, he was on the scene for an exclusive when Dillinger was killed. Lait's story, dispatched to the International News Service in New York, reached that city before even the Chicago papers were aware of what had happened. He was associated with entertainment newspaper Variety and became the head of the Chicago office as a side job. In 1911 he started his own newspaper with Tom Burke, the Chicago Morning Telegraph, but did not stay at the newspaper long. Books He had a bestseller with Beef, Iron, and Wine featuring stories of the underworld. The "Confidential" Books In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Lait, with co-author Lee Mortimer, wrote a series of four controversial books detailing the seamy underside of America and three of its main cities. Each of the four books had the word "confidential" in its title. Mortimer was a New York Daily Mirror newspaper columnist whom Lait had hired in the 1930s when he was editor. The first book to appear was New York Confidential: The Lowdown on Its Bright Life, published in 1948. Chicago Confidential (1950) and Washington Confidential (1951) followed soon afterwards, with USA Confidential appearing in 1952. The books sold very well, and Washington Confidential became a bestseller in 1951. The books garnered much criticism in the press and elsewhere for their sensational, salacious tone and "nonfactual accounts of alleged crime-politics links, vice and scandal." In The New York Times review USA Confidential was labeled "a rather hard-breathing lecture on coast-to-coast depravity that represents about as discouraging a picture of America as you can find at the moment." Several lawsuits were filed against Lait and Mortimer due to the "Confidential" books. Perhaps the most prominent lawsuit was by the Neiman Marcus Co., which alleged that it and its employees had been libeled in U.S.A. Confidential. Neiman sought damages totaling $7,400,000. In August 1952, a federal judge dismissed the suits on the grounds that plaintiffs had not been sufficiently identified in the book to claim damages. In April 1953, Lait and Mortimer counter-sued seeking $1,500,000 for "conspiracy and agreement to restrain commerce, and suppress the printing, publication and distribution" of the book. Sixty-three years after its publication Washington Confidential was described in an account as an "infamous guide to the D.C. demimonde" written by "a pair of right-wing hacks determined to peel back the city's white-frosted veneer to expose a fetid underbelly