Harry J. Karafin glittered when he walked the streets of Philadelphia, the perfect personification of the man who had risen from rags to riches. In 1939, when he was 24, he started newspapering as an $18-a-week copy boy for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He was promoted to clerk, then to reporter. Harry had nerve. He dug. He probed. He was brassy, tough, cocky. Harry had pull at city hall. With the help of a former assistant district attorney, he browsed freely through confidential files in the D.A.'s office to get leads for his searing exposes of rackets and corruption. By the 1950s, his byline appeared regularly; by last month, there was no dispute that he had raked more muck, produced more exclusive stories and uncovered more crookedness than any other reporter in the 196-year history of the Inquirer. Also, last month the Inquirer fired him.
The reasons are in the current issue of Philadelphia, one of the glossy, city-centered magazines that are now catching on across the U.S. (TIME, Dec. 24, 1965). Digging just as hard as Karafin, Philadelphia Writers Gaeton Fonzi and Greg Walter began by investigating a racket involving fly-by-night companies that bought retail items on credit, unloaded them fast at discount prices, and then went into bankruptcy. The trail led to the doorstep of a 600-lb. operator named Sylvan Scolnick. Arrested, prosecuted and convicted, Scolnick started singing. Karafin, said Scolnick, was a good friend, so good, in fact, that he vouched for Scolnick's moral character and signed his application for a gun permit. Not only that, he also served as president of a company set up to keep track of the merchandise handled by the bankruptcy-bound companies.
Doing Well. This helped explain how Karafin, on an $11,000 Inquirer salary, could wheel around town in a pair of expensive Buicks, live in a house worth $45,000, buy $20,000 worth of furniture, and install such extras as central air conditioning and a custom-built staircase. And deck his wife in furs and jewelry, and vacation in Europe and Puerto Rico, and dabble in the stock market. But it was only part of the explanation. Philadelphia's reporters also discovered that Karafin was doing very well in a public relations sideline of investigative reporting.
One type of operation that obviously needed investigation in the late 1950s was the home-repair racket. Fast-buck operators would talk a homeowner into making improvements such as installing a new heating system or aluminum siding. The owner signed a credit agreement. The work, usually cheap and shoddy, got done and the fast-buck men sold the credit agreement at a discount to a broker, commercial finance firm or a bank. If too many angry and defrauded homeowners threatened, the company simply folded. It was a business particularly vulnerable to bad publicity, and Karafin and Scolnick said so to one of its practitioners, Joe Py. Public Relations Man Karafin, they said, could help Py. He had a lot of friends and could provide valuable advice, especially since the Pennsylvania State Banking Department and the Philadelphia district attorney's office were looking into the business. They asked for a $5,000 retainer. Py said he would think it over.